What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is the promotion of your business and products using online channels and digital technology. While traditional marketing focuses on offline channels, like TV ads, digital marketing focuses on promoting your business through online tools and social platforms, like website, social media, blogs, newsletter campaigns and more. Content marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, SEO, affiliate marketing, video and SMS messaging all fall under the umbrella of digital marketing.
Why is digital marketing important?
Digital technologies are transforming the potential and practice of marketing—as companies have become more agile, data-driven, and ROI-focused. Digital marketing helps brands and organizations reach a wide audience through multiple online channels and target the prospects that are most likely to buy their products or services. Connecting with customers digitally increases your brand awareness and helps you build a wider audience and community that trusts your brand. In addition, digital marketing tools allow you to measure your success and adjust your business as you see fit.
How is digital marketing different for B2B and B2C?
In B2B marketing, your marketing strategy will focus on lead generation, so directing and converting the highest quality leads for your sales team via your website and digital channels. In B2C marketing, your priority will most likely be to direct consumers to your website – through strong calls-to-action -, where you have created a smooth and user-friendly buyer’s experience for an accelerated purchase.
Setting a digital marketing strategy
Whether your company is B2B or B2C, you still need a digital marketing strategy that will align your business with consumer needs and differentiate it from the competition. These steps will help you design your marketing strategy:
- The first step for a complete digital marketing strategy is to define your target audience and create customer personas based on their characteristics and behaviour.
- The second step is to identify your goals and choose which online tools and tactic will you use.
- Third step is to build your content strategy and decide how to distribute your content, in which platforms, in order to build your brand awareness and attract prospects.
- Embed metrics into your strategy, set key performance indicators and benchmarks to assess your performance. It is crucial to collect your data, analyze it and adjust it, so that you can redirect, customize or personalize your strategy, as needed.
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