Digital Marketing

Marketing and Sales
Introduction:
What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing refers to the creation and dissemination of content through digital media channels—websites, landing pages, social media, email, and mobile apps—and the promotion of that content using a variety of strategies across paid, earned, and owned digital channels, including SEO, SEM, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content syndication, social media, email, text, and more.

The Importance of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing strategies help marketers define goals, target audiences, and develop a digital marketing plan that best reaches that audience. These strategies provide direction for a specific marketing campaign or program and a framework for evaluating results.

Today, everything is digital, and digital marketing has been integrated into nearly every aspect of business, fundamentally changing how businesses connect with and deliver value to customers.

So, if your company can’t implement and execute a digital marketing strategy in a global, increasingly online marketplace, you simply won’t be able to compete.

Digital Marketing Strategies

Cross-channel marketing, multi-channel marketing, omnichannel marketing, or whatever term you prefer, is all about engaging with your customer or prospect across every digital channel and device. From their inbox to social media—and across laptops, tablets, and smartphones—today’s consumers can seamlessly transition, fully expecting you to be by their side, delivering a seamless, integrated experience.

To help you create a successful cross-channel marketing strategy, here are in-depth descriptions of the most commonly used digital marketing channels:

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest and most popular forms of digital marketing, used by both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers. With email marketing, you can collect customer data across various touchpoints of the customer journey, segment it to understand your prospects’ preferences, and ultimately obtain permission to add them to your email list(s).

Email content can include information about products and services, news about your company and events, personalized offers, customer success stories, links to case studies, and technical or business briefs. Value is critical to ensuring that emails are opened and read—and not immediately deleted. Personalized content and relevant offers go a long way toward increasing engagement.

Email marketing is part art and part science. Your emails and digital assets need to be engaging and engaging, but there must be a balance between sending too many emails and not enough.

Video Marketing

Video is one of the most powerful digital marketing channels available. People love watching videos. They watch videos for entertainment, research, and share videos. In fact, YouTube reports that over two billion viewers log in monthly. Both B2B buyers and B2C consumers have made purchasing decisions thanks to video.

Video marketing builds brand awareness, drives digital traffic, and increases conversion rates. Embedded videos in blog content have been a cornerstone of both business-to-business and business-to-consumer content marketing strategies for years.

Video sharing is key to increasing consideration for your content. That’s why you’ll want to leverage third-party sites like YouTube and promote videos on your website and social media channels. Encourage others to share your videos.

Keep your videos short and to the point. Attention spans are short, so delivering great content in an engaging way is key.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a great way to reach a specific, targeted audience and connect directly with customers, prospects, and partners. Which social media platform you use depends on who you want to target. Facebook is still the largest social media platform globally. Twitter remains popular with B2B buyers. Instagram and TikTok are incredibly popular with millennial and Gen Z consumers, and LinkedIn is a great place to connect with B2B buyers in the early stages of the buying cycle.

Each social media platform has different types of content, but they all focus on video/images. So, when creating content, always keep in mind how you want to distribute it across social media and then adjust accordingly.

Different platforms will continue to emerge, so marketers must continually adopt digital marketing tactics to maximize each platform’s reach. For example, TikTok didn’t exist before September 2016, and today it has more active users than LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat.

Text Messaging (Short Message Services and Multimedia Messaging)

Aside from email marketing, text messaging is the most direct way to reach customers, but like social media, messages need to be concise to be effective. Marketing teams can leverage Short Message Services (SMS), which are text-only messages, or Multimedia Messaging (MMS), which can include videos and giveaways.

Content Marketing

Content marketing allows you to customize your communication with different prospects and customers when viewing your message. The more personalized your content is, the more likely they are to engage.