Digital marketing is an umbrella term referring to any and all marketing delivered digitally. To be clear, this includes all marketing delivered online– including PPC ads, email marketing, and social media ads.
Today, digital marketing is the intricate skeleton upon which successful campaigns are built. As of 2021, a nationwide poll of CMOs found spending on digital marketing campaigns grew by 14.3% versus the previous 12 months.
By implementing this powerful medium, you stand to gain valuable insights into your target demographic’s habits and thought processes. But first, ensure your campaign pieces are indeed digital media.
What is Not Digital Marketing?
The opposite of digital marketing is traditional marketing. While your campaign may utilize both traditional and digital channels, no single marketing piece can fall into both categories.
Simply put, digital marketing is all marketing done online. Marketing pieces that exist “offline” like billboards, radio ads, and direct mailers are not considered digital marketing. And there are key differences between best practices for each type.
You can’t kill two birds with one stone when it comes to marketing campaigns. The elements of a high-converting radio ad are completely different from the elements of a high-converting Facebook ad, for example.
Spend your marketing budget strategically. Don’t create ten “Jack of all trades, master of none” ads for use both online and offline. Instead, create five ads optimized for digital marketing mediums and five ads optimized for traditional.
3 Ways You Can Use Digital Marketing to Improve Your Bottom Line
You have a wide selection of channels to deliver your digital marketing campaign, and each channel can help boost your bottom line. We recommend focusing on 3 specific outputs.
Social Media Marketing
Currently, the most popular digital marketing channels are social media platforms. This is because people worldwide spend so much time scrolling through social media feeds each day. As of 2021, the average human spent 2.5 hours scrolling daily. And that number has increased every year since 2016.
So it’s no surprise many companies successfully use social media to deliver digital marketing campaigns. Gone are the days of needing to create attention-grabbing billboards and radio ads.
Now, simply tell each social media platform exactly which demographic your ads are for, and they’ll do the rest. Your ads are placed directly into your potential customer’s news feed, conveniently nestled between updates from their friends and family members.
To harness a social media platform for your campaign, compare your audience sizes on each platform. The platform with the largest audience is a great channel to start testing your marketing.
But don’t write off the other platforms entirely. Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram are all constantly releasing new tools for targeting and delivering your digital marketing campaigns. Whether your ads are videos, photos, or another type of rich media, you’ll enjoy tools and analytics that make things easy for you.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is often thought of as the oldest form of digital marketing. Since the late 1970s, businesses have used email marketing to maintain authentic customer relationships and increase profits.
Arguably the biggest perk of email marketing is your ownership of your audience. When the social media platform Vine shut down, businesses suddenly lost access to an audience. The same is true when Facebook or Instagram changes their algorithm.
Overnight, a once-lucrative income stream can be negatively impacted by outside forces.
But you own your email list, and your subscribers willingly gave you their contact information. You don’t need someone’s permission for content or social media marketing. But your email list is a list of people who are saying “I want to keep in touch with you and I find value in what you provide!”
To get started in email marketing, create a strategy. This includes defining your demographic, setting measurable goals, creating an easy way for customers to join your list, selecting an email format, and defining the cadence of emails.
The easiest way is to begin publishing a monthly or weekly newsletter that provides value, entertains, or shares stories. Record responses and plan future campaigns accordingly.
Content Marketing
Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a digital marketing campaign that doesn’t include content marketing. As the “godfather of modern marketing” Seth Godin said in 2015, “Content marketing is the only marketing left.”
What Godin meant was customers– and how they respond to marketing– have changed. Before the internet, ads directly from companies were the main source of information customers used to make their buying decisions.
Today, customers can instantly fact-check any claims you make… and instantly find negative feedback from other unbiased consumers.
A recent study by Forrester found brands that provide valuable content for customers bring in 5.7 times more revenue than brands that don’t. If you choose not to pursue content marketing, you might as well be writing a check to your competitors.
So reconsider spending your marketing budget on ads that overpromise and underdeliver. Choose to allocate funds for content. Focus on publishing pieces that answer your customers’ questions and solve their problems.
By doing so, you’ll organically build trust, brand awareness, and customer retention. As an added bonus, your audience will start asking you directly for solutions to their problems… giving you an infinite source of ideas for your next content marketing campaign.
Get Started With Digital Marketing Today
Years of study and research have proven that digital marketing is a necessary component of modern, successful ad campaigns. Today, the minds behind the world’s biggest social media platforms are constantly thinking about the next big way people will connect online.
While you can’t predict what the next new thing in digital marketing will be, you can implement what’s working now. Research your target audience, the goals of your campaign, and each stage of your campaign’s funnel.
By doing so, you’ll discover the best channels and types of digital marketing for your business. Record data for each campaign, and eventually, you’ll synthesize the perfect formula to achieve all of your marketing goals.