What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, is a method of promoting your brands, products, or services through online channels such as search engines, websites, social media, emails, webinars, and mobile apps. Put simply, digital marketing is any marketing effort that needs electronic devices, software, and the internet to create and promote marketing campaigns.
Getting Started
Experts' definitions
Gartner defines digital marketing as a set of integrated techniques, technologies, and information that enables marketing to create new products and services; enter new markets; improve the processes needed to engage in a dynamic conversation with people who are influencers and buyers; and, ultimately, target, acquire, and retain customers.
"Digital marketing is (or should be) a part of almost every key business decision from product development and pricing through to public relations and even recruitment"
Simon Kingsnorth Digital Marketing Strategy, 2nd edition"Digital marketing is the act of selling products and services through online channels"
Neil Patel Co-founder of Neil Patel Digital.
Importance of Digital Marketing
Your audience spends, on average, more than six hours a day online: browsing websites, watching videos, and reading content on blogs and social media. Digital marketing is an easy way to reach them directly. If you don't have a digital marketing strategy for your business yet, it's high time to create one.
lower costs for digital marketing compared to traditional marketing.
more ROI with SEO.
of customers expect brands to provide consistent and precise information across online channels.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
- Reach your audience anywhere in the world
- Target people who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP)
- Deliver a highly personalized experience
- Engage and build meaningful relationships with your audience
- Create a better brand image
- Maintain better control over your marketing budget
- Benefit from high visibility over your campaign performance
- Measurable ROI
Types of Digital Marketing
SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is a continuous process of optimizing your website's technical configuration, creating relevant content for your audience, and sharing links on social media and other related websites to make your website more likely to pop up on search engines in response to users' search queries. SEO has three main components:
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On-Page SEO
The practice of optimizing individual web pages in terms of site, structure, and content. On-page SEO refers to all the measures taken directly on the website to improve its position in search rankings.
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Off-Page SEO
Actions you take anywhere other than your page to improve your page ranking in search engine results. It involves improving users' perceptions of your site's popularity, relevance, and authority rankings.
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Technical SEO
The process of ensuring your website meets search engines' technical criteria, such as page loading time, website architecture, URL structure, and security.
Several factors contribute to a good SEO score, but creating rich content is always a strong strategy. In fact, good SEO is all about content marketing.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a marketing approach focused on creating and distributing content such as blogs, infographics, white papers, ebooks, podcasts, and videos that are relevant to your target audience to make your website more likely to pop up on search engines in response to users' search queries
The primary objective of content marketing is to educate your audience about the products and services you offer to gain their interest and allow them to evaluate whether your business has the right solution for their problems. Content marketing can also be a great soft seller for your business, boosting factors like reach, brand awareness, interactions, sales, and loyalty.
Your website content, like blog posts, can significantly contribute to SEO, making sure your website appears at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) for related search queries. Users are more likely to visit the page at the top of the results, so you'll get more visitors to your website without paying for traffic. That's why content is always king.
Email marketing
Email marketing is a component of digital marketing that uses email as a medium to promote brands, products, and services to subscribers. It helps your brand build a great relationship with customers and keeps them up to date on your new products, offers, discounts, and other services.
Email marketing is ideal for
- Welcoming and onboarding customers
- Nurturing customers with relevant and valuable content
- Following up with potential new customers
- Sharing blogs or newsletters
- Promoting your new products and services
Advantages of email marketing
- Direct marketing
- Easy to create
- Reach instantly
- Deliver personalized experience
- Measurable results
- Higher ROI if executed well
Learn how to create and execute a successful email campaign for your business.
SMS marketing
SMS marketing involves sending promotional or transactional marketing messages via SMS to communicate offers, updates, and alerts to your customers who have consented to receive these messages from your company.
Advantages of SMS marketing
- Reach your audience instantly and directly on their phones.
- Create workflows and automate messages in most SMS marketing apps.
- Benefit from measurable results and a high engagement rate.
Social media marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing is the component of digital marketing that uses social media as a channel to connect with your audience to promote your content, build your brand, engage with your followers, and increase sales.
Advantages of social media marketing:
- Enhance brand awareness by promoting your content to a new audience
- Increase your website traffic Improve your SEO score
- Engage with followers and build meaningful relationships
- Attract more inbound leads
- Improve the customer experience
- Channel
- Business marking type
- Content type
- Purpose
- YouTube
- Google my Business
- B2C
- B2C
- B2C and B2B
- B2B
- B2C and B2B
- B2C and B2B
- Blogs and articles
- Images and videos
- Short text and images
- Blogs and articles
- Videos
- Images, FAQs, and reviews
- Brand awareness and loyalty building
- Brand awareness and relationship building
- Public relations and brand building
- Lead generation and brand building
- Brand awareness building and driving website traffic
- Giving more information to first-time visitors
Paid marketing
Paid marketing, as the name suggests, is when you pay to promote your brand on search engines, websites, and social media. This can be an effective marketing strategy as it relies on data gleaned from users' online interactions to boost your website traffic by delivering relevant ads to the target audience.
The two main paid marketing channels are:
Search engine marketing (SEM)
These are the ads shown at the top or side of search engine results pages on services like Google and Bing. These ads cost you for every click, conversion, or impression. You can create ads and customize them to target only your most likely potential customers, without having to show them for every search.
Social media ads
These are ads shown on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, and YouTube. There are 4.33 billion social media users around the world, and social media ads help you to reach the right users and retarget people who have visited your website before, which can really boost your conversion rates.
Webinars
Webinar marketing is a component of digital marketing which works by attracting and inviting potential customers to attend a relevant webinar, which will ideally deliver great value to attendees, while also nurturing your relationship with them and promoting your products or services.
Advantages of webinars:
- Enhance your brand value
- Deliver better value through educational content
- Interact with your audience face to face
- Generate high-quality leads
- Increase conversion rates
What does a digital marketer do?
The responsibilities of a digital marketer may include: writing blogs, sending emails, managing social media, running paid ads, measuring website traffic, generating leads, and working with other teams like product development, design, and sales to understand the products and services offered, so they can create better content to entice the audience and convert them into customers.
But the exact roles and responsibilities of digital marketers will differ from each organization to the next depending on the team size and goals. Digital marketers working at start-ups with small team sizes may have to wear multiple hats and manage all the company's online marketing activities, while marketers working at enterprises may focus on just one or two things, like just managing email campaigns or only running ads on social media.
KPIs for digital marketers include increasing brand awareness, attracting more website visitors, and generating more sales-qualified leads. To manage marketing activities and achieve their KPI targets, digital marketers need a solid strategy, a good understanding of their product and market, and, last but not least, powerful digital marketing software.
Digital marketing software supports a variety of functions used in online marketing, like email campaigns tools, social media management tools, and webinar tools. There are two main types of digital marketing software: individual marketing solutions and unified marketing platforms.
Individual marketing solutions vs Unified marketing platforms
Individual marketing solutions generally consist of only one application with one marketing function, like a marketing tool that focuses only on sending email campaigns or a tool just for publishing social media posts. A unified marketing platform offers multiple applications which target a range of marketing activities, all in one centralized place. Most solutions include tools for email, SMS, social media, webinars, surveys, ads, and automation, with some solutions offering even more functionality.
Individual marketing solutions
Unified marketing platforms
Complex to use as the user interface will be different for each vendor.
Provides a unified interface: easy to use as the user interface is the same for all the tools.
You have to set up multiple accounts and log-in credentials for your brands on different applications. This puts your data at risk.
Unified set up: This makes the process of signing up for and accessing tools easy, and your account more secure as you don't have to share your credentials with multiple vendors.
It is impossible to manage all your brands in one place, so it can be challenging to maintain a unified theme for your brand across all the channels.
Unified brand management: you can manage all your associated brands in a centralized space, creating unified campaigns for your brands across all channels to maintain brand consistency.
Collaboration with team members is challenging; you have to purchase licenses for each different account, invite your team to each tool, and discuss the performance of each campaign one at a time.
Unified team management: Collaboration with other team members is easy. A unified marketing platform is a one-stop place where all team members can track the progress in real time and manage all their discussions in the same place.
It is impossible to measure the overall marketing performance without setting up additional tools or doing manual calculations.
Unified marketing analytics: That lets you measure individual campaigns and overall campaign performance more accurately, giving a clear picture of your overall marketing ROI.
Key functionalities of a unified marketing platform
- Contact management
- Emails
- SMS
- Social Media
- Surveys
- Webinars
- Analytics
- Marketing automation
- Unified campaign management
Contact management
A unified marketing platform lets you manage all your contacts in one place.
- Upload or import contacts from other applications or build your contacts list by creating a contact form and sharing it on landing pages, blog pages, and social channels.
- Attract your social media followers, get their contact details, and add them directly to your contacts so you can nurture them on other channels like emails, webinars, and surveys.
- Segment your contacts based on demography, geography, age group, gender, and many other factors to segment them and create personalized messages.
Emails
Emails in unified marketing platforms are usually connected to other channels like social media, webinars, and online events so if you are going live on social media or hosting an online show, you can automatically send reminder emails to your audience to get good attendance numbers every time. Your email marketing platform can also help you:
- Create plain text or designer emails from scratch or start from one of the platform's huge range of pre-designed templates.
- Automate the emails you send on autopilot, like welcoming new users or reminding customers to complete their purchase, and create custom emails with workflows and auto-responders.
- Try two different email versions on a few of your contacts, then send the version that performs better to the rest of the list. This method is called A/B testing.
SMS
A unified marketing platform lets you send bulk messages like promotions, reminders, and flash sale notifications to reach your contacts right in their pocket.
- Create personalized messages for your target audience which include their first name, last name, location, and other relevant details, to make them feel more engaged.
- Set workflows to automate your SMS campaigns, like sending a series of promotional short messages or sending automatic follow-ups based on trigger actions like users opening your messages or clicking a particular link.
- Schedule your messages so that they are delivered on the optimal day and time when you tend to see the most opens and clicks, and avoid annoying contacts by blowing their phone up at a bad time.
Social media
A unified marketing platform lets you manage all your social media activities from one place without having to keep your accounts open on separate tabs or restricting you to only using one platform at a time, while you still need to keep on top of other marketing channels.
- Share your posts on all of your social channels from one place. Publish your post immediately, schedule it for later, or use optimal publishing features that will automatically share your content at times when your audience is most likely to engage with it.
- Engage with followers from all your social channels on a single screen. Respond to direct messages or comments to improve engagement with your brand.
- Listen to what your followers are saying about your brands. Monitor core keywords, brand hashtags, reviews, and more in real time so you can react immediately.
- Generate more inbound leads through social channels, add them to your contacts list, and nurture them with meaningful content.
Surveys
Create online surveys and questionnaires to collect customer satisfaction data, research data, feedback, and more. Unified marketing platforms let you create and share surveys with your contacts through emails and social media.
- Create surveys easily with a drag-and-drop interface, and select from a range of question types like multiple choice, dropdown, image type, slider, and NPS, so your participants' answers are always in the format you need.
- Embed questions into your emails and campaigns. Participants can respond to your survey directly from the email without having to open a link.
- With question and page logic, you can make responsive surveys, so that some questions and pages only appear if a specific answer is given to a previous question. This delivers a personalized survey experience to your participants.
- Measure your survey results in real time. Create custom reports, analyze them with charts and graphs, and make informed decisions.
Webinars
Unified marketing platforms connect webinars to other channels like email, social media, and SMS. This makes it easy to share your webinar links with contacts through multiple marketing channels and attract more registrations.
- Create webinars by scheduling the date and time, adding the co-organizers, and creating custom registration forms that reflect your brand's style.
- Conduct video webinars by broadcasting live video feeds and sharing presentations and record your webinars from start to finish and store them in the cloud.
- While presenting your webinar, you can chat with your attendees, share files, create polls for them to engage with, and view the results in real time.
Analytics
Measure all your marketing performance in a unified dashboard. Analytics combines data from campaigns, social media, websites, and even in-person events to calculate your marketing ROI.
- Web analytics enable you to understand your website visitors' age, gender, and location, the devices they use to access your site, how they got added to your contact list, the channels they use to connect with you, and their behavior on your pages (clicks, time spent, bounce rate, and conversion rate).
- Campaign analytics enable you to track the total number of emails you sent, the delivery and bounce rates, how many of your emails were opened, unopened, or clicked, and how many recipients unsubscribed from your mailing list.
- Social analytics measure all your social media metrics like your audience, number of posts, and engagement rate, performance, reach, and impressions for each channel.
Marketing automation
Attract more visitors, deliver them personalized content based on their behavior and interactions on your website and convert them into qualified leads with marketing automation.
- Attract more leads by creating signup forms and smart pop-ups on your landing pages, websites, social media, webinars, and much more to fill your pipeline.
- Understand how a visitor interacts with your website in terms of page visits and link clicks. Define goals for visitors, group them based on their actions, and create a personalized experience for each visitor.
- Qualify leads by setting scores and rules so you can pass the best leads to the sales team and nurture your potential leads with automated emails which contain meaningful content.
Unified campaign management
Manage your marketing campaigns efficiently: track and measure the progress of your multichannel campaigns from one centralized place.
- Track all your ongoing and pending campaign activities for every marketing channel in a clear timeline to ensure your campaigns are progressing on the right track at the right speed.
- Track your ongoing campaigns across multiple channels in real time and make tweaks to achieve your goals faster.
- Collaborate and discuss campaign performance with your team members to keep everyone on the same page.
Explore Zoho's Unified Marketing Platform
Zoho Marketing Plus is a unified marketing platform that brings all your marketing tools together: emails, SMS, social media, surveys, webinars, virtual events, and analytics. All the tools in Marketing Plus are tightly connected, so you can manage all your customer data in one common place and send campaigns on multiple channels without spending time switching between tools or importing data.
TRY ZOHO MARKETING PLUSKeep learning!
The key to success in digital marketing is constantly staying up to date on the latest marketing trends and best practices. Marketing Express is one great place to find a range of information, ideas, and best practices in digital marketing for marketers all around the world.