Digital Marketing is the set of strategies aimed at promoting a brand on the internet. It differs from traditional marketing in that it involves using different online channels and methods that allow real-time analysis of results.
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What is Digital Marketing
Nowadays, the internet is embedded in our lives in such a way that it is almost impossible to do anything without it. From simple things, like getting the phone number from the pizzeria, to complex things, like conducting public opinion polls or developing project management software, almost everything goes through the internet.
No wonder, it is increasingly difficult to see people disconnected from their cell phones, with the internet at their fingertips. And if our lives are no longer the same with the internet, the same can be said of the purchase process.
It is very common for us to look for products and services we want on the internet, either to search for the best prices (when we already know what we want), to seek information about a particular product or service (when we are still studying the possibility of purchase), or even to find out more about a problem we have (when we don’t even know what solution can help us yet).
This is all called Digital Marketing: a set of information and actions that can be done in various digital media with the aim of promoting companies and products.
Emerged in the 1990s, Digital Marketing changed the way companies use technology to promote their business. The term has become more popular as people have started to use more digital devices in the purchase process, whether to research the products or to make the purchases themselves.
To get an idea of how this changed the purchasing process, suffice it to say that, in the past, almost all the information we could obtain about products and services was in the hands of the companies that offered these solutions.
In other words: to find out about a product or service, you had to go to the seller, who would probably “pull the sardine” to the company’s side instead of providing free information about the solutions.
Today the internet allows the consumer to have a more active role in this process. In numbers, it means to say that 60% of the purchase process has already been carried out even before the consumer contacts the seller.
But, despite seeming challenging, Digital Marketing is, in fact, a huge opportunity for companies to reinforce their brand and multiply their business opportunities, as the internet will increasingly be part of people’s lives.
In addition, it includes several fronts, such as Content Marketing, Email Marketing, social networks, among others, which increases its reach and influence in the consumer purchase process.
Some statistics that prove its potential to grow:
- – The digital media budget is expected to double in the next 5 years (Source: WebDAM.com) ;
- – 87% of internet users now own a smartphone (Source: Global Web Index) ;
- – Inbound Marketing generates 54% more Leads than Outbound Marketing (Source: WebDAM.com) ;
- – Content Marketing is 62% cheaper than traditional and generates approximately 3 times more leads (Source: Demand Metric);
- – Three million advertisers use Facebook to reach their consumers (Source: AdWeek) ;
- – B2B companies that have blogs generate 67% more Leads than companies that don’t (Source: WebDAM.com) ;
- – Instagram passed the mark of 200 thousand advertisers 5 months after opening its ad platform (Source: AdWeek) ;
- – 93% of purchase decisions are influenced by social media (Source: Ironpaper) ;
- – Marketers who prioritized blogging are 13 times more likely to get positive ROI (Source: Socialemedia) .
How to do Digital Marketing
Despite the large number of possibilities for Digital Marketing applications, there are those strategies and techniques that stand out because they are used by the vast majority and usually bring positive results. Are they:
- – Content Marketing;
- – E-mail marketing;
- – Social networks;
- – Conversion Optimization – CRO;
- – Search Marketing – SEM.
What are the 5 Types of Digital Marketing?
We will detail each of them from now on, showing examples and complementary content so that you can go deeper into each theme. But first, we need to talk about an all-in-one tool, which brings together the main Digital Marketing resources in one place for its operation to be more effective.
1. Content Marketing
Content Marketing is all content designed to educate, inform or entertain a future customer. The idea is to inform people so that in the future they not only respect your brand and have it as a reference, but also become customers of your company.
But this content is not just any content: it should talk about issues related to your market and about the possible pains and doubts of your personas – that is, the fictional representations of your target audience.
But, after all, why Content Marketing is important for Digital Marketing?
As we said, today the purchase process is increasingly in the hands of the consumer. Information about products and services is no longer a privilege of companies and sellers, and is now accessible mainly because of the internet.
Think about it: when did you buy something without researching it at least once on the internet about it, it’s probably been a while. That’s why it’s very important that your company invests in Content Marketing: so that consumers find it when they look for market solutions that you offer.
It turns out that people aren’t just looking for information about products and services. They want, first of all, to solve problems; the product/service is just the final step in this process. That’s why it’s not enough to produce content about your company and your solution: you need to create value for your audience and answer their doubts and pains before they even know your product or service is the solution they need.
For example:
If you have inventory control software, instead of just writing about your platform and its advantages, think about how the consumer would come to your solution.
What does he need to know before he understands that inventory control software will help him?
Then, you can create content that gives tips on how to organize your company’s inventory, how to calculate inventory, or what solutions can help someone organize your company’s inventory.
So, when your target audience searches for these subjects on the internet, they are much more likely to find your content, and if the material generates value for them, the chances of them becoming your customer are much greater. In addition, if he already knows the solution but is in doubt about your product or the competition, having good content can be the difference for the audience to choose you.
But what does it mean to produce content? What formats can you use? There are many ways to disseminate the information you generate. The most used – and most efficient – are:
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BLOG
A blog is the most common form of attraction on the internet. With good content and good SEO optimization (Search Engine Optimization), blogging is the best way for you to get traffic to your site.
Blogs are often the gateway to future clients. Therefore, it is important that your company’s blog is relevant and catches the user’s attention. Only then will this user become a Lead and, in the future, a customer.
The important thing is that you:
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- Plan your agendas well: it’s not enough to produce content on random topics, it needs to be strategic to generate value for your audience;
- Keep your posts cadence: it’s important to keep a well-defined production pace, and post at least once a week, preferably on the same days, so that your audience starts waiting for your posts;
- Optimize text for Google: follow good SEO practices, such as defining keywords relevant to your market on your blog pages;
- Diversify the type of communication: the most common form of content on a blog is text, but nothing prevents you from going further and also creating infographics, podcasts and videos for your blog.
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VIDEOS
Videos are so hot that 1/3 of online activity is used to watching videos . Plus: having a video on a product page increases purchase intent by up to 85% , by reinforcing the product’s reliability for the customer.
You can use videos both as support for another channel, such as blogging and social media, for example, as you create specific channels for videos, such as a YouTube channel . You can even combine both strategies. For example, you can put your videos on YouTube and then embed them on your blog or social media.
If you are going to use them on your blog and social networks, prefer shorter and more dynamic videos; if you are going to create a YouTube channel or are going to use a content format where video is the main medium, such as a webinar, for example, you can create longer, in-depth videos.
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RICH MATERIALS
Blog posts and videos are good content to attract visitors, but for a complete Content Marketing strategy, it is necessary to have intermediate, more in-depth content.
That’s the function of rich content: educational material that adds value to your visitors. By offering this type of content, your company can continue educating your potential customers and preparing them over time and, at the right time, make the sales approach.
One of the most popular rich material formats is eBook, which works very well for texts that are too long to be a blog post. But in addition to eBooks, you can also create webinars, tools, kits, infographics, etc.
But those who think that the production of this material needs to be laborious are wrong: you can start by offering rich materials that your company already has and uses, such as spreadsheets, templates, market research/analysis, technical articles, checklists, glossaries, etc.
Subsequently, you can produce materials specifically designed to answer questions and curiosities or to solve the pain of your potential customers.
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CONTENT MARKETING TOOLS GUIDE
If all this seems like a lot to you, know that, fortunately, there are tools that can help you in your Content Marketing strategy. Some of them are:
WordPress
WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System) in the world ( 24% of sites use WordPress ). It serves not only to manage a blog, but ecommerces, forums, websites and practically any digital business. It is the CMS that Resultados Digitais uses to manage our blog.
Before you start using WordPress, however, you need to know that there are two options: WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
The first is a place where you can host your own website for free without having to install anything on your computer. It is easy and intuitive to use, but it has limitations: for example, your domain must be accompanied by “wordpress.com”. Example: http://trenovision.wordpress.com . If you want to have a domain without “wordpress”, you will have to pay for it.
The second is an open source online publishing platform available for free download. It has many more options than WordPress.com, but you need your own server to install the CMS. Check out the complete walkthrough to create a WordPress blog .
Buzzsume
Buzzsumo is a tool that allows you to find out what is the most popular content for a particular keyword. For example, if you put the keyword in the search box, Buzzumo will indicate which content is most shared about each subject, among other data, as the main influencers for that topic.
With this information, you can, for example, have content ideas based on what is performing well, and you can even try to produce even better content than what is already on the market.
Buzzsumo even has a backlinks tool, which shows which sites are pointing to the best content for a particular keyword. So, once you have content on that topic, you can try to get referrals from these sites to gain relevance in search engines.
Google Analytics
The Google Analytics (GA) is the web analytics platform most used on the Internet. According to Google, the platform is present on more than 10 million websites today. In addition to being very easy to install and collect a plethora of data and insights, it’s free.
In a nutshell, what it does is to allow the monitoring of information regarding the statistics of your website and/or blog, thus enabling the survey of possible points for improvement and optimization. In the case of Content Marketing, the information you can monitor is:
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- Which contents are the most/least accessed;
- What is the conversion rate of your content;
- What are the main traffic acquisition channels;
- etc.
2. E-mail marketing
Email Marketing means the direct sending of a commercial message, typically to a group of people, via email. By definition, every email sent to a potential or current customer can be considered email marketing.
Generally, in its content, it is used to send promotions, acquire businesses, solicit sales or donations and its purpose is to build loyalty, trust or branding ( branding ). Email marketing can be done to sold lists (practice not recommended at all) or to built lists, both of customers and potential customers (Leads).
In short, the term is used to categorize email message submissions for the purpose of increasing a company’s relationship with its current, former or future customers, to encourage loyalty and repeat business, acquire new customers or convince current customers to buy one. certain product.
Email Marketing, compared to other forms of Digital Marketing, is considered cheap; in addition, it is a way to quickly establish and communicate the company’s purpose with existing or potential customers.
This channel is commonly perceived by recipients as invasive and irritating, especially for new or potential customers, yet the success of Email Marketing is directly related to the language and visual appeal applied.
In terms of applied look, there are indications that the use of graphics/visuals are relevant to the message that is trying to be sent, however, to establish close relationships, in initial emails it is not indicated, as it does not establish empathy, hence the importance of if you get personality in these cases.
In terms of language, style is the biggest determining factor in defining how catchy that message will be. By using casual tones, gentle communication generates better emotions than a formal format. By combinations, it is suggested not to use graphics/visuals throughout casual language.
In addition to these factors, the possibility of measuring email metrics is what brings relevance to the channel. It is possible to quickly start communication and already understand if it is being applied correctly by analyzing: openings and clicks.
Email marketing can be applied in the following ways:
Transactional emails are commonly triggered by an action by a customer or lead with the company. To qualify as transactional or automated email, the purpose of these communications must be to facilitate, complete, educate, offer a transaction that the Lead or customer has agreed to receive. In short, it is the most assertive and recommended way to communicate by email.
Direct emails or interruption-based emails involve sending an email only to communicate a promotional message (for example, a special offer announcement or product catalog).
Due to the growth of tablets and smartphones, Email marketing today develops large traffic for these devices. Email marketing professionals have been researching ways to capture attention through these devices, and with that a new way of doing this emerged, optimizing them for reading and interacting with new technologies.
How to Choose a Good Tool for Email Marketing
An email marketing trigger tool (ESP) must contain several features, including:
- – Measurement: ability to analyze the numbers of your campaigns.
- – Anti-spam measures: if the tool has authentication systems (DKIM, for example). With proper authentication, the chances of your email falling into spam boxes is less.
- – Usability: your campaigns should be created easily in the tool, in an intuitive way, to optimize your time and increase the quality of your emails.
- – Automation: the tool must have ways to automate your emails, so you can scale your relationship process.
- – Segmentation: there must be the possibility to process the information of your Leads/customers (which emails do they click on?). In this way, it is possible to create targeted campaigns with assertive communication.
With these features, it is possible to have an active management of your contact base and your emails, being able to optimize the Email marketing process over time. Making the work easier.
3. Social networks
Since the 2000s, especially with the arrival of Orkut, social networks have become quite popular around the world as a new form of online socialization. Over time, social media has become a very interesting space for those looking for new channels to apply Digital Marketing.
Currently, there are several advantages that encourage companies to be present on social media. The first and main one is the very high number of users present on social media. On Facebook alone, for example, there are approximately 1.6 billion users, and the possibility of finding your customers and potential customers among those users is very high.
This significant presence of users has turned social media into an important communication channel between companies and their consumers, becoming a powerful Relationship Marketing tool. In addition, it is a channel that allows for great promotion, and can be used to promote the brand, products, content and promote the company’s purpose and mission.
To develop a good social media presence strategy , the first step to be taken is to define the persona, that is, who is the audience you want to follow your brand and follow your publications. The definition of the persona is very important because it is useless for you to have thousands of followers on your social media if they are not influencers or potential consumers of your product/service.
Furthermore, it is important to identify which social media your persona is present on. For example, if your persona is a Project Manager in the IT segment, the possibility of finding her on LinkedIn, for example, is very high. To illustrate, doing a brief search on this social network, we found groups with almost 20 thousand “IT Project Manager”.
Having defined which social media your company will be present in and which your target audience, there are some ways to use social media in your Digital Marketing strategy.
Promoting quality content, for example, is a good way to attract visitors to your website, as social media allows for easier and more effective sharing than other channels.
With the posts on your page, you can drive your traffic to content pages (Blog), to Landing Pages and to specific offers.
An important tip is to keep an eye on the schedule of publications and how many publications are carried out per day. Keeping to a certain and fixed schedule is important so that you can measure results later. Besides, of course, always keeping a post cadence.
Another way is interacting with users through forums and generating ideas. This allows for a less rigid approach to the public and there is an opportunity to post materials to reinforce the information.
On Facebook, for example, a very effective way to reach your target audience is through groups. Generating content for Facebook groups has many advantages, such as the fact that it is a free source and that it can be extremely segmented, including demographically.
After all this work of creating the ideal personas, verifying which social networks work for your business, planning, creating and revising the content, it is essential that your visitors convert.
There are a few ways to make converting on social media easier. One of them is the possibility of Lead converting into a Landing Page through your profile on social networks. This strategy is widely used and tends to increase the conversion rate, since the visitor will not need to fill in information that he had previously given on the social network again.
As important as making the publications, it is following them and doing analysis to understand the times and the methods that are or are not working. Facebook and Twitter have built-in tools for analyzing statistics.
4. CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization
This is how we call every effort to increase conversion rates for a given objective. In other words, reduce friction and increase the proportion of people who take the necessary action to go from context A to context B.
An everyday example is, in the case of a physical product store, the existence of a relationship between the number of people who enter the store and the number of people who buy something. This relationship can be seen as a conversion rate, in the case of visitors who make a purchase.
At Digital Marketing, our goal is to have an online presence that plays part of the visitor’s shopping journey, educating them about the problems and opportunities they face and generating value for your product or service.
In practice, what we need is for the Lead to carry out a series of actions, which together will be indicators that a certain person is close to purchasing your product. In this context, we will call conversion rate the ratio between the Leads that performed the desired action on your page and the total number of Leads that visited your page.
The CRO will therefore act to maximize each of these conversion rates in order to make a greater proportion of your visitors take the actions you expect them to do.
To facilitate our performance when optimizing a conversion rate, we usually break the final action as much as possible.
For example, there is an overall conversion rate given by the ratio between the number of people who visit my site and the number of people who buy some product.
However, there are many actions the visitor will have to take between the first and last action, and to better understand which part to improve, we’ll take a conversion rate for each relevant action the visitor takes.
In this case, we can illustrate with the following rates:
- Overall Conversion Rate = Buyers / Visitors
- Broken conversion rate 1 = visitors who clicked on a product / visitors
- Broken conversion rate 2 = visitors who clicked to buy a product / visitors who clicked a product
- Broken conversion rate 3 = visitors who clicked to buy a product / visitors who made payment
This division of the overall conversion rate into more specific rates will allow you to better understand what is being the main factor that is hindering the overall rate. In this case, if it were rate 1, it would be the level of interest that your products are arousing in current website visitors, if it were rate 2, it would be the cost-benefit ratio for the purchase of the product, and if it were rate 3, it could be any objection to the payment methods provided by your store.
Main ways of working the CRO in practice
Despite being a very exploratory work, working with CRO almost always goes through some methodologies and techniques, used and proven by more experienced companies in the subject.
Next, check out some of the main techniques to optimize website conversion rates and generate more results from the same input:
A/B tests
These tests are the simplest and most effective way to prove between two page versions, which one is more efficient for your purpose. The method basically consists of taking the traffic of a certain page and halving it randomly, so that 50% of the visitors see one version (original) and 50% see the other version (challenging).
The A / B tests are very effective in drawing conclusions well informed for two main reasons:
- By making both versions of the page available simultaneously, we reduce the influence of external factors such as seasonality, unlike a test that compares with historical results.
- By having a certain volume on both pages, we can use statistical methods to establish who is the winner with a statistical relevance that allows you to trust the test result. To help you, we created a tool to calculate test results.
There are several tools to carry out this test, but the easiest one is certainly Google Analytics.
Heatmaps and session recording
Perhaps more important than the test result itself is your understanding of the whys of that result. To help you make this interpretation, we use tools that generate qualitative data to understand what happened.
Heatmaps are heat pages, which will indicate where Leads moused over and clicked on your page, while session recording is exactly what the name suggests: it generates user recordings of everything that was done on that page .
Use this information to understand why some element of your page is building or destroying your conversion result.
5. Search Marketing – SEM
In the 2000s, online search engines emerged, whose mission was to help users search for sites in virtually every niche.
Over time, the convenience that search engines had been providing to internet users began to spread and soon a large part of the web audience started to use the network to search for services and entertainment tailored to each one.
Of the search engines that have become popular since then, without a doubt Google has been the biggest reference for all.
With the rapid growth of the “world of online search”, many companies began to worry about how they were seen in these search engines: how they were seen, when they were seen, how often they were seen, etc. For this reason search marketing (SEM) was born.
Search Marketing, or SEM, aims to make a particular site privileged and appear with priority (and quality) for those looking for something related to it on the internet.
As the habit of searching for some solution on the internet has become more and more common among everyone, Search Marketing is also in constant growth and has been of great importance for the marketing strategy of thousands of companies around the world.
Its application can be done in two ways: through the application of SEO techniques and strategies and also through investments (PPC).
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At the beginning of this era we are talking about, the difficulty to appear among the top places in online searches was not very great, so virtually everyone who decided to apply “techniques” aimed at increasing this exposure was successful.
With the evolution of the algorithms that determined who would or would not appear in the first places in search results, this type of objective became more complicated and with that a new discipline within Digital Marketing emerged: SEO .
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are all strategies and tactics aimed at increasing the exposure of a website in search engines.
According to him, the main search engine in the market (Google) has more than 200 factors that help determine whether or not a website should be in the first places of its results pages and, the job of an SEO professional, is to adapt the sites to the maximum according to these criteria.
Every day, about 100 billion searches are performed on Google, and being positioned for a particular keyword searched for can be the difference between a busy site, full of people browsing, wanting to trade, and an unpopular site.
It is for this reason that SEO strategies are still widely used by most companies that value the good performance of their Digital Marketing.
SEO is divided into on page and off page, being the on page any and all strategy you apply within your site (the famous “on page optimizations”) and the off page any strategy you apply outside of it (usually “link building” strategies)
Sponsored links
What are Sponsored Links?
These are ways to advertise on the internet through advertising spaces in search results or on content network sites that are generally paid for clicks (also known as PPC – Pay Per Click).
To appear the ads must be relevant to the keyword used in the search or a context chosen in the targeting.
The great advantage of sponsored links is being able to take advantage of an existing demand in relation to organic search, thus directing the sponsored link in the search response to a destination link focused on your objective for those who are searching or looking for.
Example: Instead of sending to your website’s home, which happens when you search in organic search, you can advertise with paid search and direct the link to a related page focused on your objective and the user’s search.
How important are Sponsored Links in the context of Digital Marketing
Sponsored Links are one of the ways to attract qualified visitors and arouse interest to direct to your site, it requires a certain knowledge in operating the management tools of these ads and the main thing is to separate an investment from a budget for it to be effective during the period of your campaign.
Common ways to apply Sponsored Links
- Ad on the search network
- Display ad (Banner on content network sites)
- Social Ads (ads on social networks)
What a tool for PPC must have to facilitate the work of Sponsored Links
Use tools that can know possibilities of finding high intent to buy or convert keywords on your page, bid amounts paid for clicks and search volume. There are tools like RD Station Marketing, SEMRush and Google AdWords Keyword Tool itself.
Is it worth it to hire a PPC tool?
The most used tools are Google Adwords and Bing Ads to manage sponsored links ads. More advanced tools such as Google AdWords Editor can be used on a spreadsheet management basis such as Excel or Google SpreadSheets.
Depending on the volume of investment and campaigns, an agency or paid tools may be hired to create these ads in volume and optimize management.
