Digital Marketing

Digital marketing typically refers to marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. Generally, it can take many forms, including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads and social media posts. However, it is often compared to “traditional marketing” such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel. Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it’s digital marketing.

Why is Digital Marketing Important?

Firstly, any type of marketing can help your business thrive. However, digital marketing has become increasingly important because of how accessible digital channels are. In fact, there were 5 billion internet users globally in April 2022 alone. Additionally, it has minimal upfront costs, making it a cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses. With digital marketing, all of this information is already at your fingertips.

5 Types of Digital Marketing

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is technically a marketing tool rather than a form of marketing in itself. The Balance defines it as “the art and science of making web pages attractive to search engines.”

The “art and science” part of it is what’s most important. However, SEO is a science because it requires you to research and weigh different contributing factors to achieve the highest possible ranking on a serch engine results page (SERP).

2. Content Marketing

As mentioned, the quality of your content is a key component of an optimized page. As a result, SEO is a major factor in content marketing, a strategy based on the distribution of relevant and valuable content to a target audience.

As in any marketing strategy, the goal of content marketing is to attract leads that ultimately convert into customers. But it does so differently than traditional advertising. Most importantly, instead of enticing prospects with potential value from a product or service, it offers value for free in the form of written material

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in discussion online. Firstly, you can use social media marketing to highlight your brand, products, services, culture, and more. Secondly, with billions of people spending their time engaging on social media platforms, focusing on social media marketing can be worthwhile.

Digital Platforms

Moreover, the most popular digital platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind. Ultimately, which social media platforms you use for your business depends on your goals and audience. For example, if you want to find new leads for your FinTech startup, targeting your audience on LinkedIn is a good idea since industry professionals are active on the platform. On the other hand, running social media ads on Instagram may be better for your brand if you run a B2C focused on younger consumers.

4. Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a form of digital marketing in which you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your digital ads. So, instead of paying a set amount to constantly run targeted ads on online channels, you only pay for the ads individuals interact with. How and when people see your ad is a bit more complicated.

5. Native Advertising

Native advertising is digital marketing in disguise. Its goal is to blend in with its surrounding content so that it’s less blatantly obvious as advertising.

Native advertising was created in reaction to the cynicism of today’s consumers toward ads. Knowing that the creator of an ad pays to run it, many consumers will conclude that the ad is biased and consequently ignore it.

The Benefits of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. In other words, it also offers a number of other advantages that can boost your marketing efforts.

Think about your social media strategy. It’s great when your target audience sees your latest post, but it’s even better when they comment on it or share it. For instance, it means more buzz surrounding your product or service, as well as increased visibility every time someone joins the conversation. In conclusion, interactivity benefits your customers as well. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand’s story.

Integrate Digital Marketing Into Your Strategy

Any opportunity where you can connect to your audience is an opportunity to convert a lead or acquire a customer. Digital marketing creates so many more of those opportunities by allowing you to reach prospective buyers through a wide variety of channels. Whether it’s social media platforms, websites, text messages, or any online medium, it’s an invaluable way to promote your business, service, or product.