At a high level, digital marketing describes advertising with digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. Utilizing these online media channels, digital marketing is how companies advertise goods, services, and brands. Customers rely heavily on digital means to research products.
For example, Google Marketing Insights discovered that 48% of consumers begin their research on search engines, while 33% search on brand websites and 26% on mobile apps.
While modern digital marketing is a vast system of channels marketers need to engage their brands, online advertising is much more complex than networks alone.
To realize the true potential of digital marketing, marketers must dive deep into today’s vast and complicated cross-channel world to discover strategies that make an impact through engagement marketing.
Engagement marketing is a way to design meaningful interactions with potential and returning customers based on the data you collect over time. Engaging customers in a digital landscape builds brand awareness, distinguishes you as a thought leader in the industry, and puts your company front and center when the customer is ready to buy.
By implementing an omnichannel digital marketing technique, marketing professionals can gain valuable insights into audience behavior while opening the door to new consumer engagement methods. In addition, companies can expect to increase customer loyalty.
According to a recent study by Invesp, companies with solid omnichannel customer retention strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers. Comparatively, companies with weak omnichannel programs have a retention rate of only 33%.
As for the future of digital marketing, the variety of wearable devices available to consumers is expected to increase. Forbes also predicts that B2B social media will become increasingly conversational, video content refined for search engine optimization (SEO), and email marketing will become even more personalized.
Common Problems That Digital Marketing Can Solve
To optimize your marketing strategies, digital marketing is essential.
Digital marketing can help you get to know your target audience, learn essential data about them and provide metrics that give your marketing team credibility.
Problem 1:
I don’t know my target group well enough to get started. Getting to know your target audience takes time, and while your marketing team may have developed personas that can be of use, consumers who actively spend time online may not behave as you would expect.
You need to test different languages with different audiences, bearing in mind that detailed descriptions will appeal to different people and their position in the buying cycle. Tune in to your target audience, and you will build credibility that will set you apart from the competition.
Problem 2:
I have not optimized my channels for SEO. Regardless of your position in the marketing process, you must know SEO best practices.
In addition to boosting search engine rankings, SEO can strengthen and support your campaign testing and optimization to ensure you deliver high-quality, valuable content that your potential customers want.
Problem 3:
I don’t have a social media strategy. Whether you want to create an organic social media strategy, a paid social media strategy, or a mix of both, you must have some form of social marketing.
Social media is excellent for branding and engagement but can also be a helpful channel for digital marketing advertising.
Discover a particular niche and a consistent voice, be patient, and as your following grows, so will the impact of your ads.
Problem 4:
My marketing teams are siloed. Your customers are not stuck in one channel waiting for advertising. It’s essential to break down silos to create elegant, fluid structures.
Therefore, your marketing efforts need to employ cross-channel capabilities with teams that bring different skills to target customers where they are.
Each social network and channel have different audiences and expectations so marketing efforts can look entirely different for each network and channel.
This includes tone of voice, visuals, offers, and even the time of day you post.
Problem 5:
I am under pressure from my CMO to report on metrics that support the bottom line. For digital marketing, various metrics can be used to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts; however, these metrics should be chosen wisely.
Each case depends on the composition of your target audience and the targeting of each channel. Therefore, set your goals for each channel and determine the metrics your CMO wants to see the most.
Components Of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing includes an extensive network of digital touchpoints with which customers interact several times daily. To use these channels properly, you need to understand each channel.
Paid Search
Paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising usually describes the funded results at the top or side of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
These ads are charged for each click and can be tailored to appear when specific keywords are entered, so your ads are targeted to audiences searching for something specific.
These ads can be very effective as they rely on data gathered from people’s online behavior and drive website traffic by delivering relevant ads to the right people at the right time.
These ads also include retargeting, meaning marketing automation tools can create unique, personalized cross-platform ads depending on customers’ actions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO (Search engine optimization) involves optimizing your website’s content, technical structure, and reach so that your website pages show up on top of search engine results for specific keywords. SEO can drive visitors to your website if they exhibit behavior that indicates they are looking for relevant products.
This can be a crucial factor considering that 90% of searchers have not yet formed an opinion about a brand (Status Labs, 2018).
While PPC and retargeting have their place, organic online traffic generated through search engine optimization significantly impacts search rankings and organic website traffic. SEO can massively increase your visibility and build a lasting customer relationship by using keywords and phrases.
SEO increases a website’s ranking in online search results and organic website traffic through popular keywords and phrases. Robust SEO strategies significantly impact digital marketing campaigns because visibility is the first step towards a lasting customer relationship.
Content Marketing
Effective content marketing is not ostensibly promotional but serves to educate and inspire consumers looking for information. By offering content relevant to your audience, you can establish yourself as a thought leader and trusted source of information, reducing the likelihood that your other marketing efforts will get lost in the noise.
In the age of self-directed customers, content marketing brings in three times more leads than paid search advertising, so it’s worth the extra effort.
Social Media Marketing
The key to reliable social media marketing is far beyond having active social media accounts. You also must incorporate social elements into every aspect of your marketing efforts to create as many opportunities as possible for like-minded people to share.
The more your audience is encouraged to engage with your content, the more likely they are to share it, potentially motivating their peers to become customers.
Email Marketing
After more than twenty years, email is still the fastest and most direct way to reach customers with important information. Today, successful email campaigns require incredibly engaging, relevant, informative, and entertaining to avoid getting lost in your customers’ inboxes.
To be successful, your marketing emails should meet five key characteristics. They must be trustworthy, relevant, entertaining, coordinated across channels, and strategic.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile devices are in our pockets, besides our beds, and constantly checked throughout the day. This does marketing on mobile critical. Two-thirds of consumers can remember a specific brand they’ve promoted on mobile in the last week, but mobile is also very nuanced given its intimate nature.
SMS, MMS, and in-app marketing are all options for reaching your customers on their devices. Still, beyond that, you need to consider coordinating your marketing efforts across your other digital marketing channels.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is an integral platform that connects all your digital marketing. Without it, your campaigns look like an unfinished puzzle, missing a crucial piece. Firms that automate lead management see a 10% or more increase in revenue in six to nine months.
Marketing automation software streamlines and automates marketing tasks and workflows measures results, and calculates your digital campaigns’ return on investment (ROI) to grow revenue faster.
Marketing automation can help you gain valuable insights into which programs are working and which are not.
It provides metrics that allow you to assess the impact of digital marketing on your company’s bottom line.
Planning, Implementing, And Optimizing Your Digital Marketing Program
Begin to roll out your digital marketing program by identifying your target audience and goals, then introduce metrics to ensure you are constantly improving.
Step 1: Identify And Segment Your Audiences
Today, shoppers expect a personalized experience at every touchpoint. To achieve this, you must understand their demographic, company, and technographic characteristics and address their questions and issues.
Step 2: Establish Goals And Measurement Strategy
Use the information about the target group to determine personas and get a clear overview of their sales channel to set your goals and measurement strategy. Key metrics include impressions, reach, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), engagement rate, conversions, cost per lead (CPL), effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM), and back-end metrics such as return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), first and multi-touch attribution and lifetime customer value (LCV).
Step 3: Set Up Your Adtech And Channels
It can take a while to obtain your head around ad technology. So make sure you have the correct data management platforms (DMPs), demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPS), and ad exchanges in place before you start.
Align your team, communicate everyone’s goals and show how their channels fit into the bigger picture of digital marketing.
Step 4: Launch And Optimize
Digital marketing can be used for acquisition, nurturing, customer loyalty, and branding. Review metrics regularly to know where you are excelling and where you need to work to be a leader in this high-impact, high-demand area.
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