What Is Digital Marketing? Types, Strategies & Best Practices
by Mike R.
Posted on 12-12-2024 07:59 PM
The best
digital marketing
is a form of direct marketing where you have the opportunity to reach your clients when they need you most.
By leveraging data-driven insights, targeted strategies, and real-time engagement, digital marketing ensures that your message is delivered to the right audience at the right time.
Whether through search engines, social media, email, or personalized ads, it creates meaningful connections that drive customer trust, loyalty, and conversion.
Digital Marketing strategies work for b2b (business to business) as well as b2c (business to consumer) companies, but best practices differ significantly between the two. Here's a closer look at how digital marketing is used in b2b and b2c marketing strategies: b2b clients tend to have longer decision-making processes, and thus longer sales funnels. Relationship-building strategies work better for these clients, whereas b2c customers tend to respond better to short-term offers and messages. B2b transactions are usually based on logic and evidence, which is what skilled b2b digital marketers present. B2c content is more likely to be emotionally-based, focusing on making the customer feel good about a purchase.
Digital marketing is an all-encompassing term that consists of digital channels, such as content marketingopens a new window , seo, email marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing and so on, to create elaborate strategies to reach and connect with prospects and customers. An average user consumes content via the television, computer, tablet, smartphone, radio, and other traditional media. This constant exposure to various types of media has led to information overload, further complicating the buyer’s journey. Digital marketing has allowed brands to stay relevant by making themselves visible through different channels and touchpoints. Apart from traditional marketing channels, such as television, newspapers, billboards, and so on, marketers use these digital channels to guide prospects through their purchase journey and keep in touch with their existing customers.
With a budget in place, it’s time to decide which channels you’ll focus your digital marketing efforts on. The goal is to strike a balance between paid and organic channels. While paid strategies like ppc can garner immediate results, organic strategies like seo come with long-term gains. Pursuing both types of strategies will set you up for digital marketing success. Since you know your target audience at this stage, opt for the channels they use the most. For example, if you’re targeting gen z college students, you would go for platforms like tiktok instead of facebook. By going where your audience already is, you’ll increase your odds of connecting with the right people.
Digital marketing leverages different digital channels to deliver marketing campaigns and connect with customers. It can take on many forms, including blog content, videos, social media posts, display ads , paid media , or email newsletters. These channels are considered owned media because companies own them outright, meaning it may cost less to acquire customers. Digital marketing includes strategies and best practices for interacting with customers at every stage of the buying journey. Watch this short video from google's digital marketing & e-commerce professional certificate on how digital marketing creates value:.
Why Digital Marketing Is Important
Not everyone would consider web design to be its own digital marketing strategy. After all, web design plays into a lot of other strategies, like seo and content marketing. Even so, web design is so important that it’s worth including on this list. Web design is the process of creating the structure, layout, functionality, and content of pages on your company website. Web design covers technical elements like page speed and mobile-friendliness , but it also encompasses aesthetic aspects like color scheme and use of white space. Web design is incredibly important for conveying the right initial impression of your website.
Digital marketing is more important than ever. Some would even argue that digital marketing is more important than traditional marketing strategies. As people are spending more time online and on their phones, digital marketing becomes the best strategy to meet a target market where they are. Digital marketing has become the go-to solution for many businesses and agencies due to its ease of access, quick turnaround time and budget. It helps a business with retaining its current customers as well acquiring new ones. Social media is one of the best tools for a company to retain their current customers and engage with them, and it also provides an opportunity for a business.