What Is Digital Marketing? The Definitive Guide to Digital Marketing

Now that you know the digital marketing definition and the answer to the question, “what is digital marketing”, let’s dive into how it compares to traditional marketing.

The difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing is simple.

Traditional marketing uses offline channels, while digital marketing uses digital channels.

A traditional marketing campaign, for example, may use billboards, print ads, and mailers, while a digital marketing campaign may use social media, blog posts, and email to promote a business and its offerings.

In recent years, the line between “traditional marketing” and “digital marketing” has begun to blur as even traditional channels like billboards, TV ads, and direct mail have developed a digital component to them.

Curious about the importance of digital marketing?

For companies today, digital marketing matters because it offers:

• Multiple online marketing strategies
• Cost-effective marketing solutions
• Level playing field
• Advanced targeting and personalization options
• Accurate campaign tracking and measurement
• Continuous campaign performance feedback

You can learn more about digital marketing’s benefits below.

Now that you know the digital marketing meaning and how it differs from traditional marketing, let’s talk about how it can benefit your business.

The benefits of digital marketing include:

Digital marketing offers multiple online marketing strategies

When we answered the question, “what is digital marketing”, we mentioned that there are several types of digital marketing techniques and strategies.

With online marketing, your company can pick from a range of tactics. Examples of digital marketing tactics include:

• SEO
• PPC
• Content marketing
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Social media marketing and advertising
• And more

You have options, which isn’t always the case when using traditional marketing. With traditional marketing, you have fewer choices. You only have a couple of channels available, like radio, print, and TV, and many of these channels are expensive, which limits your choices further.

Choosing to use digital marketing gives your company access to a range of strategies. You can pick the ones that match your business, goals, and target market the best, which helps you maximize the impact of online marketing on your bottom line.

Digital marketing offers cost-effective marketing solutions

Price is another one of the top benefits of digital marketing.

Compared to traditional marketing, online marketing is extremely cost-effective. If you advertise online, whether on social media, websites, or search engines, you set your budget and bid for ad space. You have complete control over how much you spend, which isn’t the case when buying a billboard.

Flexibility is a big feature of digital marketing. Budgets and campaigns can be set to run anywhere from years to minutes. Coupled with precise targeting, businesses get agility that is often missing in traditional campaigns. If you launch a PPC campaign, for instance, and see that it isn’t performing, you can go ahead and pause that campaign. In comparison, once you buy a billboard, you have it for that entire duration of a contract, whether it works or not.

Digital marketing offers a level playing field

Next on our list of digital marketing benefits is that it offers a level playing field. If you’re a small-to-midsized business (SMB), digital marketing also helps your company stand apart from larger brands. That’s because online marketing offers cost-effective solutions, like SEO, that can help your business reach its audience.

Large corporations are able to market themselves in ways SMBs often can’t. They take up prime real estate with company locations. They employ large numbers of cold-calling sales staff. They sponsor trade show and conferences with elaborate exhibits.

With digital channels, it is just as easy to click an ad for a large corporation as it is to click an ad for a small business. A Facebook Page for a Fortune 100 company looks the same as a Facebook Page for a 5 person company.

This even playing field can help your company bypass big brands and reach your target market.

You don’t have to worry about how your online marketing budget will compete with larger brands, either. Digital marketing offers several cost-effective strategies, including SEO, that you can use to get your products or services in front of your audience.

Digital marketing offers advanced targeting and personalization options

Perhaps one of the top digital marketing benefits is that it offers advanced targeting and personalization options.

Making web marketing a part of your business strategy also gives you access to a range of advanced targeting and personalization options. Traditional marketing, which is broader, can’t compete with what digital marketing can provide you when it comes to targeting.

For example, with an online marketing strategy, you can use targeting options like:

• Age
• Location
• Interests
• Marital status
• Hobbies
• Device
• And more

These targeting options can help you amplify the other benefits of digital marketing, like its cost-effectiveness. If you launch a PPC campaign, for example, you could use targeting options like location and device to focus your ads on users most likely to convert, like by visiting your brick-and-mortar store.

Online marketing also makes it possible to personalize content with information like the following:

• Name
• Interests
• Purchase behavior

Creating a personalized experience for users, whether via your email marketing campaign or website, can lead to better marketing results. An email that recommends products based on a subscriber’s past purchase behavior, for example, can lead to another sale and even a word-of-mouth recommendation.

Digital marketing offers accurate campaign tracking and measurement

Online marketing solves a traditional marketing problem — tracking.

With traditional marketing, it’s difficult to track whether someone found your business via a billboard, radio ad, or newspaper feature. When you can’t track your marketing efforts, you can’t measure their performance, which makes it challenging to prove marketing’s worth.

It’s easy to track the performance and results of digital marketing.

Google tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads make monitoring your strategy easy. With Google Analytics, for example, you can track website traffic, user behavior, and website conversions. In comparison, Google Ads provides a 360-degree view of your PPC ads. These types of website analytics are absolutely integral to any digital marketing strategy worth its salt.

Even better, you can use programs like Google Data Studio to compile all your data into easy-to-read and easy-to-share digital marketing reports. Tools like these help you showcase, as well as analyze, the performance of online marketing.

Digital marketing offers continuous campaign performance feedback

Making digital marketing a part of your business strategy also gives you access to a marketing approach that provides constant feedback on your campaign’s performance, whether it’s your SEO strategy or PPC ads.

For example, if you launch a PPC campaign and update your targeting to exclude mobile devices, you may notice a sudden drop in conversions. That immediate response helps you react fast. You can undo your targeting update and get your campaign back to optimal performance.

Even long-term strategies, like SEO, provide constant feedback.

For instance, you can see if your keyword targeting strategy works well by analyzing your website traffic and website conversion rates. This analysis can help you uncover other areas for improvement, too, like your site’s design and usability, as well as content quality.

With all its benefits, digital marketing is a massive asset for companies, including yours.

You know the definition of digital marketing, but how does digital marketing work?

Online marketing works by developing a coordinated, omni-channel strategy that supports your target audience’s unique buying journey. That means your business uses multiple channels, like social, email, and search, to support an overarching strategy, like generating brand awareness, leads, or sales.

For perspective, think about this digital marketing example:

• Goal: Earn leads
• Channels: Search, email, digital advertising
• Strategy:
  • Write a blog post that targets a middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) need.
  • Optimize the blog post for search engines and users.
  • Include a downloadable resource that requires users to share their email address.
  • Build a drip campaign for those email subscribers to move them to conversion.

It’s a basic example, but the above scenario shows how companies can use digital marketing to achieve global goals, like attracting leads. While you can use online marketing channels by themselves, they work best when used together, which is one of the biggest challenges for digital marketers.

Now that you know the digital marketing meaning, you might wonder how your business can take advantage of digital marketing’s many benefits.

If you’re curious about how your company can use digital marketing, check out these examples:

1. Build brand awareness with a social media ad campaign on Facebook
2. Increase qualified website traffic with a content marketing strategy
3. Generate purchases and leads with a PPC ad campaign
4. Improve website conversion rates with CRO tests
5. Grow qualified website traffic, search result visibility, and sales with an SEO strategy
6. Target competitor locations and qualified leads with geofencing advertising
7. Convert high-value leads with a dedicated account-based marketing plan
8. Encourage customer loyalty and repeat purchases with an email marketing campaign
9. Increase time on page and conversion rates by improving your site’s page speed
10. Expand reach with marketing strategies on Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, and Target+

These are just 10 digital marketing ideas.

Whether you’re in the business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) market, you can find creative ways to reach your audience through online channels. The customization and versatility of online marketing techniques make them useful for every kind of company. Here at WebFX, we’re both a B2B digital marketing agency and a B2C digital marketing agency!

A digital marketer develops, implements, manages, and measures an organization’s online marketing strategy and campaigns. Many online marketers specialize in different types of digital marketing, like social media, SEO, content marketing, and PPC.

Generally, digital marketers aim to accomplish their company’s overall goals, like increasing revenue, by achieving smaller goals, like improving the organization’s website traffic, social media following, and conversion rate.

In almost all cases, online marketers will measure the performance of their business’s digital marketing strategy with metrics, also called key performance indicators (KPIs), on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis.

Digital marketing budgets vary. The average small-to-midsized business (SMB), however, spends $2500 to $12,000 per month on Internet marketing. Generally, companies will dedicate 6.5% to 10% of their revenue to online marketing.

If your business earned $1 million in revenue, for example, you would then set aside $65,000 to $100,000 for digital marketing that year. Every company is different, of course, so you may invest more or less in online marketing.

A few factors influence how much you spend on digital marketing, including:

Your online marketing strategy’s complexity

Web marketing plans can become complicated quickly, especially if your company uses multiple channels and teams for marketing your business. That’s why complex projects require a more significant investment because they need more resources and team members to succeed.

Your digital marketing tools

Marketing your business online demands a toolkit, which will generally include tools for:

• Tracking rankings in organic search results
• Researching competitor strategies
• Developing content calendars
• Tracking content progress from writing to editing to publishing
• Scheduling, publishing, and monitoring social media posts
• Creating ads for social media and search campaigns
• Building, sending, and monitoring email campaigns

While your company can access some free tools, like Buffer for scheduling social media posts, you’ll often need to set aside some of your digital marketing budget for paid tools, like Ahrefs, for researching competitors and monitoring organic search rankings.

Depending on your business, you may also invest in some third-party services, like:

• Freelance design
• Professional digital marketing services
• One-time consulting

These services often help your in-house team with managing your online marketing strategy.

A freelance designer, for instance, can provide high-quality graphics for your company’s blog posts, social media posts, and ads, which saves you the time of creating these images yourself. In comparison, a digital marketing agency can streamline your entire strategy by leading and managing it for you.

Whether you choose to hire help or work in-house will depend on your company and its capabilities.

While large, enterprise-level corporations can often handle their digital marketing campaigns in-house, many SMBs encounter bottlenecks. Not having enough team members, time, or even experience in an area can all bring your digital marketing efforts to a halt, which is where a third-party provider can help.

Your online marketing strategy’s aggressiveness

Like complex strategies, aggressive online marketing strategies require a more substantial investment. Your business, for example, may invest closer to 10% of your total revenue versus 6.5% to make your plan more competitive.

Whether your company requires an aggressive strategy will depend on your goals, as well as your industry. If you operate in a tough market where everyone uses online marketing, you will probably need an aggressive plan for promoting your brand.

SEO is an online marketing strategy that improves your visibility or ranking in search results relevant to your business and target market. Increasing your ranking requires on-page SEO and off-page SEO. These two tactics focus on making your site friendlier and more authoritative to search engines and users.

When you use SEO as a digital marketing technique, you’ll use a few types of SEO, including:

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the practice of using coding languages to identify different parts of a page.

Most of the time that requires using a coding language like HTML, CSS, Java, JavaScript, PHP, or Schema.

Regardless of the languages you use to create your site, you need to write the code well enough for search engines to read it.

You don’t have to be a computer programmer to make simple changes to your site’s code, though. In fact, if you spend some time doing your research, you can find places online to learn them for free.

But regardless of whether you learn the languages yourself, it’s important to remember the three most important HTML “tags” of technical SEO:

• Title tag <title>: The name of your page and the blue text that shows up in Google search results.
• Headings <h1>: The names of individual sections of a page.
• Links <a href=””>: Links to other pages on your site or pages off your site.

With these three tags, you’ll at least have a start on your technical SEO.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the process of adding your business to online directories and targeting location-based keywords with content on your site. This helps you show up in multiple areas online with your brand name, address, phone number, and more.

When people look up your business name or industry online, local SEO increases the chances that they’ll find your company before they find your competitors.

That helps you get more customers, earn more revenue, and grow your business.

Best of all, most local SEO outlets are entirely free.

The most popular local SEO outlet is Google Business Profile. It lets you add your company to Google Search and Maps results, which are two of the most popular online properties in the world.

When it comes to digital marketing techniques, SEO earns the most recommendations. With SEO, your business can drive long-term revenue to your company, without the upfront and continuous costs that come with strategies like social media advertising.

If you’re ready to use SEO for your online marketing campaign, use these tips:

Build your SEO knowledge and learn the basics

An umbrella of strategies make up SEO, which is why it’s essential to master the basics of SEO.

Understand which ranking factors, like links and mobile-friendliness, matter the most to search engines. Then, learn how to optimize your website for these factors, like by investing in a mobile responsive site for mobile-friendliness or developing an outreach and content process for attracting backlinks.

Guides, like SEO From Start to Finish, can get you started with SEO.

Audit your website’s SEO

As a part of your SEO strategy for online marketing, audit your website. For bonus points, complete a full digital marketing audit.

Use what you learned and apply it to your site. Check your current rankings in search results, for example, with a free tool like Google Search Console. Analyze your keyword targeting, as well as how you use keywords in your content, title tags, and meta descriptions.

If you want to audit your site fast, use a free SEO checker. You can even invest in professional SEO audit services if you want the help of seasoned SEOs. This option works well if you’ve practiced SEO before but can’t figure out why your company isn’t ranking well in search results.

Once you finish your audit, you can move on to optimizing your site.

Research your keywords

Keyword research is the process of identifying valuable words and phrases that your customers use to find your business online.

It’s the first step to almost every digital marketing strategy because it forms the foundation of each one.

To find keywords related to your business, you have a few research options at your disposal:

Google Autosuggest

While it’s not an official keyword research tool, Google has a built-in keyword research tool right in Google Search.

All you have to do is start typing a word related to your business — like “shoes” if you sell running shoes or “garage door repair” if you’re a garage door company — and see what pops up.

The suggested keywords will be listed in order of popularity based on how many people search them.

Unfortunately, that means this keyword research strategy has a limited success ceiling. It won’t be able to tell you everything you need to know to create your plan, but it will give you a good place to start.

Keywordtool.io

Keywordtool.io is a great way to generate long lists of keyword ideas.

All you have to do is type in the root of your keyword — so again, something like “shoes” if you sell running shoes — and Keywordtool.io will generate a list of possible keywords for you to target.

Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t tell you how frequently people search for those keywords. So you’ll have to take your list and use it in another tool to get the full picture of keywords you should target.

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to accomplish this task.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a paid SEO tool.

Most companies can research keywords with the cheapest SEMrush package, though you can upgrade to get more of SEMrush’s functionality.

With SEMrush, you can upload a spreadsheet of the keywords you find with tools like Keywordtool.io and get data, like how many people search for those keywords every month, current websites that rank for those keywords, and other information that can help you decide what keywords work best for your needs.

Ideally, you want to find long-tail keywords or phrases of four to five words. They may have low search volume, but they’ll also typically have lower competition.

Better yet, they’ll drive qualified traffic to your business because long search queries imply a searcher’s intent to make a purchase.

The idea is to target these keywords with future strategies so you can pull a consistent audience to your website.

Maintain your SEO

Once you’ve achieved your goals for rankings, website traffic, conversions, and other digital marketing metrics, you must maintain your site so you can keep growing in the future.

After all, digital marketing is continuously changing — and if you don’t keep up, your competitors could leave you in the dust.

With that in mind, you (or a digital marketing agency) have to keep up with recent trends, updates to SEO, and other factors that impact your ability to compete in the digital marketplace.

Once you’ve laid the foundation of your SEO strategy, maintaining it is typically much easier. In fact, it’ll be more time-consuming than difficult, as you’ll have to update tags, add content, remove content, test calls-to-action (CTAs), and other factors.

But some maintenance jobs are tediously difficult and knowledge-intensive.

The best example of this is adapting to algorithm updates, like “Mobilegeddon” of 2015. This required website owners to incorporate responsive design into their websites, which we’ll discuss in more detail later.

This wasn’t a big problem for most companies with SEO partners.

But for some smaller businesses, it destroyed their ability to rank online.

These updates mean that every company needs to stay on top of their site and work to maintain their rankings online, even after they’ve achieved their goals.

How much you invest in SEO will depend on your needs, goals, and project scope.

The average SMB invests $1500 to $5000 into SEO each month. In comparison, hourly consultants cost around $100 to $300 per hour. If you’re looking to do a one-time project for your website’s SEO, plan to spend anywhere from $5000 to $30,000.

Find out more about incorporating SEO into your digital marketing plan with these resources:

• SEO Explained: What Is SEO and How Does SEO Work?
• The Types of SEO to Know
• SEO Checker: Check Your SEO [Tool]
• How Much Does SEO Cost?
• Professional SEO Services
• SEO Resource Library

PPC advertising is a digital media marketing tactic that promotes your business, products, or services on search engines, websites, apps, and more. PPC operates on a pay-per-click business model, which means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, which can include text, images, and video.

You can advertise your business, products, and services with several platforms, including these two:

Search engines

When you advertise with search engines like Google and Bing, you can assign ads to certain keywords. Then, you place a “bid” for how much you’re willing to pay for each click to your website, and the advertisers with the highest bids show up above the other search results.

This means when you outbid your competitors, your ad shows up directly underneath the search bar — right where search users look after a page loads.

The idea is that more people will click your ad when you rank higher.

On the one hand, that means you’ll pay more by “buying” more ad clicks.

On the other hand, it means you’ll have lots of opportunities to convert ad clicks into paying customers.

In some cases, it only takes one or two conversions to recoup your cost and turn a profit on your PPC campaign.

So, once you determine the keywords that generate results for your business, you can use PPC to maximize your visibility and generate more qualified traffic.

Social media

Social platforms often let you choose between a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) and CPC payment model. That makes social ads more versatile than search ads, but social networks — even the big ones — don’t get as much daily traffic as Google.

However, social ads allow you to incorporate images, GIFs, and videos into your ads, so you don’t have to rely on text to get new customers.

Many social networks still have rules regarding their ads, though.

For example, Facebook doesn’t allow any images to have more than 20% text.

Other networks, like Twitter or Pinterest, are more accepting of different ad formats.

With social ads, you have so many choices that it’ll take some time to find the most effective network for your needs.

Are you ready to use this digital marketing technique? Get started with these PPC tips:

Start with broad targeting

While you can create hyper-targeted campaigns with PPC, you want to avoid launching campaigns with this much targeting. Instead, keep your targeting broad at the start and then use your data (versus your hunches) to refine your campaign.

Optimize landing pages

Landing pages play a critical part in PPC.

If you have a slow, difficult-to-navigate, or irrelevant landing page, it will hurt the performance of your PPC campaigns. You’ll experience higher costs and lower CTRs. Plus, ad networks will show your ad less because they know it underdelivers when it comes to user experience.

Optimize your landing pages for users by coordinating your landing page with your ad. For example, if you advertise a pair of running shoes, your landing page should be the product page for those running shoes — not your running shoes category page.

You can also improve your landing page by improving its usability and speed.

Use responsive ads

Responsive ads offer your business a convenient way to test your ad headlines and descriptions.

With Google responsive ads, for example, Google will test different combinations of your headlines and descriptions to see which ones perform best. You can also use responsive display ads, which will also experiment with image and video combinations.

If you use responsive ads, make sure the various combinations make sense. Having a headline and description that say the same thing, for example, will naturally fail, which doesn’t help your business maximize the performance of your ads or the value of responsive ads.

On average, SMBs invest $9000 to $10,000 per month into PPC advertising. How much you invest in PPC will depend on your industry, strategy, ad network, and aggressiveness. Your PPC investment may also change over time, like if your business is seasonal.

Keep building your PPC knowledge with the following resources:

• The Ultimate PPC Beginner’s Guide
• FAQs About PPC Advertising
• The Types of PPC Advertising
• How Much Does PPC Cost?
• PPC Advertising Services
• PPC Resource Library

Email marketing is a digital marketing technique that focuses on generating and nurturing leads. With email marketing, businesses can send a range of emails, including to promote products, share company announcements, and pass along helpful advice or articles.

You can create a range of emails for digital marketing, including:

Newsletters

Newsletters are emails that go out to a large list and provide general information on your company or industry. So, if someone wants to keep up with your business, they’d subscribe to a newsletter.

This is ideal for people in your industry who want to know what you’re doing, and it allows your business to show the public that you’re an authoritative resource in your sector.

Newsletters accomplish that by going out at regular intervals, like every week. They showcase important information, like new hires or other company news.

In fact, you could have a newsletter dedicated to curated industry news from around the Internet. Then, you don’t just prove you’re an authority — you prove you’re helpful and informed, too!

Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of converting leads into paying customers by sending them additional information based on where they converted on your site.

This kind of marketing requires a lot of in-depth thought, testing, and revision to work. But once it does work, any lead-based business can earn new customers (and more revenue) much more quickly than before.

So, let’s say you sell industrial equipment to construction companies.

A new user converts into a lead and gives you their contact information. They converted on a page about bulk movers.

Another user converts on a page about backhoes.

While these machines fall under the same category — construction equipment — they’re used for different purposes. That means the company that’s interested in bulk movers won’t want the same information as a backhoe.

By sending them different emails that are tailored to their specific needs, which you can also automate, you increase the odds that one of those leads will convert into a paying customer.

Make the most of this digital marketing technique with these tips:

Create segmented audiences

Segmenting your emails can result in a 760% increase in revenue.

With segmentation, you break your subscribers into dedicated audiences. You base these audiences on subscriber interests, actions, locations, and more. Either way, when you segment your subscribers, you make it possible to provide them with more personalized and relevant emails.

Use A/B testing

Testing is a valuable tool in digital marketing. With regular experimenting, you can discover new insights about your audience, like a can’t-resist CTA, which can enhance your entire digital marketing strategy and its results.

Adopt an “always be testing” attitude for your email marketing strategy, and test elements like:

• Subject lines
• Email content
• Send times
• And more

With regular testing, your company can build a list of actionable takeaways, which you can apply to not only your email marketing strategy but also your overall digital marketing strategy to supercharge your results.

Personalize emails

Personalization works well for this digital marketing technique.

On average, for example, personalization increases email open rates by over 40%. Even better, personalizing emails can boost conversions by 10%, which translates to more leads and purchases for your business.

You can personalize emails with a subscriber’s name, purchase history, shopping cart, and more.

Most businesses invest $9 to $1000 per month into email marketing. Your email marketing costs will depend on a few different factors, including your number of subscribers, sending frequency, and overall strategy.

Use the following resources to get more information about using email marketing for digital marketing:

• What Is Email Marketing?
• The Beginner’s Email Marketing Guide
• 8 Types of Emails to Use for Email Marketing
• How Much Does Email Marketing Cost?
• Email Marketing Services
• Email Marketing Resource Hub

Video marketing is a digital media marketing tactic that uses video to attract, engage, educate, and persuade users. Companies can use video marketing on their website, as well as video hosting sites like YouTube. Video types range from product showcases to vlogs to how-tos to testimonials.

 

You can get started with video marketing as a digital marketing technique with these tips:

Optimize for SEO

For the best results with video marketing, optimize your videos for SEO.

If you’re uploading your videos to YouTube, for instance, you’ll want to follow SEO best practices for YouTube. These best practices include using your targeted keyword in your video title, adding relevant video tags, and creating custom thumbnails.

You can also use YouTube SEO services to get your video content optimized and ranking on YouTube.

Focus on content quality, not video quality

A lot of companies hesitate about video marketing because they think they need a blockbuster-level video. That’s not the case with this digital media marketing tactic. People respond well to homemade videos, even from companies.

With the quality of smartphone cameras, it’s also easy for your business to get started with video marketing. You don’t have to purchase a video camera. Instead, you can use your smartphone to shoot your first video, whether it’s a clip showing off your product or answering your most common questions.

Overall, focus on the quality of your content.

Make sure your video provides value to your audience, like by responding to questions without getting sidetracked. When you post valuable content, it will build your audience’s trust and respect, as well as interest and enthusiasm in sharing your videos.

Use a script

For the best results with this digital marketing technique, create a video script or outline.

You don’t have to write what you will say word-for-word. Outlining what topics or questions you want to cover, however, can keep your videos focused. A focused video can prevent viewers from getting bored, as well as maximize the value of your content.

Video marketing costs depend on several factors, including video quality, duration, and scope. On average, however, professional video marketing services cost $1200 to $50,000 per video. For the most accurate pricing, request a quote for your project.

Get more information on incorporating video into your digital marketing strategy with these resources:

• Why You Should Start Using Video Marketing Now
• 8 Tips for an Effective Video Marketing Strategy
• 4 Video Marketing Examples to Get You Started
• Video Marketing Services
• Video Marketing Next Year: What to Expect