Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the use of the Internet, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other channels to reach consumers. Some marketing experts consider digital marketing to be an entirely new endeavor that requires a new way of approaching customers and new ways of understanding how customers behave compared to traditional marketing.

Understanding Digital Marketing

Digital marketing targets a specific segment of the customer base and is interactive. Digital marketing is on the rise and includes search result ads, email ads, and promoted tweets – anything that incorporates marketing with customer feedback or a two-way interaction between the company and customer.

In the parlance of digital marketing, advertisers are commonly referred to as sources, while members of the targeted ads are commonly called receivers. Sources frequently target highly specific, well-defined receivers.

Digital Marketing Channels

• Website Marketing

A website is the centerpiece of all digital marketing activities. Alone, it is a very powerful channel, but it’s also the medium needed to execute a variety of online marketing campaigns. A website should represent a brand, product, and service in a clear and memorable way. It should be fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to use.

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising enables marketers to reach Internet users on a number of digital platforms through paid ads. Marketers can set up PPC campaigns on Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, or Facebook and show their ads to people searching for terms related to the products or services. PPC campaigns can segment users based on their demographic characteristics (such as by age or gender), or even target their particular interests or location. The most popular PPC platforms are Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

• Content Marketing

The goal of content marketing is to reach potential customers through the use of content. Content is usually published on a website and then promoted through social media, email marketing, SEO, or even PPC campaigns. The tools of content marketing include blogs, ebooks, online courses, infographics, podcasts, and webinars.

• Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Many people confuse email marketing with spam email messages, but that’s not what email marketing is all about. Email marketing is the medium to get in touch with your potential customers or the people interested in your brand. Many digital marketers use all other digital marketing channels to add leads to their email lists and then, through email marketing, they create customer acquisition funnels to turn those leads into customers.

• Social Media Marketing

The primary goal of a social media marketing campaign is brand awareness and establishing social trust. As you go deeper into social media marketing, you can use it to get leads or even as a direct sales channel.

• Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing, and the Internet has brought new life to this old standby. With affiliate marketing, influencers promote other people’s products and get a commission every time a sale is made or a lead is introduced. Many well-known companies like Amazon have affiliate programs that pay out millions of dollars per month to websites that sell their products.

• Video Marketing

YouTube has become the second most popular search engine and a lot of users are turning to YouTube before they make a buying decision, to learn something, read a review, or just to relax. There are several video marketing platforms, including Facebook Videos, Instagram, or even TikTok to use to run a video marketing campaign. Companies find the most success with video by integrating it with SEO, content marketing, and broader social media marketing campaigns.

• SMS Messaging

Companies and nonprofit organizations also use SMS or text messages to send information about their latest promotions or giving opportunities to willing customers. Political candidates running for office also use SMS message campaigns to spread positive information about their own platforms. As technology has advanced, many text-to-give campaigns also allow customers to directly pay or give via a simple text message.

Digital marketing challenges

1. Not getting lost in the volume

The digital world is booming, and almost every business out there has taken its products/services online to reach out to the masses. According to a report by Experian, most marketers are now facing the challenge of making their brand stand out in the volumes available on the internet. This eventually leads to the difficulty of running a brand awareness campaign or acquiring new customers.

What can you do?

While it is a fact that at least some of your products/services might be similar to what another business has to offer, there is a minor aspect that is unique to you. Discover the USP of your product/service and find ways to convey the same. Conduct surveys on your existing customers and your target audience to better understand what they are looking for and identify which needs your brand can fulfill.

2. Driving relevant traffic to the website

Continuing on the point above, marketers today are consistently facing a challenge in spreading brand awareness in the right target market. This also makes it harder for them to drive the ideal traffic to their business websites. Therefore, understanding which channel to tap into and driving the relevant audience to your website to turn them into customers is becoming an ongoing challenge for marketers.

What can you do?

Conduct an audit of your online activity. Identify what tactics you are opting to reach out to your audience. Consider the content you’re producing, the channels you’re presenting it on, your social presence, and the paid/unpaid campaigns you are running. Use robust analytics to know which of them work the best for you and optimize your efforts simultaneously. But it is essential to measure your analytics at modest intervals of time to give each of your efforts enough span to work over.

3. Targeting the right audience effectively

The first and foremost thing that an effective marketer would do is identify their target audience in the market. With the number of internet users increasing by the day and their needs changing almost every second, targeting the right audience has become one of the biggest challenges for marketers.

Keeping in mind what your business has to offer and what kind of problems it would solve when put to use, create your value proposition. This will help you identify who or what demographics would resonate with it the most when targeted.

What can you do?

Look at the general demographics of the market that you want to reach out to. Identify their needs and create customer personas taking into consideration their online behavior and possible future needs. In this case, companies like Wigzo equip you with machine learning and predictive analytics tools to enable better persona creation.

4. Lead generation using social media

When it comes to the various social channels, most businesses and marketers don’t know how to remain consistent. Most of them feel that it is all about the paid campaigns they are supposed to run for brand awareness and lead generation. Although, both of them is a constant challenge with the ever-increasing market competition.

Even though considerable marketing budgets are set aside by businesses, most marketers cannot run their engagement into revenue. But you mustn’t just build your social following – you need to get conversions that add up to the overall business goal.

What can you do?

The most effective way to leverage social media is to integrate your marketing and sales efforts. Sharing behavioral data and interaction levels with leads on social media can help the sales team define a custom, personalized customer journey for them – which they are more likely to convert on.

5. Optimizing marketing budgets and ROI

With the increase of digital channels and advanced analytics tools, marketers are now expected to optimize the marketing budgets and the ROI to best suit the business’s needs. He is expected to measure each effort and its value to achieve the end goal – the number of leads generated or the revenue raised.

What can you do?

Tap into the power of machine learning and robust analytics regularly. An effective marketer can gauge the value of every single lead generated from a marketing effort. Understand the impact of each digital campaign on lead generation, test different variants and approaches of reaching out to your target audience to optimize your campaigns for much better results.

While you measure the digital inbound results, ensure that you consider the outbound efforts being made by your business and what kind of results it is yielding.

6. Keeping up with the changing trends

The digital market and marketing techniques have changed drastically over the last few years. And it continues to change even today to cater to the modern-day addressable market needs. Hence, marketers need to stay up-to-date with all these changes.

Be it the launch of a new social media platform or a technology that would make a marketing effort more robust, marketers need to remain on top of things to ensure their business does not lose out on possible conversions.

What can you do?

Consistently engage with your target audience on platforms that they are most active on. The most effective way of doing so is to leverage social listening using tools like Hootsuite. They help you understand what people are saying about you and your product/service, what they expect – allowing you to become a part of their conversation.

7. A Check on Increased Security Risks

We have come across cases wherein online security has been compromised.  The news and media keep it afresh. Since more information is shared online, hackers get more incentives to find ways to get through security. Shopping, bill payment, application submission, order copies, certificates, and other essential documents, and so much more are stored online for easy access – making these spaces a treasure trove for hackers and thieves. Venturing into digital marketing sure comes with its cost of security getting compromised as most of the work remains online. Security comes as a challenge.

What can you do?

You may already have a good firewall, HTTPS encryption, and maybe a good antivirus program. But that’s not enough. You will need more. Sit out and work with an authentic security team and identify your website’s weak spots and apps to create measures to reduce risk.

8. Lesser Focus on Keywords

Keywords were the bread and butter of SEO sometime in the immediate past. You just needed to find the right keywords and use them right, and your site could shoot up to the top in the search results—helping you with more exposure and traffic.

Now Google has changed algorithms making the keywords less critical. However, they are still to be used but are not the focus. Instead, it has become a topical approach rather than seeking and finding one, meaning that Google first gets an overall scope of your website.

What can you do?

First, you need to use search phrases instead of keywords and build content around topics rather than coming up with content for each keyword you want to target. Make your website a resource for the phase or question you need to target and see the changes.