What Is Digital Marketing?
Table of Contents
Digital marketing is all marketing efforts that occur online. A digital marketing agency in London would use various different channels and platforms such as Google Ads, social media, email marketing and even websites to deliver a message to the right person, in the right place, at the right time.
As of April 2022, there are “more than five billion internet users worldwide, which is 63.1 percent of the global population.” That is why it’s so imperative to market your business’s product or services online. You’re simply missing out if you’re not engaging with your online audiences.
Digital marketing can be very beneficial for building brand awareness, generating sales and building a strong community around your business.
Who?
It’s really important to know who your target market is, you need to understand who it is you’re trying to reach so that you can deliver the best and most relevant message to that person. You don’t need to spend loads of money on customer research, you just need to build out customer personas. These are essentially fictional, general descriptions of your key customer groups. They should be categorised into at least 3 or 4 groups. Each persona from each group will have an identity and they will be your ideal customer. You should rank these from highest priority to lowest so you can see which audience to target first.
What Is Your Brand About? What Values Do You Hold?
Why should your prospects choose you over your competitors and what makes your brand unique? Your brand should have its own personality, this should shine through it’s brand identity. I.e the visual elements like typeface, logos, colours etc that distinguish you from the competition.
It’s also important to consider what your brand stands for, what values to do you hold, and what tone of voice should you adopt. Your brand is everything from the visuals you post on your website and social platforms from the types of messaging you use in your email campaigns. Finally, all branding should relate to the kind of problem your company solves.
Know & Understand Your Competiton
Why is this important? Well, you need to know what you’re up against. You can learn all the lessons from your competitor’s mistakes and also discover what makes your offering unique to everything else in the marketplace.
Measure, Test, Improve
Having a great strategy for how you’re going to drive traffic, sales and brand awareness is just the beginning of the process. It’s imperative you track your success by measuring the results of your campaigns. Using KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is a great way to ensure that you’re on the path to success. When you post or upload, it’s important to track the views, click-through rate, engagement, leads etc.
Before you even plan the creatives or copy of a campaign you need to know and understand which key metrics are relevant to your business and campaign because every platform is different. For Facebook Ads, you might reflect more upon your CPA (Cost Per Action) and ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) much more than you would for the number of views. After looking at these metrics month on month you will start to see a baseline for performance and whether or not it is improving over time.
Consider Your Customers Journey
Your customer’s journey (if successful) may look a little like this as your audience discovers your product or service and starts to buy into the idea of it. Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy.
In the awareness phase, you want to create blogs, post organically, and discover your keywords. Next, you should focus on your website landing page. You’ll also want to build an email list, create interest-based targeted campaigns and invest in PPC advertising on social platforms. And the last 2 stages of the journey are all about keeping your customers happy post-sale so that they purchase again in the future. You could use satisfaction surveys or email them discount codes, create a loyalty programme, and focus on having great after-sales customer experience.
Paid Search Ads
Organic SEO can help you rank higher in Google but there are also cheat codes to push your ranking right to the top of search engines. They are paid search ads with keywords relevant to your product or service. You will often pay when someone clicks on your advert and that’s why it’s called Pay Per Click (PPC).
Here are some of the reasons marketers love this kind of marketing. Firstly, the cost per click can start at as little as five cents. Facebook ads often have a click-through rate that is up to nine times higher than banner ads on other sites. You can easily set up a campaign in a couple of clicks.
Now That We’ve Covered The Who, What, and How, Let’s Discuss Why
Digital marketing will give you an edge over the competition. In this fast-paced world, so many companies are using the internet to connect with a much larger audience than would be possible if only marketing offline. It’s easier to realise the market sentiment, by carrying out surveys and market research to better understand your audience. You can instantly see how well your campaigns are performing in real-time using key performance indicators and online engagement metrics.
It’s also much easier to segment and target specific audience groups. Then, with the use of key metrics, you can understand which targeting resonates best with your campaigns so that you can switch off underperforming campaigns and invest more in winning campaigns to scale up and improve your ROI (Return on investment).
