An overview of digital marketing and content marketing

Digital marketing has several advantages when compared to traditional marketing. The most important of these are outlined here:

• It's highly targetable.
• It provides real-time interaction with audiences.
• It promotes global reach.
• It's instant and has highly measurable results.
• It's cost-effective.
• It can be customized.
• It's easy to adjust.

At least for businesses, this shift to online channels has also brought some difficulties. The most crucial, and one that has the most impact on organizations, is competition. For each product or service, customers now have countless options only a click away—it doesn't matter where they are! How can you differentiate your product or service from all your competitors? That's where a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy can make the difference between a successful business and a struggling one.

Before we delve into digital marketing tactics, we can't go on without understanding that the marketing is happening between you—the brand—and the customer through some media. Next, we'll find out why they are so important.

Brand building

You must be cautious because digital marketing should always be about building and growing your brand. Think of your brand as your business's reputation; as you know, it takes years to earn a good reputation but only minutes to destroy it, especially these days in this always-connected world. A brand is more than just a logo or name; it's the company's promise to provide a customer with what the brand means. It's not only functional, but it also has emotion, self-expression, and social benefits. Your brand has many touchpoints—some of them are digital, and some are not. Think of each of them as an opportunity to increase awareness and build your customer's loyalty… and don't forget: what happens offline always finds its ways to the online channels, through customers' shares.

Here are some examples of brand touchpoints:

I can give you an example of the importance of always thinking in terms of your brand (reputation): suppose you need to get the world to know about your incredible new product. Your young marketer comes to you with an "awesome idea", and says: "I know a place where I can buy an email list with 50,000 business owners' names and emails! I can build an entire marketing campaign on top of that. It will be easy money!" If you don't give it enough thought, you may think that there's no harm in that. In order to get a list that size, you would probably need at least a year. So, why not do it? However, this example helps me lay out another marketing golden rule: "Think like a customer—your customer." If that was your name on that list, what would you think of the company that emailed you without you ever allowing them to do so? You would just think of them as a spammer, click the junk button, and hope to never hear from them again, right? Now, multiply this effect by many other people, and you can see the impact this would have on your brand, your reputation, and the future of your business. With all of your marketing efforts, you must always have your business and brand's long-term vision in the center of your mind.

Main types of media

There's one distinction that is important for you to know, one that significantly affects the way the digital marketing mix is implemented: the difference between owned, paid, and earned media. These distinctions revolve around what you control and influence… or what you do not. Consider the following:

• Earned media can only be influenced, never controlled. I think you'll agree when I say that one of your most important objectives is to have the rest of the world sharing how good your brand is, right? Also, because you can't control it, almost all the major Google ranking factors measure this type of media, mentions, backlinks, and so on.
• Owned media is in your total control and, of course, the most significant example is your website. Your owned properties allow you to spread information about your brand and build your audience, which should be the destination in your marketing campaigns.
• Paid media is the fastest way to get your message across, but you are bound to a publisher's rules, and people tend to give it less value. They know it's "just an ad".

The table below summarizes this:

Your digital marketing campaigns should usually incorporate all those three types of media. It's very unusual to have an online campaign that doesn't communicate on several digital media channels simultaneously. For example, a marketer can use content on social media to engage audiences, but that same content can also be used as a display ad on another online publisher site.

Who is your customer?

The objective of market segmentation is to filter out and categorize different groups within your audience so that you can deliver more targeted and valuable products, services, and messages to them. Simply put, customers of each market segment have similar characteristics that businesses can leverage in their marketing.

Your audience can be segmented into subgroups: geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral are the most common and popular methods of segmentation. This helps you know which groups exist so that you can better understand the target audience. Geographic segmentation is the easiest to understand: it's just thinking in terms of where your audience is located physically. Demographic segmentation is also one of the most popular and commonly used types of market segmentation: it looks at identifiable non-character traits about a group of people. Psychographic segmentation categorizes audiences and customers by factors that relate to their personalities and interests. Finally, behavioral segmentation separates your audience by behaviors and decision-making patterns such as purchase, consumption, lifestyle, and usage.

The following table shows some examples of segmentation:

How do you get all the data necessary to segment your audience? Look at the following areas:

• Previous behavior: This is crucially important information, and one that you can get easily. What did your customer buy in their past purchases? In what kinds of products have they shown more interest?
• Personal preferences: The best way to find out what your client wants or likes is by asking. Through the sign-up process on your website, quizzes, and questionnaires that can be relatively simple and non-intrusive, you can gather precious data for yourself and for your business to know what your customer wants so that you can get it for them.
• Connection with social media platforms: By connecting with social media, you are allowed direct 24/7 contact with your customers and can talk to them in real time, if needed. This also improves your knowledge of their preferences, since you can help with orders, answer some questions, and get to know them better.
• Ad exchanges: A technology that facilitates the buying and selling of media advertising from multiple ad networks. This allows you to place your banner in different places and, then, with the results, segment your audience by interest (related to the theme of the website where you put the banner, for example).

When you learn how to perfectly segment, you get a better match between your brand and your customer, as well as better results, higher-quality leads, and better returns on your investment. Also, less money is wasted on marketing that reaches the wrong audience.

Customer journey

It's crucial never to forget that all this "marketing talk" is just for us because customers don't think about marketing channels; they think about their "wants" and "needs". However, to better plan our marketing activities, we use the customer journey to create a map that allows us to get to know our customer's actions from the first moments of research to the final purchase.

We call it the customer journey, but it includes prospects and leads before they become customers. In simple words, this is what characterizes each group:

• Prospects: People who don't know your brand exists yet. They know they want or need a product or service, but they're only starting their journey, searching for the best option.
• Leads: People who have expressed an interest in your product or service but are still thinking about their options. They're at the consideration stage, but they're watchful in terms of content related to your brand and products.
• Customers: People who buy from your company. Clients can be super clients or fans if you treat them properly, with care and attention.

Prospects visit the company website and search for different options. When they sign up for the company's newsletter, create an account, participate in a webinar, or call the sales team to get to know more about the products, they become leads. When they decide to buy from the company, they become customers.

Here, you have an example from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business customer journey:

Website visit → Email signup → Webinar participation → Call with sales team → Conversion to customer

Now that we know what digital marketing is all about and that there's no digital marketing without a brand, a customer, and a media channel, let's look at the different tactics/techniques used in digital marketing.