What Is Digital Marketing? 10 Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital marketing is internet marketing that engages new customers through omnichannel online advertising.

This form of marketing differs from more traditional advertising in both the medium it uses and the strategy it pursues. Digital marketing works by targeting internet users specifically, often through interacting with the data these users provide and personalizing content for them. This is in stark contrast to the more generalized approach of the past, where billboards and TV commercials were unable to tailor their content so specifically.

Digital marketing enables businesses and brands to connect more intimately with their customer base. It enables them to track KPIs (key performance indicators) and other core touchpoints in real-time.

Digital marketing campaigns shape the contemporary customer journey and present several benefits for marketers. Through the use of a digital marketing campaign, you can:

1. 1. Build brand awareness. Digital marketing gives you a greater opportunity to cultivate brand awareness than ever before. Not only can you define your brand far more expansively throughout any given buyer’s journey with your product or products, you can also do so interactively. Brands thus become personalized in an unparalleled way.
2. 2. Get results in real-time. Rather than developing nebulous customer personas or hoping for feedback about how your strategy is working, you can get instant results when pursuing a digital strategy. Since potential customers interact directly with your digital ads, you can accumulate data instantaneously—in other words, you can know immediately whether or not your ads are working as you hoped they would.
3. 3. Improve customer experience. The personalization possible through a digital marketing strategy makes for an improved user experience. Digital advertising can reach out to and cater to each member of its target audience uniquely.
4. 4. Increase marketing channels. Digital marketers now have access to many more marketing platforms than were common in the days of traditional marketing—when print, radio, and TV ads reigned supreme. Digital marketing channels—like social media platforms, landing pages, and websites in general—allow you to continuously expand your reach and improve your overall marketing tactics.
5. 5. Lower your marketing plan costs. It’s almost invariably less expensive to advertise on digital media than through traditional media channels. Therefore, effective digital marketing can greatly reduce your overall ad spend costs. Once you know how to deploy your marketing messages online, you’ll be able to greatly reduce the amount you would otherwise spend on ads elsewhere.

Once you cultivate a digital strategy, you can begin to achieve your online marketing goals. Consider these ten types of digital marketing strategies:

1. 1. Affiliate marketing: Advertising your products or services through a third party is affiliate marketing. In the digital space, this often takes the form of influencer marketing on social media.
2. 2. Content marketing: Marketing based around providing information is content marketing. For instance, rather than generating a traditional advertisement, a digital strategist may suggest using infographics or informative podcasts about the product or service instead. Native advertising is a form of content marketing that partners with a different brand or media outlet to share content.
3. 3. Display advertising: Display advertising centers around displaying ads on websites, mobile apps, search engines, and so on. Pay-per-click campaigns (or PPC campaigns) are one of the oldest forms of digital display advertising.
4. 4. Email marketing: Digital marketing centered around direct outreach, email marketing can manifest as a long-term engagement approach (connecting with long-term customers on an email list) or emphasize the inbound marketing potential of email outreach (creating new customers by emailing them cold).
5. 5. Marketing automation: Marketing automation is the process through which digital marketers automate their marketing strategy. This kind of automation scrapes data from customers to personalize the ads you show to them.
6. 6. Mobile marketing: Mobile marketing strategies focus on advertising through mobile apps, SMS messaging, or mobile-display websites. It’s become an especially important strategy in modern times due to how much time people spend interacting with their mobile devices.
7. 7. Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Search engine marketing focuses on obtaining display ads from search engines. The goal is to display a service or product through purchased ad space when an internet user searches for something similar.
8. 8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization is a marketing strategy engineered to boost a business’s presence on search engine results pages. Businesses optimize their content for search engines through keywords and market research as part of an SEO strategy.
9. 9. Social media marketing: Digital marketers make use of the expansive opportunities afforded by social media platforms regularly. They can generate social media posts for their business, reach out directly to customers through these platforms, and more.
10. 10. Video marketing: Digital marketers host video content on various platforms to increase their reach and engage their target audience.

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