What Is Digital Marketing, and How It Can Impact Your Bottom Line

Is digital marketing another of today’s buzzwords you should use to sound smart in meetings, or is it the real deal? Digital marketing isn’t just a buzzword, it’s really your best card to achieve your business goals. This article explains what digital marketing is, how it impacts your bottom line, and what are the most popular strategies in 2020. 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock over the last decade, you’ve heard of digital marketing. Digital marketing is, well marketing, only that it utilizes the Internet and online-based digital technologies. 

The concept was first popularized in the early 2000s, even though it has been around for a longer time. And, ever since it became so popular in the 2000s, it’s everywhere, literally, from everybody’s smartphone to our computers, tablets, and pretty much any other device connected to the Internet. 

Digital marketing skyrocketed as buying behaviors have changed drastically over the last decade. In other words, digital marketing became more relevant as consumers are starting (and most of the time end) their buyer’s journey online. This change in how consumers make their purchasing decisions and buy the products and services they need has made digital marketing a must-have for any brand trying to compete in the modern marketplace, no matter its size or sector. 

Now, before we move forward to how digital marketing can help your business and what are the most popular strategies in 2020, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what digital marketing really is. 

Digital marketing, explained

No, digital marketing doesn’t just mean your Facebook page or website, which we’re almost sure your business already has. 

Digital marketing, as a whole, represents a form of advertising which allows you to promote your brand, products, or services through digital channels, including social media, websites, search engines, email, and more. The goal? To connect with the target audience through these channels and promote whatever you are selling. 

Now, the best way to understand digital marketing is to tell you what it isn’t. In other words, digital marketing is nothing like traditional marketing that includes printed ads, phone communication, or any form of physical marketing. On the flip side, digital marketing occurs online and electronically only. Long story short, digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that involve the use of an electronic device or the Internet. You can read more in-depth information on what digital marketing is on this web site.  

Now, there are dozens of digital marketing tactics, apart from your social media pages and website, as we’ve mentioned above. If you only limit your digital marketing strategy to these two common strategies, you’re missing out on a lot of sales opportunities. 

Why digital marketing?

Why go online to market your brand? It’s a fair question. But you only have to look around you, and you’ll see that everybody is holding some kind of device in their hands. So, that’s where you find your customers these days. 

In fact, to be more precise, that’s where you find almost 4.57 billion potential customers because that’s how many people were active Internet users worldwide. So, 59% of the global population is online. Do you still doubt that you should take digital marketing more seriously? 

But, how exactly is digital marketing helping you? 

Well, digital marketing can have the power to help your business achieve any of its goals if done right. Whether you want to increase brand awareness, sell more, attract more loyal customers, increase your web traffic, or you name it, there’s at least one digital marketing strategy that can help you achieve that. 

For example, if you want to increase sales and earn more profit, digital marketing (be it social media marketing, email or content marketing, or any other tactic) is the way to do it. It helps you increase brand awareness, reach your target audience, attract customers to your business, and ultimately convince them to buy from you. However, this is just an example. For any business goal, there’s an ideal digital marketing strategy that can help you achieve what you want. 

Popular digital marketing strategies in 2020

Now you know what digital marketing is and what it can help your business achieve. Yet, digital marketing is a really vast territory. And, if you are just dipping your toes into it, you may be feeling a little bit overwhelmed by all the marketing strategies and tactics out there. 

Thus, we’ve made a list of the most popular digital marketing strategies for 2020: 

Influencer marketing

If you’ve ever bought something because someone else recommended it to you, you are familiar with the concept behind Influencer marketing. 

Influencer marketing is basically the idea of celebrity endorsement adapted to the modern-day. Online influencers use their social media accounts to promote your products or services to their followers, which ideally are also part of your target audience. 

Social media marketing

Social media is huge today, having billions of active users whom you can turn into buying customers. For example, data shows that one out of four humans on our planet has a Facebook account. 

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok are social media channels where you can reach your target audience through all types of content, including video, images, and posts.

However, it’s essential to keep in mind that when creating content, it must be tailored to each social media platform to make it relevant for the audience you can find there. 

Content marketing

Content marketing is huge these days. From videos to blog posts and many other types of content, businesses use content marketing strategies to pose as authorities in their industry and attract customers by sharing relevant and useful content. Content marketing can help you increase brand awareness, keep customers loyal, and increase sales. 

Email marketing

Yes, email marketing is still relevant, and it is actually one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Don’t believe us? You should know that 85% of US adults Internet users are also email users. So, you can reach a lot of people through email marketing. 

Video marketing

Five hundred million people around the world watch videos on Facebook every day. That’s right! People love videos these days because it is probably the most engaging and easy to consume form of content, making video marketing a popular and very effective digital marketing tactic.