Digital marketing refers to the creation and dissemination of content through digital media channels—websites, landing pages, social media, email, and mobile applications—and the promotion of that content using a variety of strategies across paid, earned, and owned digital channels, including SEO, SEM, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content syndication, social, email, text, and more.
Importance of digital marketing
Digital marketing strategies help marketers define goals, target an audience, and develop a digital marketing plan that best reaches that audience. These strategies provide direction for a given campaign or program and a framework for evaluating outcomes.
Today, everything is digital, and digital marketing has been integrated into almost every aspect of business, fundamentally changing how companies communicate with and deliver value to customers.
So if your business cannot implement and execute a digital marketing strategy in an increasingly growing, global online marketplace, you simply will not be able to compete.
Digital marketing strategies
Cross-channel marketing, multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing, or whatever term you prefer, is all about engaging with your customer or prospect across every digital channel and any device. From the inbox to social networks—and across laptops, tablets, and smartphones—today’s consumers move seamlessly and fully expect you to be there with them, providing a seamless, integrated experience.
To help you build a successful cross-channel marketing strategy, here are in-depth descriptions of the most widely used digital marketing channels:
Email marketing
Email Marketing is one of the oldest and best-known forms of digital marketing, used by B2B and B2C marketers alike. With email marketing, you collect customer data across various customer journey touchpoints, classify it to understand your potential customers’ preferences, and ultimately get permission to add them to your email list(s).
Email content can include information about your products and services, news about your company and events, personalized offers, customer success stories, links to case studies, and technical or business briefs. Value is critical to ensure that your emails are opened and read—and not deleted right away. Personalized content and relevant offers go a long way to boost engagement.
Email marketing is part art and part science. Your emails and digital assets need to be appealing and engaging, but there needs to be a balance between sending too many emails and not sending enough.
