What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is much more than posting on Social Media and has evolved from the 4 Ps. When understood and implemented properly it can grow your business tremendously. When done improperly it can be ineffective, deliver zero or a negative ROI and be very time consuming. Today I will not discuss strategies, but instead answer the question of what digital marketing is.
Marketing includes all the aspects that it has for years. This includes creating products people want, positioning those products to appeal to the target market, segmenting and targeting the market, promoting the market and of course pricing the product effectively. Those 4 Ps apply today as well.
Digital Marketing takes the 4Ps a step further because technology allows us to. Digital Marketing does refer to any onscreen experience, but also other aspects driven by computers. Let’s take a look at a few aspects of digital marketing and what you can use it for.
Learn about customer desires, needs and goals
We can join online communities, use social mining software or read blogs and alerts to learn what people are talking about, complaining about or striving for. This helps us figure out what products or services to create.
Learn about the competition, trends and perceptions
Figure out what the competition is doing, what products or services are trending and what people are saying about all of these.
Hyper-Target Your Market
Don’t waste your marketing dollars on people who don’t need your product or service. Instead find the niche that needs and loves your product or service. For example imagine you sell dog collars for small dogs that plays Chopin. After doing research you determine it does well with a celebrities in Beverly Hills that make $2M per year, have a dog and like classical music you could do that with targeted social media ads.
Analyze Your Website
You can analyze who visits your website, how long they stay on each page and what action they take after leaving. This is done with Google Analytics.
Blogs, Social Media Posts, and Video
Both paid ads and organic posts are part of most digital marketing strategies. A creative person can put together ads and posts that get shared and liked, attract clients and engage with customers.
Automated E-Mail Campaign
Email marketing has come a long way. You can put together a campaign that sends potential clients emails every 3 days with different information. The email campaign can be different for different types of customers, leads, and those interested in different product lines. This is done with a drip campaign and complex email systems.
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Suppose you want to predict who will purchase your product or learn who is most likely to return your product. Machine learning will help you learn about your customers. Artificial Intelligence allows you to tell the computer what to look for to identify leads.
All these and other various aspects of marketing make up Digital Marketing. Businesses can start with one or put together an end to end digital marketing strategy.
