Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts. Businesses leverage digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers.
The reality is, people spend twice as much time online as they used to 12 years ago. The way people shop and buy really has changed, meaning offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.
Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means that you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.
Creative and intelligent design is an important factor in a digital marketing strategy. All companies have an identity – how it’s portrayed is one of the most important choices affecting a company’s results. To be successful, it’s important that a company’s visual communication is dynamic and effective. Design projects – websites, social media marketing, email marketing campaigns, printed material and logos, should be cohesive and echo the company or product they represent.
Some Digital Marketing options:
Search Engine Optimization
Simply put, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing the content, technical set-up, and reach of your website so that your pages appear at the top of a search engine result for a specific set of keyword terms. Ultimately, the goal is to attract visitors to your website when they search for products, services, or information related to your business.
SEO can almost be viewed as a set of best practices for good digital marketing. It enforces the need for a well-constructed and easy-to-use website, valuable and engaging content, and the credibility for other websites and individuals to recommend you by linking to your site or mentioning it in social media posts.
Paid Search
Paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, typically refers to the “sponsored result” on the top or side of a search engine results page (SERP). You only pay when your ad is clicked. You can tailor your PPC ads to appear when specific search terms are entered, creating ads that are targeted to a particular audience.
PPC ads are flexible, visible, and most importantly, effective for many different types of organizations. They are also contextual advertisements—ads that appear when a person is searching for a particular keyword or term.
Email Marketing
Email has been around for more than two decades, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. It’s still the quickest and most direct way to reach customers with critical information. The reason is simple: Consumers are very attached to their emails. Just ask yourself how many times you have checked your email in the past hour!
But great marketers know that not just any email will do. Successful email campaigns must be engaging, relevant, informative, and entertaining.
Social Media Marketing
People aren’t just watching cat videos and posting selfies on social media these days. Many rely on social networks to discover, research, and educate themselves about a brand before engaging with that organization. For marketers, it’s not enough to just post on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You must also weave social elements into every aspect of your marketing and create more peer-to-peer sharing opportunities, like video. The more your audience wants to engage with your content, the more likely it is that they will want to share it. This ultimately leads to them becoming a customer. And as an added bonus, they will hopefully influence their friends to become customers, too.
How Long Will It Take to See Results?
With digital marketing, it can often feel like you’re able to see results much faster than you might with offline marketing due to the fact it’s easier to measure ROI. However, it ultimately depends entirely on the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.
If you spend time identifying the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you’re likely to see strong results within the first six months.
If paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, then the results come even quicker — but we recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach using content, SEO, and social media for long-term, sustainable success.
Starting with a strong, organic foundation will allow your digital marketing efforts to grow.
