Empowering the Future Marketers: A Guide to Excel in Digital Marketing and Advertising

Intro

The concept of digital advertising/marketing dates back to the 1990s, and recent market trends have seen it take an upward surge. Digital marketing is more of a marketing strategy that entails the use of digital platforms and online communication tools through which businesses can market their products and services to a wider audience.

Digital marketing provides businesses with opportunities to expand their businesses, increase consumer engagement, create brand awareness, achieve brand credibility and validation, enhance conversion, as well as grow global and local brand reach.

In this comprehensive read, we’ll take you through all matters digital marketing, allowing you to gain a deep insight into the digital marketing metrics and technologies available in current times.

What is Digital Marketing?

Also referred to as online marketing, digital marketing can be defined as an array of marketing efforts that happen through the internet. The concept presents business owners with an opportunity to leverage digital platforms and channels such as social media, search engines, multi-media messages, websites, and emails to connect to their clients, both existing ones and prospects.

Now, more than ever, most people spend their time online. Studies from Statista, reveal that there are approximately 4.9B internet users globally as at 2021. The world-wide digital advertising market was approximately $350B in 2020 and it is projected to surpass $786B come 2026.

Interestingly, despite modern times’ easy internet access, the number of online users keeps soaring on a daily basis. As such reaching your clients through online platforms makes so much sense as an effective marketing tactic. The idea is to come up with online marketing campaigns that best support your business objectives.

What are the Main Types of Digital Marketing?

In this segment, we’ll take you through the digital marketing strategies and tactics that are most commonly available, as well as the channels that are involved in each tactic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Image Source: BrightEdge Research

As the name suggests, SEO refers to website optimization, a process that sees your website get higher ranking on search engine pages such as Google. This in return leads to increased free (organic) traffic to your website.

Channels involved in this digital marketing tactic include blogs, websites, making presentations and infographics. The beauty with this concept is that there are tons of platforms such as RankTracker that offer top-notch quality and highly affordable SEO tools to help you drive more traffic to your website.

Content Marketing

Here, businesses create and promote unique content assets for the purposes of traffic growth, brand awareness, consumer reach, and lead generation. The channels involved in content marketing include eBooks, blog posts, online brochures, and whitepapers.

Social Media Marketing

Image Source: Data Reportal

Recent times have seen social media platforms pop up right, left, centre. Advertising on social media is all about reaching your target audience through platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more in a bid to increase your brand’s awareness, drive traffic to your website, and ultimately, generating leads for your enterprise.

In case you are not so big on social media presence you can use tools to connect channels like Facebook and LinkedIn all in one place. This makes it easier for you to schedule the content for several channels simultaneously, while easily monitoring the analytics from the various platforms.

Affiliate Marketing

This type of digital marketing is more performance-based, whereby your business gets a certain commission for promoting another business on your website. One common channel used by affiliate marketers is video ads that are mostly offered through YouTube’s Partner Program.

You can also achieve this through posting affiliate links (mostly external links) that come through your social media accounts. The new wave in this scene is campaign creation through digital platform influencers. With the right content creator (obviously one with a huge following), you can take your online marketing to a whole new level!

Email Marketing

Email marketing is mostly used by companies to communicate with their clientele base. They send out emails that include follow-ups, new customer welcome messages and packages, available promotions, upcoming events, loyalty programs, customer nurturing tips, blog and newsletter subscriptions, etc.

Video Marketing

YouTube has taken the video marketing industry by storm. Most internet users instinctively go to YouTube to either learn something, read reviews, or even seek some insight before making any purchasing decisions.

Other video marketing platforms through which you can run video campaigns include TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook videos. To achieve the best results, most digital marketers combine this tactic with social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO marketing.

Image Source: Campaign Monitor

Pay-Per-Click

With PPC, a publisher usually gets paid every time a user clicks your ad. A commonly used Pay-Per-Click tool is Google Ads, whereby the user pays for highly-ranked slots in Google’s Search Engine page at a certain price for all the links the user places. Other channels are: Twitter Ads campaigns, Facebook Paid Ads, and LinkedIn Sponsored Messages.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content entails a brand paying another entity or company to create, promote, and share content that describes your service or brand in one way or another. One common channel here is influencer marketing, where a brand pays or sponsors an online influencer in the same industry to post videos or publish articles related to the brand on their social media platforms.

Perks of Digital Marketing: Why Do Businesses Adopt it?

Digital marketing comes with a lot of advantages. Not only is it a quantifiable marketing strategy, but it is also results-oriented, cost-effective, adaptable, and much faster to implement. Here are some outstanding perks to detail:

Target Focused and Oriented

With digital marketing, it is easier to focus your energy on the prospects that are most likely to subscribe to your service or purchase your product. Traditional advertising methods such as newspaper or TV Ads leave you with little to no control over who sees your advertisement. Online marketing allows marketers to target an audience that is highly-specific.

Additionally, it allows you to personalize the marketing messages and also make them high-converting. Digital marketing requires you to perform a market analysis, through which you will learn your prospects’ personas. This way, you can refine the marketing strategy to make sure that the prospects you reach out to are more likely to purchase your product.

Competitiveness: It Evens the ‘Playing’ Field

Digital marketing provides businesses with an equal competition opportunity regardless of their size, scope, and resource availability. Small businesses and start-ups can find it difficult to compete with bigger and more-established brands in the same industry given budget campaigns. Strategic online marketing initiatives can see you outrank any competition, even the big players.

Cost-Effectiveness

One cannot possibly compare traditional advertising costs to that of digital marketing options; the former is definitely more expensive. Online marketing allows business owners to track their daily campaign performance. This way, they can get a clear picture of the performance of various channels, ultimately optimizing their campaign budgets for even higher Return On Investment.

Enhanced Leads Conversion Rates

Digital marketing makes it easier to convert prospects and target audience into customers, leads, supporters, or even subscribers, helping you build on brand reputation. With online marketing, it is simpler to measure and keep track of your marketing efforts. This way, you can keep refining your strategies and tactics, ultimately improving your conversion rate. Digital advertising helps you target a specific market, eventually yielding to better-quality leads.

Opportunities to Interact the Target Audience

Digital marketing allows business owners to interact with their targeted audiences at every stage, giving them a chance to earn their target market’s trust. With online marketing, you can follow through the customer’s purchasing journey to better understand them. Understanding your clients is crucial in leads generation as it ensures that your customers have a connection to your business right from the start.

Measurability

Online marketing is quite quantifiable and measurable, allowing you to perform in-depth analysis of your business’ growth. Regardless of your company size, digital marketing can give you an accurate overview of the marketing metrics from beginning to end.

This includes, but is not limited to, the number of shares, impressions, likes, views, clicks, and time spent on your page. Not only do you get to see real-time results, but you can also measure the Return-on-investment on all aspects of your online marketing efforts.

Adaptability

Digital marketing is highly adaptable, seeing as business owners can change their marketing strategies easily. If an online ad that you are running is not giving you the desired results, you can easily switch it up or make the relevant adjustments to it.

Tips That Businesses Can Use to Make their Digital Marketing Efforts Successful

For the best results, the rule of thumb here is to combine an array of digital marketing tactics and channels, while keeping yourself abreast of recent market trends. Keep in mind the following:

• Flexibility- Remain open to the changes in the fast-paced online marketing space. Tweak the available strategies, tactics, and tools in accordance with the changes that happen.
• Let your objectives be SMART- The goals you set should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and, above all, Time-bound. Additionally, they should remain consistent with your online marketing plan.
• Creativity- The online space is dominated by creatives from across the globe, not to mention all walks of life. To stand out, you need to be creative and innovative right from the start. Let your content be unique and authentic, giving your target audience a reason to get into ‘bed’ with you.
• Perfect Execution- Achieving your desired business goals goes way beyond the planning/ strategizing phase. You have to put your plan to action, ensuring that you remain consistent with the customer feedback you get.
• Market Segmentation- The key to successful online marketing is understanding your target audience. You do this by studying your prospects’ online behaviour and characteristics, then putting together shared/ common traits. This helps you prioritize their needs accordingly.
• Strategies, Tactics, and Channel Diversification- No single online marketing strategy is perfect. Open up to the idea that you might need to experiment with different strategies. This helps you interact with certain target audiences that you didn’t even know existed, giving you more revenue streams.
• Sales & Marketing Integration- More often than not, the sales team and marketing team in any given company find themselves working against each other. Rather than have these teams work individually, it would be smart to integrate their operation in your online marketing plan. This helps you maximize on every digital marketing aspect seeing as both teams get to work with a shared purpose.
• Data Analysis- Be sure to collect, keep track of, measure, as well as analyse all available data. In modern day times, data is quite crucial, especially when it comes to provision of customer-satisfactory services. It also helps you keep up with your industry competition.
• Connect to your Audience- Today, more than ever, clients prefer being in touch with their preferred vendors almost at all times. As a business owner, it is paramount that you create a business environment that nourishes this desire. You can achieve this by availing tools (chatbots) for easier communication with your customers, while providing content that is up to date.
• Feedback Collection- Getting feedback from your customers, and responding to it has become part and parcel of any business today. You can go about this through online surveys, comments, reviews, and polls. This feedback gives you insight into which strategies and tactics are working and which ones are not. With constant improvement, you can easily achieve online marketing success.

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In Conclusion

Digital marketing does not come with a one-size-fits-all kind of approach. Any company seeking to penetrate the highly-competitive market must be willing to put in the work. The first step would be the incorporation of different digital marketing facets before making a conclusion to go with a specific strategy. If you are completely clueless regarding where to start, you could take advantage of the numerous digital marketing courses available.

Have you ever tried any digital marketing tactic we’ve covered above? If so, which one, and how did it work for you?