What is Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the use of the Internet to reach consumers. Digital marketing is a broad field, including attracting customers via content marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, social media,
These days if your business is not online you don’t exist.
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Enter digital marketing — in other words, basically any form of marketing that exists online.

The Top 7 categories of Digital Marketing are:

  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Search engine marketing (SEM)
  • Content marketing.
  • Social Media Marketing (SMM)
  • Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
  • Affiliate marketing.
  • Email marketing.

What Can Digital Marketing Do For Your Company?

Going into 2021 and beyond digital marketing is critical for your company and brand awareness. As mentioned before if you are not online you don’t exist. Digital marketing content is so common that consumers now expect and rely on it as a way to learn about your company or other brands.
Because as mentioned above digital marketing has so many options and strategies associated with it, you can get creative and experiment with a large variety of marketing tactics even on on a limited budget. With digital marketing unlike old school types of marketing you can also use tools like analytics dashboards like Google Search Console to monitor the success and return of your marketing campaigns more than you could with a traditional promotional content — such as a television, radio, newspaper or magazine ad.

How should your business define digital marketing?

Digital marketing is defined by the use of numerous digital channels to connect with prospective and returning customers where they spend much of their time: online. From your website itself to a business’s online branding assets — digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond — there’s a spectrum of tactics that fall under the umbrella of “digital marketing.”

The Ten Different Types of Digital Marketing Explained In Detail

1. SEO aka Search Engine Optimization

This is the process of optimizing your website or your Google My Business page to “rank” higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of “organic” (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include websites, blogs, and infographics. In the long run this is the most cost effective means of marketing as it works for you 24/7 365 days a year.
There are four primary ways to approach SEO in order to generate qualified traffic to your website. These include:

  • On page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the content that exists “on the individual pages of your website” when looking at a website. By researching keywords for their search volume, difficulty and intent (or meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) those questions produce.
  • Off page SEO: This type of SEO refers to all of the activities that you and others do away from your website to raise the ranking of a page with search engines. Though many people associate off-page SEO with link building, it goes beyond that. Many activities that don’t result in a standard link on other sites are important for off-page optimization. At Digital Papercuts we specialize in using cutting edge techniques for off page SEO, such as creating strong tier one links to your site and then feeding link juice to those tier one links.
    Technical SEO: This type of SEO focuses on the unseen part of your website, and how your pages are coded. Image compression, (Schema) structured data, and CSS file optimization are all forms of technical SEO that can increase your website’s loading speed and make your website more readable to the search engines like Google.
  • Local GMB Ranking: If you have a loal business you already understand the importance of being ranked high or in the top 3 of Google Maps. There are multiple ways of optimizing your Google My Business page for higher ranking. Some of the more common methods include adding Geotagged images, Posting Regular content, Getting positive online reviews, Updating your services and service area and making sure all your business citations match your GMB listing.

2. Content Marketing

Content Marketing denotes the creation and promotion of content on your website of social media for the purpose of generating greater brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and more customers. The channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy include:

  • Infographics: Sometimes, readers want you to show, not tell them something. Infographics are a form of visual content that helps website visitors visualize a concept you want to help them learn.Video Sales Letters (VSL’s) are becoming a extremely popular way of presenting information.
  • Blog posts: Writing and publishing articles on a company blog (such as what we are doing here) helps you demonstrate your industry expertise and generates organic search traffic for your business. This ultimately gives you more opportunities to convert website visitors into leads for your sales team.
  • E-books and whitepapers: Ebooks, whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps further educate website visitors. It also allows you toe xchange content for a reader’s contact information, generating leads for your company and moving people through the buyer’s journey.It is easy to create an e-book using software such as Squibble.

3. Sponsored Content

With sponsored content, you as a brand pay another company or entity to create and promote content that discusses your brand or service in some way. This is most commonly referred to as influencer marketing with Instagram being the most well known platform for this. With this type of sponsored content, a brand pays an influencer to publish posts or videos related to the company on social media.
Another type of sponsored content could be a blog post or article that is written to highlight a topic, service, or brand.
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4. Social Media Marketing

ocial Media Marketing is about using social media channels to increase your companies brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate fresh leads for your business. The channels you can use in social media marketing include:

  • Facebook.
  • Twitter.
  • TikTok
  • LinkedIn.
  • Instagram.
  • Snapchat.
  • Pinterest.
  • YouTube

5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC is a very popular method of driving traffic to your website by paying for your ad to be seen online. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google’s search engine results pages at a price “per click” of the links you place. We have a very good Google and Bing Ads Department that can create thousands of Keyword optimized ads for you. Other channels where you can use PPC include:

  • Paid ads on Facebook:Here, users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the newsfeeds of peoplewho match your business’s audience.
  • Twitter Ads campaigns: Here, users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges to the news feeds of a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplish a specific goal for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
  • YouTube: YouTube isn’t just a good place to create content on but it is a great place to get your ads seen-even on competitors YouTube channels.
  • Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background. This is generally better for an older or more professional demographic audience.
  • TikTok: The new kid on the block and a great way to reach the sub-30 crowd. One of the great things about TikTok is that there isn’t a lot of competition..yet…

6. Affiliate Marketing

This is a type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include:

Vidnami Youtube cheat sheet

7. Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. Many people also consider social media advertising such as posting on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram to be “native”.
 
8. Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences through retargeting. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business’s website. The types of emails you might send in an email marketing campaign include:

  • Blog subscription newsletters.
  • Follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded something.
  • Customer welcome emails.
  • Holiday promotions to loyalty program members.

MJML email is a up and coming method that people are using to increase their e-mail open rates by being able to create amazing looking content rich e-mails.

9. Online PR

Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s much like traditional PR, but in the online space. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:

  • Reporter outreach via social media: HARO:-“Help A Reporter Out” is one way but is very saturated by offers. Talking to journalists on Twitter, for example, is another way to develop a relationship with the press that produces earned media opportunities for your company.
  • Engaging online reviews of your company: When someone reviews your company online be it on Yelp, Google, Facebook or on your website, whether that review is good or bad, your instinct might be not to touch it. On the contrary, engaging company reviews helps you humanize your brand and deliver powerful messaging that protects your reputation.

reputation management image of a man with a laptop and phone managing his reviews
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  • Paid for Press Release Services.
  • Engaging comments on your personal website or blog: Similar to the way you’d respond to reviews of your company, responding to the people who are reading your content is the best way to generate productive conversation around your industry.

10. Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing refers to a marketing methodology wherein you attract and engage your prospects or customers at every stage of the online experience. You can use every digital marketing tactic listed above, throughout an inbound marketing strategy for creating a customer experience that works with the customer, not against them. Here are some classic examples of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing:

  • Blogging vs. annoying pop-up ads
  • Video marketing (VSL’s) vs. traditional advertising
  • Email retargeting lists vs. email spam

Different Types of Digital Marketers

Just as their are many forms of Digital Marketing there are many forms of Digital Marketers. At Digital Papercuts we are a Digital Marketing Agency and practice many forms of Digital Marketing for our clients..
A Digital Marketer usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI) for each channel so they can properly measure the company’s performance across each one. A digital marketer who’s in charge of SEO, for example, measures their website’s “organic traffic” or their GMB Map rankings on a regular basis in order to gauge success or failure to achieve the desired result.
Digital marketing is carried out across many marketing roles today. In small companies, one generalist might own many of the digital marketing tactics described above at the same time. In larger companies, these tactics have multiple specialists that each focus on just one or two of the brand’s digital channels.
Here are some examples of these Digital Marketing specialists:

SEO Manager

Main KPIs: Organic traffic

In short, SEO managers get the business to rank on Google. Using a variety of approaches to search engine optimization, this person might work directly with content creators to ensure the content they produce performs well on Google — even if the company also posts this content on social media.
GMB Specialists-A GMB SEO specialist focuses their efforts on one key metric. Google Map Rankings.

Content Marketing Specialist

Main KPIs: Time on page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel subscribers

Content marketing specialists are the digital content creators. They frequently keep track of the company’s blogging calendar, and come up with a content strategy that includes video as well. These professionals often work with people in other departments to ensure the products and campaigns the business launches are supported with promotional content on each digital channel.

Social Media Manager or SMM

Main KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares

The role of a social media manager is easy to infer from the title, but which social networks they manage for the company depends on the industry. Above all, social media managers establish a posting schedule for the company’s written and visual content across various social media platforms.This employee might also work with the content marketing specialist to develop a strategy for which content to post on which social network. As an example our TikTok management involves creating a scheduling calender going out 12 months.
(Note: Per the KPIs above, “impressions” refers to the number of times a business’s posts appear on the newsfeed of a user.)

Digital Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing

On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur  online, and both focus on creating online content for people to see. So what’s the difference?
The term “digital marketing” doesn’t differentiate between push and pull marketing tactics (or what we might now refer to as ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ methods). Both can still fall under the umbrella of digital marketing.
Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space regardless of whether it’s relevant or welcomed. For example, the banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren’t necessarily ready to receive it.
On the other hand, digital marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers towards their websites by providing content that is helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog such as this one, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.
Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, engage, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.

Can All Businesses Use Digital Marketing?

Yes, Digital marketing can work for all businesses in any industry. Regardless of what your business does or sells. Digital marketing still involves building out buyer personas to identify your audience’s needs, and creating valuable online content. However, that’s not to say all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way.

Business to Business: B2B Digital Marketing

If your company is business-to-business (B2B), your digital marketing efforts are likely to be centered around online lead generation, with the end goal being for someone to speak to a salesperson. For that reason, the role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality leads for your salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels.
Your Website or a Product or Service specific landing page can become your best lead generator if you do it right. Learn hge hereow to create a landing page here.
Beyond your website, you’ll probably choose to focus your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending their time online.

Business to Consumer: B2C Marketing

Business-to-consumer (B2C) digital marketing, depending on the price point of your service or products, is to attract people to your website or landing page and have them become customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson. Kaching!!!
For that reason, you’re probably less likely to focus on ‘leads’ in their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an fast and easy sales funnel from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment that they make a purchase. This will often mean putting your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).
For B2C companies, channels like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.

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Huntington Beach SEO Management Digital Papercuts

 

Benefits of Digital Marketing

1. You can target only the people most likely to purchase your product or service.

If you place an advertisement on TV, in a magazine, or on a billboard, you have limited control over who sees the ad. Of course, you can measure certain demographics — including the magazine’s typical readership, or the demographic of a certain neighborhood — but it’s still largely a shot in the dark. Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to identify and target a highly-specific audience, and send that audience personalized, high-converting marketing messages.
This can be done through geotargeting, targeting different demographics or audience interest, or through keyword optimization.
For instance, you might take advantage of social media’s targeting features to show social media ads to a certain audience based on variables such as age, gender, location, interests,  or behaviors. Alternatively, you might use PPC or SEO strategies to serve ads to users who’ve shown interest in your product or service, or who’ve searched specific keywords that relate to your industry.
Digital marketing enables you to conduct the research necessary to identify your ideal customer, and lets you refine your marketing strategy over time to ensure you’re reaching prospects most likely to buy. Best of all, with data analysis digital marketing helps you to retarget and refine your target market groups. .

2. It can be more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods.

Digital marketing enables you to track campaigns on a daily basis and decrease the amount of money you’re spending on a certain channel if it isn’t demonstrating high ROI or increase the budget on campaigns that are really paying off..The same can’t be said for traditional forms of advertising. It doesn’t matter how your newspaper ad or billboard performs — it still costs the same, whether or not it converts for you.
With digital marketing, you have complete control over where you choose to spend your money. Perhaps rather than paying for PPC campaigns forever, you choose to spend money on SEO to produce long term results over time. A digital marketing strategy allows you to continuously pivot, ensuring you’re never wasting money on channels that don’t perform well. digital marketing is a more cost-effective solution, and provides you unique opportunities to ensure you’re getting the most bang for your buck.

3. You can compete with the big boys.

If you work for a small business, it’s likely difficult for you to compete with the major brands in your industry, many of which have millions of dollars to invest in television commercials or nationwide campaigns. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to outrank the big players through strategic digital marketing initiatives. Your marketing efforts can compete with well known national brands but with messages that are laser targeted for your ideal customer.
For instance, you might identify certain keywords known as long-tail keywords that relate to your product or service, such as in our case Huntington Beach SEO and create high-quality content to help you rank on search engines for those keywords. Search engines don’t care which brand is biggest — instead, search engines will prioritize content that resonates best with the target audience and meet the search query the best.
Additionally, social media enables you to reach new audiences through influencer marketing.

4. Marketing Analysis-It Is All Measurable.

Digital marketing can give you a comprehensive, start-to-finish view of all the metrics that might matter to your company including impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on page. This is one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing. Everyone knows about ‘cookies’ and tracking. You can easily get the information of what your online visitors are doing through the addition of a pixel on your website or ad. While traditional advertising can be useful for certain goals, its biggest drawback is measurability.
Here are a few examples:

Website Traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software, available in marketing platforms like Google Search Console or Facebook Business Manager..
You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.
This data helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.
With offline marketing, it’s difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. Afterall, how do you know if someone even looked at your ad in a newspaper. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people’s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the sales funnel.

Lead Gen and Content Performance

Imagine you’ve created a brochure and mailed it to a person — that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash as is common with most sales materials.
Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page, how long they viewed the page and at what point they left the page or went through to your call to action.

Where To Start: What types of digital content should you create first?

The kind of online content you create depends on your audience’s needs at different stages in the sales funnel.  On a basic level, your online content should aim to help your prospects meet their goals, and overcome their challenges. You’ll need to think about when they’re most likely to be ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they’re at in their sales funnel. We call this mapping.
With mapping, the goal is to target content according to:

  1. The characteristics of the person who will be consuming it (that’s where buyer demographics come in).
  2. How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage). Are they looky loos or interested buyers.

In terms of the format of your content, there are a lot of different things to try. Here are some options we’d recommend using at each stage of the sales funnel:

A. The Awareness Stage

  • Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.. In our own case we do this not just foor education but to be able to rank higher in the search engines ourselves by showing the search engines we are relevant.
  • Infographics. They increase your chances of being found via social media when others share your content.
  • Short videos. Video Sales Letters aka VSL’s are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by hosting them on platforms likeTikTok or YouTube.

B. The Consideration Stage

  • E-Books: People like getting e-books even if they don’t read the entire thing. Great for lead generation as they’re generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive it. It is a great way of capturing e-mails
  • Research reports or Product reviews. Again, this is a high value content piece which is great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry can also work for the awareness stage though. .
  • Webinars. As they’re a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video and can demand a higher dollar value than a simple report or e-book can..

C. The Decision Stage

  • Case studies. Having detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchasing decision but want to see proof.
  • Testimonials. If case studies aren’t a good fit for your business, having short testimonials around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of testimonials a little more loosely. If you’re a restaurant these might take the form of photos of people enjoying a meal in your restaurant

Summary

To get started with digital marketing:

 

1. Define your goals.

When you’re first getting started with promoting your business online, it’s critical you start by identifying and defining your goals, since you’ll craft your strategy differently depending on those goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might want to pay more attention to reaching new audiences via social media channels like Facebook.
Alternatively, perhaps you want to increase sales on a specific product — if that’s the case, it’s more important you focus on paid advertising. .
Whatever the case, it’s easiest to shape a digital marketing strategy after you’ve determined your company’s goals.

2. Identify your target audience.

We’ve mentioned this before, but one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is the opportunity to target specific audiences – however, you can’t take advantage of that benefit if you haven’t first identified what your target audience is. Of course, it’s important to note, your target audience might vary depending on the channel or goal(s) you have for a specific campaign.
For instance, perhaps you’ve noticed most of your audience is younger and prefers funny memes and quick videos, Think TikTok and Instagram — but your LinkedIn audience tends to be older professionals who are looking for more tactical advice. You’ll want to vary your content to appeal to these different target audiences.
If you’re starting from scratch, feel free to take a look at How to Find Your Target Audience.

3. Establish a budget for each digital channel.

As with anything, the budget you determine really depends on what elements of digital marketing you’re looking to add to your strategy.Everything either costs money or time and let us not kid ourselves time equals money.
If you’re focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation for a preexisting website, the good news is you don’t need very much budget at all. Much of it can be done with just time. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless you’re planning to outsource the work, the only investment you’ll need is your time. But determining how much your time is worth may determine if you can do it yourself or need to hire someone.
You can get started by hosting a website and creating content using Groovepage.or their Groovekart platform.
With outbound techniques like online advertising there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the advertising. Generally the more you spend the greater your reach.
For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you’ll bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google’s search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is why it’s a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.

4. Strike a good balance between paid and free digital strategies.

An digital marketing strategy likely needs both paid and free aspects to truly be effective.
For instance, if you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you’re likely to see strong results within the first six months despite minimal ad spend. We generally advise our clients to spend more initially on advertising until the SEO results begin to kick in, then to lower their ad spend.
Ultimately, it’s recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach using content, SEO, and social media for more long-term, sustainable success.
When in doubt, try both as we recommend doing, and focus on your process as you learn which channels — free or paid – perform best for your brand.

5. Learn about Analytics.

Finally, to create a great digital marketing strategy for the long-term, it’s imperative you learn how to change directions based off your analytics.
Perhaps after a couple of months you find your audience isn’t as interested in your content on TikTok or Instagram anymore — but they love what you’re creating on Twitter or YouTube. Sure, this might be an opportunity to re-examine your TikTok or Instagram strategy as a whole, but it might also be a sign that your audience prefers a different channel to consume branded content.
Alternatively, perhaps you find an older web page isn’t getting the traffic it used to. You might consider updating the page or getting rid of it entirely (with the proper deletion method so that Google knows it is no longer there) to ensure visitors are finding the freshest, most relevant content for their needs.
Digital marketing provides businesses with incredibly flexible opportunities for growth.

I’m ready to try digital marketing. Now what?

If you’re already doing digital marketing, it’s likely that you’re at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.
Contact us at
Digital Papercuts
5904 Warner Ave, Ste A-2011
Huntington Beach, CA 92649
1-480-227-6934
Contact@digitalpapercuts.com
 

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