Digital marketing has a lot of moving parts, but each one contributes to a more successful marketing strategy and, in turn, a more successful business. Are you looking to start a digital marketing campaign from scratch? Hoping to find new ways to boost your brand equity development? This article can help you improve your business development with digital marketing examples and a step-by-step guide to get the job done.
Why Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing attracts customers and clients to your business through online platforms, like email and social media, to reach a wider audience and effectively target primary audiences. That’s because once a business publishes their content online, it can distribute that content quickly and easily and allow its audience to share or forward it to their colleagues and friends.
Because everything is digital, it’s also very easy to measure the success of this type of marketing campaign by tracking analytics and data. This data can help companies understand if their marketing efforts are succeeding, if they need to refocus their efforts, or if they need to change their strategy altogether.
The 5 Pillars of Digital Marketing
There are a few different tactics that businesses can use when performing digital marketing. Though the company can use each of these tactics separately, they can also be used together to target different audiences and promote different products or services.
Here are the main pillars of digital marketing you can use to drive your business and increase its outreach:
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the act of developing content, in the form of blogs, eBooks, or videos, that interests your target audience and helps builds a relationship with them. This strategy is most effective for top-of-the-funnel marketing because it builds brand awareness and increases audience engagement. Businesses also pair content marketing with other strategies, like search engine optimization (SEO), to improve organic traffic and bring people to their website.
Essentially, this type of marketing provides prospects with something they might be searching for online. For example, a dealer might be looking for additional ideas on the best way to market a certain type of heavy equipment. If they type in “marketing heavy equipment” into Google, they’re hoping to find an article, guide, or video to help them. If your company provides that guidance, the reader might have more interest in other things your company has to offer, including additional content or your products and services.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing focuses its content on channels, like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Some companies might incorporate content marketing into their social media campaign by sharing their website’s most recent blog or video. But other companies will create exclusive content for social media campaigns that target their audience’s interests and encourage them to engage. For example, a company might use its Facebook account to share how-tos, advice, or articles on industry news or interact with its followers with questions, comments, and polls.
Email Marketing
Email marketing allows businesses to send marketing materials straight to their audience’s inboxes. These emails might include:
- The business’s most recent content, like blogs and videos
- Promotional items, like current sales, discounts, and coupons
- Company news, like recent hires and new products or services
This type of marketing is a great way to personalize your efforts and connect with your audience more easily. That’s because the reader feels like the marketing is directed at them specifically. You can add to that in more ways too by including their name in the subject line or commenting on a recent purchase they made.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing allows companies to send advertisements straight to people’s phones while they browse through apps or the internet. Businesses often target these ads to their audience, to ensure that they have an interest in what they’re trying to sell. That means, the ads are appealing, personalized, and sometimes interactive, to increase the likelihood of gaining a lead or prospect.
For example, Randall Reilly once created a mobile advertising campaign that targeted people in a specific area using geofencing. The mobile ad would then bring up a GPS map that directed drivers straight to a storefront’s location.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising allows businesses to pay for ad placement only when someone actually clicks or interacts with it. Using paid advertising is a great way to build brand awareness and target keywords your competitors might rank for. For example, let’s say your competitors rank for the keyword “construction equipment”. You can target that keyword for a paid ad and appear at the top of the search results to try to entice people to your business instead of others.
Google Ads currently offers a great system to set up your PPC ads and enter a budget for the campaign. Once enough people click on your ad and the budget is reached, Google will stop the campaign automatically. This creates a very cost-effective way for companies to advertise their website and products, while building awareness for their business.
How To Drive Business Development With Digital Marketing
Here’s a list of steps to help you improve your business development with a digital marketing strategy:
1. Understand Its Impact
Before you start a digital marketing campaign, it’s important to understand the impact it can have on your business. Though it mainly provides benefits, like increased brand awareness and effective lead generation, it’s not always easy to do everything on your own.
For example, let’s say your company wants to try content marketing. Depending on the content you create, you might need certain equipment and software, as well as a dedicated team of content creators. Being aware of how digital marketing might affect your business can help you prepare for any future challenges, seek out the resources you need, and make your campaign as effective as possible.
2. Create Goals
Creating goals for your digital marketing campaign can help you track its performance and make adjustments as you need. Digital marketing makes that easy because it provides you with an abundance of data and tools to help you monitor your goals as you go. That means it’s important to develop goals based on the SMART system, so you can track them more easily.
SMART stands for, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Essentially, you want to set a goal you can track and achieve in a set amount of time. For example, your goal might be to increase your number of website visitors by 20% in three months. Once you set the goal, you can determine the best ways to reach it and which digital marketing strategies you can do that.
3. Identify Your Audience
Identifying your audience for a digital marketing campaign is important because it helps you generate the right leads for your sales team. If you market to everyone under the sun, you might have a lot of people visiting your site or filling out your forms, but a majority of them won’t have any interest in actually making a purchase. Identifying your audience for a digital marketing campaign includes knowing who they are and what type of content they like to consume.
For example, let’s say you’re a dealer who sells construction equipment. You might conduct research that says your audience prefers videos over written content. Knowing that, you can focus on developing content and ads with videos to attract your audience more easily. You can also tailor that content to their interests and the equipment you sell to make your campaign even more effective.
4. Know Where To Publish
Whether it’s written content, social media posts, or advertisements, it’s also important to know where to publish the content you create. The location of your content is crucial in grabbing your audience’s attention and ensuring you generate quality leads for your business. For instance, you might know that your audience prefers Facebook over other social media sites. If that’s the case, it’s probably better to focus most of your social media efforts on Facebook to ensure you’re attracting the most prospects.
At Randall Reilly, we understand how essential it is to target your audience where they are. That’s why we allow businesses to place ads in our various trucking, construction, landscaping, and industry media platforms to sell their equipment, machines, and other relevant products to businesses in trucking, agriculture, manufacturing, and more. Download our media kits today to learn more and for additional digital marketing ideas.
5. Conduct Research
Researching can help you better understand what you should focus on in your digital marketing campaign and the best way to attract new prospects to your business. Once you understand more about your audience, look at what they’re liking, sharing, and engaging with. What other social media pages do they follow? What content do they share with their colleagues and friends? What topics do your competitors talk about in their blogs, videos, and eBooks?
For instance, let’s say you notice that your competitors all use a blog to reach their audience. That means a blog might be crucial to your marketing strategy. But you can also use research to find gaps in your marketing efforts. For example, let’s say your competitors all write blogs, but don’t focus much on mobile advertising. It’s possible that mobile ads are a great way to interact with your audience that your competitors haven’t thought about.
6. Talk With Experts
If you’re hoping to improve your digital marketing efforts, it’s helpful to also talk with experts who can help. At Randall Reilly, we have the ability to work with your company or ad agency to boost your marketing efforts and engage your audience. Whether you need data-driven marketing or content marketing, we have the tools and the talent to help your business grow. Contact us today to see how we can help improve your business’s development through expert programmatic and digital marketing.
