Digital Marketing Consulting

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What is Digital Marketing?

If you’ve landed on this website searching for digital marketing information, you’ve come to the right place. While yours truly may not be writing this paragraph sitting on a beach somewhere sipping Mai Tais, I have been fortunate enough to navigate my way throughout the digital marketing environment over the last ten years. This preamble conveys the notion that I’ve accumulated a vast wealth of knowledge throughout my career if you haven’t caught on yet. 

Now, what exactly is digital marketing, anyways? Well, digital marketing is the umbrella term for all marketing initiatives that occur within the online environment. Essentially, anything ranging from optimizing your website for search engine visibility to deploying a series of advertisements on Facebook is considered digital marketing. Interestingly enough, I was fortunate enough to start whetting my appetite with online advertising while studying marketing as an undergrad back in 2010. I bring up this salient bit of author history because there are numerous parallels between traditional promotional tactics and digital marketing. One of the four P’s of the Marketing Mix, the Promotional Mix, integrates various tools and channels to increase brand awareness and influence users to purchase.

Interestingly enough, the dawn of a new age of technology has forced marketing professionals to evolve, executing campaigns in a digital format that provide greater reach, lower costs, and increased tracking capabilities. Advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and sale promotion have all undergone extreme transformations with the proliferation of mobile devices and the ubiquitous nature of the internet. ALL that to say, digital marketing represents the activities businesses execute to reach new customers in an online environment. 

How Does Digital Marketing Work?

Fortuantely, digital marketing adheres to the same practices and ideas that traditional marketing has since its inception. Not dissimilar to regular TV advertising or direct marketing campaigns, digital campaigns will hit a roadblock if there are significant issues with the core product. Far too often, businesses venture into the online world with a simple concept and faulty product, hoping to be sailing on a world-class yacht within six months. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt later, small business owners find themselves with a barren bank account and an undesirable product. Fine-tuning your product and core messaging should be of the utmost importance before exhausting and infinite resources and capital on digital marketing campaigns. 

As for how digital marketing works precisely, there are subtle nuances that provide businesses with far greater capabilities than ever before. Think about the interactions you have daily with your smartphone or computer. Need to find a doctor? Just Google it. Out of laundry detergent? Head to Amazon. See an ad for double-stuffed Oreos on Facebook? BUY BUY BUY. We are inundated with an astronomical amount of advertisements and exposed to an excessive number of brands every day just because we need to use technology. Whether it’s search engines forcing an assortment of ads down your throat or social media platforms showcasing sponsored ads every four posts, we get exposure to more marketing messages than any other generation in our history. 

Types of Digital Marketing

As showcased above in the fancy little box I designed, there are myriad tactics in the digital environment that you can utilize to launch your brand into a new stratosphere. These tactics include:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Media Buying / Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
• Social Media Marketing
• Amazon Marketing
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Influencer Marketing
• Digital PR
• Ecommerce Growth Solutions
• Email Marketing
• Content Marketing

To illustrate this example perfectly, let’s take a look at what an ecommerece business can do to pull you into their infinite ring of marketing madness:

• You end up searching for a new pair of Bluetooth headphones. If you head to Google, you may see product listing ads that feature Brand X headphones (PPC Advertising). 
• Skipping the ads, you venture down the results to a link called “The Complete Guide to Buying Bluetooth Headphones”. Whoopie! A complete guide…this can’t be insidious, right? Well, thanks to content marketing and effective SEO, you’ve fallen into the digital equivalent of a Venus flytrap. 
• After reading the article, you feel a greater kinship with the brand and start to browse the product selection featured on the website. After subscribing to the newsletter for more juicy content, you venture to Facebook, where you’re now being retargeted by that brand – with the products you had in your cart! Aghast!
• …and that’s when you get an abandoned cart email notification. The cycle is complete. You cannot evade this brand. You must submit to their will and purchase those fancy Bluetooth Headphones. Of course, the free shipping (sales promotion tactic) is too alluring to pass up. 

Benefits of Digital Marketing

In the highly exaggerated and dramatized scenario described in the preceding paragraph, there are many tactics that any small business owner selling products online can employ to increase sales. The unequivocally brilliant aspect of digital marketing is the astonishingly low amount of barriers to entry. Of course, developing successful campaigns, particularly on the SEO side, takes a substantial amount of resources and months to perfect. Fortunately, long gone are the days where marketing had to consist of cringeworthy TV spots complemented by bizarre print ads crammed into a 1/8 spot. 

A tactical approach to marketing can employ data-driven campaigns to create the shortest path for users from discovery to purchase. Ranging from broad awareness campaigns to bottom-of-funnel targeting, advertising campaigns via search engines, social media platforms, and display networks allow businesses to establish revenue streams quickly. Of course, if the budget permits, recruiting influencers to promote your products in front of hyper-targeted niche audiences can be worthwhile, providing a far more significant impact than any traditional PR campaign. With a vast array of tools at your disposal, the opportunities are virtually limitless, especially when it comes to remarketing to your customers. Deploying strategic remarketing campaigns via email, SMS marketing, and social media can help a brand establish pertinent customer lifetime value metrics and create brand ambassadors for life. 

Thriving in a digital environment can be a time-consuming process that requires a significant amount of resources. Depending on your business’ nature, you might be limited in terms of funds or personnel, or even worse, both. You might have a Google Ads campaign sending traffic to the same landing page from two years ago, and if the cost-per-lead has stagnated, it might be time to refresh creatives…but do you know how? In other cases, attempting to scale campaigns that yield somewhat satisfactory results might put your business in a quandary, as you need to evaluate how effectively you can scale campaigns that might not prove to be profitable after a certain threshold. Fortunately, struggling campaigns can be turned around quite easily with a thorough Conversion Rate Optimization audit, which will also provide you with enough data intelligence to scale your marketing activities.