People spend twice as much time online as they used to 12 years ago. So combining different marketing tactics, that includes digital marketing, is essential to promoting your products and services. In fact, mobile search has surpassed the desktop in recent years making it all more imperative that your company optimize it’s reach using digital marketing.
What do we mean when we refer to digital marketing? It’s a term used to attract, engage and convert customers online. Essentially. whatever it takes, using your organization’s digital assets, to drive traffic to your website. Digital is now the first touch point for the consumer and a channel where the consumer has greater control over what they see and when they see it. In a world where the intended target has limitless choices, it’s up to Digital Marketers to understand the customer journey, customer expectations and desired outcomes from a myriad of scenarios. Simply put, anytime you use connected devices to reach your target audience with your content, you’re engaging in digital marketing.
What are your digital assets? Typically, most companies use their website as the first touch point on the digital experience, but digital assets also include blog posts, infographics, interactive tools, social media channels, online brochures, white papers, online advertisements and earned coverage (through Public Relations, reviews and social media) to drive traffic. It’s important to engage customers and prospects in digital channels, including mobile and social, where they are increasingly seeking information.
How do you leverage digital tactics? Try employing a number of strategies including offering informative content from a trusted source that is accessible across all digital devices, platforms and channels. Empowering customers to make informed decisions that will help them improve their lives is one tactic that nets positive results. One of the most important digital tactics is using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) where optimizing where you rank on a search results page drives more organic traffic to your website. Other digital tactics include: Pay Per Click (PPC), social media, affiliate, content marketing, inbound marketing, native advertising, email marketing and online PR (to name a few).
Whether you are B2B or B2C digital marketing is becoming more critical to your ongoing marketing efforts. In B2B, you can attract and convert the highest quality leads for your salesforce using digital marketing. In B2C, digital marketing helps attract customers to your site and engage with you without speaking to a salesperson.
Unlike more traditional offline marketing efforts, digital marketing happens in real time and can be tracked using a variety of analytics. Digital analytics data allows organizations to fine tune their efforts quicker than ever by seeing how many pages a person visited, what device they were using, and where they came from to your site. The goal is to identify trends and patterns in a visitor’s behaviour before they end their journey with your product or service.
Business today can make more informed decisions using digital marketing in their mix. Make sure you’re leveraging it to drive new prospects and customers.