What is Digital Marketing & Why is it Important?
Digital marketing is a powerful way to promote your business online but covers a huge rage of techniques and methods for delivery.
Direct marketing is an essential part of achieving your business goals and means employing a range of techniques to generate traffic for your website. From simple SEO strategies to advertising campaigns and regular content marketing, your online visibility relies on the reach that this method offers.
Here, we take a quick look at exactly what this method of marketing is and why it’s so important.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the name given to any form of marketing in which the main method is via digital delivery. This can be anything from display screen advertising and mobile phone messaging to email marketing. However, the term is generally used to describe online methods deployed via the internet.
Examples of Digital Marketing
When you use the web, you are exposed to many different forms of digital marketing whether you use social media, a search engine or go directly to a company’s website. This method is also used when you simply collect your emails.
The most common forms of digital marketing are:
- Affiliate Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Inbound Marketing
- Marketing Automation
- Online PR
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Social Media Marketing
Digital marketing comes in many forms.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
Without some form of digital marketing strategy in place, any business (or organisation) with an online presence relies mostly on direct traffic (users who already know what and who they are looking for and who enter the URL of your domain) for their incoming audience.
Organic traffic will be severely limited without any SEO practices, content or social media marketing being employed.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing offers companies an extremely effective and instant way to reach large audiences to deliver messages that are highly targeted to key demographics. This can be down to a local level or you can use targeted PPC advertising to reach a specific audience defined by metrics such as age, gender, income level etc.
In addition, feedback from any campaigns that are launched is instantaneous due to the availability of powerful analytics that are designed to measure performance, objectives and other metrics.
Digital marketing is an essential component to boost sales, raise awareness and engage with your customers directly. In short, it is the online equivalent of increasing your sales team and adding an effective PR division for your company.
Combined with a robust marketing strategy, it can also additional benefits which can help:
- add value to your existing customers.
- develop relationships, build loyalty and create trust.
- create an authoritative profile and build credibility within your industry.
- educate, inform and entertain your target audience.
Another major benefit is that it is much more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods. The internet is a great leveller and digital marketing can even the playing field when it comes to competing with bigger businesses.
Your marketing strategy needs some good planning, preparation and assessment.
Strategy
As with any strategy, it’s all in the planning and to deliver the best results you will need to:
- Identify your business objectives.
- Set your budget.
- Establish your audience.
- Choose the channels for delivery.
- Optimise your website for SEO.
- Deploy your plan.
Once you have put your plan in action, the last stages are to evaluate and amend your strategy as you go. The beauty of a marketing campaign like this over a traditional one is the ability to analyse live data and to respond quickly.
Depending on your initial objectives (more traffic, increased sales, greater engagement etc), you can access many online tools to help you judge the success of your campaign. Google Analytics will provide you with some useful data to evaluate traffic, and the behaviour of visitors, to your website whilst social media engagement, can be assessed using suites like Sprout Social.
Opace and Digital Marketing
Opace is a digital agency based in the West Midlands that offers a full complement of digital services from SEO to content marketing and PPC advertising.
To find out how our digital planning services can deliver exceptional results for your business, contact us today.
Image credits: mohamed_hassan/pxhere, wynpnt/Pixabay and PhotoMIX-Company/Pixabay
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