Everything changes very quickly. The old is replaced by the new, nothing in the world stands still. This also applies to online business progress. Previously, SEO was enough to attract customers from the Internet. A little later, internet marketing came to the rescue of SEO. Now, internet marketing alone is not enough. A new era has arrived - digital marketing.

Digital Marketing - What Is It?

It is, brand promotion and customer attraction using all possible digital channels - social networks, the Internet, e-mail newsletter, contextual advertising, content marketing, etc. It also uses other tools to help attract customers from the offline environment – SMS and mobile applications on phones. In one word, it is a comprehensive promotion of a product or service using different types of marketing (online + offline).

Digital Marketing Strategy

• Definition of goals

At this stage, you need to formulate the digital strategy goals, taking into account all the business goals of the organization.

• Identification of target audience

Define target audiences and events that will become a conversion for these groups

• Formation of USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

• Analysis of tools and technologies

Take a close look at the company's internal and external digital tools and channels. Also check out the ones that are available but not yet used. Formulate goals, objectives and main challenges for each channel (website, social media, mobile devices, CRM, ERP, etc.)

• Content strategy

The content strategy needs to be carefully developed: to consider in detail the tone, audience, method and time of content delivery. And, most importantly, not to deviate from the goal - communicate effectively and appropriately with users.

• Performance

Prioritize tasks based on urgency, importance, timeline, budget, and other resources available. Then distribute them among employees and arrange KPIs.

• Getting results

Determine how you will test the results of each step and the success of the project.

• Correction of results

After you have completed all the previous steps, you need to carefully analyse them, find bottlenecks and make changes in business processes to improve efficiency.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

• Established interaction with a wider target audience
• Delivering information to a larger number of potential customers in a short time
• More powerful impact on the audience
• Increasing brand awareness and loyalty to it from customers
• Transparent measurement of marketing campaign results and the ability to make adjustments in real time
• Lower costs compared to traditional advertising

Digital Marketing in Numbers

As mentioned above, digital marketing is a set of different marketing tools for attracting customers from both online and offline environments. Let's take a look at what the global numbers tell us about different new marketing tools.

Email Marketing

• The New York Times has 30 emails with 70% open rate. They got such results thanks to the narrow segmentation of the target audience. One series of letters works for students, another for retirees, a third for sports fans, and so on.
• Experian conducted a study that showed that personalized emails are opened 26% more often than with template subjects.
• Marketing Land reported that 80% of users pay attention to correspondence etiquette with unknown respondents. Their decision on further correspondence depends on this.
• Salesforce claims that using emojis in emails helps increase conversions. Only 2% of emails use this digital marketing trick.
• Most of the email openings noticed are for letters sent between 6:00 pm and 11:00 pm, according to Campaign Monitor.
• Monday and Friday are the most productive days for email newsletters, as other days are the ones with the most sending emails, reports CoSchedule.
• Marketing Land reports that people over 45 like humour in subject lines more than younger audiences.

Mobile Devices

• A study by DMR Company shows that more than 50 billion searches per month are made from mobile devices and this is important for digital marketing.
• 80% of Internet users own smartphones.
• 2015 State of Marketing Report surveyed marketers on the importance of optimizing emails for mobile devices. 31% of respondents say that more than half of their emails are opened from mobile. It is also known that only 47% of B2C companies fully utilize text optimization.
• Express Pigeon reports that over 50% of users start using their smartphones as soon as they wake up.
• Research by McKinsey & Company found that 61% of smartphone users do not return to a website if they have difficulty accessing it. In addition, 40% return to competitors.

Social Networks

• More than 1 billion smartphone owners use Facebook every month.
• 32% of teens use Instagram more often than any other social media networks.
• More than 20% of the world's population have active Facebook accounts.
• 76% of users log into Facebook daily. Instagram, in turn, accounts for 51% of such use.

Content Marketing

• 33% of marketers make between 2 to 5 publications per month.
• 70% of companies are increasing their budget for video content.
• The popularity of infographics has grown by 800% over the past year.
• More than 80% of marketers use written content and plan to increase it.
• 28% of digital marketers study podcasts.

Search Engine Optimization

• More than 600 million users do not want to see ads, using various services to block it. One of the benefits of organic sites.
• Around 60% of B2B marketers say they got most of their customers through SEO.
• The first 3 sites from search results receive more than 50% of conversions.
• 39% of users will leave the site if it takes a long time to load.

Online Advertising Channels

For this type of marketing to work effectively, you need to know where and how to use it. Let's dwell on this in more detail:

• Social networks. This channel is increasingly used by brands due to its effectiveness. Here you can directly communicate with your current and potential customers, engaging them through posts and targeted advertising. Creating interesting and useful publications, contests and surveys grabs the attention of the target audience and has a good effect on brand awareness.
• Own blog. Regular writing of useful articles also has a positive effect on attracting attention and loyalty from the target audience. The only condition is that all information should be useful and interesting to your audience.
• Mobile applications. You can see a tendency that most of the users surf the Internet from their phones. This plays into the hands of digital marketing. Mobile applications are designed to make it easier, faster and more convenient for the user to find the information he or she needs, as well as order goods and services. Thus, a person gets what she or he needs in a few clicks on his phone. Online shopping, taxi and food delivery services, hotels, useful blogs - for all these (and not only) areas, mobile applications will play a good role.
• Email newsletter. This channel allows you to point-to-point sharing of news, articles and commercial offers. With the right audience setup, email campaigns deliver great results.
• SEO. Search Engine Optimization of a website takes a lot of time before the first results appear, but at the same time it is less expensive than contextual advertising. After spending a lot of time and effort, this channel will attract a huge number of customers over a very long period.
• Contextual advertising. As mentioned above, contextual advertising requires a lot of investment. However, its strength lies in the instantaneous acquisition of customers immediately after the launch of the advertising campaign. Regular budget investments in advertising and competent audience setting will allow you to constantly receive new customers, developing digital marketing.
• Native advertising. A channel that is gaining more and more popularity. Collaborating with popular bloggers brings incredible results for companies. The main advantage of this channel is the absence of direct advertising. Brand information is perceived easily and unobtrusively.
• MEDIA. Publishing on popular news sites with the right audience increases brand awareness and credibility.

What has changed and what will change in the digital marketing market?

About 25 years ago, brands spent huge budgets on offline advertising - radio, television, big boards, etc. But in 1994, there was a breakthrough in the advertising market - the first banner appeared in front of Internet users. It had a line on it that said, “Have you ever clicked right here? Now you will. "

The first digital advertising campaign was launched by the EURO RSCG agency. This was the beginning of the transition to the digital era of marketing. A few years later, there was a race among the developers of the first search engines, the appearance of which was a real gift for marketers. Brands started to create and promote their own websites on the Internet. The next breakthrough in digital marketing was the emergence of social networks, which began to be used as a new tool for effectively promoting brands.

Today the competition has grown a hundredfold, and it has become very difficult to win a good place in the market. Marketers are constantly working on new promotion tools. There are millions of companies on the network that offer their product around the clock. Therefore, brand marketers need to follow all digital marketing trends and understand which tools are working and which are not. Let's talk about what trends will be relevant in the near future.

• Content visualization is gaining in importance. The popularity of online video is growing rapidly. During TV rush hour, YouTube captures a huge influx of audiences aged 18-25. A video posted to Facebook gets over 8 billion views every day. Advertisers who order TV ads during primetime shows can receive 56% more audience. High quality video content will evolve even more.
• Use native ads. Native advertising has replaced intrusive traditional advertising. Users are much easier to perceive "seamless" content. Native advertising delivers information naturally and non-intrusively. Data from analysts Polar and Bl intelligence have shown that native ads on mobile have 4 times more clicks than any other.
• The importance of personalized content is very significant in digital marketing. All content you send to potential and existing customers should be different from one another. The solution to the issue can be the creation of a dynamic site that will distinguish the new user from the old and will show them different information. For example, a new visitor will see a standard page listing of your products or services, and a user who has already been to your site will see a presentation of a new product. To this approach, HubSpot's name Smart Content is content that is personalized to the needs of the client. It is important to understand that one approach for everyone no longer works. The company also conducted a survey, thanks to which they received the data that a personalized call to action is 41% more effective than a standard call. In turn, Smart Insights conducted research and found that more than 60% of users trust companies that create personalized content more.
• Use of live broadcasts. Very little time has passed since the moment when such a method of communication on social networks as live broadcasts appeared. But now we can see how thousands of users are using them to the maximum. The business advantage of live streaming is instant online communication. The user can make a video presentation of the product or share their experience, instantly answering questions from viewers. Already this year, the stream of online broadcasts accounted for more than 70% of all traffic on the network. Constant research into this digital marketing tool that it is not going to lose momentum anytime soon.
• Chat bots. Gartner has provided data that in 2020 more than 80% of site user interactions will be with chatbots. Their main advantages are grabbing the user's attention and speeding up feedback, providing an increase in site conversion.
• Adaptability on mobile devices. This trend is relevant both a few years ago and now. Most of the users access the Internet using smartphones. All content that is created for the audience must necessarily be adapted for all types of devices. Convenient and quick access to the information you need will help you gain customer trust and build long-term relationships.
• Useful content. Also, one of those trends that has been going on for a long time. Creating useful and interesting content will attract more audience attention to you and build brand loyalty.

In Conclusion

In recent years, we can see that digital marketing is a new trend in global marketing, which actively and quickly pushes traditional advertising to the background. The more channels you use to attract customers, the stronger the effect will be. Create business pages on social media, shoot videos, grab the attention of opinion leaders, partner with popular bloggers, combine PPC advertising with SEO, create quality content for your audience - all this will help you double your profit and promote your brand to higher levels.