Introduction

Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the internet and
online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones, and
other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Its development
during the 1990s and 2000s changed the way brands and businesses use
technology for marketing. As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into
marketing plans and everyday life, and as people increasingly use digital devices
instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns have become
prevalent, employing combinations of search engine optimization (SEO), search
engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content
automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing, e-commerce marketing,
social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display
advertising, e-books, and optical disks and games have become commonplace.

Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such
as television, mobile phones (SMS and MMS), call-back, and on-hold mobile ring
tones. The extension to non-Internet channels differentiates digital marketing from
online advertising.

Any marketing that uses electronic devices can be used by marketing specialists to
convey promotional messaging and measure its impact through your customer
journey. In practice, digital marketing typically refers to marketing campaigns that
appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other devices. It can take many forms,
including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads, and
social media posts. Digital marketing is often compared to “traditional marketing”
such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail. Oddly, television is usually
lumped in with traditional marketing
.

What is digital marketing?

At a high level, digital marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital

channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps.
Using these online media channels, digital marketing is the method by which
companies endorse goods, services, and brands. Consumers heavily rely on digital
means to research products. For example, Think with Google marketing insights
found that 48% of consumers start their inquiries on search engines, while 33% look
to brand websites and 26% search within mobile applications.

While modern-day digital marketing is an enormous system of channels to which

marketers simply must onboard their brands, advertising online is much more
complex than the channels alone. To achieve the true potential of digital marketing,
marketers have to dig deep into today’s vast and intricate cross-channel world to
discover strategies that make an impact through engagement marketing.
Engagement marketing is the method of forming meaningful interactions with
potential and returning customers based on the data you collect over time. By
engaging customers in a digital landscape, you build brand awareness, set yourself
as an industry thought leader, and place your business at the forefront when the
customer is ready to buy.

By implementing an omnichannel digital marketing strategy, marketers can collect

valuable insights into target audience behaviors while opening the door to new
methods of customer engagement. Additionally, companies can expect to see an
increase in retention. According to a report by Invest, companies with strong
omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their
customers compared to companies with weak omnichannel programs that have a
retention rate of just 33%. 

As for the future of digital marketing, we can expect to see a continued increase in
the variety of wearable devices available to consumers. Forbes also forecasts that
social media will become increasingly conversational in the B2B space, video
content will be refined for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, and email
marketing will become even more personalized.

“Digital is at the core of everything in marketing today—it has gone from ‘one of the
things marketing does’ to ‘THE thing that marketing does.’”

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect
with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication.
This includes email, social media, web-based advertising, and text and multimedia
messages as a marketing channel.

Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it's digital

marketing.

Inbound marketing versus digital marketing

Digital marketing and inbound marketing are easily confused and for good reason.
Digital marketing uses many of the same tools as inbound marketing—email and
online content, to name a few. Both exist to capture the attention of prospects
through the buyer’s journey and turn them into customers. But the 2 approaches take
different views of the relationship between the tool and the goal.

Digital marketing considers how each tool can convert prospects. A brand's

digital marketing strategy may use multiple platforms or focus all of its efforts on 1
platform.

Inbound marketing is a holistic concept. It considers the goal first, then looks at the
available tools to determine which will effectively reach target customers, and then at
which stage of the sales funnel that should happen.
The most important thing to remember about digital marketing and inbound
marketing is that as a marketing professional, you don’t have to choose between the
2. They work best together. Inbound marketing provides structure and purpose for
effective digital marketing to digital marketing efforts, making sure that each digital
marketing channel works toward a goal.

B2B versus B2C digital marketing

Digital marketing works for B2B as well as B2C companies, but best practices differ
significantly between the 2.

 B2B clients tend to have longer decision-making processes, and thus longer
sales funnels. Relationship-building strategies work better for these clients,
whereas B2C customers tend to respond better to short-term offers and
messages.
 B2B transactions are usually based on logic and evidence, which is what
skilled B2B digital marketers present. B2C content is more likely to be
emotionally-based, focusing on making the customer feel good about a
purchase.
 B2B decisions tend to need more than 1 person's input. The marketing
materials that best drive these decisions tend to be shareable and
downloadable. B2C customers, on the other hand, favor one-on-one
connections with a brand.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. A B2C company with a high-ticket
product, such as a car or computer, might offer more informative and serious
content. Your strategy always needs to be geared toward your customer base,
whether you're B2B or B2C.

Types of digital marketing

There are as many specializations within digital marketing as there are ways of
interacting using digital media. Here are a few key examples.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is technically a marketing tool rather than a
form of marketing in itself. The Balance defines it as “the art and science of making
web pages attractive to search engines.”

The "art and science" part of SEO is what’s most important. SEO is a science
because it requires you to research and weigh different contributing factors to
achieve the highest possible ranking. Today, the most important elements to
consider when optimizing a web page include:

 Quality of content
 Level of user engagement
 Mobile-friendliness
  Number and quality of inbound links

The strategic use of these factors makes SEO a science, but the unpredictability
involved makes it an art.

In SEO, there's no quantifiable rubric or consistent rule for ranking highly. Google
changes its algorithm almost constantly, so it's impossible to make exact predictions.
What you can do is closely monitor your page's performance and make adjustments
accordingly.

Content marketing
SEO is a major factor in content marketing, a strategy based on the distribution of
relevant and valuable content to a target audience.

As in any marketing strategy, the goal of content marketing is to attract leads that

ultimately convert into customers. But it does so differently than traditional
advertising. Instead of enticing prospects with the potential value from a product or
service, it offers value for free in the form of written material.

Content marketing matters and there are plenty of stats to prove it:

 84% of consumers expect companies to produce entertaining and helpful

content experiences
 62% of companies that have at least 5,000 employees produce content daily
 92% of marketers believe that their company values content as an important
asset

As effective as content marketing is, it can be tricky. Content marketing writers need
to be able to rank highly in search engine results while also engaging people who will
read the material, share it, and interact further with the brand. When the content is
relevant, it can establish strong relationships throughout the pipeline.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging
people in discussion online. The most popular platforms for social media marketing
are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind.

Because social media marketing involves active audience participation, it has

become a popular way of getting attention. It's the most popular content medium for
B2C marketers at 96%, and it's gaining ground in the B2B sphere as well. According
to the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of B2B content marketers increased their use
of social media this year.

Social media marketing offers built-in engagement metrics, which are extremely

useful in helping you to understand how well you're reaching your audience. You get
to decide which types of interactions mean the most to you, whether that means the
number of shares, comments, or total clicks to your website.
Direct purchase may not even be a goal of your social media marketing strategy.
Many brands use social media marketing to start dialogues with audiences rather
than encourage them to spend money right away. This is especially common in
brands that target older audiences or offer products and services not appropriate for
impulse buys. It all depends on your company's goals.

To learn more about how Mailchimp can help with your social media strategy, check
out the comparison of our free social media management tools versus others.

Pay-per-click marketing

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is posting an ad on a platform and paying every time

someone clicks on it.

How and when people see your ad is a bit more complicated. When a spot is
available on a search engine results page, also known as a SERP, the engine fills
the spot with what is essentially an instant auction. An algorithm prioritizes each
available ad based on several factors, including:

 Ad quality
 Keyword relevance
 Landing page quality
 Bid amount

Each PPC campaign has 1 or more target actions that viewers are meant to
complete after clicking an ad. These actions are known as conversions, and they can
be transactional or non-transactional. Making a purchase is a conversion, but so is
newsletter signup or a call made to your home office.

Whatever you choose as your target conversions, you can track them via your
chosen platform to see how your campaign is doing.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing lets someone make money by promoting another person's

business. You could be either the promoter or the business that 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

Native advertising is marketing in disguise. Its goal is to blend in with its surrounding
content so that it’s less blatantly obvious as advertising.

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.

It’s important to always label your native ads clearly. Use words like “promoted” or
“sponsored.” If those indicators are concealed, readers might end up spending
significant time engaging with the content before they realize that it's advertising.

When your consumers know exactly what they're getting, they'll feel better about
your content and your brand. Native ads are meant to be less obtrusive than
traditional ads, but they’re not meant to be deceptive.

Marketing automation
Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns,
improving the efficiency and relevance of advertising.

According to statistics:

 90% of US consumers find personalization either “very” or “somewhat”

appealing
 81% of consumers would like the brands they engage with to understand
them better
 77% of companies believe in the value of real-time personalization, yet 60%
struggle with it

Marketing automation lets companies keep up with the expectation of

personalization. It allows brands to:

 Collect and analyze consumer information

 Design targeted marketing campaigns
 Send and post-marketing messages at the right times to the right audiences

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.

Email marketing
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:

 Individualizes the content, both in the body and in the subject line
 States clearly what kind of emails the subscriber will get
 Offers a clear unsubscribe option
 Integrates both transactional and promotional emails

You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valued service, not just as a
promotional tool.

Email marketing is a proven, effective technique all on its own: 89% of surveyed

professionals named it as their most effective lead generator.

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.

The benefits of digital marketing

Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide
audience of people, but it offers several as well. These are a few of the benefits.

A broad geographic reach

When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (provided
you haven’t limited your ad geographically). This makes it easy to grow your
business's market reach.

Cost efficiency

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.

Quantifiable results

To know whether your marketing strategy works, you have to find out how many
customers it attracts and how much revenue it ultimately drives. But how do you do
that with a non-digital marketing strategy?

There's always the traditional option of asking each customer, “How did you find us?"

Unfortunately, that doesn't work in all industries. Many companies don't get to have
one-on-one conversations with their customers, and surveys don't always get
complete results.

With digital marketing, results monitoring is simple. Digital marketing software and
platforms automatically track the number of desired conversions that you get,
whether that means email open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases.

Easier personalization

Digital marketing allows you to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing
can't. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise.

Imagine you offer financial services and want to send out special offers to people
who have looked at your products. You know you'll get better results if you target the
offer to the person's interest, so you decide to prepare 2 campaigns. One is for
young families looking at your life insurance products, and the other is for millennial
entrepreneurs who have considered your retirement plans.

How do you gather all of that data without automated tracking? How many phone
records would you have to go through? How many customer profiles? And how do
you know who has or hasn't read the brochure you sent out?

With digital marketing, all of this information is already at your fingertips.

More connection with customers

Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real-time. More
importantly, it lets them communicate with you.

Think about your social media strategy. It's great when your target audience sees
your latest post, but it's even better when they comment on it or share it. It means
more buzz surrounding your product or service, as well as increased visibility every
time someone joins the conversation.

Interactivity benefits your customers as well. Their level of engagement increases as

they become active participants in your brand's story. That sense of ownership can
create a strong sense of brand loyalty.
Easy and convenient conversions

Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad
or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope
for is a phone call shortly after someone views your ad. But how often does
someone have the time to reach out to a company while they're doing the dishes,
driving down the highway, or updating records at work?

With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the
sales funnel right away. They might not make a purchase immediately, but they’ll
stay connected with you and give you a chance to interact with them further.

Digital marketing creates growth

Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business’s
overall marketing strategy. Never before has there been a way to stay in such
consistent contact with your customers, and nothing else offers the level of
personalization that digital data can provide. The more you embrace the possibilities
of digital marketing, the more you'll be able to realize your company's growth
potential.

 
Common problems that digital marketing
can solve
To optimize your marketing strategies, digital is mandatory. Digital
marketing can help you to get to know your audience, learn important data
about them, and provide metrics that will give your marketing team
credibility.

 Problem: I don’t know my audience well enough to get

started. Getting to know your audience takes time, and while your
marketing team may have developed audience personas that can be
of use, consumers actively spending time online may not behave in
the way you’d expect. You’ll need to test different languages with
different targets, keeping in mind that certain descriptors will appeal
to different people and their place in the buying cycle. Attune yourself
to your audience and you’ll build credibility that will set you apart from
the competition. 

 Problem: I haven’t optimized my channels for SEO. Regardless of

your position in the marketing process, it’s important to have an
understanding of SEO best practices. In addition to improving search
engine ranking, SEO can reinforce and support your campaign
testing and optimization to ensure you’re delivering high-quality,
valuable content that your potential customers want. 

 Problem: I don’t have a social media strategy. Regardless of

whether you want to develop an organic social media strategy, a paid
social media strategy, or a blend of the two, it’s important to have
some form of social marketing in place. While social media is
excellent for branding and engagement, it can also be a useful
channel for digital marketing advertisement. Find a niche and a
consistent voice, be patient, and as your following increases, the
impact of your ads will increase as well.

 Problem: My marketing teams are siloed. It’s important to break

out of silos to create nimble, fluid structures. Your customers aren’t
sequestered in one channel waiting for ads, so your marketing efforts
 must deploy cross-channel functionality with teams that bring multiple
skill sets to the table to engage customers where they are. Each
social network and channel includes different audiences and
expectations, so marketing efforts may look completely different for
each. This includes tone, imagery, offers, and even the time of day
you post.

 Problem: I’m under pressure from my CMO to report on metrics

that support the bottom line. Digital marketing supports a vast
universe of metrics that can be utilized to determine the effectiveness
of your marketing efforts, but these metrics should be chosen with
care. Each case will depend upon your audience makeup and focus
on each channel. Keeping this in mind, start by determining your
goals for each channel and set metrics your CMO will want to see the
most.

Make sure you have all the

implementation roadblocks
cleared with our guide The
8 Biggest Digital Marketing
Mistakes and How to Avoid
Them.
Download Now

Components of digital marketing

Digital marketing spans a massive network of digital touchpoints that
customers interact with many times a day. To properly utilize these
channels, you need to have an understanding of each.
 Paid search. Paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising,
typically refers to the sponsored result on the top or side of a search
engine results page (SERP). These ads charge you for every click
and they can be tailored to appear when certain search terms are
entered, so your ads are being targeted to audiences seeking
something in particular. These ads can be extremely effective, as
they rely on data gleaned from individuals’ online behaviour and are
used to boost website traffic by delivering relevant ads to the right
people at the right time. These ads also involve retargeting, meaning
that depending on the customers’ actions, marketing automation
tools can craft unique, personal cross-platform ads.

 Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of

optimizing the content, technical setup, and reach of your website so
that your pages appear at the top of a search engine result for a
specific set of keyword terms. Using SEO can drive visitors to your
site when they display behaviour implying that they’re searching for
relevant products, which can be a game-changer considering that
90% of people searching haven’t formed an opinion about a brand
yet (Status Labs, 2018). While PPC and retargeting have their place,
organic online traffic earned through search engine optimization has
an enormous influence on search rankings and, by extension,
organic site traffic. You can use SEO to massively increase visibility
and begin a lasting customer relationship by using keywords and
phrases. SEO is defined as increasing a website’s rank in online
search results, and thus its organic site traffic, by using popular
keywords and phrases. Strong SEO strategies are hugely influential
in digital marketing campaigns since visibility is the first step to a
lasting customer relationship.  

 Content marketing. Effective content marketing is not outwardly

promotional but rather serves to educate and inspire consumers who
are seeking information. When you offer content that is relevant to
your audience, it can secure you as a thought leader and a
trustworthy source of information, making it less likely that your other
marketing efforts will be lost in the static. In the age of the self-
directed buyer, content marketing gets three times more leads than
paid search advertising, so it’s well worth the additional effort.

 Social media marketing. The key to effective social media

marketing goes far beyond simply having active social media
accounts. You must also be weaving social elements into every
aspect of your marketing efforts to create as many peer-to-peer
sharing opportunities as possible. The more your audience is inspired
 to engage with your content, the more likely they are to share it,
potentially inspiring their peers to become customers as well.

 Email marketing. After more than two decades, email is still the

quickest and most direct way to reach customers with critical
information. Today, successful email campaigns must be incredibly
engaging, relevant, informative, and entertaining to not get buried in
your customer’s inbox. 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. Marketing automation is an integral platform

that ties all of your digital marketing together. Companies that
automate lead management see a 10% or more bump in revenue in
six to nine months. 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.
Marketing automation can help you gain valuable insight into which
programs are working and which aren’t, and it will provide metrics to
allow you to speak to digital marketing’s efforts on your company’s
bottom line.

Learn more about what

digital marketing can offer in
our guide Digital Marketing
101: Key Tools for
Engagement Marketing.
Download Now

ROI of a successful digital marketing

program
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. Seventy percent of internet users want to learn
about products through content versus traditional advertisements
(MDG, 2014). 
 Digital marketing drives content marketing. The top five B2B
content marketing tactics are social media content (92%), e-
newsletters (83%), articles on your website (81%), blogs (80%), and
in-person events (77%) (source). 
 Digital marketing is vital for SEO. The first organic search results
on Google account for 32.5% of traffic share for a search term
(Chitka)

Learn more about investing

and budgeting to maximize
ROI with our ebook The
Digital Marketer's Guide to
Resource and Budget
Allocation Across Channels.
Download Now

Planning, implementing and optimizing

your digital marketing program
Begin the launch of your digital marketing program by first determining your
audience and goals, and then putting in place metrics to ensure you’re
always improving.

Step 1: Identify and segment your audiences. Today buyers expect a

personalized experience across every touchpoint. To do this, you must
understand their demographic, firmographic, and technographic attributes
as well as how to address their questions and pain points. 

Step 2: Establish goals and measurement strategy. Use audience

information to determine personas and get a clear view of their sales
journey to establish your goals and measurement strategy. Important
metrics include impressions, reach, clicks, click-through rate (CTR),
engagement rate, conversions, cost per lead (CPL), effective cost
per thousand (eCPM), as well as back-end metrics like return on
investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), first- and multi-touch
attribution, and lifetime  customer value (LCV).  

Step 3: Set up your adtech and channels. Ad technology can take some
time to navigate, so make sure you have the right data management
platforms (DMPs), demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms
(SSPS), and ad exchanges in place before you get started. Align your
team, communicate everyone’s objectives, and show how their channels fit
into the big picture of digital marketing.

Step 4: Launch and optimize. Digital marketing can be used for

acquisition, nurturing, building customer loyalty, and branding. Review
metrics regularly, so you can know where you are excelling and where you
need work to become a leader in this high-impact, high-demand space. 
Learn more about how to get digital marketing working for you in our co-
authored white paper with Harvard Business Review (HBR), Designing a
Marketing Organization for the Digital Age.