Before we take you through the nitty-gritty of digital marketing, let us tell you why it is the ultimate success strategy for your business.
Source: Statista
The year 2020 accounts for more than 284 million internet users in the United States. It clearly indicates how swiftly the world is moving online.
What are these people doing online?
People are looking for information, shopping for products and services, interacting with like minds, and communicating with their favorite brands.
Coming back to our point, where we stressed on digital marketing being the ultimate success strategy – these statistics are evident for the fact that the only technique to gain traction and business growth is reaching your audience where it is actively present.
When your audience is online, your customers are shopping online, and your leads are seeking knowledge over the web, what else can be better than approaching them then and there?
Hence we termed digital online marketing to be the supreme success strategy for your business.
So, let us define the term and dig deep into the basics of this strategy.
What is Digital Marketing?
Source: Statista
Types of Digital Marketing
Stressing on the online aspect of digital marketing, it is categorized into the following eight marketing types.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Three main types of SEO govern your website’s ranking:
- On-page SEO - all about content present on your page
- Off-page SEO - focuses on content created outside your website
- Technical SEO - looks after your website’s backend and graphics.
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM refers to the practice of marketing a business through paid advertisements. It allows the businesses to put their products and services directly in front of their buyers.
When an online user specifically searches for a product or service, SEM helps the relevant businesses to show their digital marketing ads on the search results along with website URLs. These ads can then entice a user to make a purchase from the most suitable brand.
The best part is, you never get to show your digital marketing ads to a dull audience who is not likely to buy from you. SEM can be executed in various formats, including text-based ads, product listing ads, product-based advertisements and more.
3. Content Marketing
4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
It is the practice of promoting your products and services or your brand as a whole on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Social media marketing entirely focuses on traffic growth and lead generation with help of audience engagement.
You can win through social media in two ways:
Social Media Posts
Create highly relevant content enriched with creatives and visuals around your industry. Post images, reels, and videos of your product along with content that generates a demand for your product.
Paid Social Media Ads
You can use social media advertising to show your content to hyper-target audiences. Depending on your audience, you can leverage Instagram ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, and Twitter ads.
5. Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
PPC refers to a digital marketing technique that involves paying for every click that your ad gets. That means, when a customer clicks on your ad while looking for products or services, you have to pay for that click even if the customer skips buying your product.
Google Ads, being the most common PPC technique, allows businesses to show their ads on the top space above the search results. Only the highly relevant brands get to show their digital marketing ads in this space.
Apart from social media ads, LinkedIn also allows you to send sponsored messages to specific people on the platform whose industry and background match your buyer persona.
6. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a buzzword in the contemporary world. Unlike paid advertising, the affiliate model works on the basis of your product’s performance. You get to advertise your product on other websites or blogs in exchange for a commission.
Similarly, if you promote someone else’s product or service on your website, you will receive a commission from them. Affiliate marketing is mostly done through review articles that list products and services from different companies along with their performance description. Every product has an affiliate link associated with it which when used for purchasing the product gives commission to the promoter.
7. Email Marketing
According to a myth, email marketing is dead. But the facts report that 86% of businesses still use emails for communicating with other businesses. Emails are not only a medium to communicate with your audience but also a fair means to promote your content, send discounts, inform about events, and even invite your audience to your website.
Depending upon the purpose, emails can take the form of newsletters for subscribing to your blog, follow-up emails to leads/clients or customers, onboarding emails to customers, holiday promotions, or a series of information content to share with your audience and build a brand.
Will Digital Marketing Work for YOUR Business?
B2B Digital Marketing
In a business to business model, the buyers are sophisticated and have a clear understanding about what you are offering. Most often they are interested in your services to fuel their business growth.
Hence, your digital marketing campaigns must address how your services can actually help them trigger their profit levels while saving money. Everything channel that you invest into for advertising your services must walk them through a well-researched strategy to make their business successful.
Also, when targeting a B2B audience, you need to be highly specific about the people you are talking to. Perhaps, you will be communicating directly with the founders, CEOs, or the top decision makers. Hence, your content has to reflect thought-leadership in your industry while proving that you are the master of your niche. Since a B2B audience is a more educated persona, your content has to provide information that is useful for them and they are actually seeking it over the web.
Talking about content distribution channels and the sales cycle, it’s always about the right information for a B2B audience. All your buyers need is the right reason to do business with you. It starts with driving them as visitors to your website and when they show their interest, it gears up with converting them into loyal clients. Advertise your content on the right channels like LinkedIn and Twitter and turn your business into a reputed brand.
B2C Digital Marketing
In case of a B2C audience, the trust factor plays a crucial role in starting a conversation. No matter how deep is your treasure of knowledge, they will talk to you only if you can build trust and offer cheap services. That said, they are aware of the competition and will listen to businesses who have been loyal to their previous customers.
In the business to customer model, your digital marketing campaign must be designed to win the trust of your audience. Since you have a larger sector to address, your content must appeal to all of them. Not to mention, you have to create personalized content for each audience segment, but again, you cannot exclude specific audiences.
When it comes to content marketing, a B2C audience expects the exact opposite of what a B2B audience does. Content is all about entertainment for B2C buyers. If you talk only about sales or promote your products without actually creating the need for them, your audience is not going to listen to you.
Your content has to provoke interest, emotions, and fun in your audience throughout its existence. Hence, the sales cycle is very simple in the case of B2C audiences. Create a need for your product in the minds of your audience and induce emotions that they will experience after fulfilling their need. And, the product is sold already.
Therefore, when content distribution is discussed with regards to B2C buyers, social media is the first choice of every digital marketer. Specifically, the social networking sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are ruling over the hearts and minds of your audience. Create content that suits these platforms and engages with your followers.
What Type of Digital Content Should You Create for Your Audience?
The virality and success of every digital marketing campaign depends on the type of content you create and the audience segment it is created for. A customer is always an information-seeker in the beginning and hence you have to walk through the entire buyer’s journey before they make a purchase.
That said, your marketing campaigns must address each stage of the buyer’s journey effectively and here’s how you can do that.
Your content must align with the following three stages of the buyer’s journey:
Awareness Stage
In this stage, your customers are seeking answers to specific questions. They have a problem and they are looking for some solution for it. Here, they need a lot of research to educate themselves completely about the problem and how to find a solution.
You need to create content that helps them understand their pain points better and discover ways to eliminate them. Blog posts, social media posts (231.47 million social media users in America), whitepapers, eBooks, and videos are among the top content types that perform well in the awareness stage.
