Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is any marketing effort delivered over a digital channel, specifically the internet, through mobile and other digital mediums. Using online media channels, digital marketing is how companies promote and sell their goods, services, and brands. Consumers heavily rely on digital means to research products. For example, People nowadays search products on Google search engines, while some customers search on brand websites and mobile applications.
Digital marketing is primarily data-driven than traditional marketing methods such as print, billboards, and TV. Digital Marketers today can collect and analyze data of different customer behavior or user engagements, enabling them to facilitate more personalized content and advertisements toward clearly defined audiences for better engagement and results with the combined forces of both the internet and technology.
Can integrate digital marketing with offline marketing channels such as print advertisements, live industry events, popup booths, and in-store promotions to maximize target market reach and lead nurturing. An example of an online/offline marketing integration would be launching a trade show (offline) through media or a mobile phone advertising campaign (online) to promote the offline event. And during the event (offline), you can collect personal details such as emails and phone numbers to follow up through email and mobile marketing (online).
Digital Marketing Agency
You have to select the digital marketing agency based on your budget, your digital marketing goals and objectives, and how hands-on you want to be in your digital marketing.
7-Types of Digital Marketing Agencies
They will reach customers online through omnichannel, multichannel, or single-channel marketing.
• Multichannel and single-channel marketing
Digital marketing Agencies interact with customers in one or multiple channels such as websites, blogs, email, social media, and more.
• Omnichannel marketing
It means that they will provide a seamless customer experience across channels and devices throughout their life-cycle.
1. Full-Service Digital Marketing Agency
They will offer a variety of digital marketing services. Businesses often partner with full-service digital marketing agencies because they have experience doing specific projects that they need, such as lead nurture campaigns or a website redesign.
2. Inbound Marketing Agency
They offer inbound marketing tactics and strategies, which differ from traditional outbound strategies. Inbound agencies seek to position a business online where customers can find them, build trust over time, and eventually generate sales. Inbound strategies can yield significant results over time, but they typically require a longer time horizon (six months to a year or more).
3. SEO Agency
They will have specialists perform the following:
• Keyword research
• Website audits
• Back-links audits
• Website and blog content
• Metadata assessment (checking the quality of URL, title tags, meta descriptions, etc.)
• Video description optimization
• Link building
• And more
An SEO company will utilize various data analytics and website developer tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEM Rush, and SEO Moz. They will help their clients’ websites and website content rank high on search results, including compliance with Google’s ever-changing search algorithm.
4. Digital Ad (PPC) Agency
These agencies will use paid traffic instead of free organic traffic, which involves bidding on keywords and ad placement on search results. Digital ads can appear on websites, search result pages (SERPs), and social media channels.
Their popular services include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube ad creation and deployment, and Google Ads Manager account creation and maintenance.
5. Social Media Agency
Social media agencies can manage and produce social content and set up advertisements on social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
They will also offer services related to responding and reacting to customer interactions on social media platforms. They may also provide influencer outreach for cross-promotion or affiliate marketing.
6. Web Design Agency
They build customized and optimized websites or web pages for businesses. Web designers will handle the pages’ look, feel, and functionality, whether it’s for a brand new website, a website redesign, or a smaller project. Standard services offered by website agencies include:
• User experience and user interface (UX/UI) design and research.
• Image creation and storage.
• Web development.
• Web hosting.
7. Digital Marketing Consultant
Digital marketing consultants have a broad knowledge of digital marketing and can help businesses develop a digital marketing strategy. They can identify weaknesses in your current system, areas of improvement, and the best way to make the most gains.
Types of Digital Marketing:
Website development
They will create a website for your business and design it to engage more traffic towards your website. They will plan your website by determining the primary process of the website; they will decide your domain name, choose a web host and then build your pages.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
It is the process of getting traffic from the free, organic search results on the search engines. They will perform tasks that help websites reach higher search engine rankings. SEO strategy focuses on getting the page on selected keywords and phrases at the most elevated search position possible.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
PPC or pay-per-click is a type of digital marketing that involves advertisers paying a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. It’s essentially a method of ‘buying’ visits to your site, in addition to driving website visits organically.
Social media marketing
This process involves using both organic and paid digital marketing efforts on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to market a company’s products and services.
Marketing automation
They will perform online campaigns and interact with people in one or multiple channels such as websites, blogs, email, social media, and more. And also perform omnichannel marketing throughout their life cycle.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a marketing strategy they use to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media.
PR services
They have a PR specialist who communicates with the public and media on your behalf of you to present them in the best light. This helps their clients create and maintain a good reputation.
Email marketing
They will do marketing through email. Sharing offers and new products to customers will send your business ads via email.
Video production
They will create video content for your business to be posted on social media because visuals talk more than text.
Event coordination
In this process, they will become aware of the people about upcoming events for the promotions of your business. They’re responsible for running a range of events, ensuring the target audience is engaged and adequately marketed the event’s message. Events play a huge part in the success of a brand or an organization.
The complexity of a digital marketing strategy primarily depends on the size of your business and your long-term goal. If you have just launched your business, you may only need to make a few simple steps using one or two digital channels.
Why Do You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?
• It motivates you to learn more
• It provides real data
• It structures your actions
• It helps to increase ROI
• It allows you to reconsider your relationships with the audience
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for developing a digital marketing strategy. Keep up your critical thinking while following our suggestions and choosing tips that resonate with your brand the most.
Research and define your goals
First of all, ask yourself if it’s possible to optimize your existing content to rank higher on Google. Here’s what you can do with it if we focus on SEO strategy:
• Structure your content according to Google’s algorithm to rank higher;
• Reduce the weight of your images to make your page load faster;
• Get linked by relevant and authoritative websites to signal that you have a good reputation.
Collect data about your audience
The second thing you should think about is the target audience for your product or service.
Develop your business’s buyer persona — a portrait of your regular customer that includes data regarding their preferences, behavior on your website, and habits as consumers. For example, you can combine your assumptions with accurate data collected using Google Analytics.
All the data you gather can help you create highly relevant display ads, use personalized email campaigns, and perform behavioral segmentation.
Generate leads
You can collect subscribers using highly targeted display advertising with Google Ads. This service allows you to display relevant ads based on the user’s search history, called re-targeting.
Below is an example of such an ad displayed because the user previously searched for copyrighting courses on Google.
Facebook is an excellent channel for growing your audience. It allows you to show relevant advertising in the Newsfeed and Messenger Chats based on a large amount of data Facebook collects about its users. Below is an example from the Masterclass ad based on the previous website visits.
You can suggest that your existing audience communicates with you on another medium to refresh your relationships. For instance, you can ask your Facebook audience to share their email address in a chatbot. Alternatively, you can suggest that they subscribe to your Facebook chatbot in an email newsletter.
There are also some ways to generate leads based on virality. For instance, you can run giveaways that target interested people and incentive them to join your mailing list.
Maybe a combination of Facebook or Instagram with giveaway emails serves the giveaways and sends notifications. Below is an example of a giveaway held on Facebook used to increase the number of subscribers and make the brand more recognizable.
Another way to build your audience is via influencer marketing. This is when a famous person, respected by thousands of subscribers, shares information about your brand and encourages their audience to check it out. It is a practical marketing approach because people regard it as a recommendation from someone they trust more than advertising. Below is an example of an influencer marketing post on Instagram.
Nurture leads
Lead nurturing moves leads towards a purchase after starting communication with your brand. You can do it with the help of emails, chat-bots, socials, but what matters most is how you do it.
You need to educate your audience, add value to their presence in your contact list, and at the same time, try to promote your brand in a non-intrusive manner.
Take care of returning clients and advocates
Once a user has purchased from you, it shouldn’t be the end of your relationship. Be sure to thank your client for their purchase, ask for feedback or a review, and try to cross-sell in the follow-up email. To generate return customers, provide an excellent customer experience and quality products. Make them feel like VIPs with exclusive personalized offers and unique content for loyal customers. You can also motivate customers to become brand advocates by offering discounts for referring other people.
Set up marketing automation
When you realize what works and what doesn’t, you need to optimize processes for your digital marketing strategy by automating them. You can easily create automated email workflows to send sequences of emails to support subscribers at various stages — onboarding, purchasing, cart abandonment, etc.
Final Thoughts
A digital marketing strategy can do a lot for your business. There are plenty of online channels to choose from. They all vary in price, outreach potential, usability, and purpose. You need a solid combination of media that best fits your business. Whatever the channels and approaches are, we recommend not sticking within the bounds of a single plan, especially if it doesn’t work as expected. It leaves lots of room for experiments, so stay open-minded.
