Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an
electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels
such as search engines, social media, email, and their websites to
connect with current and prospective customers.
With how accessible the internet is today, would you believe me if I told you the number of people who go online every day is
still increasing?
It is. In fact, "constant" internet usage among adults increased by 5% in just the last three years, according to Pew Research.
And although we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has
changed along with it -- meaning offline marketing isn't as effective as
it used to be.
Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the
right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet
them where they are already spending time: on the internet.
Enter
digital marketing -- in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.
At HubSpot, we talk a lot about
inbound marketing as a
really effective way to attract, engage, and delight customers online.
But we still get a lot of questions from people all around the world
about
digital marketing.
A seasoned inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital
marketing are virtually the same thing, but there are some minor
differences. And conversations with marketers and business owners in the
U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, I've learned a lot about
how those small differences are being observed across the world.
How Do You Define Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is defined by the use of numerous digital tactics
and channels to connect with customers where they spend much of their
time: online. From the 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."
Digital Marketing Tactics and Examples
The best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital
marketing campaign supports their overarching goals. And depending on
the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger
campaign through the free and paid channels at their disposal.
A
content marketer, for example, can create a series
of blog posts that serve to generate leads from a new ebook the
business recently created. The company's
social media marketer might then help promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business's social media accounts. Perhaps the
email marketer
creates an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more
information on the company. We'll talk more about these specific digital
marketers in a minute.
Here's a quick rundown of some of the most common digital marketing tactics and the channels involved in each one.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the process of optimizing your website 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.
- Infographics.
Content Marketing
This term denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for
the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead
generation, and customers. The channels that can play a part in your
content marketing strategy include:
- Blog posts.
- Ebooks and whitepapers.
- Infographics.
- Online brochures and lookbooks.
Want to learn and apply content marketing to your business? Check out HubSpot Academy's
free content marketing training resource page.
Social Media Marketing
This practice promotes your brand and your content on social media
channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads
for your business. The channels you can use in social media marketing
include:
- Facebook.
- Twitter.
- LinkedIn.
- Instagram.
- Snapchat.
- Pinterest.
- Google+.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a
publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of
PPC is
Google AdWords,
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. Other channels
where you can use PPC include:
- Paid ads on Facebook.
- Promoted Tweets on Twitter.
- Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn.
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:
Native Advertising
Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily
content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid
content. BuzzFeed-sponsored posts are a good example, but many people
also consider social media advertising to be "native" --
Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising, for example.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation
refers to the software that serves to automate your basic marketing
operations. Many marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks
they would otherwise do manually, such as:
- Email newsletters.
- Social media post scheduling.
- Contact list updating.
- Lead-nurturing workflows.
- Campaign tracking and reporting.
Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their
audiences. 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.
- Tips or similar series emails for customer nurturing.
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.
- Engaging online reviews of your company.
- Engaging comments on your personal website or blog.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to the "full-funnel" approach to attracting,
engaging, and delighting customers using online content. You can use
every digital marketing tactic listed above throughout an inbound
marketing strategy.
What Does a Digital Marketer Do?
Digital marketers are in charge of driving
brand awareness and
lead generation
through all the digital channels -- both free and paid -- that are at a
company's disposal. These channels include social media, the company's
own website, search engine rankings, email, display advertising, and the
company's blog.
The 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"
-- of that traffic coming from website visitors who found a page of the
business's website via a Google search.
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 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.
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
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. This employee might also
work with the content marketing specialist to develop a strategy for
which content to post on which social network.
(Note: Per the KPIs above, "impressions" refers to the number of times a business's posts appear on the newsfeed of a user.)
Marketing Automation Coordinator
Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate
The marketing automation coordinator helps choose and manage the
software
that allows the whole marketing team to understand their customers'
behavior and measure the growth of their business. Because many of the
marketing operations described above might be executed separately from
one another, it's important for there to be someone who can group these
digital activities into individual campaigns and track each campaign's
performance.
Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which Is It?
On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online,
and both focus on creating digital content for people to consume. 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 garish
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, marketers who employ digital
inbound tactics
use online content to attract their target customers onto their
websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the
simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog,
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.
Does Digital Marketing Work for All Businesses?
Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry.
Regardless of what your company 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.
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.
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.
B2C Digital Marketing
If your company is business-to-consumer (B2C), depending on the price
point of your products, it's likely that the goal of your digital
marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and have them
become customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson.
For that reason, you're probably less likely to focus on ‘leads' in
their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an
accelerated buyer's journey, from the moment someone lands on your
website, to the moment that they make a purchase. This will often mean
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 Instagram and
Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.
What Are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?
Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows
marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you've ever put an
advert in a newspaper, you'll know how difficult it is to estimate how
many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad.
There's no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any
sales at all.
On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.
Here are some 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 HubSpot.
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 intelligence 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 very difficult to tell how people are
interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a
salesperson or make a purchase. 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 marketing funnel.
Content Performance and Lead Generation
Imagine you've created a product brochure and posted it through
people's letterboxes -- 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.
Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can
measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it's hosted, and
you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using
forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your
content, but you're also generating qualified leads when people download
it.
Attribution Modeling
An
effective digital marketing strategy
combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all
of your sales back to a customer's first digital touchpoint with your
business.
We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify
trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to
make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy
deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need
refining.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important -- according to
Aberdeen Group,
companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20%
annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies
with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's' journey through
the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it's likely to
reflect positively on your business's bottom line.
What Types of Digital Content Should I Create?
The kind of content you create depends on your audience's needs at
different stages in the buyer's journey. You should start by creating
buyer personas (use
these free templates, or try
makemypersona.com)
to identify what your audience's goals and challenges are in relation
to your business. On a basic level, your online content should aim to
help them meet these goals, and overcome their challenges.
Then, 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
buyer's journey. We call this content mapping.
With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:
- The characteristics of the person who will be consuming it (that's where buyer personas come in).
- How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage).
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 buyer's journey:
Awareness Stage
- Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.
- Infographics. Very shareable, meaning they increase
your chances of being found via social media when others share your
content. (Check out these free infographic templates to get you started.)
- Short videos. Again, these are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.
Consideration Stage
- Ebooks. 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.
- Research reports. 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, as they're often picked-up by the media or industry press.
- 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.
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, as it helps you positively influence their
decision.
- 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 clothing brand, these might take the form of photos
of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled from a branded
hashtag where people can contribute.
How Long Will It Take to See Results From My Content?
With digital marketing, it can often feel like you're able to see
results much faster than you might with offline marketing due to the
fact it's
easier to measure ROI. However, it ultimately depends on the scale and effectiveness of your
digital marketing strategy.
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.
If
paid advertising
is part of your digital strategy, then the results come even quicker --
but it's recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free')
reach using content, SEO, and social media for long-term, sustainable
success.
Do I Need a Big Budget for Digital Marketing?
As with anything, it really depends on what elements of digital marketing you're looking to add to your strategy.
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. 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.
You can get started by hosting a website and creating content using
HubSpot's CMS. For those on a tight budget, you can get started using WordPress hosted on
WP Engine and using a simple them from
StudioPress.
With outbound techniques like
online advertising
and purchasing email lists, 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.
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.
How Does Mobile Marketing Fit Into My Digital Marketing Strategy?
Another key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact,
smartphone usage as a whole
accounts for 69% of time spent consuming digital media in the U.S.,
while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up less than half --
and the U.S. still isn't mobile's biggest fan compared to other
countries.
This means it's essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages,
social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. If
your company has a mobile app that enables users to engage with your
brand or shop your products, your app falls under the digital marketing
umbrella, too.
Those engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to
have the same positive experience as they would on desktop. This means
implementing a mobile-friendly or
responsive website design
to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. It might
also mean reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a
hassle-free experience for people downloading your content on-the-go. As
for your social media images, it's important to always have a mobile
user in mind when creating them as image dimensions are smaller on
mobile devices, meaning text can be cut-off.
There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users, and when implementing any
digital marketing strategy,
it's hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on
mobile devices. By ensuring this is always front-of-mind, you'll be
creating digital experiences that work for your audience, and
consequently achieve the results you're hoping for.
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