Digital marketing is about connecting with your target audience, in the right place and at the right time. Where online marketing focuses on attracting visitors to your site, digital marketing goes a considerable step further. It uses all digital capabilities to turn web visitors into loyal customers. Digital marketing is therefore an umbrella term for all marketing efforts that you use online.
Definition:
Digital marketing is the discipline through which a company’s marketing objectives are achieved through online and interactive media, channels and concepts. Digital marketing is aimed at realizing customer knowledge and value for your customer. The starting point is to build a lasting relationship with (potential) customers by entering into a dialogue with them.
What’s the use of this information?
Many entrepreneurs use online marketing. When I talk to them, people realize that you need a website and that you attract visitors to your site by advertising online. They also know about page optimization for search engines (SEO). This is indeed what online focuses on. The problem is that online marketing does not provide an approach to convert visitors to your site into leads. Leads are visitors who identify themselves by sharing data with you. So you get visitors through online marketing, but without a conversion strategy they leave your site unfulfilled. Online marketing or internet marketing is therefore a subpart of digital marketing and focuses on attracting web visitors. Digital marketing goes further and ensures that these visitors actually convert into customers and then it works on building relationships.
What are the tools of digital marketing?
Digital marketing can be divided into: channels to get in touch with your target audience, techniques to attract web visitors, techniques to convert them and techniques to build loyal fans. We explain this below.
Channels to reach the target group
The channels that are part of digital marketing are all channels with a digital basis: websites, webshops, blog, social media platforms, online advertising, email marketing, apps, search (e.g. Google), influencers, e-magazines, SMS, billboards, etc. You meet your target group in the channels.
Techniques to activate the target group
The techniques within digital marketing focus on working on a relationship with your target group. It is based on the principle of creating as many contact moments as possible. The more contact there is, the more this contributes to brand preference and thus willingness to buy. Below we discuss some of them:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is optimizing your pages for search engines. By far the most important step. And often wrongly, web builders indicate that they have this done well.
Social media marketing: 86% of the Dutch are on social media. The place to connect and inspire with your content.
Digital advertising (SEA): Google’s See, Think, Do, Care model makes it very clear where you can advertise to target the target group at the right time.
Content marketing: This focuses on creating content with which you can influence buying and orientation behaviour. This can be anything. For example: articles, E-books and whitepaper, infographics, videos, AI/VR, Webinars, etc.
Social selling: This is the process of generating more sales through an active presence on social platforms.
Website optimization: This ensures ease of use, speed, customer experience, conversion optimization, building effective landing pages with contact forms, etc.
Email marketing and marketing automation: Email and its automation is still the most powerful channel to create and inspire contact moments with your content.
Affiliate marketing / drop shipping : These are concepts aimed at promoting the services and or products of other organizations. You become, as it were, a reseller of their products.
Influencer marketing : This is a form of advertising where you promote your service or product through a person with a certain reach on, usually Instagram and YouTube. But you also come across it on other social media platforms.
Inbound marketing: This refers to an integrated marketing and sales approach. A full-funnel approach aimed at: attracting, building trust, converting and delight ( promoting loyalty ) through the use of digital marketing. All previous techniques and channels are integrated into this. Bibb companies would be wise to implement this. Read more about it.
