With how
accessible the internet is today, would you believe me if I told you the number
of people who go online every day is still increasing?
It is. In
fact, “constant” internet usage among adults increased by 5% in just the last
three years, according to Pew Research. And although
we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed along with
it — meaning offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.
Marketing
has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at
the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already
spending time: on the internet.
We get a
lot of questions from people all around the world about digital marketing.
So, we decided to answer them.
What is digital marketing?
Digital
marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or
the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines,
social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective
customers.
A
seasoned inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital marketing are
virtually the same thing, but there are some minor differences. And
conversations with marketers and business owners in the U.S., U.K., Asia,
Australia, and New Zealand, I’ve learned a lot about how those small
differences are being observed across the world.
What Is The Role of Digital Marketing To
A Company?
While
traditional marketing might exist in print ads, phone communication, or
phsycial marketing, digital marketing can occur electronically and online. This
means that there are a number of endless possibilities for brands including
email, video, social media, or website-based marketing opportunities.
At this
stage, digital marketing is vital for your business and brand awareness. It
seems like every other brand has a website. And if they don’t, they at least
have a social media presence or digital ad strategy. Digital content and
marketing is so common that consumers now expect and rely on it as a way to
learn about brands.
Long
story short, to be competitive as a business owner, you’ll need to embrace some
aspects of digital marketing.
Because
digital marketing has so many options and strategies associated with it, you
can get creative and experiment with a variety of marketing tactics on a
budget. With digital marketing, you can also use tools like analytics
dashboards to monitor the success and ROI of your campaigns more than you could
with a traditional promotional content — such as a billboard or print ad.
How Does A Business Define Digital Marketing?
Digital
marketing is defined by the use of numerous digital tactics and channels to
connect with customers where they spend much of their time: online. From the
website itself to a business’s online branding assets — digital advertising,
email marketing, online brochures, and beyond — there’s a spectrum of tactics
that fall under the umbrella of “digital marketing.”
The best
digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign
supports their overarching goals. And depending on the goals of their marketing
strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through the free and paid
channels at their disposal.
A content
marketer, for example, can create a series of blog posts that serve to generate
leads from a new ebook the business recently created. The company’s social
media marketer might then help promote these blog posts through paid and
organic posts on the business’s social media accounts. Perhaps the email
marketer creates an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more
information on the company. We’ll talk more about these specific digital marketers
in a minute.
Types of Digital Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
(SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Native Advertising
- Marketing Automation
- Email Marketing
- Online PR
- Inbound Marketing
- Sponsored Content
Here’s a
quick rundown of some of the most common digital marketing tactics and the
channels involved in each one.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is
the process of optimizing your website to “rank” higher in search engine
results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your
website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include websites, blogs,
and infographics.
There are
a number of ways to approach SEO in order to generate qualified traffic to your
website. These include:
- On page SEO: This type of
SEO focuses on all of the content that exists “on the page” when looking
at a website. By researching keywords for their search volume and intent
(or meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the
search engine results pages (SERPs) those questions produce.
- Off page SEO: This type of
SEO focuses on all of the activity that takes place “off the page” when
looking to optimize your website. “What activity not on my own website
could affect my ranking?” You might ask. The answer is inbound links, also
known as backlinks. The number of publishers that link to you, and the
relative “authority” of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for
the keywords you care about. By networking with other publishers, writing
guest posts on these websites (and linking back to your website), and
generating external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to move
your website up on all the right SERPs.
- Technical SEO: This type of
SEO focuses on the backend of your website, and how your pages are coded.
Image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all
forms of technical SEO that can increase your website’s loading
speed — an important ranking factor in the eyes of search
engines like Google.
Content Marketing
This term
denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of
generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers. The
channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy include:
- Blog posts: Writing and
publishing articles on a company blog helps you demonstrate your industry
expertise and generates organic search traffic for your business. This
ultimately gives you more opportunities to convert website visitors into
leads for your sales team.
- Ebooks and whitepapers:
Ebooks, whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps further educate
website visitors. It also allows you to exchange content for a reader’s
contact information, generating leads for your company and moving people
through the buyer’s journey.
- Infographics: Sometimes,
readers want you to show, not tell. Infographics are a form of visual
content that helps website visitors visualize a concept you want to help
them learn.
Social Media Marketing
This
practice promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to
increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business.
The channels you can use in social media marketing include:
- Facebook.
- Twitter.
- LinkedIn.
- Instagram.
- Snapchat.
- Pinterest.
If you’re
new to social platforms, you can use tools like HubSpot to connect channels
like LinkedIn and Facebook in one place. This way, you can easily schedule
content for multiple channels at once, and monitor analytics from the platform
as well.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a
method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your
ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Ads, which allows
you to pay for top slots on Google’s search engine results pages at a price
“per click” of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC
include:
- Paid ads on Facebook: Here,
users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which
Facebook will publish to the newsfeeds of people who match your business’s
audience.
- Twitter Ads campaigns: Here,
users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges to the news
feeds of a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplish a specific goal
for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter
followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
- Sponsored Messages on
LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific
LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.
Affiliate Marketing
This is a
type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for
promoting someone else’s products or services on your website. Affiliate
marketing channels include:
- Hosting video ads through
the YouTube Partner Program.
- Posting affiliate links from
your social media accounts.
Native Advertising
Native
advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and
featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed-sponsored
posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media
advertising to be “native” — Facebook advertising and
Instagram advertising, for example.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers
to the software that serves to automate your basic marketing operations. Many
marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks they would otherwise do
manually, such as:
- Email newsletters: Email
automation doesn’t just allow you to automatically send emails to your
subscribers. It can also help you shrink and expand your contact list as
needed so your newsletters are only going to the people who want to see
them in their inboxes.
- Social media post
scheduling: If you want to grow your organization’s presence on a social
network, you need to post frequently. This makes manual posting a bit of
an unruly process. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your
social media channels for you, so you can spend more time focusing on content
strategy.
- Lead-nurturing workflows:
Generating leads, and converting those leads into customers, can be a long
process. You can automate that process by sending leads specific emails
and content once they fit certain criteria, such as when they download and
open an ebook.
- Campaign tracking and
reporting: Marketing campaigns can include a ton of different people,
emails, content, webpages, phone calls, and more. Marketing automation can
help you sort everything you work on by the campaign it’s serving, and
then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress all of
these components make over time.
Email Marketing
Companies
use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is
often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct
people toward the business’s website. The types of emails you might send in an
email marketing campaign include:
- Blog subscription
newsletters.
- Follow-up emails to website
visitors who downloaded something.
- Customer welcome emails.
- Holiday promotions to
loyalty program members.
- Tips or similar series
emails for customer nurturing.
Online PR
Online PR
is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications,
blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s much like traditional PR, but in
the online space. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:
- Reporter outreach via social
media: Talking to journalists on Twitter, for example, is a great way to
develop a relationship with the press that produces earned media
opportunities for your company.
- Engaging online reviews of
your company: When someone reviews your company online, whether that
review is good or bad, your instinct might be not to touch it. On the
contrary, engaging company reviews helps you humanize your brand and
deliver powerful messaging that protects your reputation.
- Engaging comments on your
personal website or blog: Similar to the way you’d respond to reviews of
your company, responding to the people who are reading your content is the
best way to generate productive conversation around your industry.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound
marketing refers to a marketing methodology wherein you attract, engage, and
delight customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. You can use every
digital marketing tactic listed above, throughout an inbound marketing
strategy, to create a customer experience that works with the customer,
not against them. Here are some classic examples of inbound marketing
versus traditional marketing:
- Blogging vs. pop-up ads
- Video marketing vs.
commercial advertising
- Email contact lists vs.
email spam
Sponsored Content
With
sponsored content, you as a brand pay another company or entity to create and
promote content that discusses your brand or service in some way.
One
popular type of sponsored content is influencer marketing. With this type of
sponsored content, a brand sponsors an influencer in its industry to publish
posts or videos related to the company on social media.
Another
type of sponsored content could be a blog post or article that is written to
highlight a topic, service, or brand.
What Does A Digital Marketer Do?
Digital
marketers are in charge of driving brand awareness and lead generation through
all the digital channels — both free and paid — that are at a company’s
disposal. These channels include social media, the company’s own website,
search engine rankings, email, display advertising, and the company’s blog.
The
digital marketer usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI)
for each channel so they can properly measure the company’s performance across
each one. A digital marketer who’s in charge of SEO, for example, measures
their website’s “organic traffic” — of that traffic coming from website
visitors who found a page of the business’s website via a Google search.
Digital
marketing is carried out across many marketing roles today. In small companies,
one generalist might own many of the digital marketing tactics described above
at the same time. In larger companies, these tactics have multiple specialists
that each focus on just one or two of the brand’s digital channels.
Here are
some examples of these specialists:
SEO Manager
Main KPIs: Organic traffic
In short,
SEO managers get the business to rank on Google. Using a variety of approaches
to search engine optimization, this person might work directly with content
creators to ensure the content they produce performs well on Google — even if
the company also posts this content on social media.
Content Marketing Specialist
Main KPIs: Time on page, overall blog traffic,
YouTube channel subscribers
Content
marketing specialists are the digital content creators. They frequently keep
track of the company’s blogging calendar, and come up with a content strategy
that includes video as well. These professionals often work with people in
other departments to ensure the products and campaigns the business launches
are supported with promotional content on each digital channel.
Social Media Manager
Main KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares
The role
of a social media manager is easy to infer from the title, but which social
networks they manage for the company depends on the industry. Above all, social
media managers establish a posting schedule for the company’s written and
visual content. This employee might also work with the content marketing
specialist to develop a strategy for which content to post on which social
network.
(Note:
Per the KPIs above, “impressions” refers to the number of times a business’s
posts appear on the newsfeed of a user.)
Marketing Automation Coordinator
Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through
rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate
The
marketing automation coordinator helps choose and manage the software that allows the whole marketing team to
understand their customers’ behavior and measure the growth of their business.
Because many of the marketing operations described above might be executed
separately from one another, it’s important for there to be someone who can
group these digital activities into individual campaigns and track each
campaign’s performance.
Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which Is It?
On the
surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online, and both focus on
creating digital content for people to consume. So what’s the difference?
The term
“digital marketing” doesn’t differentiate between
push and pull marketing tactics (or what we might now refer to as ‘inbound’ and
‘outbound’ methods). Both can still fall under the umbrella of digital
marketing.
Digital
outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many
people as possible in the online space — regardless of whether it’s relevant or
welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many
websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren’t necessarily ready
to receive it.
On the
other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to
attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are
helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing
assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which
your ideal customers are searching for.
Ultimately,
inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to
attract, engage, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other
hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any
kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.
Does Digital Marketing Work For All Businesses?
Digital
marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your
company sells, digital marketing still involves building out buyer personas to
identify your audience’s needs, and creating valuable online content. However,
that’s not to say all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.
B2B Digital Marketing
If your
company is business-to-business (B2B), your digital marketing efforts are
likely to be centered around online lead generation, with the end goal being
for someone to speak to a salesperson. For that reason, the role of your
marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your
salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels.
Beyond
your website, you’ll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused
channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending their time online.
B2C Digital Marketing
If your
company is business-to-consumer (B2C), depending on the price point of your
products, it’s likely that the goal of your digital marketing efforts is to
attract people to your website and have them become customers without ever
needing to speak to a salesperson.
For that
reason, you’re probably less likely to focus on ‘leads’ in their traditional
sense, and more likely to focus on building an accelerated buyer’s journey,
from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment that they make a
purchase. This will often mean your product features in your content higher up
in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to
use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).
For B2C
companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often be more
valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.
What Is The Role of Digital Marketing To A Company?
Unlike
most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see
accurate results in real time. If you’ve ever put an advert in a newspaper,
you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to
that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no surefire way to know if
that ad was responsible for any sales at all.
On the
other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any
aspect of your marketing efforts.
Here are
some examples:
Website Traffic
With
digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your
website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software, available in
marketing platforms like HubSpot.
You can
also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where
they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.
This
intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or
less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your
website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic
search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase
that percentage.
With
offline marketing, it’s very difficult to tell how people are interacting with
your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a
purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in
people’s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s
journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them
to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.
Content Performance and Lead Generation
Imagine
you’ve created a product brochure and posted it through people’s
letterboxes — that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem
is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many
people threw it straight into the trash.
Now
imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly
how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted, and you can collect the
contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you
measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you’re also
generating qualified leads when people download it.
Attribution Modeling
An effective digital marketing strategy combined
with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales
back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your business.
We call
this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way
people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed
decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention,
and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.
Connecting
the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important — according to Aberdeen Group, companies
with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate,
compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you
can improve your customer’s’ journey through the buying cycle by using digital
technologies, then it’s likely to reflect positively on your business’s bottom
line.
What Types Of Digital Content Should I Create?
The kind
of content you create depends on your audience’s needs at different stages in
the buyer’s journey. You should start by creating buyer personasto identify what your
audience’s goals and challenges are in relation to your business. On a basic
level, your online content should aim to help them meet these goals, and
overcome their challenges.
Then,
you’ll need to think about when they’re most likely to be ready to consume this
content in relation to what stage they’re at in their buyer’s journey. We call
this content mapping.
With
content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:
- The characteristics of the
person who will be consuming it (that’s where buyer personas come in).
- How close that person is to
making a purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage).
In terms
of the format of your content, there are a lot of different things to try. Here
are some options we’d recommend using at each stage of the buyer’s journey:
Awareness Stage
- Blog posts. Great for increasing
your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.
- Infographics. Very
shareable, meaning they increase your chances of being found via social
media when others share your content. (Check out these free infographic templates
to get you started.)
- Short videos. Again, these
are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by
hosting them on platforms like YouTube.
Consideration Stage
- Ebooks. Great for lead
generation as they’re generally more comprehensive than a blog post or
infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact
information to receive it.
- Research reports. Again,
this is a high value content piece which is great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry
can also work for the awareness stage though, as they’re often picked-up
by the media or industry press.
- Webinars. As they’re a more
detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective
consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive
content than a blog post or short video.
Decision Stage
- Case studies. Having detailed
case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those
who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively
influence their decision.
- Testimonials. If case
studies aren’t a good fit for your business, having short testimonials
around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of
testimonials a little more loosely. If you’re a clothing brand, these
might take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress,
pulled from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.
How Long Will It Take To See Results From My Content?
With
digital marketing, it can often feel like you’re able to see results much
faster than you might with offline marketing due to the fact it’s easier to measure ROI.
However, it ultimately depends on the scale and effectiveness of your digital
marketing strategy.
If you
spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your
audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and
convert them, then you’re likely to see strong results within the first six
months.
If paid advertising is part of
your digital strategy, then the results come even quicker — but it’s
recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach using content,
SEO, and social media for long-term, sustainable success.
Do I Need a Big Budget For Digital Marketing?
As with
anything, it really depends on what elements of digital marketing you’re
looking to add to your strategy.
If you’re
focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation for
a preexisting website, the good news is you don’t need very much budget at all.
With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high quality content that
your audience will want to consume, which unless you’re planning to outsource
the work, the only investment you’ll need is your time.
With
outbound techniques like online advertising and
purchasing email lists, there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes
down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the
advertising.
For
example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you’ll bid against other
companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google’s search results for
keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the
keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is
why it’s a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.
How Does Mobile Marketing Fit Into My Digital
Marketing Strategy?
Another
key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact, smartphone usage as a whole
accounts for 69% of time spent consuming digital media in the U.S., while
desktop-based digital media consumption makes up less than half — and the U.S.
still isn’t mobile’s biggest fan compared to other countries.
This
means it’s essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages, social media
images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. If your company has a
mobile app that enables users to engage with your brand or shop your products,
your app falls under the digital marketing umbrella, too.
Those
engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to have the same
positive experience as they would on desktop. This means implementing a
mobile-friendly or responsive website design
to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. It might also mean
reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a hassle-free
experience for people downloading your content on-the-go. As for your social
media images, it’s important to always have a mobile user in mind when creating
them as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices, meaning text can be
cut-off.
There are
lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users,
and when implementing any digital marketing strategy, it’s hugely important
to consider how the experience will translate on mobile devices. By ensuring
this is always front-of-mind, you’ll be creating digital experiences that work
for your audience, and consequently achieve the results you’re hoping for.
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/
