n today's marketing landscape, digital marketing is the preferred choice for businesses across all scales. It extends far beyond basic principles, encompassing a spectrum of strategies.
Digital marketing spans many components, including search engine optimisation (SEO), content creation, distribution channels, and budgetary considerations. This guide offers an overview of digital marketing fundamentals, highlighting its advantages, diverse methodologies, and practical techniques for seamless incorporation into your business strategy.
This guide will discuss:
- What digital marketing is
- The benefits of digital marketing
- Types of digital marketing
- How to do digital marketing
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, harnesses digital channels to promote products and services, connecting brands with potential customers through the Internet. It encompasses various forms, including search engines, websites, social media, email, mobile apps, text messaging, and web-based advertising.
While digital marketing shares principles with traditional offline marketing, it leverages the digital realm to engage its target audience. This approach relies on consumer data to identify the ideal audience and deliver tailored messaging. However, in today's saturated digital landscape, standing out from the competition poses a significant challenge.
The choice of digital marketing strategy hinges on a company's business model. Business-to-business (B2B) firms cater to other businesses, necessitating a strategic and prolonged approach. Conversely, business-to-consumer (B2C) companies sell directly to individual consumers, demanding shorter sales cycles and broader audience outreach.
Key disparities between B2B and B2C marketing include the involvement of multiple decision-makers in B2B transactions, longer decision-making processes necessitating relationship-building efforts, shorter and more urgent messaging requirements in B2C transactions, and the influence of logic versus emotion in purchasing decisions.
At a glance:
- B2B decisions involve multiple people, while B2C decisions typically involve a single person
- B2B clients tend to have a longer decision-making process, so digital marketing should focus on building relationships
- The B2C buying process is generally shorter, so requires short-term and urgent messaging
- B2B transactions are more driven by logic, while B2C transactions are driven more by emotion
The benefits of digital marketing
Digital marketing holds equal significance for both B2B and B2C enterprises. It facilitates a profound comprehension of customers and enables personalised experiences across all touchpoints. By embracing digital marketing strategies, businesses can pinpoint their target audience, grasp their challenges, and utilise metrics to substantiate marketing endeavours. Moreover, digital marketing bestows a plethora of advantages on business.
Reach a large demographic
Digital marketing offers a platform to effortlessly connect with a diverse audience. Through online advertising, your message can transcend geographical boundaries, reaching individuals worldwide. This ability to engage with customers across various time zones empowers you to expand your market presence and grow your business exponentially.
Cost efficiency
Conventional marketing approaches, like TV, radio, and print media, frequently come with higher expenses compared to digital channels. Participating on social media or crafting blog posts demands time and effort but entails minimal financial investment. You can develop an attractive website affordably using template systems or, with a slightly higher budget, through custom design. Setting up social media accounts is free, and teaming up with an email service provider (ESP) is also budget-friendly.
Furthermore, content on digital platforms remains accessible on the internet indefinitely, provided it is regularly maintained. Your digital posts have the potential to continually reach audiences long after their initial publication, offering greater longevity compared to transient TV advertisements.
Regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, digital marketing helps businesses better understand their customers and deliver tailored experiences across every channel
Traditional marketing is less effective because it is usually temporary and outside your control; once it's gone, it's gone forever. A newspaper ad, for example, only runs for a limited time and disappears when people recycle the paper or throw it away.
Whether running a small business or working at a large company looking to cut costs, digital marketing is the way to go.
Results are measurable
Digital marketing offers many opportunities for analytics that traditional marketing cannot match. You can track conversions, leads, website visits, and more, providing valuable insights to help your business grow. For instance, digital marketing enables you to:
- Measure social media engagement using built-in analytics
- Track the organic traffic and SERP rankings of each blog post
- Obtain accurate data on paid ad views, clicks, and conversions
Thankfully, digital marketing can accommodate both approaches effectively. Whether targeting businesses or consumers, digital marketing offers tools to streamline the marketing process and achieve desired outcomes.
Traditional marketing only allows for one-way communication and doesn't encourage further engagement. On the other hand, digital marketing enables you to communicate one-on-one with your customers. You can engage with them directly through blog or social media posts to learn how they discovered you, what they think, and what they need. This provides quantitative and qualitative information about your marketing efforts, which is worth its weight in gold.
Easier personalisation for customers
Customer data is the foundation of digital marketing. Because it requires so much data, businesses naturally learn a lot about their ideal customers during a digital marketing campaign. Thanks to this data, it’s never been easier to personalise your marketing campaigns.
For example, businesses use customer data to:
- Monitor the behaviour of their social media followers to see which types of content and post formats they prefer
- Segment customers based on their demographics, which makes it easier to personalise messaging based on their pain points
- Address customers by name in email campaigns
- Acknowledge key events like customer birthdays and anniversaries
Opportunity to engage with customers at various stages
Digital marketing is more cost-effective, which means you can engage with customers at several points during the buying process. For example, you can create a paid advertising campaign and then follow up with those leads after they’ve made a purchase. This could be as simple as saying "thank you" or using it as an opportunity to upsell with related items or a subscription. A traditional TV ad can’t do that.
Easy and convenient conversions
Thanks to its cross-channel connectivity, digital marketing makes it a cinch to increase conversions. Shoppers can move from a social media platform to your e-commerce store to purchase just a few taps. Digital marketing also allows for automation, so if customers don’t make a purchase right away, you can quickly follow up with them to recapture their business before they forget about you.
Types of digital marketing
Digital marketing is so beneficial because of its flexibility. It comes in various forms, which gives businesses more opportunities than ever before to connect with their target audiences. Let’s look at the 12 key types of digital marketing.
Content marketing
Content marketing, a facet of digital marketing, seeks to inform and provide value to readers without overtly promoting a product or service. Instead of pushing sales, it positions your business as a thought leader and a reliable fountain of information.
Businesses use content marketing to attract leads and convert them into loyal customers. It’s also an effective strategy because it offers potential customers something for free, which entices them into (hopefully) purchasing at some point.
The content marketing industry is projected to be worth $107 Billion by 2026
Like digital marketing, content marketing also comes in many forms, including:
- Blogposts
- Ebooks
- Newsletters
- Guides
- Infographics
- Audiocontent, like podcasts
- Video content, like YouTube Shorts
Content marketing is not only affordable but it’s also effective. In 2022, 80% of marketers thought their content marketing strategy was very successful. It’s no wonder why the content marketing industry is projected to be worth $107 billion by 2026.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO involves optimising your website's content, technical configuration, and visibility to ensure that your pages rank prominently on search engine results pages for targeted keywords. Through SEO, businesses evaluate their website's performance, compare it with competitors, and develop a data-driven strategy to enhance their rankings gradually.
In digital marketing, the goal is to get your content to the top of the search engine results page (SERP). This is important because 67.6% of organic traffic clicks come from the first five results on the SERP. Most businesses boost their rankings on the SERPs by:
- Creating quality content
- Fostering user engagement
- Ensuring marketing material is mobile-friendly
Businesses also have to consider on-page and off-page SEO, as well as technical SEO. On-page SEO focuses on optimising aspects of your website that users engage with. This facet of SEO leans heavily into keyword research. With the right list of target keywords, you can optimise your web copy to answer your audience’s most important questions.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is the practice of optimising activity outside of your website that could affect your rankings. With off-page SEO, you look at ways to garner external attention to your website. This generally focuses on gathering quality backlinks to your site, which can affect your rankings in the long term.
Technical SEO is a process that analyses the coding and back-end of your website. Search engines crawl the back-end code of your website, and it is crucial to optimise it for better search engine ranking. Knowledge of programming is necessary to optimise the coding of each page. Technical SEO includes optimising page speed and compressing images and metadata to ensure that your website is set up for better search engine ranking.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Not to be confused with SEO, SEM revolves around paid ads displayed in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Paid search typically refers to the sponsored result on the top or side of a SERP. These ads appear when users enter a certain search term. As the advertiser, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. The two most popular SEM platforms are Google Ads and Bing Ads.
SEM works because 68% of online experiences start with organic and paid searches. By promoting your brand at the source of most online experiences, you can attract more interested leads to your site.
68%of experiences start with organic and paid searches
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing involves promoting your business organically through various social networks. But this isn’t just a promotional channel — social media is effective for digital marketing because it gives businesses the power to chat with their most engaged followers one-on-one.
Social media has become an essential part of our daily lives, and businesses must maintain an active presence on various platforms to stay relevant. While Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are popular platforms, LinkedIn holds significant value for specific industries and audiences. Keep in mind that social media marketing requires more than just owning an account; it demands strategic engagement and consistent dedication to be effective.
Many social networks, like Instagram, allow your followers to make direct purchases within the app, although sales alone might not be your goal. Companies often use social media marketing to start conversations with their audience. It’s also a fantastic tool for promoting your content marketing pieces to a wider audience.
Follow these best practices to increase your reach on social media:
- Understand your audience, including their preferred social media platforms
- Create compelling, top-notch content
- Aim to address comments and enquiries within 24 hours, whenever feasible
- Maintain a regular posting schedule
- Share content at the most opportune times for your specific audience
- Consider enlisting a social media manager to orchestrate your campaigns
The main goal of social media marketing is to boost engagement with your audience, which can increase the likelihood of them interacting with your content and potentially converting their peers into customers.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC advertising is a form of digital marketing in which companies pay for their ads only when users click on them. Unlike SEM, which is limited to search engines, PPC enables businesses to advertise on various social media platforms, expanding their marketing possibilities.
Google Ads is the leading PPC platform for search engines, followed closely by Bing Ads. Additionally, platforms such as Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, and Amazon Ads offer valuable opportunities for PPC advertising.
As PPC entails paid digital marketing, optimising your campaigns becomes crucial to maximising every investment. Here are some swift best practices to enhance the effectiveness of your paid ads:
- Enhance ad quality by refining your Quality Score within Google Ads
- Craft ads that directly address the pain points of your target audience
- Enhance the quality of your landing pages for a better user experience
- Employ smart bidding strategies to bid the right amount — neither excessive nor insufficient
PPC advertising can produce results in a very short time, but it comes with some risks. The cost of ads can fluctuate greatly, and if you don't have a well-planned strategy and prior experience, PPC can turn out to be very expensive. It is important to have a good understanding of how bidding works on your chosen PPC platform and to keep track of the right metrics to ensure a good return on investment (ROI).
Digital marketing can help you get to know your audience, understand their pain points, and provide metrics that will give your marketing team credibility
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a strategy that recruits affiliates to promote a business’s product or service to their followers. When a customer purchases that affiliate, the affiliate earns either a percentage commission or a flat-rate finder’s fee. Affiliate marketing overlaps with influencer marketing, but the main difference is that you only pay affiliates an agreed-upon amount if someone makes a purchase based on their referral.
With affiliate marketing, you’re promoting your business through someone with an established platform and connections to your target audience. The affiliate’s audience already trusts them, and if the affiliate recommends your brand, their audience is more likely to trust your business by association.
Affiliate marketing takes different forms. Some affiliates create review or unboxing videos for products, while others use your products and link to your company in their content.
Affiliates often insert promotions within helpful content, which increases the odds that your target audience will pay attention to the messaging. That might look like a mixologist on YouTube promoting a barware company’s goods, or a makeup content creator on TikTok reviewing the durability of different eyeliners. More often than not, these affiliates will share a unique code or URL provided by you to track their sales.
Native advertising
Native advertising is a paid promotion strategy that crafts ads to seamlessly blend in with a platform's appearance. The objective is to make these ads indistinguishable from regular content, integrating them into the user experience. Native ads assimilate with their surroundings, ensuring they don't disrupt the flow as obvious advertisements.
More businesses embraced native ads because users are sceptical of mainstream paid ads. Shoppers assume paid ads are biased and ignore them, so native ads are an advertiser's answer to declining conversion rates.
Native ads attempt to circumvent consumer cynicism with entertaining and informative content, or by downplaying the promotional nature of the content. For example, a business with a native ad might design it to look like a typical Facebook post or a business might write a sponsored article on a news site.
Native ads are tricky because they mimic the look and feel of organic content, but advertisers still need to be transparent about the fact that these are ads. Native ads usually include qualifiers like “sponsored” or “promoted” so it’s clear that it’s paid content. Even though they’re ads, users tend to react better to native ads because they appear to be less intrusive than traditional paid ads.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation revolutionises marketing workflows by automating tasks using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) software. While it doesn't replace human efforts, it empowers marketers by handling repetitive tasks, allowing them to concentrate on strategic planning and creativity.
Marketing automation tools alleviate the burden on small or overwhelmed marketing teams by managing various tasks, such as:
- Simplifying marketing tasks and workflows
- Assessing outcomes
- Estimating campaign ROI
- Identifying successful marketing endeavours and those that are not yielding desired results
Automation enables swift analysis of vast volumes of customer data. Leverage these insights to craft superior, more tailored campaigns that enhance the likelihood of conversions and sales.
Email marketing
Email marketing involves directly connecting with customers through strategic email messages. Despite its age of over two decades, email remains the swiftest and most direct route to customer engagement. However, to stand out amidst a sea of competing content in subscribers' inboxes, your emails must be highly engaging, pertinent, informative, and enjoyable.
Here are some prevalent types of emails often employed by businesses:
- Blog subscription newsletter
- Welcome emails to new customers
- Holiday or special event promotions
- Post-purchase follow-ups that include tips, tricks, and best practices
Email might be the oldest form of digital marketing, but it’s kept up with the times. Follow these best practices to get even more out of your email marketing campaigns:
- Ensure your emails resonate with your audience by personalising them with their name in the subject line and body.
- Communicate the email's purpose with a singular call to action.
- Include an unsubscribe option in every email footer.
- Be mindful of timing; avoid overwhelming inboxes with repetitive or irrelevant messages.
- Merge transactional and promotional emails seamlessly for a cohesive customer experience.
Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing, also known as SMS marketing, is a digital marketing strategy designed specifically for mobile devices and users. It targets your audience on smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices like smartwatches.
Through SMS messaging, businesses engage with subscribers directly on their mobile devices, capitalising on the fact that most individuals carry their phones with them at all times. Similar to email marketing, mobile marketing facilitates personalised communication with customers, resulting in a remarkable 102% ROI reported by companies.
Video marketing
Video marketing entails promoting your business through either long-form or short-form video content, making it a key component of digital marketing strategies. Given its ability to convey a wealth of information in a concise format, it's no wonder that numerous platforms actively support and promote video marketing initiatives.
YouTube is the most obvious place to do video marketing, but social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram are also great for promoting your brand with videos.
If you want to go all-in on YouTube, remember that this isn’t primarily a social network — it’s a search engine. 70% of shoppers have purchased after seeing a brand on YouTube. While the majority of people stream TV shows and movies online, 46% also watch videos on YouTube or Facebook for entertainment.
Video content is valuable to so many users, so tap into this growing area of digital marketing. If you have a smartphone, you can make quality videos for your company’s website, social media, email campaigns, and paid ads.
70% of shoppers have made a purchase after seeing an ad on YouTube
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a digital strategy where brands collaborate with popular content creators to endorse their products or services. Similar to affiliate marketing, it leverages the established and trusted audience of influencers to promote products effectively.
While many of us think of influencer marketing as a B2C tactic for selling consumer goods, it can also work for B2B companies selling office supplies, SaaS subscriptions, and nearly anything else. It just comes down to partnering with the right influencer for your audience.
Influencer marketing is different from affiliate marketing because it doesn’t involve profit sharing. Instead, you typically pay the influencer a flat fee in exchange for promoting your product. With this digital marketing strategy, the influencer is paid regardless of sales related to their promotion. You can certainly add an affiliate spin to the arrangement to incentivise sales, but it isn’t necessary.
With an average engagement rate of nearly 16% on platforms like TikTok, it’s no wonder why more brands are embracing influencer marketing. However, you need the right strategy to glean value from these partnerships. Follow these tips to make the most of influencer marketing:
- Partner with influencers who are familiar with your industry and whohave a good reputation — they’re representing your brand, afterall
- Establish a clear and precise written agreement for compensation
- Provide the influencer with clear guidelines on language, tone, and logistics
How to do digital marketing
Digital marketing can take so many forms that it can feel overwhelming to choose from all the options. That’s why it’s so important to understand how to pair digital marketing with your overall business strategy.
Regardless of your industry or business model, you can follow this six-step process to strategically embrace digital marketing.
Define your goals
To ensure success in digital marketing, start by setting clear, measurable, and relevant goals that align with your company's overall objectives. Well-defined goals provide direction and allow you to gauge progress for all marketing efforts.
Consider your goals and the guiding principles that direct your digital marketing strategy. For example, if you aim to increase brand awareness, think about investing in social media marketing to spread your message wider.
Make sure each goal is backed by measurable metrics. This allows you to monitor the progress of your campaigns and pivot as necessary. Key metrics to monitor include:
- Impressions
- Reach
- Clicks
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Engagement rate
- Conversions
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM)
There are also back-end metrics like return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), first-touch and multi touch attribution, and customer lifetime value (CLV).
Regardless of the goals you set, it’s easier to develop effective digital marketing strategies when you have realistic goals first. This ensures your marketing activities will make a difference for your business.
Identify your target audience
Now that you know your goals, you need to define your target audience. These are the people your campaign will reach. Every audience is different, so it’s critical to understand the people consuming your messaging. Plus, the target audience varies from channel to channel, so put in the effort to understand your followers on every platform.
Digital marketing expands your reach, optimises costs, and enhances engagement with your intended audience
Allocate budgets to individual digital channels
Establishing budgets ensures proper resource allocation. This is crucial, particularly when employing a blend of organic and paid advertising. Balancing budgets prevents overspending on paid channels, preserving resources for optimal utilisation.
Generally speaking, B2B companies have a longer buying cycle, so they might need a bigger marketing budget. Your goals, target metrics, and existing costs will also have a big impact on your budget.
If you have a variable budget, assign a percentage of your budget — instead of a flat pound amount — to each digital marketing strategy. This way, you can invest in the digital strategies that are important to you without breaking the bank.
Select your digital marketing channels
With a budget in place, it’s time to decide which channels you’ll focus your digital marketing efforts on. The goal is to strike a balance between paid and organic channels. While paid strategies like PPC can garner immediate results, organic strategies like SEO come with long-term gains. Pursuing both types of strategies will set you up for digital marketing success.
Since you know your target audience at this stage, opt for the channels they use the most. For example, if you’re targeting Gen Z college students, you would go for platforms like TikTok instead of Facebook. By going where your audience already is, you’ll increase your odds of connecting with the right people.
Optimise your digital assets for mobile
In Q1 of 2023, mobile traffic accounted for 60.89% of all internet traffic in the United Kingdom. Mobile traffic is on track to outpace desktop traffic in the coming years, so make sure all of your marketing content performs well on mobile devices, too — even if it was designed for a traditional browser. It’s also important to design a seamless experience between mobile and desktop so you don’t lose users moving between the two.
Refine your marketing efforts
Digital marketing is never truly done, it evolves, which is why it is so important to monitor and analyse your performance. Consumers and trends are never static, so you’ll need to use data to constantly refine your strategy to remain current. Review your social media metrics, email marketing data, and site analytics to become a leader in this high-impact, high-demand space.
Rely on a powerful platform for your digital marketing efforts
Since digital marketing channels are so accessible and affordable, marketing your business on these platforms will give you a wider reach. Digital marketing helps you reach more people, minimise costs, and better engage with your target audience. While there are many forms of digital marketing available to businesses today, this variety makes it easier than ever to see results from your marketing efforts.
When embarking on digital marketing initiatives, assess your existing marketing platform's capabilities to manage multifaceted campaigns effectively. Although these campaigns may become intricate, tools like VIRTRIO Engage streamline operations and amplify return on investment (ROI).
VIRTRIO excels in fostering customer engagement throughout intricate B2B purchasing paths. As a comprehensive lead management solution, it unifies marketing and sales efforts to nurture leads, orchestrate tailored experiences, refine content strategies, and gauge business outcomes across diverse channels.
Start your digital marketing campaigns on the right foot and get in touch with us today!
