Grow Your Business Using Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts using an electronic device or the Internet. Businesses leverage digital platforms like search engines, social media and e-mail to connect with current and potential customers.

A seasoned in-bound marketer might say Inbound Marketing and Digital Marketing are practically the same thing, but they're not quite the same. Some minor differences exist between these two terms. Conversations with marketers and business owners around the globe reveal that there are many similarities in the way people view digital marketing.

Why is Digital Marketing Important for Improving Business Outcomes?

Digital Marketing helps you reach a larger market than you could through traditional means. You can target the right people by using digital marketing. It's also usually cheaper than traditional marketing. Finally, you can measure your results on a daily basis and adjust accordingly.

There are many benefits to using digital marketing. Here are some of them:

• You can reach your target audience more easily than ever before.
• Digital marketing allows you to create content that is tailored specifically to your customers' needs.
• You can get real-time feedback about how well your campaign is performing.
• And finally, you can measure everything -- and what you measure gets improved!

Inbound Marketing Vs. Digital Marketing

Many people believe inbound marketing is the same as digital marketing.  Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing but not all digital marketing is inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating content that attracts people to your website. This content includes articles, videos, podcasts, etc. Once you've attracted visitors to your site, you need to get them to do something specific - sign up for an account, fill out a form, buy a product, download a file, subscribe to a newsletter, etc.

Digital marketing is a holistic concept that considers the goal first, and then looks at the available tool to determine which will effectively get to the right people, and then at what stage of the sales funnel this should happen.

The most critical thing to remember about digital and inbound marketing is they work best together. They provide structure and purpose for effective online marketing, ensuring that each digital marketing channel is working toward a goal.

Find Out What Your Competitors Are Doing Online

Your competitors may have already established a web presence. You should look at what they're doing online and see if it works for you. Perhaps they are focusing on inbound marketing through educational content or entertaining content.  Perhaps they are heavily invested in paid ads and promotions that drive traffic to their website so that they can add a tracking pixel for remarketing purposes.

Maybe they are hosting online events, or using a combination of online and offline marketing.

There are many ways to communicate your brand and what makes you different. You need to know how to get people to notice you. You can do this by using social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content creation, etc.

Fortunately, there are some great tools to deconstruct your competitors' strategy, keywords, target audience, ad buys and so on, which helps you to see what is working for them (or else they wouldn't be doing these things) and then using this insight as you plan to uplevel your own digital marketing.

• Semrush is an SEO tool that helps you rank higher in search engines. 
• Ahrefs is a link building tool that allows you to discover what links point to your site.
• Moz is a keyword research tool that ranks keywords based on how often they appear in other people's articles.
• Buzzsumo is a social media analytics tool that tracks the popularity of different topics and influencers.
• Google alerts is a tool that lets you know when someone searches for something related to your business.
• Ontolo is a tool for finding out who your customers are.

More vendors and tools can be found in the Directory

Let Customers Come to You

Digital Marketing is a way to make yourself available to the people you're targeting. Your business can be accessed by people who aren't local to you. Scalability becomes a reality. With a website, your business is open 24/7. You can create an environment for your customers to contact you any time of day or night.

This means that customers and prospects are able to send you emails with questions and purchase products online. Potential customers who have no way to physically come to you can still do some business with you through an online shopping cart or simply by using social networking.

Get to Know Your Target Audience

Digital marketing is an effective tool to reach out to your customers. You can interact with them on social media or through blogs. You can also ask questions about their problems and concerns. Listen to what people say about your products and services. Use this information to improve your business.

Digital Marketing helps you take the guessing about who your customers are out of the equation. You can personalize communications and target more precisely.

People trust businesses that they've done business with before. This means that if a customer buys something from you, he or she is more likely to buy again.

Common Problems That Digital Marketing Can Solve

To optimize your marketing strategies, you must first understand your audience. Digital marketing can help your business to get to know your customers, learn important data about your audience, and provide metrics that can give your marketing team credibility and trust.

Consumers who spend time online may not behave as you'd expect.

Your marketing team should develop audience personas that can help you to better understand your audience. Test different language with different audiences, keeping in mind that some descriptors will appeal to specific groups of people and their place in your buying cycle. Attune to your audience and you will build credibility that will set your business apart from the competition.

Some of our vetted suppliers help you to identify the people who come to your website so that you can retarget them, follow-up with them, and build lookalike audiences for ad platforms, which reduces your ad spend while also giving you insight into who you are attracting and how you can improve your offer and/or sales process.

Optimizing your website for search engines is critical to increasing traffic and sales. You need to know how to optimize your site for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other major search engines. You also need to understand what keywords people use when searching for your products or services.

Social Media Strategy - A mix of paid and organic strategies. Be patient and wait until you have a large following before advertising.

Marketing teams should be broken into smaller groups that work together across channels. Customers aren't limited to one channel, so marketing efforts need to adapt to reach them wherever they are. Tone, images, offers, and timing matter differently depending on the audience.

Metrics are important, but you need to choose them carefully. For example, if you're trying to increase sales, then you may want to measure how many people clicked on an ad or visited your website. But if you're trying to get more customers, then you might want to measure how many leads came from your website or social media posts.

There are so many ways to use digital marketing, that this page just scratches the surface.  

Check out our recommended and vetted vendors for digital marketing tools in the WIN Marketplace.

Nice Things People Say About Us

Frequently asked questions