Digital marketing is exactly what it says: marketing efforts that use digital technologies and online tactics like SEO, email marketing, and social media advertising to target a certain audience. It also covers other digital aspects such as web development but principally, is focused on the channels used to distribute content using an electronic device or the Internet to connect with customers who are spending more and more of their time online.
Digital marketing is considered an effective form of inbound marketing that helps people discover your business. The more they see your brand online, the more familiar you will feel to them, eventually developing trust and rapport with you through this online presence.
As a discipline, it overlaps with effective content marketing to convert leads into customers and bring in sales.
Both activities strive to increase traffic, qualify leads, generate sales and ultimately grow business.
Digital and content marketing work collaboratively – and often without even noticing, content marketing becomes an integral part of your digital marketing effort. When you create content like an insightful blog, you then use your social media channels to distribute and promote that content, engaging your users and giving them access to your website.
Integrating both digital and content will make your marketing strategy stronger, offering the best possible opportunity to achieve your business objectives. When it comes to developing your content marketing strategy, your planning should be heavily influenced and supported by your digital marketing data.
Integrating these marketing strategies will boost engagement and sales when used together properly. Regardless of what type of marketing strategy you use, content marketing should always be part of the process. Quality content is an integral part of all forms of marketing. To distribute the content, you always need the help of digital marketing to reach your target audience and create sales, requiring an investment of time, effort and creativity.
Types of Digital Marketing
1. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation usually plays a significant role in any digital marketing strategy, because if you’re not appearing in search results, how can you expect your prospect customers to find you? In short, SEO includes on-page optimisation like writing titles and meta descriptions, keyword research, writing alt tags for images, tag optimisation and more.
2. SEM – Search Engine Marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your brand and grow your business in what is now an over-crowded digital market place. Using paid advertisements that appear in search engine result pages, advertisers can bid on keywords in the hopes of securing an opportunity to appear alongside results for those particular queries.
3. PPC – Pay-per-click, a model of marketing online in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. It’s essentially a way of buying more traffic for your website rather than earning those visits organically using SEO techniques. Both methods are fundamentally about promotion via search engines.
4. Email Marketing – This direct form of marketing sends compelling content and offers straight to your contact’s inbox. It’s a great way to stay in touch with your existing customers or to push qualified leads into the next phase of their buying journey.
5. Viral Marketing – This is the practice of producing and distributing content that is shareworthy, using quality videos or images that indirectly promote your brand.
6. Inbound Marketing – Inbound marketing essentially covers all of the above, using both content marketing and digital marketing. The approach uses content to grow your business by building meaningful, lasting relationships with your consumers, prospects and customers.
7. Social Media Marketing – Businesses can use relevant social media platforms to reach a whole pool of potential customers using clever campaigns and targeted ads to promote awareness, engagement or conversions.
How does social media marketing work?
If content marketing builds trust through knowledge, then social media marketing builds it through interaction. Overlapping the two can produce impressive results.
Social media marketers use consistent outreach to establish a two-way dialogue: the marketer delivers a message and the consumer responds. Unlike content marketing, consumers are often in the driving seat of this relationship because people feel free to share what’s on their mind on social media, including the complete customer experience – be it positive or negative:
Praise or problems with recent purchases
Compliments or complaints about a business
Thoughts and opinions on news
As a result, business owners are increasingly using social media to run a dialogue with their target audience – addressing issues, answering customer questions, and when done well, developing a more intimate relationship with their customer base.
