What is Digital Marketing?
To put it really simply, digital marketing means promoting your business, whether it’s a physical product or service, through any kinds of digital channels. That said, digital marketing is actually one form of marketing, while leveraging different digital channels.
Whenever you market your brand through online search engines, paid Ads, social media, email or any kinds of digital channels, they all fall into digital marketing.
Unlike traditional marketing, where you mainly promote your business using traditional media like television, newspapers, direct mail, digital marketing differs from the channels being used and how performance data is being tracked.
Why should you care?
1. The Online Market Continues to Grow
First of all, you can’t omit the fact that: Everyone Is Going ONLINE. Almost everyone has experience searching something in the online space. According to Statista, as of January 2023, the total number of internet users grew to 5.2 billion, that’s 65% of the total world population! The potential reach of digital media is HUGE. And this number will just keep going. Which means, the profit potential brought from digital marketing will also keep growing.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/
2. Transparency in Performance Tracking
Second, every marketing activity, user interactions happens online, which means everything can be tracked so easily. You will wonder how it helps when it comes to performance tracking and campaign optimization. With digital analytics, you will have high transparency of your marketing campaign performance, and you know exactly where to improve to get more conversions and revenue. That said, digital marketing is very cost-effective in promoting your business because it can yield a high return on investment.
Digital Marketing Channels
By now, you should have a better concept on digital marketing.
Now, let’s talk about the marketing objectives.
Every form of marketing has a marketing goal, and that is to promote the brand and to bring more sales at the end. In the case of digital, it is to build your brand presence online, to bring more traffic to your website or online shops for customers or prospects to learn more about your product or service, or to purchase directly.
Depending on your target market, customers’ behavior and budget, there are different digital marketing channels and strategies that you can leverage to achieve this goal. Let’s dig deeper and do a simple mind map.
1. Content marketing & SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Whenever you start promoting your business online, you need content, and this is where content marketing comes to play. Content marketing is the development of relevant content that you use to engage with your customers online. It may be in the form of a blog, a video, a newsletter, a social media graphic and a lot more. Basically, everything that your customers consume online is a form of digital content.
SEO, known as Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing tactic to improve the ranking positions and so the brand visibility organically on search engines such as Google, Bing. Search engines are often one the major sources of traffic because of the high usage of search and so it is an important channel to increase your content visibility. The process often starts from your site auditing, market and keyword research, content writing, on-page / off-page SEO, and link building.
2. Paid Marketing / PPC Marketing
Unlike SEO which focuses on achieving results organically and does take some time, paid marketing focus on getting faster marketing response by using marketing spending. PPC, also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising is a model of digital advertising where you will pay a fee every time your Ad is clicked. It is also the reason why it is called “Pay Per Click”. Lots of online advertisements are using this model, including Google Ads, Bing Ads, LinkedIn Ads. To success in PPC, you will define your budget, the keywords to bid , maximum bidding cost in form of CPC (cost per click), and to make sure your Ad copy resonates with your target customers in order to maximize the outcome with the optimal ROAS (Return on AdSpend).
3. Social Media Marketing
While search engine is one key digital channel, Social Media is another channel that you can’t ignore. Because we all use social media! If you want to succeed in online business, social media marketing is effective to spread brand awareness before you drive conversions. It leverages different social channels to promote your brand for example Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn. You can also spend advertising budget to do Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads to grab attention for your business in a short time. One of the important strategies in social media marketing is influencer marketing, where you will get social influencers to promote your brand by leveraging their strong followings and Word-of-Mouth (WOM) effect.
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy to leverage a third-party affiliate, such as a blogger, YouTuber or a publisher and to give them a commission for marketing your products. In most cases, they will get a commission when they successfully bring a conversion for your brand. Affiliate marketing is a growing digital marketing tactic used by marketers because of its performance-based nature plus the increasing number of media and content publishers.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is another important strategy for nurturing your customers and to bring more sales. Today, email marketing is still considered as a very effective converting channel because of its highly targeted nature. As your business is getting traction online and growing a loyal customer base, you need email marketing to keep the customers engaged. Email marketing is a form of marketing that can keep your existing customers aware of your products and offers. Some key metrics in email marketing that you need to know include total opt-in, bounce rate, open rate, and we will cover more in other episodes. With email automation, the impact of email marketing can be further maximized, because an email can be personalized and be sent more timely based on a set of predefined triggers or actions.
6. Digital Analytics
Digital Analytics is the process of collection, measurement and analysis of your digital data coming from your campaign, websites, search channel, social media and a lot more. Because of digital analytics, everything can be tracked very easily with high transparency. It is critical to have digital analytics tracking in place before you run any digital marketing campaign, because that is how you measure your campaign success and get insights on what is working and what is not across different channels and devices. You can also identify customer behaviour, conversion funnel performance, usage trends based on insights, optimal landing page experience with A/B testing.
7. Funnel Optimization / Conversion Optimization
Funnel optimization, also called conversion optimization, is a process of optimization conversion rate in everage stage of the marketing conversion funnel. Starting from the very top of funnel awareness building, product consideration, down to the funnel to conversions and retention, funnel optimization is to make sure every stage is a success in order to achieve the best conversion (marketing) results at the end.
Digital analytics is heavily used in the process to identify the areas that need improvement and formulate the optimal strategy based on different funnel stages of your target audience. To optimize your funnel, you will need to understand your user behavior and how they interact on your site, optimize your site landing page experience, run different experiments on your campaign with different audience targeting, doing AB testing to test out what kinds of strategy can bring the best results.
Digital marketing has been an ever-changing industry with the emerging new technologies. However, the same marketing theory and concepts still hold. If you want to thrive in the digital marketing field, master the important business and marketing concepts while continuously learning the new technologies will be the key to success.
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