What is Digital Marketing? – Complete Overview with FAQs, Tips, Tricks, Advice, & More
Table of Contents
With the ever-increasing popularity of the internet, almost every part of our lives has a digital component to it.
Just like everything else, marketing has evolved with the invention of the internet as well.
In today’s day and age, digital marketing methods often yield far better results than traditional marketing methods ever could.
Quick Summary
In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into digital marketing and what it’s all about.
Key topics we’ll discuss in this post include but are not limited to:
- What digital marketing is
- Why it’s important
- The different types of digital marketing
- Is digital marketing appropriate for your business?
And much more.
It’s going to be a dense and information-packed post so, let’s get started.
What is Digital Marketing?
If you really want to simplify it then digital marketing can be boiled down to all marketing efforts made by a brand over the internet.
Businesses, corporations, and organizations can all leverage the power of the internet and the many different platforms it offers. These could be in the form of emails, social media, search engines, other websites, and much more.
Quick fact: According to a study by Pew Research, a whopping 85% of US adults said that they go online every single day.
Everybody’s online these days, and if you don’t leverage the internet to advertise your business, you’ll miss out on a lot of potential customers.
Not only that, but the internet has also changed the way people shop for products. Hence, if more and more people are now shopping for products in a digital sphere, you should consider marketing your products in this sphere too.
How Would You Define Digital Marketing for Your Business?
We think we did a pretty good job with the simplified definition we provided above for digital marketing. Everybody roughly knows what digital marketing is and what it involves but for every business, it can mean something slightly different.
What we mean is that digital marketing for a shoe store can look wildly different than digital marketing for, say, a phone company. There may be some aspects that overlap but definitely, the digital marketing strategies for both would be quite different.
These differences in digital marketing between companies can be explained by the differences in several factors. For example, the differences in target audiences, the social media channels they use, the type of products a company sells, etc.
You will compose your digital marketing strategy based on the factors provided above as well as numerous more. Hence, obviously, your strategy will be different from a different type of brand that may be dealing with wildly different variables.
As you can probably imagine, digital marketing consists of a variety of different tactics, techniques, and digital channels. The channels and tactics you use are something you will have to decide for yourself.
Whether you made the right choice or not will become apparent as you start to analyze the results of your digital marketing campaign.
We’ll provide a thorough breakdown of how you can identify which tactics and digital channels would be best for your business. For now, let’s discuss why digital marketing is important and why it’s something you should invest time and money in for your brand.
Does Digital Marketing Really Matter?
Yes, of course, it does. As we said, we are living in a digital age. Hence, digital marketing is definitely the way to go if you want to advertise your brand to as many people as possible.
The great thing about digital marketing is that it can help you reach far more people than you would with traditional marketing methods. Not only that, but digital marketing is often also much more cost-efficient than traditional marketing.
Just take a quick example: Let’s compare passing out flyers and putting up posters with sending out emails.
The former would require a fair amount of budget as you would need to print out the flyers and posters. Next, you would have to hire people to go around and paste them in various parts of the city.
This would cost quite a hefty amount and even after all the spending, you’ll only reach people within your own city.
On the other hand, with an email marketing campaign, you’d only have to spend around $25 to $100 on a popular email marketing software.
Once you have that, you pretty much have everything you need not only to compose but to also track and analyze your email marketing campaign(s).
You can get to work and compose your email marketing campaign(s) that can potentially reach customers all around the world. Of course, whether or not your emails reach the right people will depend on how well you composed your email campaign.
However, the point is that it can be done when done properly.
There’s no way that flyers and poster campaigns can match up to something like email marketing campaigns.
Here are some other great advantages of digital marketing:
You Can Really Cater to Your Target Demographic(s)
Handing out flyers, putting up posters, or running your ad on TV are all tried-and-tested ways to advertise your brand. However, with these methods, you can never really control who looks at your ads and your content.
While there are definitely ways to steer your content towards relevant demographics when it comes to traditional marketing, it’s often not specific enough. For example, fitness brands often advertise themselves in women’s magazines.
While that can certainly do the trick, it’s still not precise and easy as it is with digital marketing. When it comes to digital marketing, targeted ads are the name of the game.
You can utilize the features offered by social media platforms to easily target your ads at individuals that would potentially be interested.
You can choose the groups of individuals based on a number of different factors as well as combinations of these factors. These include
- Age
- Gender
- Hobbies and interests
- Profession
- Geographical location
- Associated networks
- Online behavior
Not only can you find a group of people that might be interested in your brand, but you can also divide them into further segments.
Segmentation refers to further dividing down people into smaller groups from your large target audience. That way, you’ll have these smaller groups that you can define and make specific personas for.
Then, based on those personas, you can have highly personalized ads for each segment. That personalized ad would make a much stronger mark on the appropriate segment than any regular ad would.
You can also use SEO or PPC strategies. This would involve your digital ads being shown to people who’ve maybe made a purchase from you in the past or shown interest in your brand in some way. An example of this could be if they visited your brand’s website in the past.
It helps you reach potential customers that are more likely to buy from you.
It’s Quite Cost-Efficient
Not only do digital marketing campaigns simply cost less than most traditional marketing campaigns, but they are also cost-efficient in other ways.
By this, we mean that digital marketing tactics allow you to monitor their results as you are conducting the campaign. That way, you can immediately figure out which strategies are working and which are not.
As you can observe and study the results while the campaign is ongoing, you can choose to drop or modify a strategy that is not yielding a good ROI (return on investment).
For example, let’s say you have ads on social media and you want to start an email marketing campaign alongside it.
If the email marketing campaign starts to gain traction and brings in a higher ROI than social media, then you can choose to invest more money into it. Increasing the scale of your email campaign could lead you to more customers.
On the other hand, if you tried the email marketing campaign and it didn’t work, then you can either drop it or look to change it in order to improve the results.
With traditional marketing methods such as a billboard on a highway, the ROI is not something you can measure at all. That brings us to our next benefit…
You Can Measure and Analyze It
Once the digital marketing campaign is over, and in fact, even when it’s going on, you can pretty much measure all the metrics related to it in real-time.
Any information you want about impressions, likes, follows, views, CTR (Click-Through Rate), and average open rate can be found easily.
As we mentioned above, this can help you make decisions on the fly, which can help make your campaigns much more profitable. At the same time, you’ll also make your future campaigns more profitable since now you’ll know the mistakes you made.
In our opinion, the worst pitfall of offline marketing is the fact that there’s no way to measure it. You can put up a billboard, but you’ll never be able to find out how many customers actually bought from your brand because of that billboard.
As a result, you will never be able to measure the effectiveness of any of your offline marketing tactics. Hence, you’ll never know which ones to invest more money and resources in and which ones to stop.
With digital marketing, you have access to all types of analytics related to the techniques and tactics that you use.
If you do an email marketing campaign, you’ll know exactly how many emails you sent, how many got opened, and how many got clicked.
If you do a social media campaign, you’ll have access to statistics like views, shares, likes, etc. You can tailor your message in different ways and see what works better and what doesn’t.
As a result of this, you can fine-tune your approach so that you get the best results and the highest number of customers possible.
Not only that but you can see all of these results in real-time which allows you to make easy adjustments on the fly. This brings us to our next point…
You Can Easily Make Adjustments to Them
We highly recommend all of our readers always take time when they prepare their digital marketing strategy. It’s a good idea to properly do your research and know your audience before you actually implement anything.
Once everything’s ready to go, you typically implement it, and once the campaign is done, you can analyze the results. These results can give you a lot of insight into what you did right and wrong. You can then use it to create better digital campaigns in the future.
However, sometimes, things can go horribly wrong. You may start a digital marketing campaign only to find out that nobody is responding to your posts.
In some other cases, you may find that a segmented group that you singled out to be a major revenue source is not responding the way you expected.
In any case, sometimes, unexpected things can happen during a campaign that has the potential to completely derail it. This can cost you financially and they can also waste a ton of your precious time.
In such a case, the only way to save a campaign is to make adjustments on the fly as you analyze the data coming in real-time.
The great thing about digital marketing is that these adjustments are quite easy to make and they take effect immediately.
Say, for example, you made a personalized email for a specific segmented group in your audience. You thought they would respond favorably but the results are not quite what you expected.
In this case, you can maybe compose another personalized email that might be more refined and focused. Once you write it, you can replace the previous email. The change will take effect immediately and people will start to receive the new email.
Similarly, if you have an online ad that isn’t performing well, you can easily pause it and make adjustments to it that you think would give you better results.
Just imagine the same thing with an offline marketing tactics such as placing a billboard for your brand. If you rent and place an ad for your brand on a billboard and later find out that it’s in an area that isn’t populated by your target demographic.
It would take days, if not weeks, for you to relocate your ad to another appropriate billboard. Not only that but the amount of money it would cost you would also be quite large.
It’s something that you’d have to pay a huge price for. Something similar in the digital world doesn’t have nearly the same level of dire consequences.
It Can Help with High-Quality Lead Generation
Sometimes with the nature of what your brand is or what platform you use to sell items, not all leads will hold the same level of value for your business.
We’ve already established how digital marketing can help you figure out what parts of your strategies work and what don’t.
At the same time, you can use that feature to identify better groups of leads that could provide better value for your business.
We already talked about how you can divide your audience up into segments. An example of this would be to cut audiences down into segments based on the value they bring to your business.
Then, you can make a digital marketing strategy with ease. You can base the time, money, and resources you want to spend on a single segment on the level of value they can provide.
As a result, the majority of your resources will focus on the segment that has the potential to provide you with the highest level of value.
When you constantly refine and adjust your digital marketing efforts in this way, your brand will eventually get to a point where it generates leads on a stable basis. You’ll always have an audience, and it will become much easier to find even more customers.
That’s because as you constantly refine your approach, your conversion rate will most likely increase. As a result, the number of loyal customers your brand has will also increase.
B2B vs B2C Digital Marketing
B2B stands for Business to Business, whereas B2C stands for Business to Consumer.
Hence, if you are a brand that sells a product or service to other businesses, then you’re a B2B brand. On the other hand, if you are a brand that sells a product or service to consumers, then you’re a B2C brand.
It goes without saying that your digital marketing strategy will depend a lot on the type of company you are.
B2B clients tend to have much longer sales funnels. This is because businesses that are in the same industry as you will spend a long time researching whether they should buy from you or not.
It’s a good idea to try and build a relationship with your clients if you are a B2B company.
Furthermore, B2B clients tend to have a higher chance of buying from you if you provide them with testimonials and evidence that your product is worth buying.
For a B2B company, most of your digital marketing campaigns will be concerned with creating online lead generation. You will use email, social media, and other digital distribution channels to create high-quality leads.
The end goal for most campaigns for a B2B brand with lead generation is to eventually have the leads talk to a salesperson from your brand.
Websites like LinkedIn are a bigger asset for B2B companies than they are for B2C companies. This is because they typically cater to industry experts who tend to spend their time online on LinkedIn.
On the other hand, if you’re a B2C company, short-term offers and short-form content is what clicks more. Moreover, marketing to consumers is more emotional. You have to address an unmet need of theirs with your product or service.
Consumers will not be concerned with statistics or evidence. On the other hand, they’ll be much more interested in a cheap deal that provides a high level of value to them.
Your goal, if you’re a B2C company, is typically not to have your leads talk to a salesperson. Rather, you aim to use your digital marketing efforts to lead them to your website and purchase from you without ever having a salesperson involved.
With a B2C company, you want to enhance and accelerate the potential buyer’s journey to purchase as quickly as possible. As soon as they visit your website, you want to lead them to products that may interest them.
For a B2C company, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are often more useful than platforms like LinkedIn.
In the end: It’s all about your target audience and your customer base.
The Different Types of Digital Marketing
There are a number of different types of digital marketing available to you. The key is not to use as many as possible but rather to identify the suitable ones and use those.
After all, to implement a marketing campaign on any platform, you’ll have to invest a fair amount of time, money, and resources. If you try to implement too many different types, you’ll stretch your resources very thin.
That’s why it’s a much smarter route to first spend time to identify which types of digital marketing would be most suitable for your type of business. Once you’ve identified them, you can start implementation.
Some great examples of different digital marketing types include:
Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the most common and most obvious ways through which you can perform digital marketing. Content marketing can involve many different types of content. Again, the content you choose will have to do a lot with what your business is.
It can serve many different purposes, such as traffic growth, lead generation, and increasing brand awareness.
Some examples of content marketing include:
- Podcasts
- Blog posts
- Live streams
- Short-form videos on platforms such as TikTok
- Long-form videos on platforms such as Youtube
- Infographics
- Ebooks
Blog posts are extremely common, and that’s because, in most cases, they work very well. We highly recommend that you have a blog for your business, no matter what industry you’re in.
This is because blog posts can play a huge role to make your business more discoverable. You can write blog posts about the different aspects of your industry. As a result, your website will attract like-minded individuals that may be interested in your brand.
This can help convert these visitors to your website into customers.
With Ebooks, you have the advantage to write long-form content related to your brand as well as the industry relevant to it. Not only that, but if you keep writing ebooks, your customers will eventually look forward to them.
This can be a great incentive to have a sign-up form on your website that you can use to collect email addresses and other information about your customers. That way, you can send them a new ebook every time you publish one.
We highly recommend that you delve into audio and visual content creation as part of your digital marketing strategy. It’s something that can really communicate the message of your brand and help reach customers that might be interested.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website, social media page, or blog to ensure it ranks higher on different search engines.
What’s the point of ranking higher on search engines?
Well, it makes your website more discoverable. If you have a website that follows the best SEO practices, it will come up higher on different search engine results.
This means that every time an individual searches for content related to your industry, there’s a high chance they’ll see your website higher in the results.
SEO is an extremely important part of digital marketing because it helps you generate organic and free traffic.
Different types of SEO practices include
- On-page SEO: This is the most basic type of SEO that deals with the actual content that is on your page. It involves using specific keywords and phrases with high search volume within your content to drive traffic to your website.
- Off-page SEO: This refers to activity outside of your page. Examples of this would include “backlinks” which are links that refer to your website from other websites.
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO is all about how you structure your page and deal with metadata related to it. As long as you follow the best SEO practices regarding site structure and CSS file optimization, you should be good to go.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a form of paid ads. Basically, a publisher posts your website’s ad on their page(s), and you pay them every time a person clicks your ad. Google Ads is the most popular way to have PPC ads.
If you set up PPC through Google Ads, you would pay for ads that link to your website. These ads would be placed on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). You would pay “per click”.
While Google Ads is the most common type of PPC, there are other great examples of it to choose from as well.
Other channels where you can use PPC ads include
- LinkedIn sponsored messages: With this, you would send direct messages to people that are in the same industry as your brand.
- Facebook ads: With Facebook, you can have a customized post, video, or image. Facebook would then post that content onto the news feeds of people that have the same interests or are in the same industry as your brand.
- Twitter ads: Twitter ads work in fairly the same way as Facebook ads. The only difference is that Twitter ad campaigns can be customized to achieve specific goals. This could be more followers, app downloads, website traffic, and much more.
Social Media Marketing
With how popular social media platforms are in today’s day and age, it would be a missed opportunity if you don’t use them to promote your brand.
Social media marketing overlaps a lot with content marketing since, of course, you would post content to your social media pages. The type of content you post will depend on the social media platform you use.
Obviously, it wouldn’t be a good idea to post long-form content onto a platform like Twitter. Hence, you kind of has to figure out which platform would be most suitable for your business.
To figure that out, you have to identify what your target audience is and then get an idea of which platform that audience would be most likely to use.
Some examples of social media marketing channels include
- Snapchat
You can have a combination of posts regarding your latest offers and newer products. You can also have links within your bio.
On platforms like Twitter, the character count can be an issue because you want to communicate your message and also include the link to your website.
Not only that, but longer links also mess with the SEO of your social media pages.
You can use any link shortener available online to shorten your link.
To shorten your link through Pixelfy, you must first register yourself on the website and then log in.
Step 1: After you log in, you will be at the Pixelfy dashboard. From here, you can check out analytics for your previously shortened links. If you want to shorten a link, you have the URL shortener box at the top.
Step 2: Copy the longer URL for your website’s landing page or wherever you want to lead your customers into the box. It should lead you automatically to the next page after you paste the link.
If you don’t get led to the next page automatically, just click on the “Shorten” button, as shown in the screenshot below:
Step 3: The next page will provide you with the shortened link that you can use within your social media marketing campaign(s).
Not only are shortened links great for social media marketing campaigns but they can also be useful for email marketing campaigns…
Email Marketing
Email marketing can be extremely powerful if you compose marketing campaigns properly. There are many tools and software out there that can help you out with setting up campaigns as well.
You can email your potential customers with offers, discounts, and information about any new products or services you may have in stock.
This is why it’s a good idea to have a sign-up form on your website as well as on your social media pages. These sign-up forms do a great job of gathering customer data, so you have a healthy email list.
Then, whenever you have to run an email marketing campaign, you’ll have an email list of customers that would be most likely to respond to them.
Email marketing campaigns can be designed to achieve a number of different goals and objectives, such as:
- Tapping into a newly discovered audience segment
- Increasing brand awareness
- Letting existing customers know about limited offers and discounts
- Providing information about new products and services
And much more.
Different types of emails that you can choose to send as a part of your email campaigns include:
- Blog newsletters
- Welcome emails for new customers
- Holiday or seasonal promotions for existing customers
- Free valuable content for existing customers related to your brand and industry
Important note: Make sure that you have an Unsubscribe option within all the emails that you send as part of your email marketing campaigns.
What Type of Digital Content Would Be Best for Your Brand?
This can be very difficult to determine for many brands. Not only that, but it’s a crucial decision to make because it can highly impact how successful your marketing campaign(s) are.
The appropriate content type for your brand will depend on a number of different factors, such as
- Your target audience
- The distribution channels that you use
- How far the customers you’re targeting are in your sales funnel
It’s a good idea to create buyer personas. These would be a fictional representation of your target audience; What their interests are and what type of content they would typically like to consume.
As mentioned earlier, you also have to take into account how far along their buyers’ journey they are. Are they just being introduced to your brand? Or are they loyal customers?
Different types of content and campaigns can be made for different categories of customers.
When you want to try to create awareness for your brand and bring newer segments of audiences to it, blog posts can work great.
Creating blog posts that provide genuine value while you implement appropriate SEO practices can be a great way to boost discoverability for your brand.
Infographics can also be useful for brand awareness since they can have a lot of content on them and they’re very shareable.
Short-form videos are another great form of content that you can make use of for brand awareness. The great thing about them is the same as that of infographics: They’re very shareable and can pack a lot of information into a small time frame.
Ebooks can be useful for lead generation since they’re a lot more detailed and extended than blog posts. This can allow potential customers to sign up for them if they want to receive them in the future.
Webinars can also be incredibly useful since they also require potential customers to sign up and provide their details.
Finally, it’s a good idea to have testimonials and case studies on your website. If a customer is visiting your website to try and decide whether they want to purchase something, they can be crucial in swaying them your way.
How to Perform Digital Marketing?
Naturally, the approach to digital marketing will differ widely based on the type of digital marketing you’re performing.
For the scope of this post, we’ll provide a generic approach that you can apply to most digital marketing campaigns. However, there will be some differences, additions, and subtractions based on what channels you use and the type of digital content you produce.
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Digital marketing can be used to fulfill a lot of different purposes.
Maybe you want to tap into an untapped audience segment or maybe you want to promote a new product that you just launched. The key is to be clear on what you want to achieve with a certain digital marketing campaign.
If you don’t have objectives and goals defined, you won’t have any way to measure how your campaign is performing.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
Digital marketing excels at targeting specific audiences. Hence, you have to take time to identify who your target audience would be most likely to buy from your brand.
Identifying your target audience can help you identify which distribution channels and platforms you should target.
Step 3: Define a Budget
While many digital marketing techniques are free, some of them cost money.
Hence, it’s a good idea to define a budget for your campaign and the different distribution channels that you will use.
The best digital marketing campaigns are always the ones that use a combination of free and paid marketing strategies.
Step 4: Create Engaging Content with Genuine Value
Many people think that they can still get away with lazy content and still find customers for their brand.
The fact of the matter is that consumers have gotten much smarter and they will not fall for lazy content that’s just trying to get them to buy something. In fact, content like that will make you lose customers.
Make sure that the content you create is genuinely engaging and provides some type of real value to your customer.
Step 5: Make Sure Your Content is Appropriate to View on Phones
Many brands don’t take the time to optimize the content they have for phones. You may even see many brand websites that don’t have a mobile version.
This can be extremely damaging since 69% of people in the US consume content on their phones.
If you don’t optimize your content on phones, you will miss out on that whole 69%.
Step 6: Study the Results and Make Adjustments in Real-Time
This is a great advantage of digital marketing: The fact that you can see all of the results and analytics in real-time as the campaign runs.
In many cases, you may find that a campaign is not going the way you expected. In this case, you can maybe make some amendments to shift it in a more positive direction.
Even after the campaign is done, it’s a good idea to analyze all the data and see what worked and what didn’t. It’ll help you be more prepared for the next campaign.
Wrapping Things Up…
Digital marketing is an extremely vast area of expertise with many different types and channels.
The best advice we can give you is to identify what type of brand you are and who your audience is. Once you know that, you can confidently assess what type of digital marketing campaign would work best.
If you have any more questions, please reach out to us in the comments section below. Take a look at our blog to find out everything there is to know about marketing.
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