Digital marketing is the name given to the set of techniques and strategies for selling and promoting products and/or services on the internet. These techniques and strategies are focused on finding the right market niche and ensuring that website visits translate into sales or subscriptions.
What are the advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing?
Digital marketing has gained great importance since the 1990s, even matching traditional marketing (also known as offline marketing). This is because it offers certain advantages that are listed below:
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Greater measurement and optimization capacity: Digital marketing offers a multitude of tools and metrics that allow measuring the success or failure of a campaign. This makes it much easier to optimize them, improving their weaknesses and consolidating their strengths.
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Segmentation: The ability to reach a much more targeted audience, avoiding the expense of reaching people who are not interested in your product or service and focusing campaigns on an audience with a higher likelihood of conversion.
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Cost reduction: Online marketing channels have a lower cost compared to traditional channels such as television or radio, especially when considering that payment is usually based on specific results (clicks, impressions, etc.)
Techniques and Types of Digital Marketing
While online marketing is the set of actions aimed at improving sales or raising brand awareness through the internet, within it, we can find various types or trends. Below you can see some of the most common ones:
Inbound Marketing
It refers to a series of techniques that aim to create an impact on a user in a non-intrusive way. While traditional marketing "assaults" users or viewers, Inbound Marketing seeks to attract and retain them, guiding them through the conversion funnel.
Outbound Marketing
Unlike Inbound Marketing, these techniques are one-way and impact the user without the user specifically seeking that product or service through ads or banners, for example.
Brand Marketing (Branding)
It is marketing whose main objective is to make the brand known, its values, and its image, in order to create a lasting impression on potential consumers, without orienting the actions towards specific and immediate results. The goal is for the brand to be stored in the users' memory and associated with credibility and trust, which can be a differentiating factor in a possible future purchasing process.
B2B Marketing (Business to Business)
It is the marketing used by companies whose customers are other businesses or self-employed professionals.
B2C Marketing (Business to Customer)
It is the marketing employed by companies whose customers are individual people and not other businesses or professionals.
Performance Marketing (Results-based Marketing)
These are actions aimed at achieving specific results within a certain timeframe (traffic, clicks, leads, sales, subscriptions, etc.) and with calculated costs to increase the ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend).
Guerrilla Marketing
It is a type of marketing focused on achieving maximum dissemination of actions with the least possible cost through originality and surprise.
Relationship Marketing
It is marketing aimed not only at selling a product but establishing a relationship with the customer, understanding their needs and desires, so that the business itself evolves according to them. Its goal is to build customer loyalty and turn them into product or service advocates and repeat customers, beyond simply aiming for a sale or subscription. It is about creating synergies with customers. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is usually used to manage this relationship.
Conversational Marketing
This marketing trend is based on the process of establishing direct and real-time communications with the aim of capturing and qualifying potential customers. This conversation is based on real-time characteristics, scalability, and personalization. Furthermore, thanks to the bidirectional conversation, feedback can be obtained from the consumer to improve their customer experience.
Permission Marketing
The advertising relationship established with a person who provides their data must be based on their express permission to establish such communications. What may seem like an obstacle becomes an advantage, as the fact that the user has to give express permission makes them a qualified lead, indicating their interest in what your brand has to tell them. Seth Godin was the first to coin the term "permission marketing".
Content Marketing
It is the strategy of generating relevant content for the user, generally downloadable, that provides value in exchange for obtaining data and consent to establish commercial communications. Additionally, this content can be adapted to different stages of the sales funnel to guide them through the purchasing process.
Corporate Marketing
It is an internal marketing strategy within the company itself, aimed at providing benefits to employees in order to foster loyalty. It is based on transparency and creativity, aiming to turn employees into the company's first ambassadors.
Solidarity Marketing
These are solidarity actions through which the brand seeks to project a committed image to society. A communication plan must be established to make the public aware of these actions in order to obtain profitability from them, even if it is in terms of branding.
Affiliate Marketing
It is a type of marketing in which the advertiser pays a fixed or variable commission to a third party for each acquisition they generate for them.
Blended Marketing
It involves the combination of online marketing strategies with offline marketing strategies in a way that complements each other. Digital marketing techniques can be combined with offline channels such as radio, television, in-store promotions, etc.
Remarketing
Also known as retargeting, it involves showing ads to users who have performed a specific action (e.g., visiting a website or filling out a form) and targeting them with ads on other websites. The user is identified in order to "follow" them with ads throughout their browsing experience by placing a cookie on their browser.
Proximity Marketing
It is a digital marketing technique that uses the GPS location of mobile devices to deliver advertising to people in specific physical locations.
Real-time Marketing
Current tools allow for real-time communication between brands and users through social media, chats, and other support tools.
Direct Marketing
Direct marketing refers to contacting users included in a database. This type of marketing includes techniques such as email marketing or SMS marketing.
Loyalty Marketing
Loyalty marketing focuses on retaining existing customers or increasing their lifetime value, rather than solely acquiring new customers.
Niche Marketing or Micro-Niche Marketing
Niche marketing targets small, specialized groups with common interests.
One-to-One Marketing
One-to-One marketing focuses on individual customers by leveraging the segmentation capabilities offered by current tools.
Seasonal Marketing
Seasonal marketing refers to strategies focused on specific annual dates such as Christmas, Black Friday, Valentine's Day, etc.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves actions carried out by content creators with a large number of followers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.
Online Marketing Channels
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing focuses on appearing in the top positions of major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.).
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SEO (Search Engine Optimization): It involves optimizing websites and their content to achieve better positions in search engine results and receive more organic traffic.
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SEM (Search Engine Marketing): It refers to the advertisements displayed by search engines on their search results pages through networks like Google AdWords, contextualized based on the user's search
Online Advertising
Online advertising can take various formats, including display networks (banners, interstitials), video ads, and even social media platforms with their own advertising networks (Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads, Linkedin Ads) .
Email Marketing
Email marketing involves conducting advertising campaigns by sending mass emails to a list of subscribers.
Social Media Marketing
Companies' engagement in social media is an effective way to create brand awareness and interact with followers and potential customers. This can be achieved through two approaches:
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Organic Reach: It refers to the natural reach that the social media algorithm grants to user-generated content, showing it to a certain percentage of followers based on their interests and behavior.
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Social Ads:These are advertising spaces offered by social media platforms to advertisers to increase their reach and target their intended audience through demographic, behavioral, or interest-based segmentation.
Blogging
Creating content through a corporate blog is one of the common practices used by companies to position their websites through SEO and attract potential customers .
Online Marketing Tools
Content Tools
These are various tools that allow the creation of content to attract visitors to a website through promotion.
Metrics and Analysis Tools
These are tools that enable the measurement and analysis of data to evaluate the success of marketing strategies. Some well-known tools in this category include Google Analytics, Sistrix, and SemRush.
Management Tools
Notable examples include CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, which facilitate customer relationship management [
Advertising Tools
These tools allow for the distribution of content in exchange for payment. They include networks like Google Ads, Social Ads, etc.
Loyalty Tools
These tools are used to maintain communication with customers and attempt to convert them into repeat customers. Examples include email marketing and SMS marketing
Automation Tools (Marketing Automation)
These are software programs that enable the automation of certain marketing tasks, such as email sending, social media posting, lead nurturing workflows, and campaign reporting and tracking.
Roles of Digital Marketing
The innovation that digital marketing has brought in recent years has led to the emergence of job roles that did not exist a few decades ago or the transformation of existing ones. Digital marketing professionals are responsible for defining and achieving the defined KPIs for each channel and medium, whether owned or paid. It is common to specialize in some of the most important roles, including:
SEO Manager
They are responsible for optimizing and improving search engine rankings to appear as high as possible in key keywords for the company.
Social Media Manager
They are responsible for creating an editorial calendar for different social media platforms and setting goals for reach, followers, interactions, etc.
Content Marketing Specialist
They define the generated content to provide value to users, including blogs, ebooks, webinars, etc.
Automation Coordinator
They handle the software used for automating certain marketing actions and ensure monitoring of reports, potential issues, etc.
PPC Manager
They are responsible for coordinating paid online advertising campaigns and measuring their return on investment.
Importance of Digital Marketing
In recent years, digital marketing and online presence have gained significant importance for small and medium-sized businesses. In addition to traditional advertising, the increase in local searches and the significance of online reputation have made digital marketing as important, if not more, than offline marketing.
The 4 F's of Digital Marketing
While traditional marketing talked about the 4 "P's" of marketing (Product, Price, Promotion, and Place), digital marketing employs the 4 "F's" as coined by author Paul Fleming. These are:
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Flow: It is the state a user enters when browsing a website or application that provides an interactive experience while delivering added value.
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Functionality: For the conversion to be completed, the website or application must be sufficiently functional not to break the state of flow the user has entered.
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Feedback: It involves building a bidirectional relationship, allowing the company to extract information about user behavior as well.
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Fidelity: Online support enables the creation of user communities that contribute content and expertise to the company, going beyond being just a simple buyer.
Digital Marketing Plan
The digital marketing plan is a document that analyzes the company's online presence, establishes a target audience, and outlines an action plan aimed at achieving a return on advertising investment, whether focused on branding or performance
Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing strategy should include the following steps:
Target Audience Study (Buyer Persona)
The specific target audience must be defined to base the entire communication strategy on that.
Competitor Analysis
It is essential to understand the market situation and be aware of competitors' strategies to differentiate oneself from them.
SWOT Analysis
The SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) helps position the company within the market sector and is useful in defining the strategy and objectives.
SMART Objectives
The objectives of the marketing plan should be:
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Specific: They should be precise and clear.
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Measurable: The results should be measurable.
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Achievable: They should be attainable.
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Realistic: They should be within the realm of time, budget, etc.
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Timely: They should be set within a specific time frame.
Media Plan
It is necessary to define the channels and tools to be used (SEO, SEM, Social Media, etc.), their importance, and their impact on each stage of the sales funnel.
Calendar and Budget Definition
A specific budget is allocated to each channel and distributed over a certain period. For example, if a business is affected by seasonality, the budget will be unevenly distributed throughout the year.
Results Measurement and Optimization
Results should be measured to improve and optimize the strategy. The advantage of digital marketing is the ability to track real-time results and adapt the strategy based on the actual outcomes compared to the expected ones.