Understanding the Who, What, Why and How of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is any internet-based form of marketing. Did you know that, on average, businesses allocate 72% of their marketing budget to digital channels? There’s a simple reason for this: digital marketing works. All of us are spending an increasing amount of our lives online. If your brand is not online, you’re not meeting your customers where they are.

Digital marketing is essential for your brand’s success. It’s an expensive component of your overall marketing strategy, and it’s essential to make the most of your digital presence. Understanding a few basics of your digital marketing campaign can help you get more returns on your investment in online marketing campaigns. In this article, we’ll investigate the who, what, why, and how of your brand’s digital marketing and how to leverage this information most effectively.

The Who: A Digital Marketer’s Job Description

Simply put, a digital marketer is someone who plans, implements, and maintains digital marketing strategies. In order to effectively plan a campaign, marketers must conduct in-depth research to understand the brand, its customers, and its competitors. Digital marketers need a thorough understanding of search engine optimization or SEO. They also oversee content creation, including emails, website copy, social media posts, and digital assets like pdf downloads. Digital marketers have to stay one step ahead of the latest marketing trends so they carefully track what other brands are doing.

To implement their strategies, digital marketers must communicate effectively with many of the brand’s team players. They also need creativity, flexibility, and excellent organizational skills. Finally, to maintain the success of their campaigns, digital marketers have to conduct constant research to gauge the effectiveness of keywords, content, and strategies. They also keep track of leads and implement new ideas for lead generation as needed. Each time a marketer implements a new strategy, they measure its degree of success by analyzing data.

The What: Digital Marketing’s Many Forms

Digital marketing is internet-based marketing, but what exactly does that look like? Digital marketing can take many different forms, and the list is constantly growing. Social media is one of the most important forms of digital marketing. Your brand needs to engage customers on the social platforms they actually use, offering high-interest content that can compete for their attention against everything else in their social feeds.

Text, email, and multimedia messaging is another key form digital marketing can take. Messaging customers about promotions and events, asking for feedback, and sharing new product details are just a few of the ways you can use digital communication for marketing success.

It might seem obvious, but maintaining an effective website is one of the most basic and essential forms of digital marketing. If your brand’s website is outdated, hard to navigate, or boring, your customers may judge your entire company based on their negative online experience. Your other forms of digital marketing should lead customers to your website as often as possible. Be sure it makes a good impression!

These are a few of the many types of digital marketing out there. A good marketing strategy doesn’t rely on just one form–it uses many forms to support one another.

The Why: Key Reasons Why Digital Marketing Is Essential

For your brand to succeed, you simply can’t ignore the importance of digital marketing. What makes this type of marketing so key?

For one thing, digital marketing offers you far more return on your investments than other types of marketing. A really successful digital marketing campaign can generate around 5 dollars in profit for every 1 dollar spent on marketing. Those impressive numbers make your online efforts worthwhile.

Additionally, digital marketing allows you to target the right customers in ways that traditional forms of marketing just can’t. Digital marketing generates mountains of data: click counts, social media comments, views, email open rates, and much more. By analyzing the data, a digital marketer can quickly determine what’s working and what isn’t and adjust the campaign accordingly.

The ease with which you can adjust and tailor your campaign is another major benefit of digital marketing. There’s no need to tear down posters, scrap promotional gifts, or shred thousands of newsletters. Instead, you can change the content of your digital marketing content quickly and easily, in real-time.

There are many more reasons why digital marketing is key to the success of your brand. Forbes explains that there’s no reason to abandon your traditional marketing efforts, but digital marketing is the best way to engage with your customers deeply

How: Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy That Works

You know you need a solid digital marketing strategy. How do you get started? Understanding your customers is the first step. Creating marketing personas can help you figure out what drives your customers, what they’re looking for, and which online spaces they spend time in. A good next step is to determine how you will allocate funds. You should have a social media presence on every major platform, but you may want to spend more marketing dollars on the one your customers prefer. Doing a cost-benefit analysis for each form of digital marketing can help you save money in the long run.

Creating truly relevant content is also a must. If your brand isn’t offering information and entertainment that your customers really enjoy, they won’t engage with it for long. Your content needs to be visually stimulating, easy and fun to read, helpful and accurate. Otherwise, your customers will just scroll past it or unsubscribe.

It’s also important to conduct keyword and SEO research to make sure your content is showing up in searches. Also, analyzing customer engagement with your content is key to measuring the success of your campaign. 

Ready To Make It Happen?

If you’re running a business, your hands are already full. How can you plan, implement and evaluate a digital marketing campaign, too? That’s where we come in. The team of professionals at Personalized Creative can revolutionize your online marketing and deliver innovative solutions. Get in touch today to discover what we can do for your brand!