Everything You Need to Know About Digital Marketing

What is digital marketing strategy? The role of digital marketing is simple, but twofold. The first role of digital marketing is to use digital media for selling or promoting your products and services. But in addition to simple promotion, a good digital marketing strategy should also strive to encourage brand advocacy and community building. The types of digital marketing that best benefit the former are SEO and AdWords marketing, while content marketing and social media marketing are two types of digital marketing benefitting the latter.

Okay, so what is digital marketing strategy versus traditional marketing? Traditional marketing involved pigeonholing customers into broad demographics, which can often result in targeting people who might not really be interested in your product. Digital marketing uses the vast amounts of data available online—from demographics to personality profiles to interests and more—to target users in a more sophisticated fashion. From there, brands can use digital channels to engage with their prospects one-on-one rather than through broad, impersonal advertisements.

Digital marketing is important because users turn to the internet to answer their questions. When researching a product or service, they’re likely to check Google first. The question for how to do digital marketing well will therefore involve how you can raise your business’ placement on search result rankings. And because word of mouth marketing is so powerful, brands must make themselves available on social platforms where consumers are talking to one another most.

The Types of Digital Marketing Explained

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One of the biggest types of digital marketing is social media. Social media marketing involves making posts on social media and managing communities of existing or prospective customers. Many networks allow promoting posts, to appear in fans’ feeds or in the feeds of those who are likely to take interest in your product. By leveraging data on user interests, this type of digital marketing is a great way to easily engage with audiences both new and old.

How to do digital marketing correctly is also a question of how well you extend outside your base. Social listening is a key strategy, in which you track mentions of your brand or product—which might not necessarily tag you—in order to make proactive outreach to prospective customers. There are many case studies on the power of social listening—check some out here.

One of the most dependable methods of digital marketing is email marketing. This is the oldest type of digital marketing, and also has the highest ROI: email marketing has significantly higher CTR and conversion rates than social media posts. Email is also the most direct way to reach your customers because you don’t have to rely on the “black box” of an algorithmic social network feed or search results page to reach your intended audience.

One of the biggest challenges of how to do digital marketing via email is building a list of customers to target. Signing up users to your email list requires consent on the recipient’s behalf. But a strong email list is valuable because it serves as an audience you can target who’s already interested in the products and services you offer.

The last few types of digital marketing involve search. This is SEO marketing, use of Google AdWords and even content marketing. SEO marketing—which stands for search engine optimization—involves optimizing your brand’s online presence for better placement in search results. This requires a sophisticated understanding of your audience and their needs, as you will have to target keywords they are likely to search.

From there, you can develop content around those keywords—for your own website as well as posts you can submit elsewhere—to build back links to your website. The more pages link back to your website with the appropriate keywords, the more confidence search engines will have in placing your pages higher in the listings.

Purchasing AdWords—or placement at the top of each page of Google results—is another option. This method of digital marketing is competitive and puts you in bid wars against others for placement. Thankfully, you only pay per click when it comes to AdWords, which makes it a relatively risk-free method of promotion.

How to Do Digital Marketing Well

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The first step in how to do digital marketing is to understand your audience. With a customer data platform and web analytics, you can gain a comprehensive, holistic view of existing customers as well as prospective customers and their needs. Once you have identified your audience and their specific needs, you can optimize your website to offer personalized pages to each segment.

One of the most popular ways to do this is to offer a different landing page for each segment of your audience. But don’t stop there: develop a content strategy around your audience’s needs by providing useful, informative and valuable content that meets their needs. Not only will this content attract customers to your site, but it may also be promoted on social media for building engagement.

Digital marketing is a constantly iterative process because it involves adapting to your audience’s needs. It’s not about just promoting a product but rather building communities and engaging with fans throughout every step of the customer journey.