I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about digital marketing, especially if you are starting a new online business. But the real question is, just what is digital marketing? Or better yet, can digital marketing help my business grow? Well, thankfully, you’ve come to the right place. This article will give you a complete crash course on what digital marketing is and how to use it to your advantage. So please sit back, and let’s take this journey together.
In simple terms, digital marketing uses the internet or internet-capable devices such as smartphones to reach customers. There’s a lot more that goes into that statement, but that’s technically the layman’s definition of digital marketing.
In essence, digital marketing caters to a specific customer base and is relatively interactive. Generally, digital marketing is on the rise because more and more people are spending endless amounts of hours online. Today, almost all gadgets can connect to the internet. And most customers use their smartphones or laptops to communicate.
That makes it the perfect way to leverage new customers from all over the world. Digital marketing includes the use of email ads, search engine result ads, and social media campaigns. All these different approaches are wrapped into one to form the digital marketing industry. With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at the various digital marketing channels.
At the heart of digital marketing is a website. This tool alone is enough to cater to most of the online marketing campaigns. More importantly, a website represents the product, service, and brand of your business. It’s technically the first point of interaction between your business and the customers.
Pay-Per-Click advertising makes it easy for marketers to reach potential clients through paid ads. As the marketer, you can set up your paid campaigns on Twitter, Google, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. PPC ads are shown to users looking for related products or services.
Content marketing uses content to reach potential clients. Fresh and valuable content is uploaded on a website then promoted through emails and social media to reach a wider audience. Content marketing tools include; blogs, eBooks, podcasts, and online courses.
Email marketing helps you get in touch with people who might be interested in your brand. Often marketers will use all other channels for digital marketing to add leads to their email lists. Afterward, they use email marketing to create a reliable customer acquisition funnel that can turn the leads into customers.
Social media marketing helps create brand awareness and establish trust between the brand and potential clients. On top of that, you can use it to get direct sales and leads to your business.
With affiliate marketing, influencers promote products at a commission every time they introduce a lead to make a sale. Affiliate marketing is one of the old forms of marketing that the internet has breathed new life into.
YouTube is currently the most popular video marketing platform. Many users turn to YouTube before making their buying decision just to read a review or learn something about the products or services they need. Many companies find great success with video marketing, especially by integrating it with content marketing and SEO.