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It’s no secret that digital marketing is rapidly evolving and has far surpassed traditional media and advertising in both results and budget. In today’s connected world, more and more companies are undergoing a digital transformation. Digital marketing has now become an essential part of any organization’s long-term plan. However, despite being relevant, many companies still struggle to master the basics of digital marketing. With marketing opportunities changing so rapidly, companies have been delving into the right digital marketing mix to promote their business.
What are the Main Pillars of Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing has become an integral part of today’s businesses. It involves the use of digital channels such as email, social media, and websites to reach customers. There are various aspects of digital marketing, but the main pillars are content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and lead generation. Content marketing is all about creating informative and engaging content that grabs attention and drives traffic to your website or blog. This could include blog posts, infographics, ebooks, whitepapers, etc. Good content needs to be relevant to your target audience and offer value for you to be successful. SEO is the process of optimizing your website for Google’s search algorithm so that it can rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). This can be done through on-page SEO tactics such as keyword research and optimizing your website’s title tags and meta descriptions. Off-page SEO includes activities like link building and social media engagement. Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects or potential customers who are interested in your product or service. Once a lead is generated, it must be nurtured so that they eventually become a paying customer. There are several ways to generate leads, such as using forms on your website, posting ads on Google or Facebook, or even holding webinars.
Assuming you mean the 5 key areas of focus in a digital marketing campaign, they would be:
Bonus tip: Build a stronger customer service strategy with AI
“Customer always comes first”: It’s a business mantra we’ve all heard over the years, but it’s more relevant now than ever. Companies that know their customers well enough and adapt to their needs and preferences accordingly have a great advantage in emerging victorious. With the advancement of AI, there are many ways that companies can learn more about their customers and provide the support they are looking for.
AI enables companies to harness data and make insightful predictions. AI also increases self-service by predicting agent expectations before they realize they need it. Humans are simply not capable of this level of foresight. We’ve all heard of numerous AI use cases within customer service, and no doubt more to come.
Why is content marketing important?
Content marketing aims to build relationships with customers, engage them and encourage them to take action. Any business can use content marketing, from small businesses that don’t have a lot of time or money to large corporations that want to build their brand.
Content marketing has become more important in recent years because it has been shown that people are more likely to buy something from a company they know and trust than one they don’t know about any.
Email – great for people you know
Generating all this content is great, but it’s a waste of time if no one is looking. It is important to get your message across. Email is a great tool to get your message across to people you already know. Most businesses will have a contact list, both of customers and prospects. Keeping in touch with these contacts is a vital part of building a strong and consistent brand, and email is the perfect medium for doing this. The process is quite simple. Once you have your contacts in a spreadsheet, these can be uploaded into an online email marketing tool (no need to look any further than Mailchimp here), which can then be used to create elegant emails based on in the content discussed above. Tools like Mailchimp include flexible templates and drag-and-drop editing features that make it easy for you to create your emails. However, a word of warning here. The provided templates are great as far as they go, but be sure to stick to their basic layouts. Trying to customize them to your exact design requirements can get very technical and frustrating!
Email is a great tool for communicating with people you know, but it’s not so great when you’re trying to engage with new contacts and broaden your audience. Here the preferred tool is social networks. For most companies, especially in the B2B arena, we are talking about Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. Using a combination of these platforms is a great way to get the word out and develop an even larger audience for your content. Also, by its very nature, social media encourages people to share and respond to your content, developing a rich two-way interaction with your market. Again a word of warning. Social media is all about activity, and to be effective, you really need to post to social media accounts on a daily basis at the very least. Obviously, the content discussed above will be the foundation of this publishing activity, but to make it sustainable, you’ll also need to identify other sources of relevant third-party content that you use to increase your local production. We talked about this and the need to develop a content radar in this previous post. Together, content, email and social can deliver truly joint and sustainable campaigns to promote and build your brand. If you’d like to talk about how you could use these tools more effectively, we’d love to talk to you.