Digital marketing. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Concept of digital advertising/marketing

The concept of digital advertising/marketing has been around since the 1990s, and recent market trends show its rapid growth. Digital marketing is rather a marketing strategy that involves the use of digital platforms and online communication tools through which a business can sell its goods and services to a wider audience.

Digital marketing provides companies with opportunities to expand business, increase consumer engagement, build brand awareness, achieve brand trust and validation, increase conversions, and expand global and local brand reach.

In this article, we will look at some of the digital marketing issues that will enable you to get a good idea of the digital marketing metrics and technologies available today.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing (or online marketing) is a set of marketing activities carried out via the Internet. This concept empowers business owners to use digital platforms and channels such as social media, search engines, multimedia messaging, websites and email to connect with their customers, both existing and potential.

Now more than ever before, most people spend their time online. Research by Statista shows that as of 2022 there will be approximately 5.3 billion Internet users in the world.

According to Statista, the global digital advertising market in 2022 was 398.762 billion US dollars. This is 23.3% more than in 2021. The largest segment of the market is search advertising, which accounted for 171.641 billion US dollars. In second place is social advertising with $107.421 billion, and in third place is video advertising with $75.399 billion.

Here is the breakdown of the global digital advertising market by segment in 2022:

Digital advertising continues to grow as more people access the Internet and use it to find information and entertainment. The digital advertising market is expected to continue to grow in the coming years, reaching USD 652.99 billion in 2026. Therefore, reaching your customers through online platforms makes a lot of sense as an effective marketing tactic. The idea is to design online marketing campaigns that best support your business goals.

What are the main types of digital marketing?

In this section, we will walk you through the most common digital marketing strategies and tactics, as well as the channels involved in each.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

As the name suggests, SEO is website optimization, the process of getting your site to rank higher on the pages of search engines like Google. This, in turn, leads to an increase in free (organic) traffic to your site.

Channels involved in this digital marketing tactic include blogs, websites, presentations and infographics. The beauty of this concept is that there are many platforms such as RankTracker that offer top quality and affordable SEO tools that will help you attract more traffic to your site.

Content marketing

Here, companies create and promote unique content assets to drive traffic growth, brand awareness, reach consumers, and generate leads. Content marketing channels include e-books, blog posts, online brochures, and white papers.

Marketing in social networks

Recently, social media platforms have been popping up right, left, and center. Social media advertising is about reaching your target audience through platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others to increase your brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and ultimately generate leads for your business.

If your social media presence isn't that big, you can use tools to consolidate channels like Facebook and LinkedIn into one place. This will make it easier for you to plan content for multiple channels at the same time, and it will also allow you to easily track analytics from different platforms.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate Marketing - This type of digital marketing is more result oriented where your business receives a certain commission for promoting other businesses on your site. One common channel used by affiliate marketers is video advertising, which is mostly offered through the YouTube affiliate program.

You can also achieve this by posting affiliate links (mostly external) that come through your social media accounts. The new wave in this scene is creating campaigns through influencers on digital platforms. With the right content creator (obviously one with a huge following) you can take your online marketing to a whole new level!

Email marketing

Email marketing is mostly used by companies to communicate with their customer base. They send emails that include follow-up information, welcome messages and new customer packages, available promotions, upcoming events, loyalty programs, customer development tips, blog subscriptions and newsletters, and more.

Video marketing

YouTube has taken the video marketing industry by storm. Most internet users instinctively go to YouTube to learn something, read reviews or even get some information before making a purchase decision.

Other video marketing platforms that can be used for video campaigns include TikTok, Instagram and Facebook videos. For best results, most digital marketers combine these tactics with social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO marketing.

Pay per click

With PPC, the publisher usually gets paid every time a user clicks on your ad. The most common pay-per-click tool is Google Adsense, with which the user pays for high-ranking places on the page of the Google search engine at a certain price for all the links it places. Other channels: Twitter advertising campaigns, paid advertising on Facebook and sponsored posts on LinkedIn.

Sponsored content

Sponsored contentinvolves a brand paying another person or company to create, promote and share content that describes your service or brand in some way. One common channel here is influencer marketing, where a brand pays or sponsors an online influencer in the same industry to post videos or articles related to the brand on their social media platforms.

Benefits of Digital Marketing: Why Businesses Implement It?

Digital marketing has many advantages. It is not only a quantifiable marketing strategy, but also result-oriented, cost-effective, adaptable and much faster to implement. Here are some of these benefits that are worth considering in more detail:

Purposefulness and goal orientation

Digital marketing makes it easier to focus your energy on the prospects who are most likely to sign up for your service or purchase your product. Traditional advertising methods, such as newspaper or television advertising, give you virtually no control over who sees your ad. Internet marketing allows marketers to focus on a narrowly specific audience.

In addition, it allows you to personalize marketing messages and make them more conversion-friendly. Digital marketing requires you to conduct market research to find out who your potential customers are. This way, you can improve your marketing strategy to make sure that the potential customers you reach are more likely to buy your product.

Competitiveness: It levels the playing field

Digital marketing provides companies with equal competitive opportunities regardless of their size, field of activity and availability of resources. Small businesses and startups can find it difficult to compete with larger and more established brands in the same industry, given budget campaigns. Strategic online marketing initiatives can help you stay ahead of any competition, even the big players.

Economic efficiency

It is impossible to compare the costs of traditional advertising with the costs of digital marketing opportunities; the first is certainly more expensive. Internet marketing allows business owners to track the daily performance of their campaigns. This way, they can gain a clear view of the performance of different channels, ultimately optimizing their campaign budgets for even greater ROI.

Improved lead conversion rate

Digital marketing makes it easy to convert potential customers and target audiences into customers, prospects, supporters or even followers, helping you build your brand reputation. Online marketing makes it easier to measure and track your marketing efforts. This way, you can constantly improve your strategies and tactics, which will ultimately improve your conversion rate. Digital advertising helps you target a specific market, which ultimately leads to higher quality leads.

Possibilities of interaction with the target audience

Digital marketing allows business owners to interact with their target audience at every stage, giving them a chance to gain the trust of their target market. With online marketing, you can track your customer's journey to purchase to better understand them. Understanding your customers is critical to lead generation because it ensures your customers have a connection with your business from the start.

Measurability

Internet marketing is completely quantifiable and measurable, which allows you to conduct an in-depth analysis of the development of your business. Regardless of the size of your company, digital marketing can give you an accurate view of your marketing performance from start to finish.

This includes, but is not limited to, the number of shares, impressions, likes, views, clicks and time spent on your page. Not only do you see real-time results, but you can also measure the ROI of all aspects of your online marketing efforts.

Adaptability

Digital marketing is very adaptable as business owners can easily change their marketing strategies. If the ad you're running isn't producing the results you want, you can easily change it or make adjustments accordingly.

Tips that businesses can use for successful digital marketing

To achieve the best results, you should combine different digital marketing tactics and channels, and be aware of the latest market trends. Keep the following in mind:

• Flexibility - Stay open to change in the fast-paced online marketing space. Adjust existing strategies, tactics, and tools as changes occur.
• Make your goals SMART - the goals you set should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and, above all, time-bound. Also, they should align with your online marketing plan.
• Creativity - the online space is dominated by creative people from all over the world, not to mention all walks of life. To stand out, you need to be creative and innovative from the start. Make your content unique and authentic, giving your target audience a reason to "get into bed with you".
• Flawless Execution - Achieving desired business goals goes far beyond the planning/strategy stage. You must put your plan into action, ensuring that you remain consistent with the customer feedback you receive.
• Market Segmentation - the key to successful online marketing is understanding your target audience. You do this by studying the behaviors and characteristics of your potential customers online and then matching their common traits. This will help you prioritize their needs.
• Strategies, tactics and channel diversification - no internet marketing strategy is perfect. Be prepared that you may have to experiment with different strategies. This will help you engage with specific target audiences you didn't even know existed, giving you more revenue streams.
• Integration of sales and marketing - most often the sales department and the marketing department in any company work against each other. Instead of forcing these teams to work separately, it's wise to integrate their activities into your online marketing plan. This will help you maximize every aspect of digital marketing as both teams will be working towards a common goal.
• Data Analysis - Be sure to collect, track, measure and analyze all available data. In this day and age, data is critical, especially when it comes to delivering services that satisfy customers. It will also help you keep up with the competition in your industry.
• Keep in touch with your audience - today more than ever before, customers prefer to be in touch with their favorite suppliers at almost any time. As a business owner, you need to create a business environment that fosters this desire. You can achieve this by using tools (chatbots) to facilitate communication with your customers while providing relevant content.
• Gathering feedback - getting feedback from your customers and responding to them has become an integral part of any business today. You can do this through online surveys, comments, reviews and surveys. This feedback gives you insight into which strategies and tactics are working and which aren't. By constantly improving, you can easily succeed in online marketing.

Conclusion

Digital marketing does not have a one-size-fits-all approach. Any company seeking to enter a highly competitive market must be prepared to put in the effort. The first step should be to combine the different aspects of digital marketing before deciding on a specific strategy. If you don't know where to start, there are many digital marketing courses you can take advantage of.

Try any of the digital marketing tactics described above. And this will definitely help you in the development of your business.