What is Digital Marketing: How it Works for Your Business?

Digital marketing is the process of promoting a product or service online

Digital marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business today. In order to remain competitive, it is essential to have a strong digital marketing strategy in place.

In order to demonstrate this, let’s examine a few statistics about digital marketing:

• The average local business puts 5-10% of its revenue towards its digital marketing budget, but for larger businesses, that number can climb to about 14%.
• Roughly 63% of businesses have increased their digital marketing budgets just this past year. With 72% of their overall marketing budget dedicated to digital marketing.
• The digital marketing and advertising industries are larger than the online gaming and cyber-security industries combined.

So what is digital marketing, and what makes it so important? In this article, we will discuss what digital marketing is, the different types of marketing associated with it, and how your business can benefit.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the process of promoting a product or service online. This can be done through a variety of means, including social media, email, and content marketing. In order to be successful in digital marketing, it is important to have a clear strategy in place and to understand what your target audience is looking for.

There are several types of online marketing associated with digital marketing:

• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Customer Reviews

Each of these has its own unique benefits and can help you reach or engage your target audience in different ways. We will discuss the benefits of each type of online marketing below.

Why Your Business Needs Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is essential for any business today because the majority of consumers are now using the internet to find products and services. If you want to stay competitive, it is important to have a strong digital marketing strategy in place. By doing so, you will be able to reach and interact with your target audience and promote your product or service effectively.

Employing a solid digital marketing strategy provides the following benefits to your business:

1. Increased visibility
2. Improved customer engagement
3. Greater reach to a larger audience
4. Increased brand awareness
5. Enhanced SEO and web traffic
6. More cost-effective than traditional marketing methods
7. Allows for real-time interaction and feedback

There is a good chance that the most successful businesses in your niche are already using digital marketing in some form.

What is Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the process of promoting a product or service on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This type of marketing has become increasingly popular in recent years due to the widespread use of social media. It is a great way to connect with your target audience and build brand awareness.

Why Is Social Media Marketing Beneficial for Businesses?

There are several reasons why social media marketing is beneficial for businesses:

1. Increased visibility: When you post content about your product or service on social media, it becomes visible to a larger audience than traditional advertising methods.
2. Improved customer engagement: Social media provides a platform where customers can interact with your brand and leave feedback. This helps to create a connection with customers and builds trustworthiness.
3. Greater reach to a larger audience: Social media has a global reach and allows you to connect with customers from all over the world.
4. Increased brand awareness: When your business is active on social media, it helps to increase brand awareness and build name recognition.
5. Enhanced SEO and web traffic: Social media can help to improve your website’s SEO and increase web traffic.
6. More cost-effective than traditional marketing methods: Social media marketing is more cost effective than traditional marketing methods such as print or television advertising.
7. Allows for real-time interaction and feedback: Social media provides a platform for real-time interaction between businesses and customers. This allows for immediate feedback which can be used to improve customer service.

Social Media Marketing Drawbacks and Disadvantages

As beneficial as social media marketing can be, it also has a few drawbacks and disadvantages. In order to be successful, businesses need to be aware of these potential problems and take steps to avoid them. We will discuss the most common drawbacks and disadvantages of social media marketing below.

One of the few disadvantages of Social Media Marketing is that it converts visitors to customers at a much lower rate than other forms of digital marketing. The e-commerce software firm Monetate found that only 0.59% of visitors from social media buy something. That means you would need to get in front of 2000 people on social media before converting one of them to a customer (on average).

Later on in this article, we will compare the conversion rate for SEO and Email marketing to see how visitors from those mediums convert more often into paying customers.

Read more about “What is Social Media Marketing” and download our free guide to getting started.

What is Email Marketing

Email marketing is a type of digital marketing that involves sending promotional emails to customers. Email marketing is one of the most effective and popular digital marketing methods because it allows businesses to connect with their customers directly.

Why Is Email Marketing Beneficial for Businesses?

There are several reasons why email marketing is beneficial for businesses:

1. Increased visibility: When you send an email about your product or service, it becomes visible to a larger audience than traditional advertising methods.
2. Improved customer engagement: Emails provide a platform where customers can interact with your brand and leave feedback. This helps to create a connection with customers and builds trustworthiness.
3. Greater reach to a larger audience: Email has a global reach and allows you to connect with customers from all over the world.
4. Increased brand awareness: When your business sends emails about its products or services, it helps to increase brand awareness and build name recognition.
5. Enhanced SEO and web traffic: Emails can help improve your website’s SEO and increase web traffic.
6. More cost-effective than traditional marketing methods: Email marketing is more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods such as print or television advertising.

Email Marketing Drawbacks and Disadvantages

One of the biggest disadvantages of email marketing is that it can be considered spam if it’s not executed properly. If you send too many emails, or if your emails are not relevant to your audience, you run the risk of being marked as spam. This can lead to your emails being blocked or filtered, and it can damage your reputation.

Another disadvantage of email marketing is that it’s not as interactive as other forms of digital marketing. Unlike social media, where you can reply to your audience directly, email marketing feels more like a one-way conversation. This can make it challenging to build a rapport with your customers.

Finally, email marketing can be time-consuming. Crafting effective emails takes time, and if you’re not careful, it can be easy to spend too much time on this aspect of your digital marketing strategy.

What is Content Marketing

Content marketing is a type of digital marketing that involves creating and sharing content with the goal of attracting and engaging customers. Unlike other forms of digital marketing, content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Content marketing has become an essential component of modern business strategy, and it can be used to drive website traffic, increase brand awareness, create leads, and boost sales.

There are several reasons why content marketing is beneficial for businesses:

1. Increased visibility: When you publish high-quality content about your product or service, it becomes visible to a larger audience than traditional advertising methods.
2. Improved customer engagement: Content provides a platform where customers can interact with your brand and leave feedback. This helps to create a connection with customers and builds trustworthiness.
3. Greater reach to a focused audience: Content has a global reach and allows you to connect with customers who have a specific interest or are focused on a specific topic.
4. Increased brand awareness: When your business publishes content about its products or services, it helps to increase brand awareness and build name recognition.
5. Enhanced SEO and web traffic: Content can help improve your website’s SEO ranking position and increase web traffic. It may attract other bloggers who link to your content from their content.
6. More cost-effective than traditional marketing methods: Content marketing is more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods such as print or television advertising.
7. Helps you become an authority in your industry: When you consistently publish high-quality content, you become seen as an expert in your industry, which can help increase leads and sales.

One of the most important aspects of content marketing is that it takes place in a space that you own and have more control over; your website. This allows you to analyze visitors as they consume your content to determine what interests them the most.

Writing guest posts for other website owners could also be considered content marketing. This allows you to insert a few key links in your article back to content on your own website.

Read more about What is Content Marketing? In this link, we describe how it can benefit your business. There are also helpful tips on How to Get Started with Content Marketing.

Things to Consider about Content Marketing

There are a few elements of content marketing to keep in mind:

1. It can be time-consuming: Creating high-quality content takes time, and if you’re not careful, it can be easy to spend too much time on this aspect of your digital marketing strategy.
2. There’s a risk of being too self-promotional: If you focus too much on promoting your product or service, your content will come across as a sales pitch or self-serving. This can turn off potential customers.
3. You need to be consistent: To be successful with content marketing, you need to be consistent with your publishing schedule. If you’re not consistent, you won’t be able to build a following or generate results.
4. It can be challenging to measure results: Measuring the ROI of content marketing can be challenging since it can take time for customers to make a purchase after consuming your content.

What is Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising is a form of paid digital advertising in which businesses pay to have their ads displayed on websites or search engines.

The most common way to measure the success of PPC advertising is through click-through rates (CTRs). A CTR is the number of times an ad is clicked divided by the number of times it is displayed. The higher the CTR, the more successful the ad campaign is considered to be.

There are several reasons why PPC advertising is beneficial for businesses:

1. Increased visibility: When you run a PPC ad campaign, your ads will be displayed on websites and search engine results pages (SERPs), reaching a larger audience than traditional methods such as print or television advertising.
2. Improved ROI: Since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, PPC campaigns have a higher ROI than traditional methods.
3. Greater targeting capabilities: With PPC advertising, you can target your ads to a specific audience using factors such as location, demographics, interests, and even keywords.
4. Faster results: Unlike SEO, which can take months to see results, PPC advertising can produce results almost immediately.
5. Increased control: With PPC advertising, you have complete control over your budget and ad campaigns. You can start or stop a campaign at any time and adjust your budget as needed.

Things to Consider about PPC Advertising

There are a few things to keep in mind when running a PPC ad campaign:

1. It can be expensive: Depending on the keywords you’re bidding on and the competition in your industry, PPC advertising can be expensive.
2. There’s a learning curve: It can take some time to learn how to run a successful PPC campaign. You need to be comfortable with managing your budget, bids, and ads.
3. You need to have a good website: If you want people to convert after clicking on your ad, you need to have a well-designed website that is optimized for conversion.
4. You need to track your results: Tracking the results of your PPC campaign is essential to determine whether or not it is successful. Without tracking, you won’t be able to make the necessary changes to improve your results.

What is “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) and how does it help with Digital Marketing?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy used to improve a website’s visibility in search engine results pages. It helps businesses achieve higher rankings for relevant keywords so that their website appears more prominently on the results page when users search for those words. The goal of SEO is to draw more organic, or natural, traffic to the website through higher rankings.

As your website grows and you add new information, your website’s SEO should be constantly evaluated and maintained to provide a consistent message to your potential customers. SEO is NOT a one-time effort. But an ongoing process to ensure your website remains relevant and visible to your target audience.

It is essential to perform SEO before beginning any digital marketing campaign as it provides the best foundation for success. By optimizing your website with SEO, you can ensure that your website appears prominently in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords, allowing it to be more visible to potential customers. With better visibility comes higher traffic and more opportunities for businesses to convert leads into customers.

Furthermore, SEO helps businesses provide a consistent message to their target audience. As users search for things related to the business, they should find websites that accurately portray the company’s brand and values. Without proper optimization, companies may end up promoting outdated information or products that no longer exist. By keeping up with SEO trends, companies can make sure their content remains fresh and relevant.

How SEO Helps your Digital Marketing

Proper SEO can reduce the costs associated with digital marketing campaigns by increasing organic traffic and decreasing reliance on paid advertisements. When websites are properly optimized for search engines, there is an increased likelihood of ranking higher in SERPs without needing to pay for clicks on ads or sponsored content. This allows businesses to allocate budget funds towards other aspects of their digital marketing efforts such as content creation or lead acquisition instead of solely relying on expensive PPC campaigns.

Finally, performing SEO before starting a digital marketing campaign can save time since businesses don’t have to worry about making changes after launching their campaign if it’s not performing well due to poor optimization. On-site SEO should be done carefully and thoroughly before launching any online advertisement efforts so that all aspects of the website are optimized from the start rather than having to go back and adjust them later on when trying to optimize performance or when noticing discrepancies between what was advertised and what’s actually available on the site.

Overall, performing SEO prior to launching any digital marketing campaign is important because it provides a strong foundation for success by improving website visibility in SERPs through organic traffic growth; ensures consistency in messaging by reflecting current business interests; reduces costs associated with paid advertisements; and saves time since no changes need to be made after launching an ad campaign if all optimization has already been done correctly from the start.

Related: 4 Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses

How do Customer Reviews Relate to Your Digital Marketing Efforts?

Customer reviews are important because they provide social proof from real customers, which is a powerful motivator in the decision-making process when it comes to purchasing goods or services online. Customer reviews are an invaluable tool for digital marketing efforts. Positive reviews can increase trust in a business and its products or services, while negative reviews can be used to identify areas of improvement so that the business can better serve its customers.

Customer reviews can provide invaluable insight into customer preferences and experiences with a particular product or service. Through customer feedback, businesses can gain valuable insight into what customers like about their offerings, as well as what could be improved upon. Additionally, customer reviews can help businesses determine if their services are meeting customer requirements and expectations. This data provides important information that can be used to make changes and improvements that will ultimately improve their reputation in the marketplace.

Positive customer reviews also have an impact on search engine optimization (SEO). When potential customers make decisions based on organic search results, they often take into account ratings and customer reviews before making a purchase. Having positive ratings and reviews will help increase your website’s visibility in SERPs by pushing it higher up the list of results. This will help draw more organic traffic to your website, which has the potential to increase sales and conversions.

How you Manage Reviews is the Key to Success

Having an active presence on review sites such as Google, and Yelp, or other review sites, is an excellent way for businesses to gain valuable insights into their services from real customers. Businesses should use these platforms to respond promptly to both positive and negative customer feedback which helps boost engagement with current customers while simultaneously giving potential buyers insight into how responsive they are towards customer needs – something which is incredibly important when it comes to developing long-term relationships between businesses and consumers online.

Negative customer reviews can also have a positive impact. They show potential customers how you handle issues or problems when they arise. It is important to respond in a positive or productive manner to all reviews when possible. Even if a customer has left a negative review, the potential customer will appreciate your position if you have responded in a kind and helpful manner, even if it wasn’t your fault.

In conclusion, customer reviews play an integral role in digital marketing campaigns. Reviews provide valuable insights into how existing customers perceive your products or services while helping businesses increase visibility through SEO efforts. They build credibility with prospective buyers. Through reviews, you can also monitor trends, develop relationships, identify areas of improvement, and ultimately increase trust. All of which contribute significantly to successful marketing campaigns in today’s digital age.