Skip to content

Digital Marketing – Everything You Need to Know

As recently as 20 years ago, marketers didn’t have as many tools to promote products. They used leaflets, newspapers, television, radio, or billboards along busy roads. Of course, these types of tools are still used in marketing today. However, in the past, it was not yet possible to use the real “gold mine” for modern marketing – the Internet. Its development ushered in the era of digital marketing.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing, as the term suggests, includes all marketing activities carried out in digital channels. In fact, it means actions taken on the Internet (online marketing). What kind of activities? For example, maintaining a website, company profile on social media, or sending newsletters to customers. Digital marketing also includes paid activities such as ads in search engines or social media as well as more traditional methods like advertising on radio or television.

Digital Marketing vs Online Marketing. What’s the difference?

Nowadays, the terms “digital marketing” and “online marketing” are used interchangeably. Nevertheless, they do not mean exactly the same thing. Online marketing campaigns only refer to online activities. Digital marketing, on the other hand, also refers to other digital media such as radio or television. In other words, the term digital marketing has a broader meaning. Every online marketing campaign is also a digital marketing campaign, but not every digital marketing campaign is also an online marketing campaign.

Components of digital marketing

Content marketing:

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to build engagement among the audience. It involves creating content that is attractive to the target group. To promote it, you can use your website or social media channels.

Why is it so important? Creating compelling content can not only improve the perception of your brand in the market but will also allow you to reach a larger audience.

SEO

These days, the vast majority of businesses have a website. So just creating a website is no longer enough to get customers. It still needs to be positioned well in search engines. This is important because it gives a chance for your content to reach an interested audience.

How does it work? A person interested in a particular term usually looks for the answer in a search engine. The task of an SEO specialist is to make our website appear in search results, with the answer to the problem the user wants to solve.

Social Media Marketing

As the name says, social media marketing is the entire activity of creating a brand experience on social media. In B2B business, social media marketing is more often based on creating a company profile with the goal of increasing brand recognition and redirecting users to the website. 

The specifics of running marketing campaigns are significantly different from SEO. In the case of search engine positioning, it is the user who has to make the first step by searching for a keyword. This allows us to gather traffic to our website that is interested in a topic related to our business. When it comes to running a social media campaign, the first step belongs to the marketing specialists. They are the ones who have to search for an audience and try to reach them. Moreover, they have to interest the recipients enough with their content to make them like the profile (thanks to which the company obtains the possibility of conducting regular communication with the recipient) or visit the company’s website.

Paid advertisements

Paid advertisements on the Internet are a kind of support for organic (free) activities. This is especially important due to the huge competition, which often makes it very difficult to get a large reach and get to your target group. 

We distinguish:

Paid Google search ads (Google Ads)

This is a paid support for SEO activities. It often takes 3 to 9 months to position a website for a specific keyword. To speed up the process, you can buy an ad from Google. Thanks to it, your website will appear on the first pages of search results.

Paid ads in social media

Nowadays, it doesn’t make sense for social networks to promote pages or posts organically because they can monetize by displaying paid content to users. For this reason, in recent years Facebook or LinkedIn have been severely limiting the reach of free posts. This is why it is so difficult to promote a page on social media today without spending money on advertising. 

Advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter has many benefits. First of all, we should pay attention to how many people have their profiles on these social networks and how much data users leave on them. Marketers like to use this data in order to optimally target their message. They use not only information about our education, work experience, or interests. Social networks even monitor how we behave while using their websites and apps. This allows advertisers to target their ads only to people who most often add comments and reactions under posts, click links or fill out contact forms. In this way, ad specialists target messages to the most likely people to perform the action that marketers care about.

Email marketing

From time to time there are claims that email marketing is a thing of the past. Nevertheless, email marketing campaigns are still doing well and producing many positive results. Why?

Marketing Automation

As you can see, there are many types of campaigns that can be run in different media within digital marketing. Most companies conduct their marketing activities in at least a few of them. How then to deal with such a large amount of campaign data when most of it is collected in different places through different tools? 

Marketing automation solutions such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud are the answer. They allow you to conduct most of your digital marketing activities from one place. 

Through marketing automation you can conduct, among other things:

  • email marketing,
  • social media marketing,
  • SMS marketing,
  • advertising campaigns in social media.

Marketing Cloud also allows you to create advanced customer paths. You can learn more about marketing automation tools in this article.

Benefits of digital marketing compared to traditional marketing

Just as we mentioned at the beginning of this article, the internet has created almost unlimited opportunities for marketing professionals. Why?

Huge target audience

Nowadays, the internet is used by basically everyone. So, marketers have a chance to reach a huge audience with their marketing message. A larger target group means a greater chance of achieving higher conversions.

Ability to target your message

Each of us leaves huge amounts of data on the Internet. It’s not just about the information we provide ourselves to populate our social media accounts. Our online activity or what articles we read and what websites we visit are tracked and analyzed. This allows marketers to find out what our interests are and where we live and our income level and what industry we work in. Marketing professionals use this data efficiently. Thanks to it, they don’t have to “burn” the budget on ads that everyone will see. They target only those people who are likely to be interested in the advertised product.

Lower cost per conversion compared to traditional marketing

Advertising on the Internet is definitely cheaper than on TV or radio. Thanks to that, everyone (with a bigger or smaller budget) can afford it. Owing to the possibility of targeting and optimization of advertising campaigns, high conversion rates, CTR, and ROAS can be achieved at a low cost.

Would you like to know more about digital marketing? Contact us! We will answer all your questions and recommend specific solutions tailored to the needs of your organization.

Article by Bartosz Kwapiszewski.