While it seems like the digital boom was some time back in the early 2000s, many businesses are still getting introduced to the idea of a digital platform for their commercial transactions. Digital marketing is a key part of digitalizing a business, as it promotes the best interest of the company and its consumers on a global virtual platform. This includes marketing initiatives done digitally. Businesses utilise different digital platforms today like websites and social networking platforms to engage with ongoing and attract new customers.
While conventional marketing exists today in print advertisements, audio or physical marketing, digital marketing occurs electronically and online, meaning it has more breadth and length for coverage. As such, companies engaging in this type of marketing have countless opportunities to market through video, social network and media, websites and email.
Since digital marketing includes a wide number of strategies and options associated with it, there is so much ground to get creative and experimental with within your forecasted marketing budget! This brings about an analytics playing field, whereby you can also use tools like analytics dashboards to monitor the ROI of your targeted marketing campaigns. With such information available, as a business owner, you can do so much more with your marketing compared to conventional print marketing. Your marketing tactics can evolve into A/B testing and targeted prolific marketing which are better suited to target the specific profile of customers you’re after.
With people spending more and more time of their day online, digital marketing empowers companies to utilise this opportunity to engage with customers. This can be done via social email, social media, video marketing, and promotional marketing or through advertisements, just to name a few.
Digital marketers have risen in popularity with the burst of the digital age, giving rise to different sub-specialties of digital marketing occupations. Regardless of their specialisation, digital marketers are commercially aware of how their marketing efforts tie in with the overarching company’s strategy.
Let’s explore this through the example of an eBook company. Company Y has launched an eBook product recently, and its digital marketing team was given the responsibility to increase sales of this product and others within the company’s portfolio.
Digital marketer A is a content marketer who churns out fresh content through a set of blog posts to generate leads for a new product that has been recently created. On the other hand, digital marketer B a social network and media marketer would look at promoting the blog posts via both inorganic and organic posts through the company’s social media profile. Likewise, digital marketer C is an email marketer who would specifically look at generating leads through the use of an email campaign which sends out promotional marketing material to those customers who have previously purchased the eBook. All three types of digital marketers look at increasing the revenue of the company through the sale of the company’s eBooks.
Each digital marketer usually has an accompanying KPI according to their channel of specialisation. An example would be 40% campaign reach for email marketers, meaning that at least 40% of the existing customers are aware of the upcoming promotions.
Today, the realm of digital marketing has expanded far beyond its humble beginnings, with Google being a massive powerhouse in the area. It provides tools such as Google AdSense, Google AdWords and Google Ads that can aide in digital marketing efforts greatly, as well as generate clear analytics that would, in turn help fine-tune the digital marketing efforts.
Depending on the type of digital marketing specialisation you’re interested in developing for yourself or your company, it is always useful to research and understand the current changing trends in the market. After all, the world is our playground.