According to Keith Weed, digital plays a fundamental role in any marketing-based activity – so much so that the term digital marketing, which sits as a niche function in an organization, is now much more defunct. It needs to play a central role in the way that we operate.
Benefits of digital marketing
Clear measurement of campaign effectiveness
It’s really easy to understand the level of impact that you’re having from a digital perspective. Take banner adverts. You know exactly the number of people that have clicked through. You know the number of people that have gone and then purchased as a consequence of that click-through. So it’s very easy to follow the chain along to determine the extent to which your advert made an impact on the bottom line.
Quicker conversions and engagement
You can move from the research stage in the customer life cycle all the way through to purchase and engagement. So it’s much easier to do quicker conversions and engage the customer across the life cycle.
For instance, if you’re selling an insurance-based product, it enables you to move from a price comparison website straight through to your site, fill in a quick number of details, and actually make that purchase quicker; as opposed to watching an advert, say, on traditional channels like television, where you may have to call up. The chances of someone doing that are much more remote versus the digital option. You also have the ability to engage customers in a robust way through digital channels. Email marketing is a great methodology to use for that.
Ability to reach real niche target audiences
You don’t have to look much further than Facebook or LinkedIn advertising to understand that you can really drill down into the key target segments that you want your advert to be seen too. For instance, you can segment it by job profile or where you’ve studied, perhaps, in addition to all the regular things like age, geography, and so on.
Create test and learn campaigns
A test-and-learn campaign is where you test two creative outputs and have an understanding of which one works better than the other. The scientific name is A/B testing, something we’ll come on to shortly. Now, once you have an understanding of which creative works better, you can then allocate your marketing budget more effectively to that area.
Greater shareability
It enables consumers themselves to share the content in an easy, accessible way and, therefore, expands the reach and penetration that your marketing communication gives you. You have to look no further than things like the Ice Bucket Challenge just to see the viral nature of what digital communications give you over traditional ones. You can also have user-generated content. Now what this enables you to do is for consumers to interact and get in the mix of the type of message that you’re trying to drive through.
Potential for user-generated content
The previous example of the Ice Bucket Challenge is a great example of user-generated content. Think about the celebrities that then got involved, which then enabled family, and friends, to be able to do the challenge themselves. This generated a much wider appeal, which was then shared across social media, which was a great advantage that could never have happened if it was using traditional communications alone.
Identification of key influencers
You can track and understand the key people that are helping to spread your word. Using influencers as a way to try and gain greater reach is a must when it comes to digital communications. You’ve got people like bloggers or people who are constantly writing content marketing that enables you to get your word over, to get the reach of your communication over and above what you currently have.
Benefits of digital communications
Small financial commitment
From multinational organizations to small one-man bands, anyone can use some of the digital tools to actually extend your reach to your target audiences. It takes a relatively small financial commitment. For instance, you can set the levels of pay-per-click that you actually have on, say, Google, or you can set the limits of Facebook advertising. It essentially ensures that you don’t ever go over what you currently have as a budget.
Organic evolution
Once someone shares or engages with your communications, say, on social media, it has the ability to go viral. This enables you to then basically expand the reach without actually having to incur any cost to the organization itself.
Highly targeted
Think about an analytics tool like Google Analytics. You get a real insight into the type of audiences that are clicking on your website, for instance, drills down to things like demographics, age profiling, as well as attitudes. This gives you a much more in-depth understanding of the type of customers that are engaging with your product or service.
Accountable
You can truly understand the end-to-end impact that you’re having across the customer journey with the variety of digital tools that you use. So you know exactly where your bottlenecks are. You know when and where customers are leaving your website, for example. And then you have the ability to do something about it for that specific stage of the journey.
Complement offline communications
Digital communications complement your existing online infrastructure and channels. A great example of this is the one used by Burberry. Burberry has got great social and digital presence. So much so that they’re trying to integrate digital into their in-store experience. So no matter where you start your journey, whether it’s their website or mobile, when you go to make that purchase in-store, you feel like you’re walking through to their website. It’s a great example of trying to blend both the online and the offline worlds.
Top Digital Marketing Tools for 2023
If you are a digital marketer looking to boost your marketing strategies and ROI, you will want to know about certain tools that can make things easier. With digital marketing tools, you will be able to execute proper strategies in the right manner. These tools are designed to keep things organized, allowing you to make necessary customizations whenever needed.
After facing the challenges in 2022, we have to focus on creating better and more innovative strategies in 2023. In this post, we share the most influential and creative digital marketing tools you should experiment with and try if you want to outshine your marketing campaigns in 2022.
- MailChimp
MailChimp is a social advertising and email marketing tool designed to orchestrate and automate digital marketing campaigns. It is one of the best digital marketing tools you can get to improve your campaigns and track the traffic generated. Moreover, the platform allows multiple integrations with different SaaS companies. The tool is quite efficient for email campaigns, using which you can engage with your audience. MailChimp is a well-renowned name in the world of email marketing.
The features of MailChimp:
- Creates better content with easy-to-use design tools
- Use Ai-powered assistant for generating custom designs.
- Create personalized emails and get up to 6 times more orders using marketing automation
- Provides tools for getting insights and analytics in one place
- Also, provide a free plan for small marketers.
MailChimp incorporates pre-built, customizable email automation that makes it easy for you to reach the right audience at the right moment. The best part is that you can keep your brand top of mind and delight your customers with happy birthday messages, welcome automation, and order notifications.
Online retail and e-commerce businesses can significantly benefit from MailChimp, as it can help you drive traffic, increase conversions, and grow sales.
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful digital marketing tool that can help you with numerous marketing decisions. You can easily track your e-commerce business as well as goals that can help keep your company on track. Using the innumerable data insights that Google Analytics provides, it is easy for marketers to understand the directions required to take with website modifications and changes. All you have to do is install Google Analytics on your site, and you are ready to go.
The features of Google Analytics:
- Provides you with information about traffic on your website that is divided by devices, products, pages, and more.
- Let you create your metrics, dimensions, and dashboard for easy access to data and information.
- Helps you understand your target audience in a better way. You will get real-time updates about your website’s customers, including the pages they are currently exploring. This can help you make your landing page more engaging by providing the customers with a more intuitive experience.
- Let you uncover insights about how the business is performing.
- Let you share the insights with the help of various reporting tools.
- Let you organize and visualize the data suiting business requirements.
Last but not least, Google Analytics comes with tons of features, functionalities, and the ability to create customized reports and dashboards.
- Google Ads
Google Ads can work for almost any business; it doesn’t matter whether it is small, medium, or large. While many marketers think that Google Ads is too expensive, it is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools that can help your business reach new heights.
The features of Google Ads:
- Drive website visits
- Increase the call calls from customers through a click-to-call button
- Increase footfall in your shops
People need to learn Google Ads first in order to use it effectively; else you will be wasting your money. The best part about Google Ads is that return on investment (ROI) is relatively easy to measure. Moreover, new artificial intelligence features make the platform a lot faster and easier to use. The AI features can help you get results faster in Display advertising.
The multiple targeting options allow you to target your customer base based on different factors like age, gender, location, profession, etc. This is something that you will not find in other digital marketing tools.
Most importantly, you can access Google Agency Account Strategist, where you can learn about the latest features that Google provides. Moreover, access to this means access to some beta testing as well.
- Canva Business
If you are in digital marketing, you will understand the need for a quality design tool that can help you create impressive social media posts and other things in marketing. Canva is a prominent design tool that allows you to develop effective marketing campaigns through visual content that can be shared on your blogs, websites, social networks, and other platforms. Visual content is the backbone of any digital marketing campaign. In order to entice the targeted customer base, you need to design compelling posts.
The features of Canva:
- Canva allows you to edit posts and create graphs of any type and kind.
- The tool incorporates numerous templates. It boasts a massive library of stock images, photos, designs, icons, and vectors that you can use to create any type of visual content for your marketing campaign.
- It allows you to choose from a massive collection of designs, such as postcard, brochure, CD cover, wallpaper, book cover, resume, certificate, magazine cover, letterhead, presentation graphic, blog banner, card, poster, flyer, presentation, logo, and social media.
Its simple drag-and-drop design allows you to create visual pieces according to your campaign. The best part is that you don’t need an experienced designer to create visual content for your digital marketing campaign. It is so simple that anyone with no design background can use it.
- Trello
If you are looking for a content management tool that will help you brainstorm and strategize content for your digital marketing campaign, you can opt for Trello. It is one of the most popular content management tools used by hundreds and thousands of digital marketers worldwide to create, schedule, and organize content online.
The platform keeps the whole team together, making communication a lot easier and more manageable. You can assign multiple members from your team to a single card so that they can work on a project together. This way, you will know who’s in charge of designing, writing, editing, posting, and adding call-to-action offers to a post.
The features of Trello:
- Allows you to create cards and incorporate notes on the card topic while creating deadlines and assigning topics to specific teams.
- Facilitates remote working where your teams can access their tasks and projects from anywhere.
You can use Trello for organizing your digital marketing campaigns and ensure that you never miss out on anything that your team is doing.
- Slack
Digital marketers use Slack every single day. With Slack, you can discuss client work, new articles, new projects, and new support tickets, share useful content, and send messages.
If you have a distinct team of digital marketers, you will need a powerful medium to make effective communication with them. This is where Slack comes into play.
The features of Slack:
- Makes it easier to communicate with team members over the web in real time.
- Let you follow everything related to the projects, teams, and channels.
- Let you do message and video conferencing too.
- Assist the teams in collaborating from anywhere
While it seems like a messaging app, it does a lot more than that. Slack can potentially tighten up your organizational efficiency. It is not a collaboration or a project management tool. It serves as a messaging platform with a rich collection of options and settings. It lets you have group conversations that are searchable and public, including private conversations. You can change the color scheme of the interface and create different groups.
