Digital Marketing: Definition + Strategies

With the ability to track granular data like media exposures, sales, and geolocation, you can derive actionable insights that can inform decisions and guide marketing efforts in the future. Affiliate marketing has proved so effective for attracting customers and increasing sales that during a survey, 90% of businesses who run an affiliate program stated it was a key part of their digital marketing strategy. Pay-per-click is a form of paid advertising that allows marketing teams to essentially purchase traffic to their website. Marketers place ads on websites or search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing, and pay a fee each time their ad is clicked on.

There are as many specializations within digital marketing as there are ways of interacting using digital media. With offline marketing, it's very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. Digtal Marketinf For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage. Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you've ever put an advertisement in a newspaper, you'll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad.

Of course, it's important to note, your target audience might vary depending on the channel or goal you have for a specific product or campaign. As they're a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video. For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often be more valuable than business-focused platforms like LinkedIn. Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message in front of as many people as possible in the online space — regardless of whether it's relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren't necessarily ready to receive it.

Review metrics regularly, so you know where you are excelling and where you need work to become a leader in this high-impact, high-demand space. With B2B marketing, a business may have to convince several stakeholders — you could be selling building materials directly to large construction companies and in competition with similar providers. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand's story.

A recent report by Hootsuite estimated there were more than 3.4 billion active users on social media platforms, a 9% increase from 2018. A 2019 survey by The Manifest states that 74% of social media users follow brands on social sites, and 96% of people who follow businesses also engage with those brands on social platforms. According to Deloitte, one in three U.S. consumers are influenced by social media when buying a product, while 47% of millennials factor their interaction with a brand on social when making a purchase.