What is Digital Marketing?
Experts in the field of marketing disagree when digital marketing first began. However, the phrase initially originated in the 1990s, when online advertising, search, and technology were only being started. As the pioneers investigated the new online world, there were many firsts, such as the first search engine, Archie (short for “archive”), which was launched in 1990.
The first clickable web ad was sold to a law firm by Global Network Navigator (GNN) in 1993; the first online sales transaction occurred in 1994 when Sting’s friends purchased his CD; the first internet marketing agency designed websites and interactive media (on CD-ROMs) for early adopters and built “electronic malls” for clients throughout the 1990s, and Labatt Breweries launched the first mobile marketing campaign in North America in 2002.
Many professionals may be thinking, “What is digital marketing in 2018?” after seeing how far it has progressed from its humble beginnings. Experts today define it in a variety of ways. These 15 characteristics, on the other hand, are critical components of digital marketing today.
Did you know there are over 1 billion websites on the World Wide Web? Almost 200 million of those are active sites. If you’re in business, you need a unique website that offers something valuable to your users. Are you ready to start the web design process?
Digital marketing, on the other hand, is the promotion of items or brands using one or more digital channels, such as search engines, websites, social media, and email. A good digital marketing campaign necessitates a lot of factors to be in place. The number of important variables is practically limitless.
15 Elements Of Digital marketing Necessary Today
1. Digital Marketing Strategy
Your digital marketing campaign’s ultimate purpose is most likely to increase income. But it’s the “how” that needs to be pinpointed with pinpoint accuracy. As a result, creating goals is the first step in developing an effective digital marketing plan. Your marketing objectives should, ideally, be in line with your business objectives.
Are you trying to raise brand awareness, shorten the sales cycle, or improve customer satisfaction, for example? Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), of which there are literally hundreds, is a terrific approach to measuring your impact.
Website views, social media engagement, and sales qualified leads are a few tried-and-true examples. When KPIs are based on a combination of your historical marketing success and the goals of your current efforts, they can help you design your campaigns and methods with greater understanding.
2. Value-based Messaging
What is the most important message your company or brand should provide to leads, prospects, and customers? This will be the lifeblood of your digital marketing campaign.
Before you start creating content, you should have a firm grasp of your company’s value proposition, since this will serve as the cornerstone for your digital marketing strategy.
Potential consumers’ needs should be addressed in your digital marketing content, which should also introduce them to the value of your product or service.
In order to be heard in our crowded environment, your message must have a consistent voice and tone. This will help you succeed by increasing your following, motivating consumer loyalty, and developing customer relationships.
3. Buyer Personas
You must first establish your buyer personas before you can begin creating digital marketing campaigns. These will intelligently lead your content strategy, from the type of material you develop to what you say and how you distribute it.
Because each audience is unique, you must understand what keeps them awake at night, what they are held accountable for, what motivates them, and what media they consume. The more information you have, the more narrowly you may target your campaigns and achieve greater outcomes.
4. Content Marketing
High-quality material, such as blog articles, case studies, ebooks, infographics, and more, will be at the heart of your digital marketing strategy. Consider your content to be the catalyst for the magic to happen. Any digital success depends on getting the right material to the right location at the right time.
Consumers today have the ability to seek out high-quality digital materials and experiences that help them make better, more informed decisions. There’s no reason for consumers to visit a company’s website, social media sites, or read its emails unless it produces a wide variety of intriguing unique material.
Remember this axiom when developing content: Today’s buyers want organizations to assist them in the buying process by offering the knowledge they need to make an informed decision.
5. Marketing Automation
Without marketing automation, it is hard to perform successful digital marketing in 2018. You may use these tools to manage a large amount of content, run several campaigns, construct landing pages, design email campaigns, track website visitors, engage with sales teams, and much more.
Marketers can personalize their campaigns depending on diverse target audiences, sales cycles, promotions, and strategic planning updates, among other things, with marketing automation tools.
6. Websites
Your website is an important part of your overall digital marketing strategy. It will increase the effectiveness of your marketing if it is created for maximum impact.
Your website must be flexible to all devices, publish relevant and up-to-date information, clearly convey your company’s values, feature product-specific landing pages for PPC campaigns, and interact with customer relationship management and marketing automation technologies in today’s online environment.
7. Online Ads
Customers aren’t going to swarm to your website the moment your product is introduced. Paid advertisements, such as Google Adwords and display ads, are a great approach to obtain awareness in addition to organic search.
Reaching targeted consumers through the correct channels, paying only when an interested individual click on an ad, controlling your spending budget, and obtaining instant results are all reasons to invest in paid ads.
8. Social Media Strategy
In your marketing strategy, social media plays a crucial part. Because an increasing number of businesspeople utilize social media in their buying decision process, research suggests that it not only works for B2C marketing, but also for B2B.
You must first evaluate which platforms would perform best for your company in order to improve your social media strategy. With social media, there is no such thing as a “one-size-fits-all” solution.
9. Email Marketing
Email marketing reigns supreme today since it is one of the most efficient ways to communicate with specific consumers. Email marketing is the most effective approach to succeed, whether your goal is to create leads, convert prospects, develop relationships with consumers, or achieve any other goal.
A solid digital marketing strategy necessitates a strong email strategy that accomplishes several key objectives: driving traffic to your website, educating and informing prospective buyers with new content, ensuring your brand remains top-of-mind, establishing your credibility, and establishing your company as a thought leader.
10. Videos
According to various sources, video has the ability to affect effective digital marketing strategies. Many experts believe that video will eventually overtake text as the most powerful form of content for attracting and converting customers.
You get an effective means to present your company’s values, product features, and brand messaging in ways that customers want and anticipate by including video into your digital marketing approach.
11. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The technique of increasing conversions from existing traffic is known as conversion rate optimization (CRO). Instead of getting a 1% conversion rate, you can improve your conversion rate by 2 or 3 percent by changing specific aspects of your campaigns, such as content, button size, image, and location.
CRO is less expensive than recruiting new visitors, reduces the danger of attracting the wrong types of visitors, and allows you to improve your content marketing ROI.
12. Sales Enablement
The goal of sales enablement is to provide salespeople with a consistent stream of qualifying leads as well as the tools they need to convert them into clients. Unless you solely sell in online storefronts, your whole digital marketing strategy should be focused on generating leads for your sales team and empowering them to sell with the correct automated solutions and content.
13. Search Engine Optimization
The higher you rank in search engine results, the more likely you are to succeed with your digital marketing strategy. To achieve a high ranking, you must examine the types of search phrases that your potential customers might use when looking for what you have to offer.
You may carefully construct content around those terms in your blog posts, how-to manuals, eBooks, infographics, and website once you’ve compiled a list of keyword search terms.
14. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Your clients are the lifeblood of your business. They’re everything you’ve spent time looking for, nurturing, and converting. You must, however, keep them. This implies that you must effectively handle them. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (CRM).
These solutions provide you with a single point of contact for communicating with and better understanding your customers. In an ideal world, your CRM system would allow you to keep a consolidated list of information on your prospects and customers, track all customer discussions throughout your whole team, and better analyze the success of your sales efforts.
15. Analytics
Finally, running analytics on your outcomes and changing your method to better your revenue objectives and KPIs is an important part of successful digital marketing. Indeed, one of the most beneficial aspects of having a digital marketing plan is the ability to continuously monitor and optimize the results.
There are a number of analytics tools available to help you track your marketing progress. You’ll be able to plan and execute your strategy with precision—and maximize your ROI—if you have the appropriate information.
Stop asking yourself, “What is digital marketing?” and start putting money into it. A well-thought-out strategy can help you meet customers where they are online while also maximizing your marketing budget. Check out our new guide, How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy, to discover everything you need to know about creating a successful digital marketing strategy this year.