We often get asked: what exactly is digital marketing? In this article, we’ll be looking at what it is, how it differs from traditional marketing methods, and how it can benefit you. Below is a summarized video version of the article, but we recommend reading on to gain a more thorough understanding.
The advertising landscape is changing. Early forms of advertising were priced and measured by volume, the audience was overly broad, and not much data was gathered from them. Traditional marketers create content that they hope resonates with their target market, and pay exorbitant fees to show that content to everyone who can see it – not just their target market. By the end of a traditional campaign, there’s no way to accurately gauge how many people who saw the ad took the desired action – be it buying a product, visiting a website, or contacting your company.
This is where digital marketing outperforms traditional: it enables you to target your audience more precisely, engage on a personal level, and yields accurate data for use in your next campaigns. The advantages of digital marketing are thus:
This doesn’t mean that traditional marketing is dead – in fact, both digital and traditional marketing benefit from being used together. It never hurts to expand your reach as far as you can, but traditional marketing has certainly lost ground to digital in terms of relevance, and should no longer form the basis of any campaign strategy. Now, let’s look at the digital marketing process.
Defining your goals
The first step is to know what you want to achieve. Usually this falls into one of three categories:
Awareness
Awareness
- Brand awareness
- Reach
Consideration
Consideration
- Website traffic
- Engagement
- App installs
- Video views
- Leads
- Messages
Conversions
Conversions
- Conversions
- Catalogue sales
- Brick-and-mortar store traffic
Defining your audience
It’s important to start a digital campaign with a few different audiences to experiment with. This makes it possible to narrow your audience over time to identify your target audience. Basically, there are 3 different types of audiences:
Core Audiences
Core Audiences
These are created manually from known details like demographics, location, and interests.
Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences
These are based on a list of existing customers, which can be segmented based on various characteristics.
Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike Audiences
These are automatically created from your other audiences to target people similar to those audiences.
Defining your platforms
There’s a wide range of digital platforms to choose from, each of which has their own unique audiences and ad formats. We mostly recommend the use of Facebook and Google together, as these two platforms have the most complete and complementary sets of data about their users. Anyway, the main platforms include, but are not limited to:
Capturing the right data
A digital campaign isn’t complete if it doesn’t have the right tracking and analytics set up beforehand to make sure you capture the most useful data about your audience. That’s why we make use of industry-standard analytics platforms to build custom conversion funnels for every client.
So let’s get started!
Either chat to us on Whatsapp or fill in the contact form. Try to fill in as much detail as possible, as this will help us figure out your specific requirements. After this first contact, we’ll carry out our ten-point digital marketing audit. Once we’ve sent you a proposal and you’ve approved it, we’ll send you a Service Level Agreement. Once signed, we can get going!