Marketing your company online is a crucial these days. Internet usage has more than doubled over the past decade and this shift has dramatically affected how people purchase products and interact with businesses. With that being said, what is digital marketing? Digital marketing is like any other type of marketing—it’s a way to connect with and influence your potential customers. The real difference is, you connect with and influence those customers online through a variety of distribution channels.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to any online marketing efforts. Email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, podcasting, and even blogging are all great examples of digital marketing—they help introduce people to your company and persuade them to buy. Here are some of the most common digital marketing techniques and strategies businesses use to reach people online:DIGITAL MARKETING ASSETS
Many companies under utilize many digital marketing assets they have at their disposal. Here are just a few examples:- Your website
- Branded assets (logos, icons, acronyms, etc)
- Video content (video ads, product demos, etc)
- Images (infographics, product shots, company photos, etc)
- Written content (blog posts, eBooks, product descriptions, testimonials, etc)
- Online products or tools (SaaS, white papers, interactive content, etc)
- Reviews
- Social media pages
DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES
The list of digital marketing strategies is also constantly evolving, but here are some of the strategies most businesses are using:ONLINE ADVERTISING
Online advertising is actually a broad term that covers any type of digital marketing where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad. For example, Google AdWords is a form of PPC advertising called “paid search advertising”. Facebook Ads are another form of PPC advertising called “paid social media advertising”. Google, Bing and Yahoo all allow you to run text ads on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Paid search advertising is one of the best ways to target potential customers who are actively searching for a product or service like yours. (Check out one of our paid search campaigns here)SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
If you don’t want to pay to show up in the SERPs, you can also use search engine optimization (SEO) to try and rank pages or blog posts on your site organically. You don’t have to pay directly for every click, but getting a page to rank usually takes quite a bit of time and effort.SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Like SEO, social media marketing is the free, organic way to use social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn to market your business. And, just like SEO, organically marketing your business on social media takes a lot more time and effort, but in the long run, it can deliver much cheaper results.CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is another fairly broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, podcasts, etc) to build brand awareness or drive clicks, leads or sales.EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is the oldest and most reliable forms of online marketing. Most digital marketers use email marketing to advertise special deals, highlight content (often as part of content marketing) or promote an event.Does Digital Marketing Work?
Digital marketing is essential for any business. At Tampa Digital Marketing Agency, Digillennial, we’ve used digital marketing to help all kinds of businesses grow—from startups to multi-million dollar businesses and beyond. That’s the beauty of advertising online. If you know who you want to target, you can use digital marketing to target anyone, anywhere. However, that being said, certain types of businesses will benefit more from certain types of digital advertising.How Do I Get Started?
The good news is, getting started with digital marketing is fairly easy. Most online advertising platforms make it easy to sign up and create your first campaign. Regardless of which strategies you choose to use, here are 4 questions you need to answer before you get started with digital marketing:- How much do you need to make?
- Who are you marketing too?
- What are your customers worth?
- How much do you need to spend to reach your goals?