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In today’s digital economy and online world, digital marketing IS marketing. The importance of knowing what is Digital marketing and the benefits of digital marketing cannot be under stated. Companies need to meet people where they are. Today’s Online customers spend a tremendous amount of the time in various social media platforms. Modern customers shop online and also research traditional and digital businesses they want to know more about in online.
Digital marketing is inseparable from the digital economy, and this is the overriding reason all businesses need digital marketing.
Digital marketing services helps companies communicate with customers and prospects, increase traffic to their websites, increase inbound leads, and ultimately increase sales.
Let’s look at the 5 current most important aspects of digital marketing strategy, Content Marketing, Social Media, Digital Web Presence (including SEO & SEM), Email Marketing, plus emerging Conversational and AI Marketing.
Content Marketing
Marketing starts with a message. Content Marketing is that message, and it is a continual dialog with your customers and your target market. Digital media marketing starts with Content Marketing. Companies today need to create compelling, engaging, and interesting content for customers (or potential customers) about a business’s products and services. They need to do this to build a relationship with customers and to stay engaged with them so that when they are ready to make purchases they reach out. Examples of content can be blogs, short videos, interesting blogs, white papers, case studies, PR, social media posts, and more. As much as possible, content marketing is about making sure customers contact a business for conversation when they are ready to engage. Everything else in a digital marketing strategy feeds off of having content people want to read or watch and interact with. Content marketing helps companies by allowing them to message about their business and build creditability with potential customers and clients.
Social Media Marketing
Once you have interesting content what do you do with it? Of course, you will include it on your website. You can also post links to it on social media. This is when social media agency and marketing comes into play. This aspect of digital marketing helps business connect directly with their target audience. Posting about content just created, posting about news, initiatives, campaigns, and information that will be interesting to prospective customers can all be done on social media. Social media is one more way to communicate with customers digitally and meet them where they are. There are numerous social media platforms to interact with customers. Linked In for purely B2B engagements is an excellent platform. Facebook and Instagram are good for both B2C and B2B engagements. Twitter is useful for some companies. Pinterest, Tick Tock and Snap are still others that can be used. A good social media strategy and an active social media presence is essential for any comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
Websites, SEO, SEM, PPC
The benefits of digital marketing is never clearer than when thinking about a business website, its online presence, and its performance on search engines. A good digital web strategy is the equivalent of putting your business on the map in the present day. Having an attractive website with a clear message and branding is just the beginning, however. Businesses today must pay close attention to SEO (search engine optimization) so that they rank high on user searches. This is done by focusing on key words and promoting them on pages. SEM or search engine marketing or PPC pay per click ad campaigns can also be an excellent way to drive traffic to a web site, so that a business can generate leads that eventually become sales. Key words and Google algorithms are constantly changing and having a paid digital marketing consultant assist a business on SEO is a worthwhile aspect of any digital marketing strategy. Making sure potential customers can find you online is just one more argument for the importance of digital marketing.
Email Marketing
An additional online digital marketing strategy to drive targeted traffic to a web site to engage with company content is email marketing. Email marketing is best done with short and regular emails that have a specific message. Conducting a multistep email campaign is often referred to as drip email campaigns. Sending customers and members of your target audience regular updates about content that you are consistently creating is an excellent example of a drip email campaign. Percentages of conversion with email marketing can be relatively low, but this is expected. We could almost equate email campaigns of today to junk mail or direct mail marketing of yesteryear. Costs are low for email marketing and when a conversion occurs it is typically very well qualified. Having a well thought out and consistent email marketing plan is another aspect of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
Conversational & AI Marketing
The newest pillar or aspect of a digital marketing strategy is Conversational Marketing or AI Marketing. The best example of this is bots on a website that will get information for a digital visitor. Great care needs to be taken to make bots nonobtrusive and super easy to opt out of. Bots on a website can be incredibly useful though. The most common use of online bots is for website navigation or to fetch information for online visitors. Bots on our own website will do the above and also place calls to appropriate Valenta team members on behalf of a digital visitor. Bots can also book appointments for visitors with Valenta staff. Conversational AI works for both the written and the spoken word and bots can be part of a spoken conversation as well as written ones.
At Valenta we even work with a company named Soul Machines (https://www.soulmachines.com/) to provide virtual digital people to act as agents. The technology is super cool. Nestle has used this software for virtual cooking assistants for their customers.
There is a lot of room to grow in the bot and assisted interactions categories. Companies are also using AI to predict what customers will want, and also who will want to engage with them. A great example of the former is how Netflix or other OTT streaming providers suggest content to viewers to keep them engaged and on a platform. Conversational Marketing or AI Marketing will increasingly be a part of digital marketing strategy in the decade to come.
Want to learn more?
As we mention at the start, digital marketing is inseparable from the digital economy. The importance of digital marketing for all sizes of businesses is obvious. We have also narrated Why do you need Digital Marketing for your business to thrive in this digital age and What to expect in a full service Digital Marketing Agency like Valenta USA. At Valenta we focus on SMB clients who can sometimes struggle with digital marketing and do not have large Digital Marketing staffs in house to support their efforts. The advantages of digital marketing benefit these SMB just as much as large enterprises. At Valenta we offer managing partners, plus local or regional senior marketing experts, and offshore staff that can economically execute back-office web and online marketing tasks and content creation for digital marketing.
Valenta’s Digital Marketing Consultants can help to upscale your digital footprint and increase profitability and revenue in your business.
Please Contact us if you want to engage with us