What is Digital Marketing and why is it important to your strategy?
Digital Marketing is an umbrella term for all the online marketing efforts that you and your company are doing or will, eventually, do.
Since people are spending more and more time online every year and this presence is getting more and more mobile, it makes sense to invest in digital channels to access your customers pretty much anywhere.
Having a strong online strategy is not just a choice, it’s mandatory in most industries nowadays, and investing in digital marketing is one of the best ways to make sure you and your product will get in front of the right potential customer, at the right time, with the right message.
Beautiful, but, what, in fact, is digital marketing?
In practice, there is a wide range of marketing activities covered by the ‘Digital Marketing’ term, and they are not universally agreed upon, but we know that it’s been a long time since just having a static website and a blog was enough to ensure an online presence.
Users now require a lot more personalization, reliable information, speed, interactive solutions, and a great experience to engage and convert online.
The fact is that if you are not able to offer the minimum necessary to convince your users to stay on your page, chances are that they will never visit you again if they already had.
In order to create this whole digital environment, these are some of the most common assets and activities adopted by companies on their online strategy:
- Website: Although some companies prefer to rely only on social media profiles to be online, having a website is probably the most basic asset to ensure a digital presence. Some of them can become complex platforms, taking care of career pages, investors relations, blogs, and so on. Think ‘website’ in a wider perspective, as a hub of your online presence than just a home page.
- Content Marketing: Content is very important for making a brand standing out online. Content marketing is the dimension of digital marketing that defines how the company will create and share content, including topics, formats, approach, and many other decisions.
- Social Media Marketing: Users spend over 30% of their time on social media, and this is the part of the digital strategy that defines how the brand will communicate, in which social channels, and so on.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Spending time and efforts to be in the first pages at search engine results pages (SERPs) is one of the first efforts companies usually do, and it pays off. SEO defines some strategies to get there, including how to improve the backlinks strategy, what to prioritize in order to create high-quality (targeted) content, and technical aspects of SEO like page speed, for example.
- SEM (Search Engine Marketing): Google and other search engines are some of the best ways to reach your customers while they are actively looking for your product. SEM takes care of thinking on how to use online advertising (such as Google AdWords) to reach the right customer at the right time.
- Email Marketing: Emails have been around for a long time now, but are getting more and more important with strong artificial intelligence and automation features. Email marketing has been an important asset on digital strategies since the beginning, approximating clients, companies, and solutions.
- Marketing Automation: The digital environment is getting more complex and, depending on the size of the company, it needs to be executed by robots. Marketing automation makes it faster, easier, reliable, and, especially, opens a whole opportunity for personalizing messages, offers, and interactions in a really targeted-level. Strong software can help marketers to take decisions and representatively increase acquisition, conversions, and retention in levels never reached before.
What are the competitive advantages of using Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing itself is not a competitive advantage. In some industries is the ‘rule’. Do it or die.
Reaching a world-class level and exploring all the possibilities of Digital Marketing is the real opportunity.
Marketers can take decisions faster, test, improve, and gather real-time feedback in ways that were never possible in traditional media.
It brings a lot of advantages when talking about product development, communications, sales, brand management, and many other aspects.
Digital marketing, when well executed, can make small companies compete with market leaders in equal conditions.
The advantage comes from data and the real possibility of reaching out to millions of daily active users with highly targeted strategies.
Small companies and even individuals can create real marketing engines and, while spending just some couple Dollars per month, reach the right customer all around the world.
Digital Marketing can, indeed, be used by tech giants and market leaders, but it can also be explored by single-person companies to created automated processes that can lead to million Dollars results.
So…
As you can see, I’m an enthusiast of Digital Marketing.
I understand, though, that is not easy to reach world-class-level results.
It will depend on a lot of aspects, from setting up your tools properly, analyzing the right data, defining the right strategy, executing it properly, understanding the market changes, until reaching the bottom of the sales funnel by making your customers become real ambassadors of your solution.
Digital Marketing is not new, but new strategies are created every day.
There is a lot of room for innovation, combinations of tools, and experiments.
I believe that the best way to start doing Digital Marketing is by experimenting, and this is my tip for those who read by this point:
Experiment and you can, maybe, be the next one to be beating your competitors with strong and sustainable digital strategies!
