On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online, and both focus on creating digital content for people to consume. So what's the difference? Both can still fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space — regardless of whether it's relevant or welcomed.
For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren't necessarily ready to receive it. On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them.
One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for. Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, engage, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they're considered inbound or outbound.
Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing still involves building out buyer personas to identify your audience's needs, and creating valuable online content. However, that's not to say all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way. If your company is business-to-business B2B , your digital marketing efforts are likely to be centered around online lead generation, with the end goal being for someone to speak to a salesperson.
For that reason, the role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels. Beyond your website, you'll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending their time online. If your company is business-to-consumer B2C , depending on the price point of your products, it's likely that the goal of your digital marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and have them become customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson.
This will often mean your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to use stronger calls-to-action CTAs. For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn. The kind of content you create depends on your audience's needs at different stages in the buyer's journey. You should start by creating buyer personas use these free templates , or try makemypersona.
On a basic level, your online content should aim to help them meet these goals, and overcome their challenges. Then, you'll need to think about when they're most likely to be ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they're at in their buyer's journey.
We call this content mapping. In terms of the format of your content, there are a lot of different things to try. Here are some options we'd recommend using at each stage of the buyer's journey:. When you're first getting started with digital marketing, it's critical you start by identifying and defining your goals, since you'll craft your strategy differently depending on those goals.
For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might want to pay more attention to reaching new audiences via social media. Alternatively, perhaps you want to increase sales on a specific product — if that's the case, it's more important you focus on SEO and optimizing content to get potential buyers on your website in the first place.
Additionally, if sales is your goal, you might test out PPC campaigns to drive traffic through paid ads. Whatever the case, it's easiest to shape a digital marketing strategy after you've determined your company's biggest goals. We've mentioned this before, but one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is the opportunity to target specific audiences — however, you can't take advantage of that benefit if you haven't first identified your target audience.
Of course, it's important to note, your target audience might vary depending on the channel or goal s you have for a specific product or campaign. For instance, perhaps you've noticed most of your Instagram audience is younger and prefers funny memes and quick videos — but your LinkedIn audience tends to be older professionals who are looking for more tactical advice.
You'll want to vary your content to appeal to these different target audiences. As with anything, the budget you determine really depends on what elements of digital marketing you're looking to add to your strategy.
If you're focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation for a preexisting website, the good news is you don't need very much budget at all. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless you're planning to outsource the work, the only investment you'll need is your time.
With outbound techniques like online advertising and purchasing email lists, there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the advertising. For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you'll bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google's search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is why it's a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.
An digital marketing strategy likely needs both paid and free aspects to truly be effective. For instance, if you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you're likely to see strong results within the first six months despite minimal ad spend. However, if paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, then the results might come even quicker.
Ultimately, it's recommended to focus on building your organic or 'free' reach using content, SEO, and social media for more long-term, sustainable success. When in doubt, try both, and iterate on your process as you learn which channels — paid or free — perform best for your brand. Once you know your audience and you have a budget, it's time to start creating content for the various channels you're going to use. This content can be social media posts, blog posts, PPC ads, sponsored content, email marketing newsletters, and more.
Of course, any content you create should be interesting and engaging to your audience because the point of marketing content is to increase brand awareness and improve lead generation. Another key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. This means it's essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages, social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices.
If your company has a mobile app that enables users to engage with your brand or shop your products, your app falls under the digital marketing umbrella, too. Those engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to have the same positive experience as they would on desktop. This means implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices.
It might also mean reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a hassle-free experience for people downloading your content on-the-go. As for your social media images, it's important to always have a mobile user in mind when creating them, as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices and text can be cut-off.
There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users, and when implementing any digital marketing strategy, it's hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on mobile devices.
By ensuring this is always front-of-mind, you'll be creating digital experiences that work for your audience, and consequently achieve the results you're hoping for.
Digital marketing is all about reaching targeted audiences through personalized content — all of which can't happen without effective keyword research. Conducting keyword research is critical for optimizing your website and content for SEO and ensuring people can find your business through search engines. Additionally, social media keyword research can be helpful for marketing your products or services on various social channels, as well.
Even if you don't have a full-time SEO strategist, you'll still want to conduct keyword research. Try creating a list of high-performing keywords that relate to your products or services, and consider long-tail variations for added opportunities. Finally, to create an effective digital marketing strategy for the long-term, it's vital your team learn how to pivot based off analytics.
For instance, perhaps after a couple of months you find your audience isn't as interested in your content on Instagram anymore — but they love what you're creating on Twitter. Sure, this might be an opportunity to re-examine your Instagram strategy as a whole, but it might also be a sign that your audience prefers a different channel to consume branded content. Alternatively, perhaps you find an older web page isn't getting the traffic it used to. You might consider updating the page or getting rid of it entirely to ensure visitors are finding the freshest, most relevant content for their needs.
Digital marketing provides businesses with incredibly flexible opportunities for continuous growth — but it's up to you to take advantage of them. If you're already doing digital marketing, it's likely that you're at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though. A retail study looking at more than one billion shopping sessions found that email marketing had a conversion rate of 2.
The highest conversation rate was direct referral, at 3. Most consumers use some kind of social media, though the type you will focus on will depend on the behavior of your target market. Older consumers are more likely to use a platform like Facebook, for example; millennials often use Instagram; and younger consumers are more interested in video platforms, such as TikTok or YouTube.
Find out where your ideal customers spend their time and focus your efforts there. Blogging allows you to increase your website's SEO by adding articles and posts around certain targeted keywords.
This increases the likelihood that customers will find and visit your website as a result of online search. You can also write for other people's blogs, magazines, or websites.
This can increase your audience and put your business in front of more potential customers. Some creators who make videos or podcasts use that as their sole business. Other times, businesses use these platforms to establish expertise, connect with others in the industry, and create a funnel for new customers to find and develop an interest in their products or services.
Podcasts especially are growing in popularity. More than million Americans listen to podcasts every month. Online ads can take a variety of forms. Pay-per-click advertisements placed in search engines target particular search terms that potential customers might use. Targeted ads on social media designed to reach specific segments of the platform's users who might be interested in your business's products, services, and promotions.
You can also place sidebar ads on other people's websites or in their email marketing. Whatever you choose as your target conversions, you can track them via your chosen platform to see how your campaign is doing. Affiliate marketing lets someone make money by promoting another person's business. You could be either the promoter or the business who works with the promoter, but the process is the same in either case. It works using a revenue sharing model.
If you're the affiliate, you get a commission every time someone purchases the item that you promote. If you're the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make. Some affiliate marketers choose to review the products of just 1 company, perhaps on a blog or other third-party site.
Others have relationships with multiple merchants. Whether you want to be an affiliate or find one, the first step is to make a connection with the other party.
You can use a platform designed to connect affiliates with retailers, or you can start or join a single-retailer program. If you're a retailer and you choose to work directly with affiliates, there are many things you can do to make your program appealing to potential promoters. You'll need to provide those affiliates with the tools that they need to succeed.
That includes incentives for great results as well as marketing support and pre-made materials. Native advertising is marketing in disguise. Native advertising was created in reaction to the cynicism of today's consumers toward ads. Knowing that the creator of an ad pays to run it, many consumers will conclude that the ad is biased and consequently ignore it.
A native ad gets around this bias by offering information or entertainment before it gets to anything promotional, downplaying the "ad" aspect.
When your consumers know exactly what they're getting, they'll feel better about your content and your brand. Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns, improving the efficiency and relevance of advertising.
Marketing automation lets companies keep up with the expectation of personalization. It allows brands to:. Many marketing automation tools use prospect engagement or lack thereof with a particular message to determine when and how to reach out next. This level of real-time customization means that you can effectively create an individualized marketing strategy for each customer without any additional time investment. The concept of email marketing is simple—you send a promotional message and hope that your prospect clicks on it.
However, the execution is much more complex. First of all, you have to make sure that your emails are wanted. This means having an opt-in list that does the following :. You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valued service, not just as a promotional tool.
It can be even better if you incorporate other techniques such as marketing automation, which lets you segment and schedule your emails so that they meet your customer's needs more effectively. Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people, but it offers a number of other advantages as well.
These are a few of the benefits. This makes it easy to grow your business's market reach. Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also carries a lower cost. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television spots, and other traditional marketing opportunities can be high. They also give you less control over whether your target audiences will see those messages in the first place. With digital marketing , you can create just 1 content piece that draws visitors to your blog as long as it's active.
You can create an email marketing campaign that delivers messages to targeted customer lists on a schedule, and it's easy to change that schedule or the content if you need to do so. When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you much more flexibility and customer contact for your ad spend. Email marketing. After more than two decades, email is still the quickest and most direct way to reach customers with critical information. To succeed, your marketing emails should satisfy five core attributes.
They must be trustworthy, relevant, conversational, coordinated across channels, and strategic. Mobile marketing. Mobile devices are kept in our pockets, sit next to our beds, and are checked constantly throughout the day. This makes marketing on mobile incredibly important—two-thirds of consumers can recall a specific brand they have seen advertised on mobile in the last week—but mobile is also very nuanced considering its intimate nature.
SMS, MMS, and in-app marketing are all options to reach your customers on their devices, but beyond that, you must consider the coordination of your marketing efforts across your other digital marketing channels. Marketing automation. Without it, your campaigns will look like an unfinished puzzle with a crucial missing piece.
Marketing automation software streamlines and automates marketing tasks and workflow, measures results, and calculates the return on investment ROI of your digital campaigns, helping you to grow revenue faster. Digital marketing ROI involves much more than the up-front payback of standard banner ads, organic content marketing is also a major player in the digital marketing space.
Digital marketing reaches customers beyond advertisements. Digital marketing drives content marketing. Digital marketing is vital for SEO. The first organic search results on Google account for Step 1: Identify and segment your audiences.
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