What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing – also known as online or internet marketing – describes the marketing initiatives businesses introduce to promote their services and products online. Those actions aim to target consumers with products/services that will provide solutions to their pain points.
Digital marketers have lots of aces up their sleeves. Some of their techniques drive organic traffic; users can land on your website through search engines without you paying for those results. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is such a method.
You can also acquire paid traffic with solutions like Pay-Per-Click (PPC). For instance, your business can create targeted paid ads to bring more potential customers to your website.
We’ll elaborate on these different tactics extensively below.
Inbound Vs. Outbound Marketing Methodology
The digital marketing spectrum has both inbound and outbound aspects.
As inbound marketing, we define the methods that aim to bring customers to your website through sources like blog posts or social media updates and nurture them over time. With the proper marketing outreach, consumers interested in your services will start interacting with your brand and finally turn into loyal customers.
On the other hand, in outbound marketing, a marketer or sales representative reaches out to potential customers without necessarily knowing if they’re already interested in what you offer. Cold calling is one of the most common outbound methods. Sales reps can also utilize email or mobile messaging apps for the same purpose.
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The various practices we’ll discuss below belong in the inbound category. They promote a more customer-centric marketing approach, targeting consumers or potential buyers at the right place or time, with higher chances of converting down the road!
Why Do You Need Digital Marketing For Your Business?
Here are some of the top benefits of online marketing for businesses:
It Increases Brand Awareness and Customer Engagement
As mentioned above, digital marketing helps you boost your brand awareness and acquire new leads and prospects. Once they start interacting with your brand, you can make them stick with you by providing special offers or helpful resources.
Moreover, with the right digital assets, such as email marketing, you can communicate consistently with customers and prospects. Inform them about your latest products or deals, and keep your relationship warm and steady.
It Boosts Brand Visibility Across Marketing Channels
By creating an omnichannel marketing experience across different channels, you can interact with consumers no matter what platform they use. You can invite them to your website and social media profiles or reach them by email or SMS to tell them about a new product they can’t miss.
With consistent brand visibility, you remind your prospects that you’re always there for them, ready to provide them with the best solutions. The more they see your brand assets, the higher the chances they’ll remember you for long.
Keep in mind that we all run into loads of information online daily, and it’s easy to get lost in this endless ocean. So make your outreach and messaging consistent and unique.
It Helps You Reach Your Target Audience
With specific techniques like paid advertising or search engine optimization, you can display your product or service to people who need it. These techniques are “value for money” as they target your so-called buyer personas.
A buyer persona is an ideal customer for your business. By shaping and analyzing this figure, you can grasp what they need and create the best marketing and content experiences for them.
And ultimately, by optimizing your site and digital ads with the traits of your buyer personas in mind, such as age or profession, you will maximize your sales!
It Is Easy to Track and Analyze
In digital marketing, you can set tangible marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for each channel you use to analyze results efficiently. For example, with tools like Google Analytics, you can collect and interpret data to reach safe conclusions about the success of your campaigns.
There are additional tools that offer data analytics and reporting capabilities, too. For example, Moosend is an email automation platform offering custom report and analytics features that enable users to monitor their email campaigns. Platforms like this can save you lots of time, money, and energy if you use them wisely.
B2C Vs. B2B Online Marketing Approaches
In most cases, a business-to-customer (B2C) approach is different from a business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy, depending on the product or service you wish to promote.
In B2C, the customer journey is more straightforward. If you manage to bring buyers to your site and offer them a unique user experience (UX) with glossy product web pages and a quick path to the shopping cart, you’ll probably convert them soon. By using social media, email, and SEO practices cleverly, you can reach prosperity!
However, in B2B, especially in SaaS companies, the buyer’s lifecycle follows a more complex pathway. Your website leads will probably look for content and resources, sign up for demos and webinars, and schedule meetings with the company’s sales team before purchasing.
In such cases, you’ll need to place more digital arrows in your marketing quiver. For example, you can invest in content marketing, paid digital advertising, and SEO to successfully move your leads down the funnel.
9 Different Digital Marketing Types: Description & Examples
Below, we’ve listed some of the top-tier practices that can help your business grow. Let’s start:
Digital Marketing Options:
- Email marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Paid Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
- Referral Marketing
- SMS Marketing
- Website Optimization
1. Email Marketing
Emails are one of the best digital marketing solutions for both beginners and pros, especially for eCommerce. Here is why: 59% of consumers have stated that marketing emails affect their purchase decisions, with 50% buying straight from emails at least once monthly.
As you understand, setting up an email strategy is a big deal. Here are some different email types you can send to customers:
- Transactional: Automated emails triggered after a customer’s specific action, e.g., sign-up.
- Newsletters: Latest news and product updates, e.g., upcoming features.
- Abandoned cart emails: Reminders to shop items left in the shopping cart.
- Promotional: Discounts, offers, and special deals for customers.
These emails will gradually enhance customer engagement and retention and give your sales a good boost.
Top Elements of Great Emails
To create successful email campaigns that will attract the viewers’ attention, you’ll need:
- A catchy subject line
- A simple and beautiful design
- Clear copy that entices the reader
- CTA buttons that convert
Here is a fantastic example by Tupperware:
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Apart from these essential email elements, certain methods can power up your email marketing success. Through list segmentation, you can divide your subscribers into different email lists based on several criteria. For example, where they are in the sales funnel or even their demographics.
Segmented lists lead to more personalized customer experiences, which can benefit your brand dearly. You can also use extra personalization techniques, such as adding your customers’ names to subject lines to draw their attention.
Keep in mind that buyers favor personalized marketing. More specifically, 91% of consumers stated that they are more likely to buy from brands that provide relevant offers.
But how can you manage all these processes with flying colors without extra effort? With an email marketing platform like Moosend or Mailchimp, you can create beautiful automated campaigns to increase your revenue and monitor key metrics such as open and click-through rates.
Looking for an email solution? With Moosend, you can create personalized email campaigns with ready-made templates and track their progress with analytics and custom report features in simple steps!
For more tips, feel free to read these best email marketing practices. Plus, if you target companies, find out how to build a B2B email marketing strategy for winners!
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In many cases, consumers will discover your brand through an ad, a recommendation, or while scrolling through social media. But what happens with consumers who casually search for information about products or relevant information on search engines?
Numbers have spoken: 80% of significant purchases start with online research – even though the purchase can also happen in a store. Google is the leader in the market share (including Google Images), followed by YouTube, which Google also owns.
As you can understand, the higher your website and content appear on search engine results pages (SERPs), the more your opportunities to increase brand awareness and acquire new leads. But how can you make this come true?
Here is where the search engine optimization (SEO) magic starts! SEO is the optimization process that aims to increase the quality and quantity of your traffic organically – aka for free.
SEO can be a little complex for digital marketing newbies. That’s why businesses that want to reap its benefits prefer to hire or partner with a strategist to own the project and bring the best possible results.
SEO: The Absolute Basics
Here is the bigger picture about SEO:
On-Page SEO is about your website and how you can boost it to rank higher on search engines. You can achieve that by using high-volume keywords and creating content that answers your target audience’s questions.
In contrast, Off-Page SEO is traffic generated by external sources in the form of backlinks. If external sites with high authority start linking to your content, the search engine crawlers will identify that your content is valid and boost your rankings.
And finally, technical SEO refers to your backend structure and site index that can impact the loading time of your pages and how search engine crawlers “read” your content. For example, broken links are a bad quality sign.
SEO professionals usually tend towards tools such as Ahrefs and Moz to monitor these processes in one place. If you want to learn more about search engine optimization, start with this excellent beginner’s SEO guide by Moz.
3. Social Media Marketing
Look at these impressive social media marketing stats: On average, 3.5 billion social media users are daily online, and 54% of users research products on social media.
Overall, social media shapes consumer behavior in diverse ways. People follow the brands they like, interact with their content, and learn about their products. Plus, consumers often turn to their favorite influencers on social media for product reviews and recommendations.
And since social media can boost brand awareness and drive purchase decisions in multiple ways, it’s crucial to explore this digital marketing territory. By posting on impactful platforms like Facebook or Instagram, you can obtain followers and transform them into potential customers. Finally, there are options for both organic and paid acquisition.
Well-known social media platforms
Here’s is a list of the most frequently used social platforms that can affect buyers’ decisions massively. Each of those platforms has its unique assets and rules:
Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube & Twitter
Facebook has 1.84 billion active users and hosts over 200 million businesses globally using its marketing tools. Marketing professionals utilize it to promote brand awareness and drive audience engagement through shares, likes, and other reactions.
The most potent weapon of this platform is Facebook Ads. It enables you to create highly targeted paid campaigns and direct users straight to your website.