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While seasoned inbound marketers might claim that inbound marketing is almost the same as digital marketing, there are some differences. Through conversations with business owners and marketers in the U.S. and U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, we have learned a lot about the subtle differences observed around the globe.
What is Digital Marketing for a Business?
This stage is crucial for your business and brand. Every brand has a website. Even if they don't have one, every brand has a social media presence as well as a digital advertising strategy. Digital content and marketing are expected to provide reliable information about brands. You have so many options with digital marketing that you can be innovative and use different strategies even if your budget is limited.
Digital marketing involves using multiple digital channels to reach customers online. The best digital marketers understand how each campaign supports their overall goals. Marketers can support larger campaigns via paid or free channels depending on their goals.
A content marketer might create blog posts that result in leads via ebooks. Social Media Marketing could promote blogs through paid and organic posts on business accounts. A marketer might also send an email campaign to give more information to the people who have downloaded the ebook.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
Digital marketing can reach more people than traditional advertising, and you can target the most likely buyers of your products or services. Digital marketing is also less expensive than traditional advertising. You can track your progress every day and adjust as needed.
There are many major benefits to digital marketing:
- Focus your attention on the prospects most likely to buy your products or services.
- It is cheaper than traditional outbound marketing strategies.
- Digital marketing allows you to compete with established companies.
- Digital marketing can be measured.
- It's easier to adapt and modify a digital marketing strategy.
- Digital marketing can improve lead quality and conversion rates.
- Engaging audiences at all stages of life can be done through digital marketing
Let's dive deeper.
1. Concentrate Your Attention on Only the Prospects Most Likely to Buy Your Product or Services
The audience that sees your advertisement on TV, in magazines, or on billboards is not something you can control. It is difficult to predict the audience, even though you can measure certain demographics such as the readership of the magazine or the area where the advertisement is placed. Target highly-targeted audiences using targeted digital marketing messages that convert.
You might, for example, use social media targeting to target certain audiences based upon gender, age and location. PPC and SEO strategies can also be used to target people who are interested in certain keywords that relate to your product, industry, or service.
You can use digital marketing to conduct research and determine buyer personas. Then, you can refine your strategy to reach these buyers.
2. It Is Less Expensive Than Traditional Outbound Marketing Methods
Digital marketing allows you to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of your efforts each day. This allows you to maximize your Return on investment and optimize your marketing budget. Traditional advertising is exempt from this rule. No matter how effective your billboard is, it will still cost the same regardless of whether or not it converts.
Digital marketing gives you complete control over the spending of your money. It is possible to spend more on software that produces high-converting Instagram content than you would on PPC campaigns. Digital marketing allows you to make frequent pivots and save money on ineffective channels.
Digital marketing has the potential to maximize your ROI and is usually more cost-effective. You might think about investing in SEO, blogging, and social media if you have a small business. Even with low spending, these strategies can offer a high return-on-investment.
3. Digital Marketing Helps You Compete With Larger Brands And Even Levels The Playing Field In Your Industry
Small businesses will find it difficult to compete with large companies in your industry. With strategic digital marketing strategies, you can easily surpass the big guys. Long-tail keywords can be used to create high-quality content that ranks well in search engines. Search engines don't care if a brand is the largest, but they care about content that resonates with their target audience.
4. Digital Marketing Can be Measured
While traditional advertising can be useful for some goals, it is not measurable. This is digital marketing's greatest advantage. This can give you a comprehensive view of all your company's metrics including clicks, views, impressions, time on page, clicks, and shares.
Contrary to traditional offline marketing methods, digital marketing allows marketers to immediately see results. You can see exactly how many people saw your advertisement if you have placed it in a newspaper. It is impossible to tell if your ad has generated any sales. Digital marketing makes it possible to determine the ROI of any aspect of your marketing activities. These are only a few examples.
Website Traffic
You can see the number of people who have visited your site's homepage with digital marketing. Digital analytics software can be used to track visitors. This information is available in HubSpot marketing platforms. It is possible to see what device they used, which pages they visited, where they came from and other digital analytics data.
This information will help you choose which channels to focus on, based on how many people they bring to your site. SEO is a must if organic search accounts for less than 10% of your traffic.
It can be difficult to understand how people interact with each other before buying or speaking with them. Digital marketing can help you identify patterns and trends in people's behaviors before they reach the end stage of their buyer's journey. This allows you to make better decisions when it comes to attracting them onto your website.
Lead Generation Content Performance
Imagine you have created a brochure about a product and sent it to people via their mailboxes. This brochure is an example of offline content. Problem is that you don't know how many people have read your brochure.
Imagine the brochure is on your website. You can track the number of people who visited each page and create a contact form to provide the information. It's two-fold. This is twofold: you can track the engagement with your content and generate qualified leads by downloading it.
Attribution Modeling
Combining a Digital Marketing Strategy with the right technologies allows you to track every sale back to the first contact with a customer.
This is called attribution modeling. This allows you to spot patterns and trends in the people who search for your product and purchase it. It helps you determine which areas of your marketing strategy require more attention and which parts need to be refined.
It is vital to link sales and marketing. LinkedIn reports that 87% sales professionals and marketers agree that collaboration between marketing, sales and business development is crucial. But, poor financial performance can be caused by misalignment of the two departments. Digital technologies can improve customer experience throughout the entire buying process. You will see a significant improvement in your bottom line.
5. It Is Easy To Modify And Adapt A Digital Marketing Strategy
It is difficult to create a marketing strategy. You will usually follow the strategy to its completion. Then, you'll let it take effect and then evaluate its results. Sometimes things don't go according to plan. Sometimes you may realize that something is not right with your calculation, an assumption wasn't correct, or that the audience didn't respond as you expected. It can be very helpful to adapt or pivot your strategy as you go. You won't have to start it over.
There are many benefits to digital marketing, such as the ability to change your strategy. Digital marketing is simpler than traditional marketing strategies such as billboard advertising and mailers. Imagine an online advertisement not performing as expected. You can adjust the program or pause it to achieve better results.
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6. Digital Marketing Can Increase Both The Quality And Quantity Of Leads
Digital marketing allows you to easily measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing efforts. This allows you to increase your conversion rate. You can also evaluate each technique's performance to help you develop more effective plans. Continuously improving your methods will increase your conversion rate. Online marketing is a great method to increase conversion rates.
Leads are not all created equal. Digital marketing allows for you to target specific audiences, and generate better-quality leads. These leads are more likely to convert to customers. Connecting your business with the most valuable leads will improve your conversion rate.
7. You Can Use Digital Marketing To Engage Audiences At All Stages
It is important to engage your audience early. It is crucial to establish a relationship with your buyer at the start of their journey. This will allow you to move the lead through your customer funnel. Digital marketing allows you to do this from the beginning to the end, and every step between.
Online channels allow you to track all aspects of the buying journey of your customers. It is essential to understand and analyze how customers behave and function in order to convert leads. Digital marketing can help you track customers. It helps to keep customers connected even if they don't convert immediately.
These Are The Top 7 Digital Marketing Trends For 2023
1. Social Impact Strategy Front And Center
It is not a new trend for brands to change their values. However, putting their impact strategy at the forefront of their digital marketing strategy shows a shift in how brands frame themselves in response to global events.
We're not talking about responding to natural disasters and socio-political issues. Brands that are authentic and thoughtful and that focus on the values and morals they represent will be sought after by consumers.
Sometimes, highlighting your social-impact strategy can be risky and bold. Nike collaborated with Colin Kaepernick after he took a knee during Nike's 2016 NFL National Anthem.
Digital marketing is about embedding social causes in your brand's mission. This isn't a trend but an effect of what it means for a brand to be values-driven in today's digital world. Your social impact strategy must influence your social content, graphics, and email topics.
2. Marketing That Is Youth-Focused
Gen Z is not just the next generation of consumers. With $143 billion of purchasing power, Gen Z is the current generation. It will account for more than 40% of U.S. consumers by 2021.
Gen Zers, in addition to their incredible power as consumers and innovators, are changing how we interact with brands through youth-dominated platforms such as TikTok. They don't believe in traditional marketing tactics and only connect with brands that appeal to them. Gen Zers expect companies to be authentic, honest, transparent, real, and down-to-earth.
The younger generation is becoming more aware that they don't want to feel sold to. They prefer to have the product be more personal and imaginative. If you want to appeal to this market, short-form video content is the best way to do it. Your brand identity should reflect their tastes. Studies show that Gen Z finds hope, motivation, and community in bright colors, even in a scary world.
It's more than just about applying acid traffic to your marketing materials and calling them 'lit. It's more than just a trend for 2023. It's also the start of how all brands should be positioning themselves. From the bright and colorful aesthetics that appeal most to Gen Z to the original mission and personality, they hold dearest, creating a brand persona that resonates with younger generations.
3. Branded Content That Is Authentic And Humanized
Gen Z is not the only one who wants to be connected with brands on an even deeper level. A lot of people are looking for light relief from current world events. This includes how they align themselves with brands.
One of the best ways for brand loyalty to be built in 2023 is to create digital content that is authentic and human-like. This includes humor, vulnerability, honesty, and all other qualities we look for in interpersonal relationships. This is possible by using characters or mascots in your digital marketing. The personas must feel authentic and relevant to the brand. Digital marketing is a great way of building loyalty.
We are moving beyond perfectly curated social media feeds to a more realistic, gritty, and unfiltered space. Consumers need to know that the people behind brands have been through similar experiences. Before they purchase your brand or service, they want to feel more connected with the brand persona. Society is now craving reality over aspiration.
4. Audio-First Marketing
The impact TikTok has had on digital marketing is hard to overstate. One of its most notable effects is the rise in audio-first content. This is a result of TikTok's position as a social platform for video and audio-based content.
A majority of users consider sounding an integral part of their platform experience. This means they are eight times more likely than others to remember branded content if distinctive sounds are used. As a digital marketing strategy, audio-first is driving a lot of advertisements we see online. These include how-tos and product highlights, and teasers.
A staggering 81% of podcast listeners act after hearing audio ads on their favorite podcasts. These 'actions' can include following up on what they heard online, liking the brand on Socials, and sharing what they have heard with others. The podcast hosts recording the ad make it feel very real to listeners.
Audio-first content can promote authenticity in advertising. It doesn't matter if it's on TikTok or podcast; the comforting voice and tone of your audience's favorite influencers will help you to build trust and belief in your product.
You can let go of the word-for-word, well-written scripts used by radio advertisers and allow your brand partners to have fun.
5. Steam Gains For Symphonic Ads
A.I. Music, a British start-up, launched its first symphonic advertisement in 2019. This digital advert used a "shape-shifting" technology to allow users to remix songs with artificial intelligence. The technology adjusted the backing music of the digital advertisement to match the current listening habits.
Although it might seem like a trend, Dunkin' Donuts used this technology in 2021. Their results were quite impressive. Their engagement was 238% higher than the non-personalized ads they used in other campaigns.
Symphonic advertising is unique because it doesn't matter if you choose one backing track for your content. This makes it more accessible for all users. You tailor the music to each individual's needs at the time the ad is being played. This trend is a truly individual segment of digital marketing.
It's been proven that music used in advertisements increases recall and buy intent. The best thing about finding the perfect song is for the ad to choose the track that resonates with your listener.
Once you can get past the futuristic techiness and confusing name, it is simple: it works. Studies have shown that audio-only content has a greater emotional impact than video and can cause increased heart rate and temperature.
Immersive experiences are what users want from content they find engaging. It helps them to feel connected and inspired and builds empathy. Symphonic ads feel immersive as they seamlessly fit into the content the listener is already interested in without taking them away from the experience like traditional ad breaks would. The more brands can integrate this feeling into digital marketing; they will be more successful in reaching their audiences.
6. Marketing A.V. Products
Immersing consumers in ads is a key feature of Digital Marketing Trends. You should explore audio-visual (A.V.) technology to engage with customers. Branded visuals that appeal to multiple senses stand out from the sea of static images online. You can be noticed by consumers and build brand loyalty.
How can you integrate A.V. technology into digital marketing content? Consumer expectations are increasing as more sophisticated technology becomes available. It's more common for brands today to do extra for limited editions or key products.
It means you can create interactive, immersive mini-sites that users will enjoy. Gamification is a feature that allows designers to reward users for navigating the site and reaching specific goals. It's no longer enough to rely solely on static digital marketing.
Brands can also adopt A.V. technology on a smaller scale. You can think of social media filters that allow users to interact with your product as they browse, such as a lipstick test to see how it looks. You can also follow in the footsteps of Meta and create a whole brand universe for your customers.
7. Marketing With Realist Influencers
Although it may sound familiar, influencer marketing is not new. How brands work with influencers to reach their audience is constantly changing. We expect to see a shift from the traditional, aspirational influencer in 2023.
TikTok (yes, it's back!) This has changed the way that social media users see each other. It allows anyone to build huge followings (read, influence) without having curated Instagram feeds or long-form content like YouTube. They can now see past the high-profile, paid ads of celebrities and influencers. They are choosing more trustworthy, credible sources than them: each other.
We predict that in 2023 there will be a decline in celebrity endorsements and an increase in TikTok's micro-influencers. Brands realize that even those with the smallest followings can make a big impact. Their followers will trust your content if it is aligned with their brand.
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Conclusion
There you have it. These seven trends will help you be prepared for a successful digital marketing year in 2023. These ideas will help you to improve your strategy, increase brand loyalty, and build a digital following.
These new big trends like A.V., A.I., and immersive experiences are not going anywhere. If you can keep up with these technological advancements, you will be ahead in 2024 and every year after that. Ensure that every Digital Marketing Campaign you create for 2023 is authentic, engaging, relevant, and personal to your audience. Future trends are being adopted by them, and so should you.
