TL;DR
- Experts expect that by 2026 the digital marketing industry will reach $806 billion.
- Digital marketing is becoming crucial in the technological world.
- Numerous digital marketing services must be combined to create a good marketing strategy.
- The goals of digital marketing are turning the audience into leads, acquiring customers, and raising awareness about the particular brand.
Nowadays, the marketing world goes under a rapid reshaping process initiated by innovative and creative digital marketing companies. It is believed that by 2026, spending on digital advertising will reach $806 billion.
This is because e-commerce has steadily been growing more and more. So, effective digital marketing is becoming crucial. Digital marketing agencies have now started to offer all kinds of services, including paid ads, instant message marketing, SEO, and more. Each of these has various costs and targets specific customer segments.
It’s even more interesting that companies are constantly devising new marketing strategies to help their clients target audiences and make their products and services visible. They have solutions to help you increase website traffic, produce high-quality video content, optimize your email campaigns, etc.
This article elaborates more on this topic. We’ll cover what digital marketing is, its importance, and what the different digital marketing services are.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is part of the marketing discipline which raises brand awareness by using the Internet and similar channels. It is also known as online marketing because it utilizes the tools and services provided by search engines, social media networks, and other digital companies to reach a targeted audience and turn them into leads.
A digital marketing campaign has four main goals:
- Generating leads.
- Acquiring new customers.
- Raising brand awareness
- Boosting online brand visibility.
Below we’ll detail each of them.
Leads
For particular companies, leads can be acquired from contacts who are potential clients. For other companies, leads can be sales contact. Simply put, we can define leads as potential customers who have gone through the first stage of getting acquainted with the products and services.
So, the first purpose of devising effective digital marketing strategies for your business is to generate as many leads as possible for future cooperation and a bigger ROI (Return on Investment).
Acquisition of New Customers & Raising Brand Awareness
The two other digital marketing goals are the acquisition of new customers and raising brand awareness. Digital marketing efforts aim to enable people to find your products and services and promote them through digital advertising policies. Simply said, they aim at getting new customers.
And that is where raising brand awareness is used. Digital marketers usually do this by increasing the site’s organic traffic, making the brand products and services more visible, and stressing their crucial competitive advantages compared to others.
Boosting Online Brand Visibility
This goal is tightly connected to the previous one. The only way to actually raise brand awareness is to boost your online brand visibility, considering everything is happening online today.
In fact, all of these goals are intertwined with each other. By boosting your brand, you raise awareness of it. With that, you get new customers that will eventually turn into leads.
Why Digital Marketing Is Important For Online Business?
Digital marketing isn’t just an offshoot discipline of marketing. Nowadays, digital marketing is becoming the number one solution to all marketing issues for companies who want to become more visible and establish trust in their products and services in the ever-growing market.
Marketing messages broadcasted through television or published in magazines are becoming less visible than ever. The main reason behind this is that more than half of the world’s population already have social media accounts. Simply put, everybody’s online!
But that’s also kind of the problem. In the overbrimming sea of business entities promoting their products and services, without a digital strategy, nobody will notice what you’ve invented. Or if you’ve invented something, people won’t know why they should buy it.
Here’s where digital marketing kicks in!
Its influence can be seen in helping your brand reach the target audience of millions of internet users. Furthermore, digital marketing is essential because it can support you in developing an effective marketing strategy for different marketing channels, such as websites, blogs, e-mailing, affiliate sites, etc.
This is crucial for making your brand visible and attracting customers.
Different Types Of Digital Marketing Services
Digital marketing is multichannel marketing. So if you decide to promote your brand using digital marketing services, you’ll need a unified strategy for each digital marketing channel.
That’s why there are different types of digital marketing services. From content and search engine marketing to influencer and social media marketing – each is a digital marketing discipline and a service.
However, they must be unified in a single digital marketing strategy to help your products and services reach a significant amount of audience. For example, you’re running a blog and have developed an exquisite search engine optimization methodology (made your site pop up among the first results on Google). But you haven’t devised a profound email marketing strategy.
This means that your potential customers will most likely just read your articles and stop there. They won’t have the incentive or urge to come back to your blog again. Hence, you can lose consumers.
A consistent digital marketing effort must encompass more than two digital-marketing services to help your brand become recognizable. For instance, paid advertising and email marketing are a winning combo!
So what are these different types of digital marketing? In the following text, we’ll show you and elaborate more on the basic digital marketing services.
Content Marketing
Digital marketers spend 40 percent to 50 percent of their budgets on content marketing. Content is the key, the magic word, the most potent weapon in their hands!
Simply put, content marketing is a digital marketing service aiming to attract the targeted audience, engage it, and retain it by creating meaningful and relevant content. This includes everything from articles and videos to audio materials and more.
Content marketing consists of a few services: audio marketing, video marketing, podcasts, white letters, and more.
Audio Content
Audio marketing is a digital marketing method that uses sound to convey a meaningful message. It compromises audiobooks, podcasts, audio posts, and more.
The most famous example of audio marketing is the Amazon and Apple Music ads. This service can help you make your products or service visible through audio presentation to the targeted audience that uses these apps to download music.
Video Content
Video marketing uses video content to raise brand awareness. Frequent types of video marketing are featured product video ads, social media videos, documentaries, crowdfunding video ads, and more.
Video marketing is crucial for a targeted audience that spends a lot of time on music and video channels like YouTube, TikTok, or similar video content platforms.
Blog Content
You can see the important aspect of content marketing in creating meaningful and relevant content for your blog or company website. Here, the content marketing strategy has to be consistent and engaging to grab the reader’s attention and turn them into leads.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is the digital marketing service that will make your blog, website, or ad pop up among the top search engine results. Remember that search engines like Google have incorporated algorithms and active policies for ranking your site among the best-ranking search results.
For example, Google uses algorithms to assess the relevancy of your content, the quality of the metadata and description, the number of relevant links, affiliate ads, etc. This Google algorithm for ranking your site is called PageRank (PR) and applies to all online businesses and organizations.
The crucial intertwined factors of the SEO process are building up domain authority, keyword research, appropriate usage of keywords, social scoring, backlinking, regular page updates, and more. Furthermore, there are three types of SEO:
- Black Hat SEO
- White Hat, SEO
- Gray Hat SEO
Black Hat means that you pay to promote your website and get backlinks. In contrast, White Hat means you build up your search engine visibility through organic traffic (keyword research, relevancy, domain authority, and regular updates).
SMM (Social Media Marketing)
Social Media Marketing is rapidly becoming the most popular and effective digital marketing service. As we’ve already mentioned, more than half of the world’s population has social media accounts. That’s why the easiest way to make your business and products visible is through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
It is crucial to develop an engaging and interactive social media marketing funnel, i.e., a path your potential customer takes from the first time they notice you to purchasing your products and services. That’s why most online businesses use social media channels to promote their brands by engaging their potential customers in discussions and debates and providing them with meaningful content.
There’re various types of social media marketing for small and medium businesses, including:
- Advertising/sponsorship
- Influencer marketing
- Content creation and marketing
- Bookmarking
- Media sharing
- Forum sites
Digital marketing agencies utilize multiple online tools to reach the audience through social media platforms. The most popular ones are Buffer, Social Pilot, and Facebook Business. Keep in mind that each induces its inherent costs, and they’re combined for a unified social media marketing strategy.
Paid Advertising
Paid search advertising is also known as pay-per-click. This type of digital marketing is also prevalent among online businesses because it enables them to pay for their ads to website owners or search engines to promote their products and services.
Paid advertising means you pay the website or the search engine each time a potential customer clicks or views your ad. That’s why businesses tend to conclude a contract with popular websites or an engine to make their products and services more visible due to the popularity of the particular site or engine.
This service is multidimensional – there’re various tools and measurement criteria, such as ROI (Return of Investment), CPL (Cost Per Lead), CTR (Click-through-rate), Conversion Rate, etc. The best part is that you can utilize the paid advertising strategy through different digital marketing channels.
For example, you can pay a particular search engine to generate your clicks and potential customers. You can initiate paid advertising by using the Google Google Ads. You can also use video platforms like YouTube to set your pay-per-view or pay-per-click campaigns.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is also one of the digital marketing services with a very high ROI rate. The average ROI for email marketing is 36:1 or acquiring $36 (in subscriptions, products bought, or services used) for each $1 investment.
However, email marketing is not buying databases and sending thousands of emails to all types of customers. On the contrary, email marketing can be anything from sending personalized inMails on Linkedin to sending one-on-one customized emails promoting your products, sending potential discounts, etc.
Email marketing can be of various types: newsletters (opt-in), drip marketing techniques, freebie offerings, cold mailing strategies, support emailing, and customer service. Through this type of marketing, you can connect to prospective customers by inviting them to subscribe to your blog, website, or any service.
Once they subscribe, you can devise a strategy to keep them engaged and satisfied until they buy a product or eventually use some of your services. There are numerous tools digital marketers utilize to support an effective email marketing strategy. Some include:
- Mailchimp
- Mailerlite
- Send Pulse
- Sender
Instant Message Marketing
In the last few years, we’ve been hearing about Instant Messenger Marketing Platforms. Examples of this include Rocket.Chat, Slack, What’s Up, and WeChat. They’re all instant messaging companies that allow you to promote your products and services on their platforms.
These platforms will provide you with real-time communication with your potential customers, automatic replies and options for live chat, and reaching other businesses.
Instant message marketing works through a standalone application (like What’s Up, We Chat, or Facebook Messenger) or embedded software (like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Workspace).
This type of marketing is relatively straightforward. It uses these apps to deliver your ads or any other relevant content for your product or service to a particular mobile user. A good digital marketer will offer you all types of instant marketing services, including promotions, notifications, reminders, navigations to your official website and ordering domain of the products, etc.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is yet another digital marketing service that is commission-based. This means that there’s a mediator who gets a commission from you for advertising your products and services on their website, blog, network, etc. It’s a win-win combination!
The affiliate receives a commission every time a potential customer purchases your product.
There’re different types of affiliate marketing. For instance, you can utilize three different strategies:
- Involved
- Related
- Unattached affiliate marketing
Involved Affiliate
This type of affiliate marketing is when the affiliate marketer promotes your creations on their goodwill, believing in the inherent value of your product.
Unattached Affiliate
The more obvious way is unattached affiliate marketing. It is when you promote your products and services on a site, blog, or platform which doesn’t have any connections with the particular product or service. Unattached affiliate marketing usually works on the pay-per-click principle, where you pay for your advertisements.
Related Affiliate
Finally, related marketing promotes your products and services through an affiliate related to that particular niche. In this case, you both aim for profits through the ad.
Influence Marketing
As the popularity of social media platforms grows, so does the number of influencers. Influencers can promote high-quality content related to the valuable features of the product or services you’re offering. They’re people who are already famous across various social media and have a high impact on the lives of the people watching them.
Influencers have hundreds or thousands of regular viewers, so companies use their social impact to raise a product’s brand awareness. Usually, you sign a contract to collaborate with them so they can promote your products and services through their social media accounts, posts, podcasts, video prompts, and more.
Note that if your digital marketing strategy includes an influencer, their social media profiles have to be followed by people who might be your potential customers. Of course, your brand will have to pay a certain amount to the influencer or a commission fee for every sold or reviewed product.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is another digital marketing service that can boost your brand awareness and turn thousands of potential customers into leads. Mobile marketing is practically a multichannel marketing technique that reaches the audience through smartphones, tablets, etc.
There are various types of mobile marketing. For instance, you can choose between:
- In-app marketing
- Push marketing
- SMS marketing
- Social media marketing
- Location-based marketing
- QR-code marketing
You can utilize any of these methods to promote your products and services to the targeted potential customers.
Take in-app marketing, for example. In-app marketing means that you promote your brand through the use of mobile apps. You can pay the software developer to include promotion of your brand on their apps to the people who download and use them. In-app marketing usually includes banners, overlays, and inbox messaging.
SMS marketing is another way. It means sending promotions, discounts, and offers through text messages, while social media marketing does this through Facebook ads, shippable pins, or promoted tweets.
Another highly used method is location-based marketing. This one targets your potential customers based on the location of their mobile devices.
Quality Content: Important Part in All Digital Marketing Efforts
A professional digital marketer will always stress the importance of quality content and organic traffic in all digital marketing campaigns. That’s why, for years now, digital marketers’ efforts have been focused on creating valuable content related to various products and services which will engage and interact with potential customers.
However, you must combine high-quality content with other forms of digital marketing, such as pay-per-click, social media, and email marketing, if you want to effectively target your audience. In digital marketing, many different services come as a single package!
Conclusion
Various digital marketing platforms and services exist today. All of them can help turn your potential customers into leads, raise brand awareness, and acquire new clients. Each digital marketing service targets the audience differently.
But the good thing is that they can all be easily combined into a single digital marketing strategy.
Even though digital marketing is the best way to promote your products and services online, you must frequently adjust and update your strategy. However, make sure that you always adapt it to the current changes and needs of your business and the environment. As technology and society change, so does the way people receive information – including the one about your brand!
FAQs
Can I promote my business through paid ads?
Yes, you can promote your business through paid ads. Some of the more popular platforms you can use for this digital marketing strategy are Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads.
SEM or SMM: Which is better?
Deciding which one is better depends on the aspect of digital marketing you are targeting. SEM is focused on boosting the visibility of the site, while SMM utilizes social media networks to deliver the message. In practice, they work best in combination.
What is the role of SEO in digital marketing?
Search engine optimization is a digital marketing service focused on optimizing your blog or website to rank among the top results on a particular search engine. SEO has many components (backlinks, quality content, meta tags and descriptions, keywords, etc.), and it uses them all to make your website pop up among the top results.
Can a website grow organically using content marketing?
The right use of the content marketing strategy can definitely help your website grow organically. It will help you grow and build a reputation in the marketplace, at the same time bringing more customers to you.
