If you are reading this you might be wondering what is digital marketing, what is a digital marketing strategy and how can you use it to make your business grow. We’ll dedicate this article to understanding this phenomenon and analyze its importance today.

For more specific digital marketing contents, we recommend you to check out our previous posts in our blog. For instance: What is project management and what is its importance, How to choose the best digital marketing agency? or 5 digital marketing best practices for you to adopt today. Alright? Let’s start from the beginning.

Well, the first thing we should do is to expose a digital marketing definition. We could simply say that digital marketing is online advertisement. In other words, it’s about developing techniques, methods and software to promote products, brands and services on the Internet.

From its origins in the 90s, the world of digital marketing has expanded worldwide creating new ways of advertisement based on revolutionary developments such as big data, artificial intelligence, algorithms, machine learning and more.

Now, let’s share a few statistics that can convince the most exceptical ones about the benefits of digital marketing.

Everyone is online. There are 1.5 billion social media users and 55% of buyers around the world do some social media research before purchasing. 74% of salespeople agree that target personalization increases buyer engagement. But that’s not all.

49% of Internet users say they like to receive weekly promotional emails from the brands they follow. In fact, 60% of consumers actually subscribe to get promotional emails from their favourite brands.

Digital marketing allows companies to operate in a global scenario in a much cheaper way than traditional marketing. Ads can be personalized and automated, and results can be measured in real-time. Also, competition is open for all to see what the neighbor is doing.

There is a huge amount of ads formats and digital channels for companies to reach their target-audience, build their buyer persona, plan their marketing strategy, design their content, decide their budget, calculate their ROI, define their goal and choose the right time to display their campaign.

In a highly digital world, online advertising is vital.

There are a few basic steps that we can list for digital marketing starters to begin with. However, we must say that there’s no consensus about it. There’s no universal rule or formula. Anyway, many experts would agree with a structure that looks like this:

This is always the first step. Do you want to bring more traffic to your website? Are you interested in promoting the products from your online catalog? Would you prefer to persuade people to download your app? Are you building or repairing your online reputation?

Defining what you want to achieve will determine the whole process.

Once you have decided what your goal is, you need to define your audience. Who do you want to target? Think in terms of segmentation. Imagine an hypothetical consumer. Build a persona with it. You’ll have to create a campaign targeting those kinds of people that are likely to consume what you have to sell.

As we said already, digital marketing is the cheapest way of advertisement, but that doesn’t mean it’s for free. You can create a series of engaging campaigns and attractive contents, but you won’t go far without investing in promoted links or sponsored posts.

No pain, no gain.

If you’re aiming to reach companies in a B2B model, you probably won’t be using the same channels as you were trying to reach consumers. Are you going to advertise on social media? Which platform is your target-audience using the most? Are you going to include an email marketing campaign? You’ll have to choose the right channels for the right purposes.

Also, don’t forget to include a mobile approach into your marketing strategy.

It’s very important to have an optimized website and a well-targeted audience in order to personalize your advertising content. In order to do that, you’ll have to do some research. You’ll need to understand which keywords are the most appropriate for your campaign. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the pillars of digital marketing.

Through KPIs (key performance indicators) you’ll set up a monitoring method to help you understand if your digital marketing actions are heading in the right direction. Analyzing your campaign’s performance while it’s running allows you to make improvements and changes in order to keep your strategy on track. It will also help you identify which actions are performing well and which ones aren’t.

Many companies have at least one person in charge of their marketing actions. Big organizations have in fact a whole marketing department full of experts. But online advertising is a dynamic and always-changing world. That’s why it gets difficult for many small and mid-size companies to keep it up with all the new developments and trends.

Those are the main concerns that companies have when they reach out digital marketing agencies. It’s a lot to take into account: market research, Google Ads, social media ads, SEO, video advertising, mobile marketing, content marketing, email marketing, web design and web optimization, chatbots, online reputation, etc. It can be a little intimidating.

That’s why businessmen all around the globe are understanding that leaving their digital marketing strategies into specialized agencies’ hands is a profitable and effective option.

If you want to know more about digital marketing and how it can be adopted in your business, contact our team of digital marketing experts. We’d be pleased to answer all your questions. At Chili we love what to do.

What’s your experience with digital marketing? Which strategies have you used? Which channels work better for your business? Share your thoughts with us, leave a comment!