In today’s modern landscape, digital channels like social media, email, and Google search have made it easier for businesses to connect with their current and prospective...
In today’s modern landscape, digital channels like social media, email, and Google search have made it easier for businesses to connect with their current and prospective customers. Companies choose online channels over offline marketing tactics because people are spending more and more time on the internet these days.
From your website to your social media platforms, there are countless ways to reach your target audience through digital marketing. And whether you’re starting a business or launching a new product, understanding the fundamentals of digital marketing is crucial to your success. After all, the best marketers have a clear idea of how each asset supports their business goals.
Digital marketing encompasses every marketing effort that involves using electronic devices or the internet. These days, it means using various digital tactics and channels to connect with customers online. You may consider leveraging channels like social media, email, or search engines to reach out to prospective customers, for instance.
In today’s digital age, you’ll need a digital marketing strategy that appeals to your target audience and follows them through their online sales cycle. Your strategy should list down the action steps you need to take so you achieve your goals on your preferred online channels.
Your digital marketing campaigns serve as the building blocks or series of actions within your strategy that guide you toward reaching your business goals. You may consider running a campaign that shares your best performing content on Facebook to generate more leads through that channel, for instance.
With a clearer understanding of the different types of digital marketing, you can determine the most actionable way forward.
SEO is the process of optimizing your website to make it rank higher on search engine results pages. An optimized website can increase the organic traffic that your site receives, through different channels like websites, blogs, and infographics. Generating greater traffic and improving your website’s ranking involve using different approaches to SEO. These include:
Your website’s content is part of on-page SEO. By understanding customer intent (or what motivates your customers to make a purchase) and researching keywords, for instance, you can answer questions and provide fresh and helpful content to your prospective customers.
Just as the name implies, off-page SEO includes the techniques outside your website that you can use to improve your website’s ranking. Publishing a guest post for another blog or leaving a comment on another is part of off-page SEO. In simple terms, it improves your site’s relevance and authority.
This type of SEO focuses on the backend of your website, such as the technical aspects that make it easier for search engines to index your site and improve your ranking. Structured data and image compression are examples of technical SEO that can boost your site’s loading speed.
Content marketing focuses on the creation of valuable and useful content to spark interest and drive profitable action among your target audience. The goal of any content marketing campaign is to increase brand awareness, improve traffic, and generate leads. Some popular channels to include in your content marketing strategy are blogs, videos, infographics, e-books, whitepapers, and more.
Social media marketing promotes your brand on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to boost your online presence and engage in meaningful interactions with your target audience.
Maximize the impact of your social media marketing campaign with a paid social strategy. Paid social ads allow you to increase your return on investment (ROI) by strategically targeting consumers and tracking the cost and ROI for each click on your ad.
PPC is a cost-effective way of driving traffic to your site because you only pay for it every time someone clicks on your ad. This means you can attract people who are already interested in your offer. When done right, you can attract quality leads and boost your ROI.
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning commission by promoting someone else’s website. If you have a product you want to sell, you can provide an opportunity for affiliate marketing by offering promoters a financial incentive. Or, on the flipside, you could promote a product that has value and earn an income from it as an affiliate marketer.
Native ads hardly look like ads because they match the look, feel, and media function of the media format where they appear. You’ll find them on social media feeds, or recommended content on a web page. And since they look like part of the editorial flow of a page, they’re a great way to reach out to your target audience.
Marketing automation is a form of technology that allows you to manage marketing processes and campaigns across multiple channels. Through this type of digital marketing, you can target customers with automated messages across web, email, text, and social.
Communicating with your customers via email can help you promote content, events, discounts, and entice more people to visit your site. Some emails you send can include blog subscription newsletters and holiday programs to loyalty program members.
Similar to traditional PR, online PR helps you secure coverage—except in the digital world—through digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. Proactively enrich your PR by engaging with online reviews and responding to people reading your content.
Inbound marketing centers on creating meaningful experiences that have a positive impact on your brand. And this entails attracting prospects through relevant and helpful content at different stages of the buyer’s journey. It’s the best way to turn strangers into lifelong advocates of your brand.
The kind of content you create will depend on your target customer’s needs and what stage of the conversion funnel they are on. Good content meets your audience’s goals and helps them overcome challenges they meet along the way.
Before you launch your marketing strategy, you need to know who you’re marketing to. And this starts by creating a detailed buyer persona. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on market research. Having a deep understanding of your buyer persona will help you internalize the type of person you’re trying to attract and guide you in creating content to drive greater customer retention and acquisition.
When a user visits your website, you want them to complete an action—whether it’s to sign up to your blog or fill out a contact form. And when someone does what you need them to do on your website, it’s called a conversion. It’s when a visitor converts from browsing your site to taking action.
How does this tie in with the conversion funnel? A funnel is the set of steps a visitor needs to go through before they reach the end of the conversion.
Customers need to know you exist before they push through with a purchase. Start by generating awareness and interest in your brand. Learn what your target audience’s wants and needs are, then tell them about how you can help them solve a problem. If you build a strong first impression, you can lead browsers further down the funnel.
At this stage of the sales funnel, your customer has already consumed your content and is eager for more. This is also when a consumer starts to associate your brand with the solution you are offering. It helps to supply them with content that would assist in evaluating your business and your products. They’ll be looking for info like product descriptions, demo videos, how-to content that showcases your products, and more.
By the time your customers make it into the interest stage of the funnel, they already know that your business can help address their need or solve their problem. But there are also alternatives that offer the same product or service as you do. Help your potential customers discover why they should choose you by banking on your unique selling proposition. Highlight what makes you different to turn interest into desire.
Your customer is almost convinced that you are the right solution for their problem—they just need a gentle nudge in the right direction. Businesses use different tactics to entice customers to take the next step, like using urgency by reminding a customer that a product will be out of stock soon, or by making the check-out process smooth and efficient. As long as the buying experience is pleasant, your customers will be happy with your services.
As a digital marketer, it is your job to take the lead in driving brand awareness and lead generation on all channels. To measure the success of your marketing campaigns, it helps to focus on different key performance indicators (KPIs) for each channel so you can properly assess your performance on each front.
And unlike offline marketing efforts, digital marketing enables you to view the results of your campaign in real time.
Just like traffic on a highway that describes the number of cars traveling down the road, web traffic refers to how many people are visiting your website. Finding out how much traffic your site is getting provides useful insights on which channels to prioritize and if you’re attracting the right people to your brand.
A well-written content piece has a positive impact on your bottom line. And no matter how long you’ve been creating and distributing content, you need to measure that impact at every stage of the process to discover areas of improvement. That way, you can continue providing your audience with useful, relevant info.
A lead is a qualified potential buyer who is interested in buying your products or services. Lead generation, on the other hand, is the marketing process that involves sparking interest in your brand to develop your sales pipeline. Measuring this is important because it teaches you how to forge long-lasting relationships with buyers.
A successful digital marketing strategy results in better search rankings and traffic. In turn, these translate to higher sales. But to get a grip on whether your site is making money, you need to calculate the amount of revenue generated on your website. You can do this by using conversion tracking tools then examining the data to see how much revenue you are getting from your campaigns.
If customers are loyal to your business, they offer a greater customer lifetime value (the total revenue your business can expect during the entire duration of your relationship with that customer), which translates to a higher revenue for your business. Customer retention describes the ability of your company to retain customers over time. Measuring this is important to any growing company because it shows how successful you are at acquiring new customers and satisfying existing ones.
Attribution modeling provides a framework where you can analyze which touchpoints and marketing channels receive credit for each conversation. By tracking your sales back to your customer’s first touchpoint with your business, you can make more informed decisions about which parts of your marketing and sales strategy need refining.
In today’s world, a huge part of your marketing strategy has to be digital so you can reach your customers online. And this comes with the responsibility of creating, fine-tuning, and maintaining a digital marketing strategy that helps you achieve your business goals through carefully selected online digital channels.
Build an effective strategy that maps out the steps to help you achieve your goal. Start growing your business and partner with a company that specializes in customer retention and acquisition. Get in touch with Growth Rocket today.
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