How Digital Marketing Became the Best
Digital marketing has become the best because it provides many different avenues to make money from one single campaign. There are 2 main ways to approach it: SEO and SEM. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. These are both ways to get your website to show up at the top of search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others so people can find your business, product, or service easier.
What is Digital Marketing
To answer that question, let’s start with what digital marketing isn’t. It isn’t online advertising, social media or a viral video campaign. Digital marketing is all of those things and more — it is an integrated approach to communicating your brand to your target audience via every medium available.
With digital marketing, your message can be spread across any number of channels including text, video, display advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media platforms. Each channel works together to help you reach a larger audience while gaining better insight into who they are and what they want.
The interdependence of these channels keeps users engaged with your content and helps them understand how your product or service fits into their lives. Also known as multichannel marketing, digital marketing allows you to say much more than just buy my product. You can tell a rich story about why customers should care about what you have to offer and why they should buy from you instead of someone else.
Even though digital marketing seems complicated at first glance, in reality, it’s quite simple: Everyone has their own reasons for using certain technologies, so if you make yours work for them, they will come back for more.
The Past and Present of Digital
How Did It Become So Advanced?
In a space of relative youth, digital marketing has already gone through quite a few changes over its existence. This year, we’re looking forward to seeing even more changes as digital continues to be adopted into our lives with ever-growing fervor. Let’s take a look at how digital has developed in recent years and where it’s going next.
Where we’ve been: 2015 was an interesting year for digital as Google and Bing continued their grip on what most people consider search. Despite breaking away from conventional thinking about SEO rankings, Google has remained a crucial part of any serious marketer’s toolbox. Some say that Google is trying to kill organic traffic; others complain that you can never do enough SEO work to reach those coveted first-page results (thanks to panda/ penguin penalties). And yet despite all these woes, many marketers agree that SEO is still one of the best ways to get in front of target customers online - so what gives? For now, though, marketers will continue their push into social media - especially with platforms like Facebook continuing their evolution towards true eCommerce solutions. We’ll also see continued innovation on mobile devices, with better efforts toward keeping users engaged and monetizing apps effectively.
2016 may very well become the year of mobile apps. The Present: When thinking about why online advertising works so well for brands today, some point to companies like Airbnb and Uber who have managed to bring new kinds of business models into play. These innovators have shown us just how quickly consumers can adopt new ideas if they really want them - but that doesn't mean they're happy giving up complete control. Consumers are demanding higher quality ads, requiring them to actually provide value before asking for anything from users.
As trust goes down and consumer power goes up, expect higher standards in every step of your customer journey. The Future: Mobile growth isn't showing signs of slowing down anytime soon and analysts predict that by 2017 nearly 50% of Internet users will come via smartphones or tablets. This presents several challenges when it comes to staying ahead of evolving consumer behavior but also opens opportunities for companies who know how to properly manage multi-platform campaigns geared toward finding buyers wherever they happen to be browsing.
As virtual reality moves into the mainstream market it'll likely present both challenges and opportunities along similar lines - bringing further change to areas like content creation, customer engagement tactics, and possibly even attribution modeling!
The Future of Digital Marketing
Focusing on relationships, people, and context will make for a more valuable and better experience. And in order to deliver that kind of experience, businesses are going to have to reevaluate their approach to digital marketing.
I recently had a conversation with Adam Toporek from SteelHouse about just that—and it got me thinking. What’s going to come next? How is digital marketing going to evolve over time? And how can we as marketers prepare ourselves for what’s coming down the road? Here are some questions you should be asking (but probably aren’t): Are you putting your customers first or your channels? Do you know your customer persona or do you want all possible customers regardless of fit? Are you delivering an omnichannel experience or treating each channel independently? How much effort do you put into loyalty programs and upselling/cross-selling potentials?
As our technology evolves, so too will our understanding of digital marketing. We need to focus on what really matters—the human element and context—because those things don’t change. Digital is not one way forward anymore; it’s several different paths for many types of companies to explore together. But when we combine empathy with tech innovation, we find success along every path ahead of us. It starts by making sure digital marketing keeps its core value: Delivering a remarkable experience.
If we lose sight of that, then we start getting away from why customers prefer business to business interactions in general: they get quick answers to specific problems they face. They get help making decisions based on real-time events and current affairs. They connect with others who share similar interests, challenges, goals, etc., which makes them feel like they belong somewhere—that’s where value comes from.
It doesn’t matter if you run a brick-and-mortar store or an eCommerce shop; if you’re not connecting in person and digitally over commonalities shared between strangers, then you’re missing out big time!
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