Business leaders are always looking for new ways to grow their companies and reach new levels of success. Luckily, there are almost unlimited opportunities to promote your brand online through different digital marketing channels.
Digital marketing is more versatile, cost-effective, and immediately impactful than traditional marketing channels like print and radio. It’s a digital world now, and your marketing efforts should reflect that.
The best part about digital marketing is that anyone can run these campaigns successfully with the right tools and tricks — even if you’re entirely new to it. Learn how to leverage digital marketing in this guide.
What exactly is digital marketing?
Digital marketing uses online channels like social media, search engine ads, and promotional emails to promote your business. Any marketing you do online falls under the its umbrella.
You probably see tons of digital marketing campaigns daily without even realizing it. Each promotional email you receive or display ad you see when you visit a website is part of a digital marketing campaign.
Why digital marketing matters
Digital marketing offers some unique benefits over traditional marketing channels. Here are a few of the ways digital marketing can help your business:
Ability to reach large demographics
In the United States alone, more than 300 million people have smartphones — even those who don’t likely still access the internet on other devices. Marketing through digital channels helps you reach large, diverse demographics.
You’re not restricted to people in your local area or even those in your time zone. All an audience member needs to potentially see your fsecampaigns is an internet-connected device.
You can cast a wide net with digital marketing if that works best for your business. Alternatively, you can be more specific and reach smaller audiences who share specific qualities you’re targeting. Either way, digital marketing offers nearly infinite possibilities when selecting the audience for your campaign.
Cost efficiency
Getting the most out of your marketing budget is crucial to driving your brand to new heights. You need marketing campaigns that give you the most bang for your buck, and that’s exactly what digital marketing offers.
Compared to traditional marketing channels, digital marketing campaigns generally have relatively low startup costs. For example, to start organic social media marketing, you just need to create and post content — no outrageous ad spend required.
You can also control precisely how much you want to spend on digital campaigns like emails, paid search ads, and paid social ads. Once you hit your established budget, the campaign platforms automatically stop spending more.
Measurable results
Your campaign results are the best way to understand what’s working and what you can improve. The more data you have about your campaigns, the better you can make them going forward.
Online marketing offers a unique advantage because it makes it very easy to measure your results. At any given moment, you can see exactly how audiences are engaging with your campaign online. Whether you’re looking at open rates on email messages or clicks on paid ads, these measurable results are invaluable.
You’ll never have to wonder whether you’re getting a solid investment return from your digital campaigns. The results will speak for themselves. Then, you can use that information to decide how to invest your marketing budget going forward.
Easier personalization for customers
People expect personalization. Over 80% of customers say they prefer when companies provide personalized experiences. With digital marketing, it’s easier than ever to provide that personalization and satisfy customers.
For example, you could create a cart abandonment email campaign for customers who put products in their carts but didn’t complete purchases. These emails can mention each customer’s selected items and be fully customized to each recipient. By integrating your existing customer data with your marketing efforts, you can effortlessly customize your marketing messages and provide the personalization customers want.
Customer engagement at various stages
Traditional marketing is typically geared toward reaching customers only at the earliest purchase stages. These marketing campaigns make customers aware of the brand but don’t go much further.
Digital marketing services help you expand your reach and engage customers at several other stages of the buying process. You can see when customers interact with your brand more and send targeted messages related to their current purchasing stage. With digital marketing, you can even reach out after the customer purchases something to encourage them to provide feedback or buy related products.
These digital campaigns offer more targeting opportunities for better conversions.
Convenient conversions
If a customer sees your marketing message and is interested, you want as few obstacles between them and a purchase as possible. Each additional obstacle reduces the likelihood the customer will actually make a purchase.
Digital marketing makes it easy for interested customers to complete a conversion by clicking a link or button in the message they saw. If they like your promotional email and want to learn more, they just click the call to action button. There are no extra steps involved.
Compare that to a print or TV ad that requires the customer to pick up a separate device to hunt the company down. What do you think a customer is more likely to do: (1) click a link or (2) log into a mobile device to look up a company, find their website, and search for the product or service they’re interested in after seeing an ad?
Conversions are much more convenient and likely with digital campaigns.
Challenges in digital marketing
It’s normal to encounter some challenges when you start using digital marketing. As long as you’re aware of them and know how to adapt, these challenges shouldn’t hold you back.
Some common digital marketing challenges include:
- Adjusting to rapidly changing online trends
- Understanding your target audience
- Creating engaging digital content
- Getting lost in the sea of other campaigns
- Dealing with privacy concerns and regulations
- Combating digital ad blockers
If you hire a digital marketing agency, you may have other growing pains as you adapt to working with another team.
Types of digital marketing
There are so many different types of digital marketing. You’re sure to find some that work for your business. Here are some of the most popular options:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: Online ads that you only pay for when someone clicks on them
- Content marketing: Publishing valuable content online to inform audiences and get them interested in your brand
- Email marketing: Sending promotional emails to customers subscribed to your messages
- Social media marketing: Posting organic content or ads on social media to build customer interest and direct traffic to your website
- Text messaging marketing: Sending promotional texts to customers who provide their phone numbers
- Search engine optimization (SEO): Tailoring your website to perform well in search engine results
- Influencer marketing: Working with online social media personalities to promote your brand
Building your digital marketing strategy
Before you start, make sure you have a solid strategy in place. Your marketing strategy will guide your decision-making and help keep you on track.
Defining digital marketing goals
Your first step is deciding what you want to achieve through digital marketing.
Once you know your goals, you can tailor your campaign to achieve those results. For example, a campaign geared toward generating new leads may look very different from a campaign to increase average order value.
Some possible goals for your campaign include:
- Establishing brand authority
- Improving your ranking in search engine results
- Generating leads
- Boosting engagement
- Increasing web traffic
- Growing conversions and sales
Identifying the target audience
Next, you need to determine the target audience for your campaigns. It’s helpful to identify your broader target audience and possible smaller groups of customers within that audience. While some campaigns will target your whole customer base, others will be more specific.
Digital marketing allows detailed audience segmentation. For example, if you want to contact only female customers over 55 who live in Kentucky, you can do that with digital marketing campaigns. The target audience for a single campaign might be smaller than your general marketing audience.
Establishing a budget for each digital channel
The next step is deciding how much money you can dedicate to campaigns on different digital channels.
To start, you might want to focus on only one campaign, and that’s fine. If you’re using multiple digital channels, you need to find the best way to split your budget between them. Set your budget beforehand so you don’t run into money issues while developing your campaigns.
Using analytics for strategy improvement
Digital marketing campaigns can always get better. The secret to improving your marketing strategy is always tracking and analyzing your campaign results.
Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) for your campaigns, such as clicks, open rates, and conversion rates. Track your audience engagement to see who responds best to your marketing messages. Using this information, adjust your strategy to create more impactful campaigns.
Roles in digital marketing
As you expand your efforts, you’ll need to assign roles so no critical tasks fall through the cracks. Here are some common roles in digital marketing that you may need to fill:
SEO manager
The SEO manager is responsible for ensuring your website ranks highly in search engine results. Ranking higher leads to more eyes on your website and more potential conversions.
This person typically oversees web content production, manages keyword research, and develops SEO strategies for your brand. If search is an essential digital marketing channel for your brand, an SEO manager is a must-have.
Main KPI: Organic traffic growth
Content marketing specialist
Content marketing specialists are directly involved in creating quality content for your website and other brand pages. They conceptualize and write content like blog articles, ebooks, and social media posts. The specialist may also oversee external writers and editors if you use freelance services.
You know your content marketing specialist is succeeding if traffic to your blog increases and people spend more time on your website.
Main KPIs: Time on page, overall blog traffic
Social media manager
A social media manager oversees all marketing efforts on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Whether you use organic or paid social media marketing, the manager’s job is to make sure all your social content performs well.
They may generate post ideas, engage with your audience, and monitor social media analytics. The social media manager’s main goal is to boost engagement on your brand pages and, hopefully, push customers toward conversion.
Main KPIs: Follows, impressions, shares
Marketing automation coordinator
If you use marketing tools like email automation software, you may need a marketing automation coordinator. This person sets up automated marketing campaigns, shows other team members how to use the automation software, and analyzes campaign results.
Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate
Choosing the right digital marketing platform
You can set up and run many digital campaigns yourself, but it’s much easier with a digital marketing platform. Here’s how to find the best fit for your business.
Weigh factors such as:
- Price
- User-friendliness
- Compatibility with your existing software
- Scalability
- Available features
- Customer support
- Reliability
One digital marketing platform to consider is Constant Contact. Constant Contact is a suite of marketing software that helps with social media, SMS, and email marketing.
With Constant Contact’s tools, you can easily connect with your audience and produce high-quality marketing content. Get started for free today.
Growing your business with digital marketing campaigns
Digital marketing is essential in today’s online landscape. Your digital marketing campaigns will help you connect with customers, boost engagement, and drive conversions. And the good news is that anyone can get started immediately and see results.
Find a digital marketing channel that works for your business and begin developing your campaign. Don’t forget to use digital marketing tools to optimize your efforts. If you have any questions, rely on guides like How to Avoid Emails Going to Spam and Targeted Email Marketing for help.
And for agencies, download the guide
