Web 2.0 expansion and digital media has changed customer expectations and behaviors. The scope of marketing has expanded, placing digital marketing at the heart of companies’ business strategies.
To clear up any misunderstandings, here’s everything you need to know about digital marketing.
What is digital marketing?
Also known as digital marketing or e-marketing. It refers to all actions taken to promote products or services using digital communication channels.
Simply put, digital marketing is any action that takes place online using a cell phone, computer or the Internet.
How does digital marketing differ from traditional marketing?
As you know, getting in touch with your prospects is the key to sustaining your business. And therein lies the difference between the two.
A traditional marketing campaign, for example, may use billboards, printed materials and direct mail. Whereas a digital marketing campaign can use social media, blog posts, digital advertising and e-mail to promote a company, its services and products, and its offers.
In recent years, the boundary between “traditional marketing” and “digital marketing” has begun to blur, as even traditional channels such as billboards, TV ads and direct mail have developed a digital variant.
Why digital marketing?
Quite simply, because digital marketing offers a lot of benefits for all types of business, which can be summed up in 5 points:
Fast: your company’s commercial message and communication are delivered instantly.
Interactive : Thanks to targeting, services become more personalized, and digital presence creates a climate of trust and proximity. The result: high satisfaction and loyalty rates.
Less expensive : It allows you to save on your marketing budget, so you can consume more efficiently. For example, buying an e-commerce site costs less than setting up a physical store.
Targeted: It allows you to reach new prospects within a well-targeted audience, thus gaining a significant competitive advantage.
Measurable: Your company’s performance is much more accurate than before, thanks to the analysis of key performance indicators (also known by the acronym KPI) that you can collect on your digital channels.
What are the different facets of digital marketing?
What’s becoming clear these days is that digital marketing is a vast field with many specialized sub-domains. Each of these sub-domains targets a specific area of digital marketing. For clarification, we can list 6 e-marketing specializations:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
A powerful traffic vector that relies on regular article writing to improve your position in search engine results (Google, Bing, Yahoo, …). This article from Hubspot is an excellent guide.
Paid search (SEA):
This involves buying keywords for which your links will be displayed at the top of search engine results pages.
Google Ads are the best-known ads in this field, with the “Ad” sign preceding the link. These are billed by the number of clicks (CPC).
Content marketing :
Focuses on creating content that is relevant and useful to users. This content takes the form of infographics, blog posts, videos, podcasts, e-books and any other content published on digital media.
Social media marketing (SMO):
Social media marketing is a great way to build brand awareness and trust while interacting directly with your target audience on your digital channels.
It involves creating and publishing small pieces of content consistently across social media platforms.
E-mail marketing:
A key element of digital marketing, this involves sending newsletters and promotional emails to existing and potential customers.
Based on purchasing history and behavior, emailing enables you to segment and personalize your campaigns.
Affiliate marketing:
Another type of advertising is a contract between a service provider and partner sites affiliated to its program. This means that a partner site hosts affiliate content (banners, links, product catalogs, etc.) that redirects visitors to the provider’s site. This marketing method increases web traffic acquisition.
How do you create a killer digital marketing strategy?
Keep in mind that digital marketing, like any other form of marketing for that matter, needs to follow a coordinated, well-crafted, multi-channel strategy to hope to achieve the desired results.
To establish this strategy, follow the steps below:
A – Define your objectives :
First of all, you need to know what you want your digital marketing campaign to achieve. Generate more leads? Increase sales of a specific product? Improve quality and increase traffic to your site?
Whatever goals you choose, make them SMART
B – Identify your target and the channels to use :
Knowing your target is the secret of a successful strategy, as long as it has an impact on the choice of channels.
In B2B, e-marketing focuses on generating leads and then handing over to the sales team. In B2C, on the other hand, the digital marketing strategy aims to attract Internet users to your website and transform them directly into customers (or prospects) without going through a sales representative.
C – Drawing up a budget :
You can invest different amounts depending on the size of your company, your strategy and the value of the product or service you offer.
For example, the budget to be defined for a paid digital marketing strategy (SEA, SMA, Display network) will not be the same as that defined for a content marketing or natural referencing strategy (SEO, SMO).
D – Create engaging content :
To increase brand awareness and improve lead generation, it’s imperative to create interesting content.
These can be social network posts, blog articles, digital advertising, sponsored content, e-mail marketing newsletters, etc.
E – Monitor your digital marketing campaigns:
A proactive approach to monitoring your digital marketing campaigns can help you identify and resolve problems quickly, so you can improve the results of future campaigns.
F – Implement digital marketing campaign improvements :
Close monitoring and continuous improvement will not only improve your strategy, but help your company stay ahead of the competition, which means more leads, sales and market share.
G – Measure the results :
Where you go with digital marketing depends entirely on the data you gather on your current situation. Once your strategy is in place, you need to measure its results.
Digital marketing tools such as Google Analytics and your Meta Pixel make it easy to track the number of visitors to your website, the number of conversions, the number of clicks on your ads and much more.
You can then adjust your strategy according to this information.
To help you build a successful digital strategy, we’ve put online a comprehensive guide that you can follow to make your strategy a success.
Conclusion
Digital marketing remains one of the best ways to reach new customers and achieve your goals. Whether you want to increase your sales, your return on investment, your brand awareness or your customer loyalty, digital marketing is the solution for you!
Digital marketing no longer has any barriers. It’s a constantly evolving field, with new Internet marketing trends such as artificial intelligence (AI) and video marketing developing at a rapid pace. Even more established areas such as SEO continue to evolve year on year, and digital marketers must never stop learning.
Would you like help setting up your digital marketing strategy? Don’t hesitate to contact us today !.
