What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing covers a variety of areas, each with its own purpose and benefit. Here are a few types of digital marketing you may want to consider, and keep in mind, some of these may also have mobile avenues:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Want your website to rank higher in search results? SEO is a path to increasing organic traffic to your website. You can boost your SEO by focusing on keywords and content. This is often considered “free” marketing, but you’ll still want to budget for the time invested in this tactic.
Content Marketing – Content includes articles, blogs, infographics, video and more. Basically, anything created about your company or product. The nice thing about content is that it can be used in your other digital mediums and even promoted with a press release depending on the relevance. Content can fuel a lot of your marketing initiatives including SEO, social and email efforts.
Social Media Marketing – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest and Tik Tok are some of the social media platforms on which you could advertise. Make sure to research your target market and determine where they spend most of their time. You don’t need to market on all platforms, pick one to three depending on your target and budget and focus your efforts there.
Pay Per Click (PPC) – This drives traffic to your site through a process of bidding on search keywords and then paying for every click your company receives. While Google is a common PPC platform, it’s not the only option, so it would be good to determine where you want to run PPC and make sure you have budget to cover all platforms.
Email Marketing – Communicate with customers right to their inbox! You may want to share your latest blog, media win, promotion or simply share some interesting content to nurture your customer relationship.
Online PR – Your company has a presence online and monitoring and growing that presence is important. This may include media outreach, engaging with customers on social media or responding to reviews or comments.
Sponsored Content – This is pay-to-play exposure where you might pay someone to be featured on their website, in their blog or on their social media account. Influencer marketing is a subsect of sponsored content, so if you’re considering that route you should include budget for this category.
Get your wish list ready
Start your digital marketing list by determining where your current leads are initiated and grow your digital plan from those sources. You might not need all of the items listed above, or you may want to go a step further and include other digital marketing tactics like affiliate marketing or marketing automation enhancements. Either way, take this first step to determine where you want your digital budget to be spent, and then you can look at your overall marcom spend and allocate from there. We’ll be covering digital marketing spend allocation in Part 2, so be sure to check back for the next installment!