Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Digital Marketing

Traditional marketing started more than a century ago when entrepreneurs began to realize that what they said about their products seemed to make a difference in sales. The more they portrayed the benefits, the more customers wanted to buy.

Digital marketing – the online version of traditional marketing – exists in a very different world to that of the early conventional marketers. Customers are far more educated about what marketing is, the ploys that companies use, and are more discerning about the extent to which they are willing to expose themselves to commercial messages. This awareness makes the job of digital marketers more difficult. Digital marketing is no longer about bombarding customers with catchy jingles (although that’s still part of it), it’s also evolved into something that’s a lot more customer-centric.

• The Customer-Centricity Of Digital Marketing

At root, digital marketing is the use of digital tools to entice customers to buy products. But this simple description belies the complexity of how digital marketing has evolved over the years. It’s not fair to say that it’s just an online version of traditional marketing: it’s an entirely different animal.

Customers have made it clear that they don’t enjoy receiving corporate messages which don’t improve their experience. They do want to know about great products, but they want to be told in a way that makes them feel as if they are still in control of the sales process. Yes, some digital marketing techniques try to push a hard sell like pay-per-click and banner ads, but a lot of digital marketing today focuses on being useful and then hoping that this entices customers.

For instance, consider a manufacturer that sells cutting machines. Rather than just plaster banner ads all over the internet, companies like these are now creating helpful content that customers can use to improve their own operations. Although the content doesn’t lead to a sale directly, that customer could remember that the cutting machine company helped them when they needed it, and are more inclined to return and investigate their products.

It’s this change in emphasis that is the crux of how digital marketing differs from traditional varieties: customers derive value from the advertising. Customers are no longer passive. In case you’re not clear about the concept, here are some more examples of value-added digital marketing strategies:

Instructional videos
Informative blogs
Webinars
Whitepapers
Informational podcasts
Instruction manuals
Guidance infographics

• Should You Embrace Digital Marketing?

Although traditional advertising methods, like television and radio, are still big business, there’s no doubt that they’re in decline. Data suggest that total spending on digital platforms has already outstripped that of traditional platforms by a significant degree.

What’s more, the return per dollar invested is much higher on digital platforms than it is on traditional platforms, thanks to the targeted nature of the advertising. Traditional methods, like TV adverts, market to whoever happens to be watching the television at that particular time, whether they’re interested in your product or not, whereas digital marketing can be more finely-tuned to only go after those people who might buy from you.

• What Else Should You Know About Digital Marketing?

• You Should Focus On Mobile

We’ve witnessed two simultaneous revolutions in the advertising world: the move from traditional to digital, and the move from desktop to mobile. Both these changes are equally important, with one of them being within the digital world itself.

Companies that want to get ahead in the world of digital marketing should adopt a mobile-first strategy. Google released data back in 2016 suggesting that mobile search had eclipsed traditional desktop search for the first time, marking a shift in consumer preferences away from bulky desktops towards their handheld devices.

What does a mobile-first strategy look like? It means doing things like developing mobile apps (as many successful companies have already done), producing a mobile site (as the main site), and providing easy mobile payment options.

• Digital Marketing And Impulse Buying

The purpose of digital marketing is to get customers to part with their hard-earned cash. Some of the time you’ll want to do this using “inbound marketing methods,” like providing the value-added services we discussed earlier. But you may also see an opportunity to get customers to click on your products “at the moment,” without them having gone down any long-winded conversion path.

Digital marketers have applied the term “micro-moments” to those interactions that they have with customers when they arrive on their mobile site and have just a few seconds to fulfill their needs. Building a great micro-moment involves things like making sure that pages load fast, that buying is smooth (no forms to fill out), and that navigation is simple. Without these elements, it’s unlikely that your micro-moments will have the desired effect.

• Social Media

The third significant trend in advertising is towards social media and away from company websites and search engine results. Companies like Facebook are so valuable because many now see them as a new kind of marketplace: a platform on which companies can offer to sell their wares and have meaningful connections with their audience.

Social media offers marketers a genuinely novel way to interact with their customers. Whereas before there was no way to have a one-to-one relationship with every individual potential customer on the internet, that’s now feasible, thanks to social media platforms. Many companies use both wall posts as well as messenger chat facilities to interact directly with customers to a level of granularity not seen before in the world of advertising. Individual agents can meet the needs of specific customers, and companies have an opportunity to go into much more depth about their products, who they are, and what their values are.

• Conclusion

Digital marketing is not a continuation of the past in the digital realm: it’s something that’s fundamentally new. For the first time, customers are getting real value from advertising (besides entertainment) to a level that just wasn’t possible before. Companies that want to be successful in the 21st-century economy need to use these powerful marketing methods to capture their target markets and beat out the competition.

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