Digital Marketing: Who, What, Why, and How
Content Marketing Glossary
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25 July 2022Given how easy it is to get online these days, would you believe me if I told you that daily internet users is on the rise?
It is. In fact, in the previous three years alone, "continuous" internet use among adults has climbed by 5 percent, as reported by Pew Research. In addition, the way consumers make purchases has evolved, making traditional offline marketing methods less successful.
Making meaningful connections with customers at at the right time and place has long been a cornerstone of successful marketing campaigns. That implies you have to go to where they are, which is increasingly the internet.
Digital marketing, which encompasses all promotional efforts made in cyberspace, has emerged to fill this void.
At The Pursuit Agency believe that inbound marketing is the best strategy for attracting, engaging, and delighting customers in the digital space. However, people from all over the world continue to email us with inquiries regarding digital marketing. As a result, we made the call to respond.Keep reading to learn more about modern digital marketing strategies.
- What is digital marketing?
- Why is digital marketing important?
- Types of Digital Marketing
- What does a digital marketer do?
- Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which is it?
- Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
- How to Do Digital Marketing
What is Digital Marketing
Experienced inbound marketers may argue that inbound and digital marketing are essentially interchangeable, but there are some subtle distinctions. Talking to business owners and marketers in the US, UK, Asia, Australia, and NZ has taught me a great deal about how these cultural nuances are taken into account in different countries.
How does a business define digital marketing?
Your company and brand need digital marketing now more than ever. In this day and age, it seems like every company has its own website. Even if they don't, they almost certainly have some sort of digital advertising or social media presence. These days, people have come to expect and rely on digital content and marketing as their primary source of information about various brands. Thanks to the flexibility and adaptability of digital marketing, you may try out new approaches to advertising without blowing your budget.
To reach consumers where they spend most of their time, online, digital marketers employ an array of digital strategies and mediums. The most effective online marketers are able to see how each individual digital marketing effort contributes to the achievement of the company's larger objectives. Marketers, depending on their campaign's objectives, can use both free and paid channels to bolster a broader effort.
For instance, a content marketer can leverage a newly published ebook to generate leads by writing a series of blog entries. The company's social media marketer may then use both paid and unpaid posts to draw attention to the blog entries. The email marketer may decide to follow up ebook downloads with a series of emails detailing the company's offerings. In a moment, we'll get into more detail about these selected digital advertising pros.
Why is digital marketing important?
Among the many advantages of digital marketing are:
- Target only the people who are most likely to buy your goods or service.
- As opposed to traditional outbound marketing strategies, this one saves money.
- With digital marketing, small businesses may compete effectively with larger brands in their industry.
- Advertising online can be tracked in a variety of ways.
- Changing and adapting a digital marketing plan is simpler.
- If you use digital marketing, you may increase the number of leads you receive and the quality of those leads.
- Digital marketing allows you to interact with consumers at any point in the purchasing process
Let's delve into them right away.
1. You can zero in on the customers who are the most likely to buy what you're selling.
When advertising on television, in a magazine, or on a billboard, you can only target a certain demographic at best. Although some demographics, such as the typical magazine reader or a neighborhood's demographic, may be measured, targeting your audience effectively is still primarily an educated guess.
On the other hand, digital marketing makes it possible to zero in on a certain subset of the population and then deliver them highly targeted and individualised marketing communications.Advertisements on social media can be targeted to specific users based on demographic information like age, gender, geography, hobbies, networks, and behaviours.
To reach consumers who are more likely to be interested in your product or service, you can employ pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine optimization (SEO) tactics.With digital marketing, you can easily gather the data you need to create a buyer profile and adapt your approach over time to focus on the people who are most likely to make a purchase.
The best part about digital marketing is that it allows you to target certain demographics within your overall customer base. This is especially useful if you sell a variety of items or services to distinct types of customers.
2. It saves money compared to traditional outbound marketing strategies.
With digital marketing, you can monitor your campaigns on a regular basis and cut back on resources for those that are underperforming in terms of return on investment (ROI). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for conventional advertising methods. Billboards are expensive regardless of their effectiveness in generating sales for your business.
You can direct your marketing budget whichever you like with digital marketing. To generate high-converting Instagram content, you may decide to invest in design software rather than pay for PPC advertisements. In order to avoid throwing good money after bad, digital marketing allows for continual adaptation to changing conditions.
Investing in social media, blogging, or search engine optimisation, for example, can yield a high return on investment (ROI) despite a relatively modest outlay of resources, making them attractive options for small businesses.
3. Competing with larger businesses is now possible thanks to digital marketing
When you're a little firm trying to compete with industry giants who can afford multimillion dollar ad campaigns, it can be tough. Fortunately, if you employ some clever strategies for promoting your business online, you can easily compete with the major brands and even outrank them.
To improve your search engine rankings, you may, for instance, zero in on specific long-tail keywords that are relevant to your product or service, and then produce relevant, high-quality content. Search engines don't give a hoot about who has the most popular brand; they prioritise content based on how well it speaks to the intended audience.
4. You can track the results of your digital marketing campaigns
Impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on page are just a few examples of the metrics that can be tracked and analysed with digital marketing. This is arguably the most significant advantage of online advertising. While conventional advertising can serve a purpose, its greatest weakness is that it is difficult to quantify the results.
Digital marketing, in contrast to traditional methods, provides immediate feedback on performance. It's tough to tell how many people saw your newspaper ad since it's so hard to tell how many people actually read the paper. There is no way to definitively determine the advertising's impact on sales.
Conversely, with digital marketing, you can track the success of every single one of your campaigns.
Some instances are as follows:
Incoming Traffic on a Website
Digital marketing allows you to track the exact number of visitors who have visited your website's homepage in real time utilising analytics tools. Along with the number of pages they viewed, the type of device they used, and the source of their visit, digital analytics data like these can be viewed as well.
Information like this might help you prioritise your marketing efforts based on the volume of visitors each channel is bringing in. If only 10% of your site visitors are coming from organic searches, for instance, you know you need to devote more time to search engine optimisation.
Before a customer interacts with a salesperson or makes a purchase, it's hard to know how they feel about your brand when using traditional offline marketing methods. Through digital marketing, you can learn about your target audience's habits and preferences long before they reach the decision-making phase of the buying process. This allows you to tailor your marketing efforts to the top of the sales funnel with greater precision.
Creating Quality Leads Through Effective Content
An offline type of content is a product brochure that you've printed and mailed to potential customers. The issue is that you have no way of knowing how many people actually read your leaflet before discarding it.
Picture having that brochure online instead. Forms allow you to collect email addresses and other information from individuals who downloaded it after visiting the page where it is stored. When consumers download your information, you not only get feedback on how useful it is but also potential customers.
Modeling Attribution
With the correct digital marketing strategy, tools, and technology in place, you can track each transaction back to the very first digital interaction a customer had with your company.
We call this attribution modelling, and it can help you determine which aspects of your marketing and sales strategy are working and which ones need improvement based on patterns in how your customers find and purchase your product.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is crucial. Businesses who have good alignment between the two see revenue increase by 20% annually, while those that don't see a drop of 4% do so. The bottom line will certainly benefit from the use of digital technologies that enhance the consumer experience throughout the purchasing process.
5. How flexible it is to change a digital marketing strategy
The process of creating a marketing plan is lengthy and laborious. In general, you'd see the plan through to the end, give it some time to work, and then evaluate the outcome.
However, it's important to remember that life isn't always predictable. A mistake in the calculations, an inaccurate assumption, or an unexpected response from the audience may become apparent midway through. Having the flexibility to make course corrections or adjustments as you go along is advantageous because it keeps you from having to restart from square one.
One of the many advantages of digital marketing is its adaptability. Compared to more conventional methods of advertising like direct mail or billboards, adjusting to the digital marketing environment is quite simple. When an internet ad isn't performing as planned, for instance, it can be easily paused or tweaked to improve outcomes.
6. You may increase the number and quality of leads you receive.
Since digital marketing makes it easier to track the success of individual campaigns, increasing conversion rates is a breeze. You may improve your strategy making by measuring how successful each method is.
In order to increase your conversion rate, it is essential that you constantly tweak your strategies. When money is put into internet marketing, it is optimised for maximum conversions.
In addition, not all leads are created equal in terms of the value they may provide to your company. With digital marketing, you may reach out to a very precise demographic, resulting in more qualified leads with a higher likelihood of converting into paying clients. A higher conversion rate can be achieved by establishing connections between your company and the best leads.
7. You can interact with your audience at every stage
Making an immediate connection with your audience is crucial. Connecting with a lead at the beginning of their journey is crucial to moving them forward in the sales pipeline. You can achieve this goal, as well as any intermediate goals, by employing digital marketing strategies.
Customers' full paths to purchase can be tracked through various digital marketing channels. When trying to convert leads, it is crucial to comprehend and analyse client motion and activity. The use of digital marketing enables for monitoring of the customer at every stage. Moreover, it helps guarantee that the customer has connected with your brand, even if they don't buy immediately.
Types of Digital Marketing
Here is a quick summary of some of the most popular channels and strategies used in digital marketing today.
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the practise of enhancing a website's visibility in organic search results, also known as "free" or "natural" traffic. Websites, weblogs, and infographics are all platforms that can be improved using SEO.
Using search engine optimisation , you can attract targeted visitors in a number of ways. Among them are:
Technical SEO - This approach to search engine optimisation concentrates on the coding structure of your website. When it comes to search engines like Google , page load times are a major ranking factor. Technical SEO techniques like image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimisation can help improve your site's load times.
Onpage SEO - To put it simply, on-page SEO optimises everything that can be seen when a website is visited. Doing keyword research for search volume and intent (or meaning) enables you to provide readers with answers to their concerns and rise in the search engine results pages (SERPs) that are generated as a result.
Offpage SEO - All the work you do to optimise your website that doesn't directly affect its content is known as "off-page" SEO. You may be wondering, "How might anything else my own site's activity effect my ranking?" Answer: inbound links, commonly known as backlinks. How well you rank for the keywords that matter depends on how many publishers link to you and the "authority" of those publishers. Earning the backlinks necessary to boost your website up on the appropriate SERPs can be accomplished through networking with other publications, producing guest posts on their websites (and referring back to your website), and creating external attention.
2. Content Marketing
In this context, "content marketing" refers to the process of developing and disseminating content assets to increase visibility, engagement, conversions, and revenue.
Your content marketing plan may incorporate the following channels:
Writing and publishing content on a business blog is a great way to show off your knowledge in your field while also attracting new customers through natural search results. In the end, this increases the likelihood that your website's visits will become sales leads.
Long-form content such as e-books and whitepapers might be useful in educating website users. You may also generate leads for your business and advance prospects along the buyer's journey by trading content for contact details from interested readers.Sometimes, however, it's more effective to show than tell, and infographics are a great tool for doing just that. Infographics are a visual representation of data or information designed to aid in comprehension for readers of a website.
Audio or Visual Content: Digital advertising via radio and television is very common. Producing content that can be broadcasted over the radio or uploaded to a video sharing website will allow you to reach a far larger audience.
3. Social Media Marketing
This method promotes your brand and content on social media channels in order to raise your company's profile, attract new visitors, and produce new leads.
If you're just getting started with social media, you may use a programme like Publer or Hootsuite to manage all of your accounts in one spot, from Facebook to LinkedIn. Content for many channels may be scheduled at once, and analytics can be viewed in one convenient location.
HubSpot not only allows you to connect your social network accounts for publishing purposes, but also your social media inboxes, allowing you to view all of your direct messages in one spot. Marketing via social media can be carried out via several platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram
As a result, many advertisers will employ these channels to launch a viral marketing campaign. One method of viral marketing is to join up with a well-known creator of content or to jump on the bandwagon of a popular trend. The goal is to produce content that people will want to talk about on social media in the hopes that it will spread on its own.
4. Pay Per Click (PPC)
Through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is widespread, with Google Ads being one of the most popular examples. With Google Ads, users can purchase prominent placement in Google's search engine results pages in exchange for a set "per click" fee. It's also possible to employ PPC on other channels, including;
Facebook's paid advertising allow users to publish a customised video, image post, or slideshow to the news feeds of Facebook users who match the demographics of their target market.
Marketing initiatives on Twitter: Here, users can pay to have their posts or badges displayed in front of a targeted audience on the social networking site. These KPIs may include visits to the website, new Twitter followers, replies to tweets, or even app downloads.
LinkedIn Sponsored Updates: Here, individuals can pay to contact other LinkedIn members who share their interests and professional experience.
5. Affiliate Marketing
When you promote another company's goods or services on your website and they generate sales as a result, you earn a commission. Media that can be used in affiliate marketing are:
- Ad hosting via YouTube's partner programme.
- Publishing links to your affiliate partners on your social media profiles.
There has been a recent upsurge in the use of influencers in marketing campaigns like this one. Affiliate marketing that incorporates influential people into the campaign development process has the potential to yield impressive results. Your digital marketing effort will benefit greatly from the addition of skilled content creators.
6. Native Advertising
The term "native advertising" is used to describe paid content that blends in with its natural surroundings on a platform. Sponsored content on BuzzFeed is one example, but many people also perceive Facebook and Instagram ads to be "native" to those platforms.
7. Marketing Automation
A marketing automation platform is a piece of software designed to streamline routine marketing tasks. The marketing department can save time and effort by using automation software to perform a variety of routine operations, including but not limited to:
Promotional emails: Email automation is more than just a method for sending out mass emails without any input from the sender. By allowing you to selectively send your newsletters to only those who have opted in, it can also assist you in managing the size of your contact list.
Scheduled updates on social media: Consistent posting is essential to expanding your brand's reach on social media. This makes the process of manually posting a little more chaotic. You may devote more time to content planning by employing a social media scheduling tool to automatically distribute your posts across all of your accounts.
Automated processes for nurturing leads: It can take a long time to get leads and much longer to convert them into paying clients. When a lead meets a specified condition, such as downloading and reading an ebook, the process can be automated so that they receive targeted emails and material.
Monitoring and reporting on campaign performance: The people, emails, material, webpages, phone calls, and other elements that make up a marketing campaign are practically limitless. Marketing automation allows you to categorise your tasks according to the campaign they support and monitor the campaign's success depending on how far along its various parts are in their development.
8. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a popular method of interaction between businesses and their customers. The purpose of email marketing is to increase traffic to a company's website by informing customers about new products, special offers, and upcoming events. In an email marketing campaign, you could send emails like:
- Newsletters for blog subscribers.
- After a user has downloaded something from your website, you can send them a follow-up email.
- Communication with new customers via electronic mail.
- Member-exclusive holiday specials for the loyalty programme set.
- Customer nurturing via email series containing helpful hints.
9. Online PR
Online public relations (PR) is the process of obtaining editorial coverage in online media such as blogs, news sites, and other content-rich websites. Like traditional PR, but conducted in cyberspace. To get the most out of your public relations efforts, you can employ the following methods:
- Reaching out to the media through social media: You can build a relationship with the media that results in earned media chances for your company by, for instance, chatting with journalists on Twitter.
- Positive feedback from customers posted on the web: It's natural to want to ignore reviews of your business, good or negative, posted online. On the other hand, positive company evaluations can lend a personal touch to your brand and help you spread persuasive messages that safeguard your reputation.
- Comments that stimulate thought on your personal website or blog: The greatest method to spark useful conversation about your sector is to interact with the people who are reading your articles, just as you would with reviewers of your business.
10. Inbound Advertising
To attract, engage, and delight customers throughout the buyer's journey is the goal of inbound marketing. Every single one of the aforementioned digital marketing strategies can be integrated into an inbound marketing plan to help you better serve your customers. Here are some tried-and-true examples of inbound vs. outbound marketing strategies:
- Pop-up ads vs. blogs as a medium for advertising
- Promotional videos contrasted. traditional commercials
- Comparison between email contact lists and spam
11. Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is when a business pays another business or organisation to produce and disseminate information about the business's products or services.
Influencer marketing is one form of sponsored content that has seen considerable success.
Sponsored content is a form of advertising in which a corporation pays another entity, typically an online influencer, to spread positive word-of-mouth about that company via social media.
Blog posts and articles that are written to draw attention to a particular product, service, or brand are also examples of sponsored content.
12. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
It's a terrific chance to promote your company when a potential customer is actively looking for something that's similar to what you offer. Paid advertising and search engine optimisation are two excellent ways to spread the word about your brand and attract potential customers.
Paid advertisements on search engines are one method of search engine marketing. Google AdWords and Bing Ads are the two most used search engine marketing tools. These sponsored links appear naturally at the top of search engine results pages.
The use of native advertising in this context is another illustration of its success.
13. Instant Messaging Marketing
Directing your product marketing efforts on messaging platforms allows you to quickly reach potential leads, even if they haven't provided their cell phone number.
It's a straightforward method of informing your target market about time-sensitive offers, fresh wares, or order status changes. It's also a quick and easy way for customers to get in touch with support if they have any issues or inquiries.
Depending on your preference, you can send a message to a mobile device by text messaging or through an intermediary service like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
What does a digital marketer do?
To gauge the efficacy of their efforts across several platforms, digital marketers typically prioritise distinct KPIs for each channel. For instance, an SEO manager will track their site's "organic traffic" to see how well it is performing in search engines. In smaller businesses, one person may be responsible for many of the aforementioned digital marketing tactics simultaneously. To implement these strategies, larger businesses often employ a team of experts, each of whom is responsible for managing a certain subset of the brand's digital platforms.
Some of the many examples of these experts are as follows:
Key Performance Indicators for an SEO Manager: Inbound, or "organic," traffic
To sum up, search engine optimization managers are responsible for the company's visibility in search results. Even if the company also shares the content on social media, this individual may work directly with content providers to ensure that their work is optimised for search engines.
Key Performance Indicators for a Content Marketing Specialist: Page views, blog visits, and YouTube channel subscribers
Specialists in content marketing are the ones responsible for creating the digital content. They regularly monitor the schedule for company blogging and also develop a content strategy that incorporates video. These experts collaborate with colleagues across the company to ensure that all available digital channels provide promotional content for newly released items and campaigns.
Core metrics for a social media manager: Indicators of Success: Fans, Views, and Shares
A social media manager's duties are fairly obvious given the job description, but the specific social networks that need to be managed for a given business can vary greatly. First and foremost, a company's social media manager will create a publishing calendar for both textual and visual content. In addition, this person may collaborate with the content marketing professional to determine what kinds of content should be shared on which social media platforms.
(Note: "impressions" refers to the number of times a business's posts appear on the newsfeed of a user, as shown by the KPIs above.)
Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, and lead-generation (conversion) rate are the primary key performance indicators for a marketing automation coordinator.
The marketing automation coordinator plays a key role in the selection and management of software that helps the marketing department as a whole learn about and analyse customer behaviour and the success of marketing campaigns. Given that many of the aforementioned marketing operations may be carried out in isolation from one another, it is essential to have a resource that can organise digital actions into distinct campaigns and monitor the efficacy of each.
How Do You Choose Between Inbound and Digital Marketing?
To attract, engage, and delight customers online, an inbound marketing strategy makes use of digital marketing assets. In contrast, the word "digital marketing" can be used to refer to any type of internet marketing strategy, whether it be "inbound" or "outbound".
Comparing digital marketing to inbound marketing is common, although digital marketing doesn't distinguish between inbound and outbound strategies. When compared to inbound marketing, which is more of a strategy, "digital marketing" is more of a catch-all term for any form of marketing that makes use of digital communication.
The goal of digital outbound marketing is to reach as many individuals as possible online with a promotional message, regardless of whether or not that message is acceptable or useful to the recipients. The flashing banner advertising at the top of many websites, for instance, are an attempt to sell products or services to individuals who may not be interested in them.
The goal of digital inbound marketing is to bring in qualified visitors to a website by showcasing useful products or services to them. One of the most effective forms of inbound digital marketing is a blog, which can be optimised to take advantage of the search terms being used by your ideal customers.
Is it true that any company may benefit from using digital marketing?
A business in any sector can benefit from implementing a digital marketing strategy. The same principles of digital marketing apply regardless of the products or services your company offers. These include developing buyer personas to better understand your target market and producing high-quality content for the web. But that doesn't mean every company should follow the same digital marketing playbook.
B2B Digital Marketing
Business-to-business (B2B) companies often focus their digital marketing efforts on generating online leads in the hopes that those leads will be converted into sales conversations. For this reason, your marketing strategy should focus on generating high-quality leads for your sales team through your website and other digital platforms.
If you want to reach your target audience online, you should look beyond your website and into business-oriented venues like LinkedIn.
B2C Digital Marketing
If you run a business that sells directly to consumers (B2C), the goal of your digital marketing activities is probably to get people to visit your website and make a purchase without ever interacting with a salesperson.
As a result, you may be less concerned with generating leads in the conventional sense and more interested in shortening the time it takes for a customer to get from discovering your business online to making a purchase. If you're trying to sell to consumers rather than other businesses, you'll need to position your product earlier in the marketing funnel and use more compelling language in your calls to action (CTAs).
Instagram and Pinterest, which are geared more toward consumers, can be more effective marketing channels for business-to-consumer enterprises than LinkedIn.
What types of digital content should I create?
The needs of your audience at various points in the buyer's journey will dictate the type of content you produce. Making use of makemypersona.com, you may begin to understand your target market's motivations and pain points in relation to your product or service by developing buyer personas. Your website's content should fundamentally focus on assisting users in achieving these objectives and solving these problems.
The next step is to consider when they are in the buyer's journey and hence most receptive to this information. In this context, the term "content mapping" is used.
The purpose of content mapping is to direct material toward certain audiences based on:
- The traits of the target audience (this is where buyer personas come in).
- At what point in the buying process they are (i.e., their lifecycle stage).
There are numerous options available to you when deciding how to present your content. At each phase of the buyer's journey, we suggest the following approaches:
Awareness Stage
Blogs written during the "Awareness" phase of the process. When combined with a solid search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword strategy, it can significantly boost your organic traffic.
Infographics. To put it another way, they're highly shareable, which means your material will be exposed to more people when their readers share it. (Here are some examples of infographics that you can use as a starting point.)
Brief video clips. Again, they are very shareable and can open up new audiences for your company when hosted on sites like YouTube.
Consideration Stage
Ebooks. For the purpose of generating leads, they are superior than blog posts and infographics because readers are more likely to provide their email addresses in exchange for the full report.
Reports on studies. Once again, we have a high-quality piece of content that will help you bring in new customers. The awareness phase can also benefit from research studies and new statistics for your business, since these are generally taken up by the media or industry press.
Webinars. Webinars, being more in-depth and engaging than a blog post or short video, are an excellent content type for the consideration stage.
Decision Stage
Case Studies. Having in-depth case studies available on your website is a great way to influence the buying decisions of visitors who are close to making a purchase.
Testimonials. Having brief testimonials scattered throughout your website is a wonderful alternative to case studies if they don't work for your organisation. Testimonials for business-to-consumer brands can be interpreted more broadly. If you're a clothing company, these may be examples of how real people have worn your products, such as photographs from a branded hashtag where customers can share their own photos of how they've styled your shirts and dresses.
How to Do Digital Marketing
1. Define your goals
Depending on what you hope to achieve, your digital marketing strategy will take a variety of forms, so it's important to nail down your objectives before diving in. If you want more people to recognise your business, you may want to focus more on expanding your social media following.
If, on the other hand, you have a certain product in mind that you'd want to see more sales of, then search engine optimisation and content optimisation should be your top priorities. Furthermore, if conversions to sales are your end aim, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns are worth exploring.
Whatever the case may be, defining your company's primary objectives is the first step in developing a successful digital marketing plan.
2. Identify your target audience
One of the main advantages of digital marketing is the ability to zero in on a certain demographic; yet, this is of little use if you haven't already narrowed down your audience.
It's worth noting that your intended demographic may shift slightly from one product or marketing effort to the next, or even from one medium to another.
Perhaps you've found that the most of your Instagram followers are under the age of 30, and are therefore more interested in humorous memes and short videos, whereas the majority of your LinkedIn followers are over the age of 30, and are therefore searching for more strategic advise.
You should tailor your material to each of these groups individually.
3. Establish a budget for each channel.
What parts of digital marketing you incorporate into your approach will, of course, decide your budget.
Inbound marketing strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), and content generation for an already established website, require surprisingly little funding. The only investment you need to make in inbound marketing is time, provided you don't want to outsource the labour.
You can launch a site and populate it with content with WordPress on WP Engine, a beginner-friendly theme from StudioPress, and the code-free Elementor Website Builder for WordPress.
There is no doubt that using outbound methods, such as online advertising and buying email lists, can rack up some costs. The cost is determined by the level of exposure desired from the advertising campaign.
To deploy PPC with Google AdWords, for instance, you would compete with other businesses in your industry by bidding on certain keywords related to your firm. Therefore, it is wise to put equal effort into expanding your organic reach, as the cost of paid advertising can range from quite low to exorbitant, depending on how competitive the term in question is.
4. Strike a good balance between paid and free digital strategies.
Paid and unpaid efforts must work hand in hand for digital marketing to succeed.
For instance, if you invest significant effort into developing in-depth buyer profiles, Strong results can be seen within the first six months with low ad spend if you focus on identifying the needs of your audience and then developing quality online content to attract and convert them.
On the other hand, if paid advertising is incorporated into your digital strategy, you may get even faster results. Organic (or 'free') reach building through content, SEO, and social media is advised for greater long-term, sustainable success.
If you're not sure if paid or unpaid channels will yield better results for your brand, try both and adjust your strategy accordingly.
5. Create Engaging Content
The next step, after determining your audience and allocating funds, is to begin developing content for your chosen distribution platforms. This material can take many forms, including but not limited to social media updates, blog articles, pay-per-click adverts, sponsored content, email marketing newsletters, and so on.
Since the goal of marketing content is to boost brand recognition and customer interest, it stands to reason that whatever you come up with should be entertaining and informative for your target demographic.
6. Optimise your digital assets for mobile.
Mobile marketing has emerged as a critical part of the digital marketing mix. The United States still isn't mobile's greatest fan compared to other countries, but smartphone usage now accounts for 69% of total time spent watching digital media there.
That's why it's crucial to make sure all of your digital assets, including adverts, web pages, social media photos, and so on, are optimised for mobile use. If your business offers a mobile app through which customers can interact with your brand or purchase your wares, then your app can be considered a part of your digital marketing strategy.
Online customers who interact with your business via mobile devices should have the same great experience they would have on a desktop browser. To improve the mobile browsing experience, websites should adopt a mobile-friendly or responsive layout. To make material downloads on the go as painless as possible, you may also need to shorten the length of the lead generation forms you use. When designing photos for social media, keep in mind that mobile users may only see a portion of them due to the screen size limitation.
Considering how the experience will translate on mobile devices is crucial when implementing any digital marketing plan, and there are many approaches to optimise your digital marketing materials for mobile customers. By keeping this in mind at all times, you can ensure that the digital experiences you design will resonate with your target demographic and produce the outcomes you seek.
7. Conduct Keyword Research
Keyword research is essential to the success of any digital marketing campaign because of the importance of reaching specific demographics with tailored messages.
To increase your website's visibility in search engine results and attract new customers, it is essential to conduct keyword research. When promoting a business's goods or services on social media, keyword research is a useful tool.
You should always do keyword research even if you don't have a dedicated SEO expert on staff. To expand your market, try compiling a list of popular search terms that are relevant to your business's offerings; don't forget to include long-tail variants.
8. Iterate based on the analytics you measure
Finally, your team needs to learn how to pivot based on analytics if they want to develop a sustainable digital marketing strategy.
After a while, you may realise that your Instagram followers aren't as interested in your posts as they once were, but they still enjoy what you're sharing on Twitter. This could be a hint that your audience prefers to consume branded content on a different platform, or it could be an opportunity to reevaluate your Instagram strategy as a whole.
On the other hand, you might notice that a website that is many years old isn't receiving the same amount of visitors as it formerly did. To guarantee that your site visitors are always presented with the most recent and applicable information, you may want to think about refreshing the page or doing away with it altogether.
It is up to you to take advantage of the many growth prospects that digital marketing presents to your organisation.
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