More on Digital Marketing
What is Digital Marketing?
Plain and simple, digital marketing is advertising using digital channels including social media, search engines, email, apps, and other digital channels.
The goal of digital marketing can vary from driving traffic to generating sales leads, driving traffic, or any other desired action from users.
With a basic understanding of what digital marketing is as a concept, let's dive into the various types of digital marketing.
The Types of Digital Marketing
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Search Marketing: Search marketing includes both organic (SEO) and paid search (Google Ads). The goal of search marketing is to show up in search results for specific, relevant keywords. In the search results, there are paid results followed by organic results. To show up in the organic results requires a good SEO strategy involving keyword research, content marketing, technical optimization of your site, backlinks, and more. In order to show up in the paid results, you'll need to set up a Google Ads account and bid on specific keywords and pay for each click that you get from that ad. Search marketing is like a world of its own and requires a lot of knowledge and creativity to do it well, but if you execute properly it can result in a lot of growth for your business.
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Social Media Marketing: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and all social media platforms can be lumped into social media marketing. Within social media marketing, you can take both organic and paid strategies for your desired outcomes. Building an organic following on one of these platforms will require you to produce content that engages your target audience and creative strategies to grow your following. Within each of these social media tools, there are also paid options that allow you to pay to show your ads to users on the platform. Paid social media marketing can be a great way to find new customers (prospecting) but you'll need to make sure you are targeting the right audiences with the right messaging to do it efficiently and effectively.
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Email Marketing: Although it is one of the older forms of marketing, it remains one of the most effective ways to market. Email marketing requires you to put in the effort and get creative in finding ways to build an email list. Once you have a strong email list in place and a good strategy to continue growing that list, you can leverage that list to sell your products or services, offer promotions, or engage with your customers.
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Other Digital Marketing: While the above cover some of the most popular forms of digital marketing, there are lots of other ways to go about digital marketing and growing your business digitally like site optimization and marketing analytics.
Prospecting vs Remarketing
Another key distinction to consider when thinking about which tools to learn and use is to understand the different objectives of prospecting and remarketing.
We can generally categorize our digital marketing efforts into 2 buckets: driving new customers to the site and converting customers once they have interacted with us in some way. Driving new customers to the site is what we’d call prospecting and converting customers who have already interacted with us would be considered remarketing.
Driving Traffic
If we are newer to business or just want to drive more traffic to our site then we can look at a variety of prospecting strategies, ways to drive new users to the site.
SEO
Search engine optimization can pay off big if done well and can drive sustainable traffic to our site. If we are able to get to the top of the search results for the relevant keywords to our site then we will consistently be found on the search engines and generate traffic. Doing SEO well is no easy task and requires a full-on SEO strategy. Some of the core elements of SEO include:
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Content marketing: writing high-quality content for your audience
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Backlinks: getting links from other reputable and relevant sites
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Pages/Tags: making the relevant pages to match different search intent
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Site Speed: ensuring a speedy site and experience
Google Ads
As mentioned above, Google Ads is the paid “brother” of SEO as it also gets you into the search results. Getting into the search results with Google Ads is generally easier than with SEO but it is more costly. As it is commonly referred to as pay-per-click, you need to pay for each click that you get through Google Ads. Google Ads can be a great way to get started in search marketing to drive new traffic to your site. One of the key sticking points of search marketing is that you are meeting users while they are looking for a specific product or service.
Social Media
Leveraging social media platforms, both organically and inorganically, can be another great way to drive new prospects to your site. With paid social media, you can show ads for your product or service to people within the social media experience. Social media marketing is generally less costly than something like Google Ads but because they are not “in search” of the product at the moment they will generally convert at a lower rate. Social media can be a great way to quickly and cost-efficiently drive a lot of traffic to your site. In order to increase efficiency and effectiveness, make sure to find the right audiences to target and deliver engaging marketing copy.
There are lots of ways to drive traffic to your site and generate buzz for your product or service, but these are a couple to get started.
Remarketing
Now, let’s say we are continually getting lots of traffic to our site but we aren’t converting as many people as we’d like. This is where remarketing comes into play. Generally users will not convert the first time they visit your site so it is your job to remind them to come back with remarketing.
Google Ads
We discussed Google Ads as a prospecting tool but it also serves as a remarketing tool. You can create audiences of site visitors and deliver display ads to those visitors across the web. In order to do this effectively, make sure to segment your visitors into the right groups and deliver tailored and compelling ads. For example if you sell office supplies and someone was on your pages for pens, you’ll probably want to serve them an ad for pens with some sort of special offer.
Social Media
Similar to the way Google Ads remarketing works, you can also use social media platforms to retarget website visitors. The same principles will apply as the above - make sure to segment your audiences and tailor your messaging.
Email Marketing
Another time-tested way to retarget site visitors is to leverage an email marketing strategy. One of the biggest challenges with email marketing for retargeting is actually getting people’s email addresses, but if set up a good system for email capture, then email marketing can be a big source for targeting. Email marketing is relatively inexpensive and can convert pretty well since these are already people who expressed interest by giving you their email addresses. You’ll need to get creative about email capture and you may want to offer something free to get the email.
Learn More & Master Digital Marketing
You can keep reading at our digital marketing blog, Google Ads blog, or SEO blog.
We hope to see you soon at one of our digital marketing classes so we can help you master digital marketing and bring the tools and strategies back to your business to drive results.
Social Media Marketing Courses
Learn how to build, target and convert leads from the major social media platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, through paid and organic marketing techniques.
Social Media Marketing Bootcamp
12 Hours $650
In this two-day bootcamp you'll learn why Social Media Marketing has become one of the most powerful digital marketing tools. Learn how to build, target and convert leads from the major social media platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, through paid and free marketing techniques.
LinkedIn & Instagram Marketing
6 Hours $325
In this one-day course, we'll take a close look at Instagram and LinkedIn and help you choose the platform and digital marketing strategy that works best for you. Learn how to build, target, and convert leads through paid and organic marketing techniques.
Facebook Marketing
6 Hours $325
Learn how to create and manage successful Facebook ad campaigns, including setting up business pages, leveraging Facebook groups, and creating targeted ads. We'll also review conversion tracking, audience targeting, and Facebook Pixels to ensure that you earn a high return on your advertising budget.