The rising trend of digitising businesses has created the need for unconventional marketing methods that can keep pace with the dynamic demands of the customers. Filling this vacuum with ease, digital marketing focuses on engaging with the consumers more than brand imposition, unlike conventional strategies. As a result, it is an indispensable business tool for any organisation.
This marketing strategy involves invoking the feeling of a community, relating to various audience pools and creating content that aim at connecting with today’s internet-savvy consumers, which drives in more revenue and goodwill than conventional marketing approaches of the past.
If you want to know more about this marketing approach or want to pursue a career in this field, this blog is for you. It explains more about the term, the different strategies involved in it, its benefits, and the scope of a career in this domain.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is all about connecting with today’s audience at the place they spend the most amount of their time—the internet. It targets people who share interests for products that are similar to the product being marketed. It employs several strategies to inform them about the product’s benefits and converts them into potential customers.
Digital marketing unlike traditional marketing generates more revenue and reaches a wider audience because it is not bound by physical constraints. In addition, it also offers the flexibility of experimentation which can lead to the development of more evolved marketing strategies.
Different types of digital marketing
The term digital marketing is a broad umbrella for many individual marketing strategies that are mentioned below.
- Digital advertising: This involves creating picture or video advertisements that can be circulated across all digital media on the internet. A few examples include banner ads and YouTube ads.
- Content marketing: Digital marketers create brand awareness in different written formats such as blog posts, whitepapers, crowdfunding articles, infographics, and outreach articles.
- Search engine optimisation: This strategy involves modifying the content of the company’s website so that they rank higher in search engines and garner higher amounts of traffic. SEO analysts also collaborate with other creators to redirect traffic with backlinks.
- Social media marketing: Digital marketers promote the company brand across the popular social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat to reach a wider network of people. These social media channels also helps in targeting specific audiences that increase the chances for lead conversion.
- Pay per click (PPC) advertising: PPC is a method of increasing website traffic by paying different channels money every time the link of the company ad is clicked. These publishers such as Google Ads, Facebook ads, and Twitter campaigns in turn feature the ads in the newsfeeds of the target audience.
- Affiliate marketing: This method involves partnering with people with an expanded digital presence to promote the organisation’s brand. Digital personalities such as Instagram influencers promote the company’s brand across their social media handles in exchange for a commission.
- Native advertising: The sponsored posts by different information websites such as BuzzFeed are a good example of native advertising. These are primarily content promotions that focus on the benefits of a particular brand.
- Email marketing: Many companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with the target audience. These emails can contain information about product launches, discounts, promotions for registered customers, sales and other relevant news about the company. The emails can also include follow-up emails to people who visited or downloaded something from the website.
- Online PR: Online PR is very similar to the traditional PR practice of media coverage of the company but exists in the online social media space. This includes collaborations with different content-based websites, news agencies or critics who operate through the internet.
- Inbound marketing: Inbound marketing is methodology that engages with consumers at every stage of their buying process. This involves components of all the digital marketing strategies mentioned above to create an excellent customer experience. Inbound marketing adopts the best of every strategy and modifies them to eliminate the negatives.
What is the importance of digital marketing strategies?
This marketing approach has an enormous edge over traditional marketing methods. The benefits of this marketing methodology are below:
- Helps in creating brand loyalty by engaging with the customers;
- Takes the company to a global level with a wider network of consumers;
- Quantifies the results of marketing unlike conventional methods;
- Saves money on marketing campaigns and drives more revenue.
How does digital marketing help to grow a business?
Adopting the digital marketing strategy can help businesses grow in the following ways.
- Geographical expansion: Marketing is crucial to create awareness about a brand when it is expanding to different locations. This marketing approach can easily accomplish this by reaching to the audience in the new location months before the actual shift.
- Cost-effectiveness: Small and medium businesses can easily grow their audiences with this strategy. While printing billboards costs a lot, Facebook ads can reach a larger audience in a small portion of that cost.
- Measurable analytics: It is one of the main advantages of digital marketing. Businesses can measure the results of every marketing channel such as website clicks and number of leads registering on the website and use the insights to develop better strategies.
- Higher revenue: Helps in generating much higher revenues as compared to conventional methods and helps in engaging with a larger pool of potential customers.
- Better targeting of audience: With this strategy, companies can choose their target audience and specifically engage with them instead of imposing on a general audience. It helps customising the marketing campaigns as per the preferences and interests of the target audience.
Scope and future of a career in digital marketing
This industry offers you employment opportunities without having to wait for a suitable job. There are scores of freelance opportunities in every branch of this stream. You can also obtain a Google Analytics or Google AdWords qualification to attract employers in need of talented marketing analysts.
You can pit your creativity and analytical skills to good use in any of the following positions.
- Social media managers: this is one of the coolest jobs in the industry. As a social media manager, you get to experiment with the social media accounts of your clients to increase their website traffic, coordinate with the content team for customer-centric content and create social media ads. You must have a knack to know what the target audience wants and should have the ability to analyse traffic data accurately.
- SEO analysts: an important part of any digital marketing team, SEO analysts ensure that the written and video content is in tandem with the algorithms of search engines. They are responsible for increasing the website traffic with a variety of SEO strategies. You must be good with analysis and keyword research to be an SEO analyst.
- Content writers: these people create the raw materials that social media managers and SEO analysts need to increase website traffic. The content produced can be blog posts, articles, snippets, ads, or posters. As a content writer, you must have an excellent command of language and should be able to write clear engaging copy for the audience based on SEO inputs.
Apart from these, there are other interesting positions that you can explore such as CRM managers, E-commerce managers, analytics managers, mobile marketing specialists, web designers, graphic designers, bloggers, social media influencers, brand managers, communications officer, and digital marketing specialists.
If you want to pursue a career in this field, you can opt for the Diploma in Digital Marketing Specialist Co-op from Toronto School of Management (TSOM) to gain a solid foundation on the subject. The diploma focuses on the different components and types of digital marketing, their impact on sales and revenue and also provides you with a hands-on experience. Click here to learn more about the course.
