What is Digital Marketing?

What is Digital Marketing?

 

Landing on this blog means you are ready to take your business to the next level with digital marketing. Well done! You are in the right place — 78% of salespeople using social media perform better than their peers and 72% of online marketers describe content creation as their most effective SEO tactic. Keep reading to learn more about how to elevate your brand online with all of the individual spokes of the digital marketing wheel.

What is Digital Marketing? Step 1: Start with Research

As a digital marketing newb, it can be challenging to figure out where to start. Before you begin paying for PPC ads, rounding up influencers, or setting up your social media profiles, the first thing you need to do is research. The two most important types of research that will influence your entire social media strategy include audience persona and competitive market analysis.

Audience Persona

Who is your audience? Take some time to think about that. Of course, you would like for as many people as possible to purchase your product, use your service, or hire your expertise. However, you have to hone in on your target audience and figure them out.

Through audience persona research, you will learn:

• Who. Is your ideal target a woman? What is her age? Does she have children? Or, is it a man? Could it be a professional of a certain level, despite their gender? Or, are you targeting pet owners?
• What. What are their interests? What is important to your target audience, and what is not important? What is their income level?
• Where. Specifically, where are they located? Is your business regional or national? Where does your target audience spend time outside of work? Where do they get their news?
• When. According to the above, when are they online? Is it nights and weekends, or in the middle of the day?
• Why. How is choosing you going to make their lives better?

Competitive Market Analysis

One of the easiest ways to figure out where to start with your digital marketing strategy is through competitive market analysis. Learning what your competitors do — whether it is bad or good — helps create a perfect starting point. Begin by making a list of your top 3-5 competitors and start digging.

Things to look for include:

• What do their social media profiles look like?
• What are their top-performing keywords?
• Which offers have worked, and which do not?
• What are people saying about them in reviews and testimonials?
• What are their website traffic sources?

Finding the answers to these questions and more will require some serious digging – but the information gained is precious. If you need help, let us know. Navazon’s research team will analyze your 5 top competitors’ marketing campaigns and provide you with the market intelligence insights you need to succeed.

Social Media

Let’s kick off with this statistic: Social networks influence 74% of shoppers because they rely on these platforms for decision making. This means that if your business isn’t on social media, or if you aren’t prioritizing your business’s social media, you are turning away customers.

Social Media Presence

When it comes to social media marketing, simply having a presence just isn’t cutting it anymore. Your social media presence needs to be professional, on-brand, clean, using all the up-to-date industry standards, optimized, easy to use, and aesthetically pleasing all in one. It is also essential you use data to drive your social media, such as posting times, lifestyle content, hashtags, imagery, and more.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a great way to build trust and gain high-quality leads. By leveraging another social media account’s followers, you are getting in front of your target audience in a straightforward and natural way. You can offer a discount code to an influencer to track performance while also giving your audience something to make them feel special.

Paid Advertising

If you are looking for the most direct way to reach your target audience, paid advertising or PPC Ads marketing is the way to go. Not only that, paid advertising helps the health of your entire digital marketing strategy due to the traffic gained from it. It’s a necessary “evil” when you’re ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, but investing in them (in the right way) provides nothing but benefits.

Social Media Ads

Simply having a social media presence by itself won’t work anymore — in order to grow on social media, you need to be running ads. Benefits for social media ads include:

• You’re able to grow your sales by increasing your fanbase
• You waste less money with better targeting than anywhere else
• They are inexpensive to create — the less produced, the better, and you can even use user-or-customer- generated content
• You can A/B split test and use comprehensive insights to determine what works best

PPC Ads

Our Los Angeles-based PPC agency partners with the world’s top ad networks to extend the reach of our client’s brand message. These include Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, and more specialty ad networks worldwide. PPC ads get placed at the top of search pages, putting you in the prime position for success to reach hot leads quickly.

SEO/SEM

Making sure you’re at the top of search engine pages takes more than just PPC ads. It also takes organic search engine optimization tactics. This is because search engines are constantly looking for the best results to give their users. If your website and social media are optimized precisely to the search engine’s liking to provide the user with the best result possible, you will come out on top.

Blogging

One of the many things search engines look for while working to serve the best results possible to their uses is new, fresh, and relevant content. Since search engines re-spider the internet every 30 days, the best way to do this is through regular blogging. Blogging is the fuel for search engine marketing — 60% of businesses who blog acquire more customers.

Directory Listings

Are you a local business? Local business directory listings are essential for a well-performing digital marketing strategy. This is much more than just Yelp and Facebook — there are over 100 important local directories, and the more of them you are on, the more relevant you are online. Dentist in Woodland Hills? Plastic Surgeon in the West Los Angeles? Get as specific as possible and make sure you dominate your territory with directory listings.

Email Marketing

Think email marketing is simply “spam”? We will let these statistics speak for themselves:

• On average, email marketing has a 4400% ROI 
• Welcome emails have an average open rate of 82% 
• 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement 
• 49% of consumers say they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis
• Personalized emails get 6x Higher Transaction Rates, but only 30% of brands use them 
• 60% of consumers subscribe to a brand’s list to get promotional messages and deals 
• 49% of all emails are opened on mobile devices 
• Email is 40x more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter

Digital Content

Knowing what kind of content to use with your digital marketing efforts is essential, and having consistency across the board is critical. Making sure your content is engagement-worthy, eye-catching, and on-brand (and anything else with a hyphen), is extremely important. You can achieve this through videos, copywriting, and digital design.

Videos

YouTube is the second largest search engine. Need we say more here about video production?

If so:

• Video offers a significant opportunity for you to quickly and easily introduce yourself, explain your product or service, and show off all your benefits
• According to HubSpot, explainer videos have seen tremendous success. An overwhelming majority of people (94%) report watching explainer videos to learn more about a product, with 84% being swayed to make a purchase
• An estimated 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, so if your business isn’t using it, you aren’t up-to-date with industry standards

Copywriting and Content Writing

Skilled copywriting can express and explain your product or services and the overall philosophy behind your business. It can draw potential customers in so that they remain on the page long enough to understand the benefits and advantages that your company offers. Knowing how to talk to your target audience is important, and this is done through professional copywriting and content writing. A CEO would be spoken to differently than an HR Representative, and a mother of 4 would be spoken to differently than a twenty-something.

Design

Bad graphic design will position you as unprofessional, untrustworthy, and lazy. Great graphic design is standard and expected. Amazing graphic design is what will take you to the next level.

Finding your company’s branding will steer your entire digital marketing design efforts. What colors best portray your brand? What fonts are the best for what you are trying to say? What sort of imagery will best represent how life will be once a customer purchases from you or hires you?

Digital design will be part of everything you do. From having a beautiful website to engaging social media posts to eye-catching ads, it is an investment worth making.

Ready to Get Started?

Digital marketing is only strong if all the components are working together. Think of digital marketing as the car, and all the different pieces mentioned above are the parts under the hood. Everything affects the other, and if one part isn’t working well the entire car is affected. If you are ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, we’re here to help you.