What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a word that is bounded around quite often in our industry. It’s a term that as marketers we really understand but, more often than not other businesses or potential businesses that we could help aren’t too sure what that means.
I’m going to help answer that question today and give you some tips that you can use to help market your product or service.
Let’s get to it!
What does Digital Marketing mean?
Digital marketing encompasses everything that is not traditional marketing.
What’s the difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing? When we talk about traditional marketing we talk about magazines, print, newspapers, flyers and posters. Digital Marketing is EVERYTHING else, from social media to content to SEO to Email, basically anything that happens online.
Will digital marketing ever replace traditional marketing? In the world we live in today, there is space for both! Traditional marketing encompasses classic methods of marketing that is tangible and until we go completely digital, there is still a place for it and I believe there will be for a long time!
What does digital marketing include?
When we talk about digital marketing, we talk about anything that is within the digital sphere in the digital space. That can encompass these 8 different things which I will run through.
SEO - ‘Search Engine Optimization’, hacking where you rank in the search results which can be based on the amount of content you produce, the keywords that you are ranking for among other different factors. This also will include your activity on Google My Business.
Content Marketing - this is so valuable for a business, content marketing is about writing content around exactly what your business does. You will see this method often from a lot of service-based platforms, they’ll often create a lot of content. A great example of this is Sprout Social which is a scheduling tool that we use at Firebelly, they create amazing content around producing content for social media. They do this because they know their audience is going to be interested in those topics and if they can help teach them about those topics and then serve them their service at the end, then people are likely to have more of an intention to buy. Content marketing is really valuable to be seen as a thought leader!
Social Media Marketing - this includes anything that comes under the umbrella of social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, you name it. These social media platforms are all where you would do social media marketing. Remember you don’t have to be on all of them! Read this article to find out more.
PPC - ‘Pay Per Click’ campaigns on Google that impact your ranking and positioning in the search results where you’ll appear in those advertising spots at the top. This is really important if website visits are a way that you drive your business.
Marketing Automation - if you have any regular touchpoints with your business or your customers. Let’s say, for instance, you are a tyre company and you’ve just replaced my tyres, now you will know that in 18 months time, the tread on those tyres is going to be wearing thin and I’ll need a replacement. You could automate emails to send as a touchpoint to say ‘hey we know your tyres might be running thin’ and prompt your customers to return back.
Email Marketing - which is not dead by any means! It’s so valuable, and having a really good subscriber list or email list is really useful to have when you are looking at advertising on social networks or PPC because you can use those audiences to create a lookalike audience. Which is a very powerful method!
Online PR - anything that includes, press releases on online publications, magazines, inclusion in any major online journalism websites.
Sponsored content - advertising on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all social platforms.
Those are all of the things that come under the umbrella of digital marketing and can help you to build relationships with your target audience and create brand awareness online!
Why is digital marketing important?
Now if you are looking at doing any of those things, as a small business obviously doing all of them is not going to be possible because of time and budget.
Think about what would best serve your customer, and what would give you the best ROI (return on investment). Your time as a business owner is extremely valuable so use it wisely.
Equally, much larger organisations will be doing lots of these things all at the same time, a lot of the businesses we manage have all of these things going on a once, and they all work well with each other. We’re able to track the performance of these using UTM parameters which is special links to then show the ROI for each of these. We can toggle them on and off depending on what’s really working and what’s not.
I hope you’ve found this useful!
I hope that helps to explain what might come under the term digital marketing, I know it can often be bounded around, and as marketers, we understand what it means but you guys may not.
If you’ve got any questions about these specific things then please do drop me a message, I’m here to help!
Remember, you don’t need to be on every single platform or do everything! Focus on what will get you the best return of investment and value your time!
BIG love,
Mary-Anne. x
p.s if you would like to check out more Digital Marketing tips and tricks that I’ve been sharing on TikTok, you can view ALL of my videos here.
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