We talk a lot about digital marketing here at Mars Digital, but I don’t believe I’ve ever gone into an explanation of exactly what digital marketing is. So this is exactly what I’ll be doing in this post. At a very high level, digital marketing is the process or act of advertising through and on digital platforms such as search engines like Google (through SEO, PPC, and more), websites, social media, email, and mobile applications.
While putting together notes for this article I actually came across a quote which personally sums up my opinion of digital marketing to a T.
“Digital is at the core of everything in marketing today—it has gone from ‘one of the things marketing does’ to ‘THE thing that marketing does.’”
So Why Digital Marketing?
Put simply, you should consider digital marketing because of one simple fact; your customers spend a lot of time on the internet. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it’s the only place to advertise and that you should completely get rid of any traditional media advertising because ultimately it’s about what works for you and what generates the best ROI. Ultimately, your marketing efforts should help you solve a problem and digital marketing looks at solving several of these. Boiled down, we can focus on 3 overarching problems that most businesses will face at once point or another.
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- You don’t know your customers well.
- Your customers don’t know you exist.
- Your customers don’t come back.
Knowledge is Power
It might not be the sexiest part of any marketing campaign but its essential if you want to have a successful campaign. So if you’ve identified with the first problem: you don’t know your customers well. Then lucky for you, digital marketing can help.
You might have heard someone talk about developing customer profiles or personas, I do this for and with my clients, but at the end of the day, these are a starting point and should be viewed as something fluid. Your customers are the ones spending the most time on your website and digital platforms and might not behave in the way you expect them to. That where data capture and split testing comes into its own.
The ability to test different images, language (tone and style), different layouts and even different pricing for products gives you a huge amount of insight into your customers. Testing all these while running an in-depth look at your customers’ journey through Google Analytics will arm you with all the knowledge you need to boost your website’s conversion, improve your offline marketing and even provide insights into how your customers will react to your products in-store.
