Digital marketing: Ultimate Guide In 2024

Digital marketing is the act of promoting products and services through digital channels, such as social media, SEO, email, and mobile apps. Any form of marketing that involves electronic devices is considered digital marketing.

Digital marketing considers how individual tools or digital channels can convert prospects. A brand’s digital marketing strategy may use multiple platforms or focus all of its efforts on 1 platform. For example, a company may primarily create content for social media platforms and email marketing campaigns while ignoring other digital marketing avenues.

Why is digital marketing important?

Any type of marketing can help your business thrive. However, digital marketing has become increasingly important because of how accessible digital channels are. In fact, there were 5 billion internet users globally in April 2022 alone.

From social media to text messages, there are many ways to use digital marketing tactics in order to communicate with your target audience. Additionally, digital marketing has minimal upfront costs, making it a cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses.

Types of digital marketing

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a long-term digital strategy that aims to generate attention and interest in your brand. It involves creating relevant content and sharing it on platforms where your target audience hangs out.

In short, content marketing is about creating high-quality content to attract prospects and customers and to convert them into engaged followers who will spread the word about your products and services.

Content marketing also has several advantages, and can help you increase:

Traffic: You’ll drive traffic from search engines, social media, people following links in email or article sharing sites.
Sales: Content marketing is often a great way to not just drive traffic, but to drive the right traffic (people who are more likely to become customers).
Email Subscribers: If you are writing articles, you will be able to drive people to opt-in on your signup page (this is the best place for them to do that—don’t try and get it out of them elsewhere)

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better.

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing,” and then ordering it by how well it matches the query in a process we refer to as “ranking.” We’ll cover crawling, indexing, and ranking in more detail in the next chapter.

SEO vs. SEM

SEM stands for search engine marketing – or, as it is more commonly known, search marketing.

Search marketing is a type of digital marketing. It is an umbrella term for the combination of SEO and PPC activities meant to drive traffic via organic search and paid search.

Put simply, search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.

So how do SEO and SEM differ? Technically they aren’t different – SEO is simply one-half of SEM:

SEO = driving organic traffic from search engines.
SEM = driving organic and paid traffic from search engines.

Social media marketing is the process of creating tailored content for each social media platform to drive engagement and promote your business.”

Social media marketing is all about connecting with your audience or customers and helping them understand your brand better. It is incredibly beneficial to your business growth.

Imagine you’re going to meet someone for the first time with an intention to build a good relationship.

What should you do to make that person like you instantly because you’re not going to get a second chance? Will you succeed if you meet that person and say things that are boring or meaningless?

People tend to like you more when you make them happy, no matter how you do that.

Just like the offline world, your social media marketing success largely depends on your ability to find and make your target audience happy so that they like your brand and share your stories with others.

Your social media marketing efforts will produce no results if your story isn’t worth sharing.

Increase brand awareness
Boost website traffic
Faster and easier content distribution
Regular interaction with the target audience
Industry, marketplace and competitor insights

4. Paid Advertising (PPC)

PPC or pay-per-click is a type of internet marketing which involves advertisers paying a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Simply, you only pay for advertising if your ad is actually clicked on. It’s essentially a method of ‘buying’ visits to your site, in addition to driving website visits organically.

One of the most popular forms of PPC is search engine advertising, which allows advertisers to pay for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links. This works when someone searches for a keyword related to their business offering. For example, if we bid on the keyword ‘Google Shopping Management’ our ad might show up at the top of the Google results page.

Google Shopping, what we do best, is an example of how PPC advertising can be used to boost both visibility and profitability.

Pay-Per-Click Models

Commonly, pay-per-click advertising rates are determined using the flat-rate model or the bid-based model.

1. Flat-rate model

In the flat rate pay-per-click model, an advertiser pays a publisher a fixed fee for each click. Publishers generally keep a list of different PPC rates that apply to different areas of their website. Note that publishers are generally open to negotiations regarding the price. A publisher is very likely to lower the fixed price if an advertiser offers a long-term or a high-value contract.

2. Bid-based model

In the bid-based model, each advertiser makes a bid with a maximum amount of money they are willing to pay for an advertising spot. Then, a publisher undertakes an auction using automated tools. An auction is run whenever a visitor triggers the ad spot.

Note that the winner of an auction is generally determined by the rank, not the total amount, of money offered. The rank considers both the amount of money offered and the quality of the content offered by an advertiser. Thus, the relevance of the content is as important as the bid.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is a marketing strategy surrounding sending emails to current and potential customers with the goal of increasing brand awareness, driving engagement, nurturing leads, or making a sale.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to communicate with your customers. It can help you nurture leads, raise brand awareness and sell your products.

Benefits of email marketing

Email has become such a popular marketing tool for businesses partly because it forces the user to take some kind of action; an email will sit in the inbox until it’s read, deleted, or archived.

Email marketing can help you build a relationship with your audience while also driving traffic to your blog, social media, or anywhere else you’d like folks to visit. You can even segment your emails and target users by demographic so you’re only sending people the messages they want to see most.

Email marketing also allows you to run A/B tests of a subject line or call to action to identify the best performing message by using email marketing software that can also be configured to easily send out emails. Check out Mailchimp’s email templates to see more of what you can do with email marketing.

Growing Your Email List

What most people do when they want to build an email list is to put an optin form on their website and hope that people sign up. Unfortunately, this strategy usually doesn’t work very well.

To grow your email list, you need to attract people with a compelling offer. You need a lead magnet.

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet (a.k.a. an optin bribe) is something awesome that you give away for free in exchange for an email address. It doesn’t have to cost you anything to create; most lead magnets are digital materials like PDFs, MP3 audio files, or videos that you can create yourself at minimal or no cost.

It can be absolutely anything you want, so long as it provides value to your visitors for free. Some popular lead magnet examples are:

ebooks
A cheat sheet of tips or resources
White papers or case studies
A webinar
Free trials or samples
A free quote or consultation
Quizzes or a self-assessment
A coupon

The possibilities are endless!

6. Video Marketing

Video for marketing means incorporating a video format into your marketing strategy to promote a brand, product, service, or message. Video marketing educates your audience effectively and helps increase engagement on social and digital channels.

What are the benefits of video marketing?

With access to faster networks, businesses are using more and more videos to engage with their customers. Many businesses, probably also your competitors, use videos to help capture value from their audiences.

Why should you use videos in your social media posts? Video posts:

Stay visible longer on social feeds
Get more exposure and engagement
Increase the understanding of your product
Stand out more
Provide a more personable way to engage with your audience
Are powerful sales tool
Rank higher in search
Are growing in popularity across platforms

How to create a video marketing strategy

1. Choose your target audience and find out where they spend their time.

The popularity of video and user-generated video content means that you need to target a specific audience with each video. If you don’t already have strong buyer personas, start creating them now. If you already have a set of buyer personas, make sure to update your personas to include the most recent video research.

2. Connect with stakeholders to align on a plan for the video.

There are typically a lot of players when making a video. How can you ensure they’re all aligned?

Create a questionnaire using Google Forms or SurveyMonkey and pass it along to the stakeholders of the project. This way, you can ask the same questions of everyone and keep their responses in one place.

At this stage, it’s important to agree on a clear set of goals. Is your video marketing to increase brand awareness? Sell more event tickets? Launch a new product? What do you want your audience to do after watching the video?

3. Set a timeline and budget for your video.

Think of video as a shorter, quicker, and less expensive version of your favorite film. While a video needs fewer resources to succeed, it can still be a time-consuming and expensive process. You can save time and money with planning and project management.

Create a clear timeline for every step of the process and plan for occasional delays. Even a small video production relies on the skills of many different people. So, you want to make sure that even with unexpected challenges and changes you can still deliver your video on time.

4. Choose the best platform to distribute your video.

Before you start making your video, think about where you’re going to broadcast it. YouTube SEO is becoming as important as website SEO. source Think about what people on that platform are looking for. You’ll also want to consider:

Average view time
Size and sound limitations
Communities
Budget
Promotion

While videos are often used for advertising, a video doesn’t just promote itself. Some platforms have built-in vehicles for promotion, while others will need you to put in some time and effort to get more eyes on your video content. This list of video platforms can help you decide what platform is best for your video campaign.

7. Influence Marketing

Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy of collaborating with social media users and other content creators who have influence over communities of varying sizes. This collaboration usually includes some sort of co-content creation or promotion of the brand by the influencer to their community.

Types of Influencer Marketing Opportunities to Explore

More businesses are using social media to engage with consumers. In 2021, 91.9% of U.S. company marketers with over 100 employees planned to use social media marketing.

The expansion of social media marketing has given consumers more options, making social media influencers essential to cut through the noise and genuinely connect with customers.

Affiliate links or discount codes.

Create a discount code and unique link for influencers to share with their followers. This content harnesses the influencer’s audience to reach consumers and drive sales to your store. Send the influencer a product sample to help them create realistic content based on their experience. It’s ideal to use this method with high-performing influencers that have the potential to scale.

You can also use the link to track conversion and influencer reach. Tracking your campaign performance is essential to help you make informed decisions and monitor investments.

Affiliate links can be profitable for influencers. When a customer purchases using the link, the influencer generally receives a 10-20% commission.

Contests and giveaways.

Who doesn’t like to win a prize or a free product? Contests and giveaways create buzz. They excite potential customers, get them talking about your brand and get your products into the hands of new buyers.

Influencers offer a prize (free product or service) in exchange for brand engagement. Followers will also share the opportunity with their network.

Center your contest around a valuable offering that makes people eager to participate. Provide clear giveaway instructions and winner selection criteria with minimum steps such as liking, sharing or commenting on the post, tagging friends, following your brand’s social media channel, subscribing to a newsletter, submitting user content as entries (i.e., photos, videos or Instagram stories) or registering an account with your ecommerce store.

Since giveaways may only provide a short-term boost, combine them with other types of content to generate more traffic. You can compensate influencers with a free offering or discount.

Running content from influencers on your channels.

Promoting influencer blog posts and other content on your platform is a win-win for both parties. You’re helping the influencer market their personal brand while driving their audience to your channels.

Influencers are content creators who love receiving features for their work. It’s best to partner with influencers with a highly engaged audience for maximum exposure and conversion. Let influencers know when you post the content. Add backlinks to their channels and a copy or quote to connect the two brands.

Run content from different influencers separately, so they don’t have to share the spotlight. The good thing about this type of content is that it doesn’t require formal payment.

Brand ambassadors.

Brand ambassadors are long-term influencer partnerships. They are the face of your brand and build credibility, trust and awareness. Ambassadors can help promote product launches and diversify content to showcase your brand.

You may work together for several weeks, months or even years. The additional time gives the influencers the freedom to create ongoing, diverse posts and offerings. As their audience becomes more familiar with your brand, it increases sales and traffic.

While some companies choose a celebrity ambassador, collaborating with multiple influencers can maximize brand visibility, campaign momentum and ROI. Current followers and customers make excellent ambassadors because they know your brand and enjoy your product.

Nano-influencers: Nano-influencers have 10,000 followers or fewer, like mommy blogger Lindsay Gallimore (8.3K followers)

Micro-influencers: Micro-influencers have 10,000 to 100,000 followers, like lifestyle blogger Sharon Mendelaoui (13.5K followers)

Macro-influencers: Macro-influencers have 100,000 to 1 million followers, like food and travel creator Jean Lee (115K followers)

Mega-influencers: Mega-influencers have 1 million+ followers, like TikTok star Savannah LaBrant (28.3M followers)

8. Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is a branch of digital marketing focused on mobile device users. Mobile marketing is a way to promote products or services through mobile devices. With this strategy, target consumers access location and time-sensitive customized content that promotes certain products, services, or ideas.

Types of Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing works by connecting with customers through their mobile devices encouraging them to interact with your brand. Here are some types of mobile marketing:

In-App Marketing

In-app marketing is marketing through mobile apps. In-app marketing can be either for your own brand or for other brands. For your own brand, In-App marketing refers to the use of banners, overlays, and inbox messaging to market your products to your app users. You can engage customers who are active users of your brand’s app and guide their user experience in your app. For other brands, ads can be included on popular apps or your brand’s app. The ads can be banners, a full page, or videos. In-app marketing also allows you to increase your customer base through advertisements on popular apps.

Mobile Push Marketing

Mobile push marketing sends marketing messages on mobile devices using push technology. It allows you to deliver relevant information to users even if they are not on your website or app. Mobile push notifications allow you to communicate with existing and potential customers in a simple and effective way.

SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is a marketing campaign via text message. You can send promotions, alerts, offers, and more to current and potential customers’ phones. Text marketing campaigns can be successful because most people have their phones with them, and it is difficult to ignore push notifications.

Social media platforms typically have billions of users, making social media a great place to advertise and promote your business. Social media marketing allows you to make a more personal connection with consumers through Facebook ads, promoted tweets, or shoppable pins on Pinterest.

Location-Based Marketing

Location-based marketing allows you to target a customer on their mobile device based on their location. You can create specific marketing campaigns based on your customers’ location, making the marketing campaign more relevant.

QR Code Marketing

QR code marketing allows you to create a link to your website, download your app, review your business, or signup for your newsletter. Customers can scan the QR code with the camera on their smartphones and it is simple to use. QR code marketing allows you to engage more customers and can be used for almost any marketing purpose.

Conclusion

Digital marketing comes in a broad space but makes everything including marketing very good. Knowing the in depths of digital marketing will help you to grow and build your brand(s).