We all are aware of how inbound marketing is the most effective way of attracting, engaging, and nurturing leads. We are also aware that inbound marketing comes under digital marketing. But are we aware of digital marketing alone? In this article, we shall discover the world of digital marketing.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to the use of online mediums to promote and sell products or services online. The most common ways are the use of the individual business website, social media, paid advertisement, and email to reach out to potential customers. It also includes communication through texts and calls. Often the terms inbound marketing and digital marketing are used synonymously, but they are two different terms.
Inbound marketing is a part of digital marketing. It uses all the assets which come under digital marketing except the outbound marketing tactics. For instance, HubSpot has adopted an inbound marketing methodology. In today’s market, it is convenient to adopt inbound marketing as it focuses on attracting leads to what they want rather than bugging them with what they could have.
Why Is Digital Marketing Important?
It is ideal to promote your content digitally because it is cost-effective. Furthermore, the chances of your company reaching a larger audience is higher through online modes than it is with traditional marketing. These are also the benefits of digital marketing. Apart from this, there are plenty of reasons why digital marketing is important. Let’s find out!
1. It is Result-oriented
If you want to understand if a particular strategy works for you, you need to analyze its results such as how many leads did it gather and much profit did it bring in. In digital marketing software and platforms, desired conversions are tracked automatically, such as email open rates, website visits, and direct sales. Therefore, you can monitor the results in a much more convenient way.
2. Convenient Customization
Data collection is more accurate and specific in online marketing. For instance, if you are a business selling casual wear and wish to send out special offers to people who looked at your online store, you will see visible results if you target the right audience. You create three campaigns, one targeting people who checked out kid’s clothing, one targeting people who checked out women’s clothing, and lastly the one who checked men’s clothing.
After this step is done, you can automate a lot of workflows through this campaign which could have been difficult if you did the same thing manually. Through digital marketing, almost all relevant information is available at your fingertips.
3. Better customer relations
With the help of it’s services, you can communicate with your customers on a real-time basis. If you are promoting content on social media platforms, you can always communicate back and forth with the customers. Interactivity is ideal in social media strategy as it increases brand visibility thereby winning customer engagement and growing your channel.
4. Convenient conversion
Through digital marketing, people can click a link or save a blog post and proceed right away through the sales funnel. Even if they don’t make a purchase right away, you’ll be able to interact with them further.
Types Of Digital Marketing
There are a lot of options when it comes to digital marketing. As the saying goes, “Ocean is way deeper than you think” similarly the specializations of digital marketing are plenty. Let us walk through a few of them.
1. Search Engine Optimization- SEO
SEO helps you to rank your website at the top of search engines. Think of SEO as ornaments of your website, it just elevates your website’s appearance and drives traffic to your website. You can use SEO in blogs, infographics, and your website in general. There are namely three ways to approach SEO-
– On-page SEO:
It defines the words present in your content as key phrases to rank them in search engines. The wiser the keyword selection the better ranking results.
– Off-page SEO
This refers to the external linking, also known as backlinks. When you are linking certain words to some website regarding those words, it gathers external attention thereby improving your lead generation
– Technical SEO
Technical SEO is based on the coding of your website. It focuses on the backend, CSS file optimization, structured data, and image compression which improves your website’s SEO analysis.
2. Content Marketing
The purpose of content creation is to promote brand awareness and visibility which leads to traffic growth, lead generation, and prospects. There are different ways through which you can create content such as blogs, e-magazines, infographics, and podcasts.
Statistics prove that content marketing works:
- Companies are expected to provide entertaining and useful content experiences according to 84% of consumers
- Companies with at least 5,000 employees produce content every day in 62% of cases
- Content is viewed as an important asset by 92% of marketers
3. Social media marketing
Platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and youtube are excellent ways to promote your content to create brand visibility. To make things easier you can connect all your social media handles on one platform such as HubSpot. Usually partnering with viral content creators allows expanding your reach. The purpose of creating posts on social media is to create engaging content which educates customers as well as makes them curious to know more and invest in your company.
4. Pay-per-click marketing- PPC
In this kind of advertisement, you pay for every ad clicked by a prospect. The most renowned way of PPC marketing is google ads, in which you will have to pay to rank in a higher position on google. Other options are Facebook paid ads, Twitter ad campaigns, and sponsored messages on LinkedIn. The algorithm is almost the same on each platform, it provides you spots on these factors:
- Ad quality
- Keyword relevance
- Landing page quality
- Bid amount
What Is The Role Of a Digital Marketer?
The only thing digital marketers are concerned with is growing and promoting your content and products in such a way it drives growth and traffic. There are different types of digital marketers with varying roles but the common objective is to ensure that the platform they are handling is performing well.
Let’s look at a few specialists:
SEO manager
Main role- Organic Traffic
Content Manager
Main role- Time on page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel subscribers
Social Media Manager
Main role- Follows, Impressions, Shares
Marketing Automation Coordinator
Main role- Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate
B2B Digital Marketing V/S B2C Digital Marketing
| B2B Digital Marketing | B2C Digital Marketing |
| A longer decision-making process leads to longer sales funnel | Customers tend to reply quicker to offers and promotions. |
| Based on logic and evidence | based on the emotions of the consumers. |
| Requires input of more than one person’s | one-on-one connections with the brand. |
The strategy formation is based usually on the type of business you run. You need to go through your buyer’s persona and create valuable content to attract that audience.
How To Perform Digital Marketing?
There are five steps to running a successful digital marketing campaign.
1. Create a buyer’s persona
2. Install goal-oriented digital marketing tools
3. Conduct a digital asset and channel evaluation.
4. Audit and plan the framework
5. Bring your digital marketing campaign to life.
You can read in-depth about these steps in our blog regarding the digital marketing campaign
Inculcate Digital Marketing In Your Success Stories.
The Internet is an invaluable tool for promoting your business, service, or product, whether it’s social media platforms, websites, texts, or any other online medium. With digital marketing, you can reach prospects through a variety of channels, opening up more opportunities. You can convert a lead or acquire a customer at any time when you can connect with your audience.