Digital marketing is a general term for all online marketing activities. Businesses use digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and their own websites to connect with both current and prospective customers.
These days, people spend twice as much time online as they used to a decade ago. The way that people shop and buy has also changed, meaning offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be anymore. Today, you need find customers where they are already spending time, which is on the internet. Therefore, digital marketing has become extremely important.
An experienced inbound marketer might argue that inbound marketing and digital marketing are the same, but there are some differences. Marketers who use digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their targeted customers to their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. Everything is on the internet and people can really get good traffic with internet marketing.
Digital marketing is just an umbrella term describing online marketing strategies and tools of any kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.
What is Digital Marketing?
From the website, to online brochures, email marketing, etc. there are a variety of strategies and tools that can be considered to be digital marketing. A good marketer knows how best to use the different strategies and tools.
These are some of the most common;
Tools
- Blog posts
- Websites
- Info graphics
- Social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
- Ebooks and whitepapers
- Interactive tools
- Branding assets (logos, fonts, etc.)
- Online brochures and look books and eBooks
- Earned online coverage (PR, social media, and reviews)
Strategies
Content Marketing. The creation and promotion of content in order to generate brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers.
Marketing automation is software used to automate marketing activities. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, etc.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to ‘rank’ higher in search engine results pages. This increases the amount of natural (or free) traffic to your website.
Inbound marketing is an approach to attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers using online content.
Social Media Marketing is a strategy of promoting brands and content on social media to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business.
Email Marketing is where companies use emails to communicate and market to their audiences. It is used to promote discounts, sales, events, content, and to direct traffic to the website.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a way to drive traffic to your website by paying a publisher each time your ad on their site is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google AdWords.
Native advertising are adverts that are mostly content-based and are featured on a platform alongside non-paid content. Many people also find that social media advertising is ‘native’, such as Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising.