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What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the use of digital channels or technologies to sell or promote a product or service. Content marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and SEO all fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. Put more simply: if you’re being nudged to buy something when you’re online, then that’s digital marketing at work.
Why Is Digital Marketing Important?
Digital marketing helps brands reach their target audience and promote their product or service. While that’s the goal of a traditional marketing campaign too, digital marketing allows brands to target a more specific or niche audience. Connecting with customers digitally helps build a wider audience that trusts your brand. It’s particularly useful for small businesses, which can easily leverage digital marketing tactics without the help of a marketing department or agency.
How Do Businesses Use Digital Marketing?
To understand how businesses use digital marketing, let’s use the example of Ryan—a fictitious mid-level salesman at a paper company. As a side hustle, he wants to open up a small business. He creates an app named “Woof!” which allows a person or company to simultaneously send an identical message across different mediums—text, email, Facebook, and so on.
Since Ryan has a small marketing budget, he will rely on systems and processes that have maximum reach with minimal investment. He will channel his resources towards awareness building. Value-filled content will be sufficient to propel his business. He might not have an in-house marketing department, so he will leverage social media through digital marketing agencies or freelancers who specialize in these areas. He might take on the social media marketing aspect himself.
As his small business expands, he might also outsource to a digital marketing company that will handle content marketing and all the other pillars. Till then, he upskills with these free online marketing classes and learns how to become a digital marketing manager on his own.
To market his app, he can do the following:
- Content marketing. Ryan can create written content—such as blogs and guides—about his product. He could also launch a YouTube channel featuring product demos. These kinds of content allow people to better understand the value of his product.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Ryan has all this content now, but it’s lost in the abyss of online searches. He looks at what his target customers are looking up online when searching for communication tools like his. So he uses these search terms as keywords to optimize his website, in the hopes of his content ranking higher.
- Email marketing. Ryan then identifies a sizable list of prospective customers interested in buying his product. He creates an email list so that he can send information and resources related to his product.
- Advertisements. Ryan has been relying on creating and repurposing content to build his pool of customers. He now wants to dip his toes in advertising, so he pays for ads to drive traffic to his website. This will require a budget to buy ad space for text, video, and image ads on websites or social media.
- Social media marketing. Ryan has researched his audience and identified that they hang out on only one social channel, Instagram. So he creates an Instagram business profile to talk about his product without coming across as too “sales-y,” which helps him connect with his audience more intimately.
- Influencer marketing. Ryan may use his influencer friends like Kelly, Pam, and Andy to promote his brand. Pam is a business communications consultant and is assisting her audience with using innovative communication tools. She recommends Ryan’s product to her followers, who flock to his website to buy the product using Pam’s referral code. Pam gets a commission.
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