Digital marketing is the act of promoting products and services through digital channels, such as social media, SEO, email, and mobile apps. Any form of marketing that involves electronic devices is considered digital marketing.
It can be done online and offline; in fact, both kinds are important for a well-rounded digital marketing strategy.
Do you want to learn more about digital marketing? This guide will cover everything you need to know to get familiar with digital marketing.
Why Digital Marketing Matters
In 2015, many clients spent hundreds of millions of dollars on billboard advertising.
Today, most companies have moved to online marketing.
That’s because Google and Facebook generate more revenue than any traditional media company. After all, they control more eyeballs. That’s why digital marketing matters; it’s where the attention is.
Do me a favor; take a peek at the passenger seat the next time you give someone a ride. Just for a second.
Chances are, they’ll be looking at their phone.
Who will see those advertisements if no one is looking at the road?
What’s more: the share of people spending more time using electronic devices continues to rise, while print advertising continues to decline.
That means you don’t have much time to figure out this digital marketing stuff.
Nearly 5 billion people worldwide go online to shop, learn, entertain themselves, and even work.
If you want to reach those people, digital marketing is a must.
Intro to Digital Marketing
There are five main categories of digital marketing:
- enhanced offline marketing
- radio marketing
- television marketing
- phone marketing
- QR codes
Enhanced offline marketing is a form of marketing that is done offline but enhanced with electronic devices.
For example, if your restaurant uses iPads for your customers to place orders, then the offline experience of eating Thai food is enhanced with this electronic device.
People have been using digital media to enhance their marketing for decades.
Next, there’s radio marketing. The next time you hear an annoying, over-enthusiastic car dealer shout every word of his or her commercial, thank Mr. Marconi.
Of course, we can’t forget television marketing, which has been around for more than half a century.
Phone marketing is the biggest and fastest-growing area of offline marketing, with admittedly many flops, busts, and failures as well.
Enhanced Offline Marketing
What’s the difference between a billboard somewhere in the desert of Arizona and a billboard in New York City’s Times Square?
The size? The product?
Three letters: LED. Light emitting diodes.
All of the billboards in Times Square are electronic!
Why? Because in the desert of Arizona, no one’s competing with you for people’s attention. If you have a billboard at all, you win.
In Times Square, attention is probably more valuable than anywhere else in the world, with more than 360,000 visitors each day.
If you want to be distracted, there are buses, taxis, promoters shouting, and then, of course, the electronic billboards. Some of them are even interactive, showing live feeds of the people on the square or pictures of customers.
Renting a billboard space on Times Square for just one day can set you back over $50,000.
Radio Marketing
In fact, it’s thriving:
- Nearly 244 million Americans listen to the radio each month.
- People spend an average of 99 minutes per day listening to radio content.
- Radio ad spend is predicted to hit 11 billion USD.
In recent years, radio made a smart move: having the hosts read out advertising sponsorships at the beginning of shows.
To create a sponsorship, find your local radio stations with a quick Google search. Find a station whose audience reflects your company’s target demographic; radio stations should be able to provide you with the data that helps you select the right fit.
For example, if your company sells maternity products, you want to find a radio program whose average listener is a female between the ages of 24 and 40.
If you go the traditional radio advertising route, the key is to be entertaining and catch the listener’s attention.
TV Marketing
Television marketing is so huge, it’s unlikely to ever fully go away. However, it is changing as consumers move away from traditional television in favor of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Some fast facts about TV marketing:
- 122.4 million households in the US have a television.
- cable providers lost 6 million subscribers a year between 2019 and 2021.
- 85 percent of US households have at least one streaming service.
Though cable TV ads are harder to target the right audience, have a low ROI compared to other forms of digital advertising, and generally seem irrelevant in the digital age, there is one type of television ad that may still be worth it; but it will cost you big.
Remember I mentioned renting a billboard in Times Square can cost $50,000 a day?
A 60-second commercial aired during the Super Bowl costs $5.6 million.
The often viral and memorable commercials still pay for themselves thanks to their cross-pollinating effect.
Roughly 10 percent of all TV commercial-related shares on social media come from Super Bowl ads.
So do about 8 percent of all views on Youtube that go to TV commercial videos.
If your commercial makes it to the blacklist (commercials the network decides can’t be shown on TV), the viral effect is usually even stronger, like the infamous Carl’s Junior ad that couldn’t be shown in the 2015 Super Bowl.
What’s more, these commercials become online assets, generating millions of YouTube views over time.
Phone Marketing
Nearly 75 percent of Americans own a smartphone, and more people access the internet from their phones than via a desktop PC or laptop.
Mobile marketing is here to stay. In 2015, the amount spent on mobile ads exceeded that spent on desktop ads for the first time and the market continues to grow.
Let’s look at some offline ways to market your products using phone marketing.
Calling and Texting
Cold calling is the act of calling a person with no prior contact in an effort to make a sale.
Cold calling can generate an average of three sales per day, so it doesn’t have the scalability of social media or email. Still, it can be a valid method of marketing in some industries.
What works better is marketing via texting, an “app” available on every phone.
Online or offline, a text message is almost a guaranteed read.
While you should definitely get permission first, for example, by having your customers text a certain word to a phone number, several providers offer text marketing at scale.
There are several ways to leverage text message marketing.
Special deals, coupons, and discounts are great for restaurants to get additional customers and turn walk-ins into regulars.
Using text reminders as customer service can also enhance your mobile marketing as many pharmacies do. They alert customers when their prescription is ready for pickup.
Another option is to create a loyalty program, where you text participating customers special deals and giveaways.
QR Codes
QR codes are a type of barcode that take users to a specific web page or app.
You used to have to download a specific app to use QR codes, but now all you need is the camera on your smartphone to scan and open the site.
They can be used to deliver ads, send users to a video, or even be combined with other forms of enhanced offline marketing.
Digital Tips to Expand Your Brand Presence and Reach
In a world where tools like Google Analytics let you track the conversion rate of each page of your website, and platforms like Facebook Ads and Google AdWords let you bid for leads and sales, it’s understandable that many marketers forget about the value of branding.
Branding is the oft-ignored side of digital marketing — a strategy that produces real results over the course of months, years, and decades instead of minutes, hours, and days. It’s slow, traditional, and long-term — three characteristics that make it a digital outlier.
While branding doesn’t produce the immediate results of a PPC campaign, it’s one of the most valuable marketing assets around. An established, trusted brand can bring new customers into your business in huge numbers, propelling you to the top of your industry.
Luckily, taking the first steps toward building a trusted brand for your business isn’t as difficult as it might seem. Below, we’ve listed tips to help you establish, expand and strengthen your digital brand presence as a B2B or B2C company.
Become a content authority in your industry
One of the most effective ways to establish and strengthen your brand is through content.
Whether it’s a blog or video content, the most well-known brands tend to be the ones with lots of engaging, authoritative content. Content is a great way to define your brand as one that’s interested in helping and teaching people at no cost.
In B2B, brands like Moz have defined themselves as authoritative sources of information using blog content. Moz’s blog reaches hundreds of thousands of readers every month, increasing its presence and reach.
In B2C, brands like Red Bull use video content to generate millions of impressions, all of which have a positive effect on brand recognition. Red Bull’s top YouTube videos have reached tens of millions of people — reach that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars using paid media.
Since 2006, Red Bull has used video content to generate almost 1.5 billion impressions across its total library of videos.
Each of these impressions is an advertisement for Red Bull’s brand — one that viewers are very unlikely to forget. Whenever someone reads your blog post, views your video, or listens to you on a podcast, they’ll develop a stronger impression of your company.
While Red Bull’s videos are spectacular, content doesn’t necessarily need to be expensive to be effective. An engaging, interesting blog post can generate tens of thousands of impressions, all at a very low cost.
Content also has a complementary effect on SEO, with engaging content attracting links as well as page views. This makes it a great long-term strategy for brand strengthening while also improving your website’s search visibility.
Use Facebook and Twitter ads to promote content
Platforms like Facebook Ads and Twitter Ads are invaluable tools for content promotion. Both allow you to reach a large, highly targeted audience of people likely to respond positively to your brand.
Using Facebook Ads, you can target people who like similar products and companies to your own, helping you reach a highly responsive audience. Twitter’s ad platform even lets you target the audiences of specific brands and people.
This means that you can promote your content to an extremely specific audience, limiting your reach to the people most likely to read and respond to your content. In effect, you can add to your brand without ever reaching people who are unlikely to become customers.
Become a prolific guest blogger
For brands with a clearly defined audience, guest blogging is one of the best ways to put your content (and company) in front of responsive, interested readers.
Digital marketing guru Neil Patel has one of the strongest brands in the online marketing world, largely because he has guest posted on hundreds of authoritative marketing blogs over the last few years, from Entrepreneur and Search Engine Land to Social Media Examiner and Hubspot.
“Prosumer” brand WP Curve, which has a target audience of entrepreneurs and freelancers in need of WordPress help, built its brand by guest blogging on entrepreneurship blogs and digital strategy websites.
If you have a clearly defined target customer audience, guest posting is one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to strengthen your brand. It’s 100% free, and the only real cost involved is the time required to think up content ideas and write posts.
Since people are more likely to respond to content than a banner ad, you’ll have an advantage over your competitors that rely on paid media. Through guest blogging, you’ll likely generate a large amount of conversions and new customers while you establish your brand.
Arguably the biggest advantage of guest blogging is that it lets you tap into the authority of an existing website. Reach the right audience through the right blog and you could win over tens of thousands of readers with a single blog post.
Focus 100% on branding, not conversions
Online, it’s extremely easy to track the exact response rate and profitability of an advertisement, right down to the top-performing placements and demographics. This makes it tempting to focus on conversion rate and short-term ROI as the barometer of a campaign’s effectiveness.
The end result of this is that many marketers launch social, search and display campaigns with branding in mind, only to compromise them by optimizing for direct response metrics like ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and conversion rate.
Branding works best when there’s no pushiness or sense of urgency. The world’s most effective branding campaigns don’t push you to buy a certain product or take action — instead, they focus entirely on associating a specific feeling with a certain brand.
Nike’s famous Just Do It commercials don’t end with a call to action — they end with a flash of the Nike logo. Old Spice’s brilliant The Man Your Man Could Smell Like campaign didn’t encourage people to buy anything – instead, it made a boring and outdated brand into something fun.
Since the goals of a branding campaign are somewhat opposite to those of direct response, it’s best to keep branding and direct response separate. View conversions from branding as a lucky free extra, as the real value of branding, is only visible over the long term.
