TL;DR
- Digital marketing is blogs, emails, images, videos & more
- Digital marketing starts with digital content auditing & strategy
- Great content is often the key to successful digital marketing
What the heck is digital marketing? In this information age, digital marketing is what’s required for many companies to shine. Digital marketing is the practice of planning, executing, measuring, and optimizing all types of creative marketing initiatives on the internet. Digital marketing often aims to remove all possible friction from a buyer’s journey.
You likely have many questions about digital marketing, and that’s pretty neat. Keep scrolling to learn everything you want to know about digital marketing in 2024.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is marketing that uses one or many digital strategies to educate, engage, and inspire potential and actual customers. At the core of many successful digital marketing strategies is great digital content.
Digital marketing can produce results that matter when the digital strategy is aligned with key business objectives. Digital marketing takes many forms, for example—
- Creating memorable and engaging social media posts that grab attention
- Publishing a weekly newsletter that educates and provides product updates
- Posting how-to and user testimonial videos on YouTube
- Using paid advertising for quick gains in brand visibility
Digital marketing produces much of what you consume on the internet—this masterpiece included! 😂 Your customers’ time matters—a lot—and that’s why your digital content needs to be consistently excellent.
How does digital marketing work?
A digital marketing effort may be structured as a series of campaigns that support near-term milestones and long-term business priorities. If you’re looking for the basic steps to create and execute a digital marketing strategy, then check this out—
1- Conduct a digital content audit: Your first step is to conduct a digital content audit to assess the strengths and weaknesses of any existing content.
2- Create a digital marketing strategy: You can use the audit results to help create a digital marketing strategy that maps to the most important business goals.
3- Find resources: Procure the necessary resources—mainly humans, money, and time—to execute your digital marketing strategy.
4- Create digital content: Have fun creating great content in the formats identified by your digital marketing strategy.
5-Publish digital content: Publish your content using the digital channels and schedule specified by your digital marketing strategy.
6- Measure content performance: Collect data on a regular basis to learn how your digital strategies are performing.
7- Analyze the data: Evaluate the relevant data to spot trends, areas for improvement, and core strengths.
8- Optimize your content: Use the results of your analysis to improve your digital content to better meet customer needs.
9- Refresh your digital strategy: Reevaluate your digital marketing strategy on a routine basis to ensure that it’s meeting your most important business and customer needs.
Pros and cons of digital marketing
Digital marketing can enable organizations to meet many different business goals, which is pretty awesome. But digital marketing can have some drawbacks, too, which are important for any organization to understand.
Let’s dive deep into all the pros and cons of digital marketing.
What to love about digital marketing
- High ROI potential: Digital marketing can be among the most profitable ways to market a company. Choosing digital strategies with high ROIs—like blog content and email marketing—can maximize the profit potential of your digital marketing strategy.
- Customized and adaptive: Digital marketing initiatives can be highly customized to address an organization’s unique business challenges. Digital marketing strategies can (and should!) evolve over time as preferences and needs change for all stakeholders.
- Creative yet valuable: The best digital marketing content is a joy to consume. Digital marketing at the precise intersection of art and business captures the best of both worlds.
How digital marketing can do better
- Time to positive ROI: What’s the fastest way to boost sales performance using digital marketing? Probably via paid advertising. Organic digital marketing can require 3-6 months before your investment return becomes positive.
- Accuracy of measurement: Measuring the ROI of a digital marketing campaign or strategy is notoriously difficult. The formula to measure content ROI has many variables, and external factors—like search algorithm updates—can skew performance data.
- Total duration: The other bad news about digital marketing is that you may always need it. Your organization will likely always have goals, customers will continue to want to engage, and you typically need digital marketing to satisfy these requirements.
The hardest part of digital marketing is usually getting started. A digital marketing strategy set in motion can begin to meet urgent stakeholder needs, generate useful data, and produce positive ROI over time.
Examples of great digital marketing
Digital marketing can take so many different forms—some examples of digital marketing assets include whitepapers, blogs, videos, newsletters, podcasts, and infographics. Let’s get some more clarity by focusing on four specific examples of digital marketing done exceptionally well—
- Consensys Signal: This email newsletter is published by the leading Ethereum software company. It’s jam packed with useful information but phrases like “yes, you may need a blockchain” make it fun to read, too.
- Celsius Network: The (now defunct 🤦♀️) digital asset lending platform stands out for creating an explainer video on “blockchain banking” that uses storytelling to be memorable. The animated style of the video further engages anyone who loves cuddly teddy bears.
- Dogecoin: The ultimate meme coin not surprisingly has an engaging website. Dogecoin.com is informative while staying fully in character—visitors to the homepage are greeted with announcements like “Such core wallet 1.14.6 released! Much upgrade, plz!” The infamous style of Dogecoin is key to the vibrancy of this community.
How to get started with digital marketing
Are you curious about how to begin your digital marketing journey? Getting started with digital marketing usually requires making several key decisions to guide your efforts. Here are some crucial questions to ask—
- Who will plan your digital marketing strategy? You can devise your own digital marketing strategy, hire an in-house professional, or work with a digital marketing consultant or agency.
- Who will execute the digital marketing strategy? Same deal here—you can choose to execute the entire digital strategy yourself, hire freelance writers and creators, or outsource to a consultant or agency.
- How will you pay for digital marketing? Finding a way to afford digital marketing usually means making a business case or allocating part of an existing marketing budget.
- Are you prepared to succeed at digital marketing? Excelling at digital marketing may prolong its necessity. It’s smart to ponder if you feel prepared for this commitment.
Is digital marketing right for you?
You may still be wondering if you need digital marketing or if it’s worth the expense. That sounds logical. The high ROIs of successful digital marketing make the option attractive to many people with marketing objectives 🙋♀️. Digital marketing is rooted in providing value to stakeholders, and forms the core of many modern marketing strategies and campaigns. You may not need digital marketing, but your target customers do.
