What is Digital Marketing or Online Marketing? Discover how to boost your brand with this strategy

Digital Marketing, also known as Digital Marketing is the set of activities that a company (or person) performs online with the aim of attracting new business, creating relationships, and developing a brand identity. Among its strategies are SEO, Inbound Marketing, and Content Marketing.

The concept of Digital Marketing may seem very clear, but at the same time, it is very subjective.

How to understand a subject that covers so much? Any action on the Internet of my company characterizes Digital Marketing? What are the best strategies? How to extract the maximum potential from these actions?

There is no doubt about the usefulness and growth of digital marketing in the coming years, and many people already know this.

And you? Are you ready to know this whole universe?

If your answer is “Yes”, we create this complete content so that you understand exactly what Digital Marketing is, its main benefits, the strategies used and how your company can take advantage of it.

In this article you will learn:

• Definition of Digital Marketing or Online Marketing;
• Digital Marketing Concepts
• Benefits of Online Marketing;
• Digital Marketing strategies that you can implement;
• Steps to put together a Digital Marketing plan;
• Online Marketing Tools for your company  
• Definition of Digital Marketing or Online Marketing

Digital Marketing or Online Marketing is the set of strategies aimed at electronic communication and marketing of products and services.

It is one of the main ways available for companies to communicate with the public directly, personally, and at the right time.

Philip Kotler is considered the father of Marketing, and defines it as "The social process from which people and groups of people satisfy wishes and needs with the creation, offer and free negotiation of value products and services with others."

However, the ways of making that happen change almost daily.

Therefore, currently, it is impossible to talk about marketing and ignore that more than half of the world's population has access to the Internet and that until 2021 there will be 2.3 billion digital consumers.

This explains why Digital Marketing is the most outstanding way of doing and conceptualizing marketing right now.

The term is used to summarize all your marketing efforts in the online environment.

Using digital channels, such as blogs, sites, search engines, social media, emails, and others, companies try to solve ailments and wishes of their clients and potential clients.

Digital Marketing can be carried out by individuals, companies, universities, NGOs, associations, churches, etc. But you must take into account cultural, psychological, geographic, and legal factors that influence people when buying or selling a product or service.

Before continuing our study on Digital Marketing, I must warn you that this is an extensive article. Therefore, we make this content available for download in PDF. Just fill out the form below:

The great flow of communication that the web provides today favors agile strategies, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Inbound Marketing, and Content Marketing, as we will see in the next points.

When we talk about increasing our network, strengthening our brand, and making better sales, these are all objectives in which digital marketing is an important tool to achieve it.

How Online Marketing was born

In the 90's the first version of the Internet emerged, a little different from what we know today: the so-called  Web 1.0.

That old Internet did not actively allow users to interact with web pages but allowed them to find information in a simple search system.

It was like a library you went into, found what you wanted, but couldn't alter the content you found.

However, it was still very similar to traditional marketing, as the communication was one-sided,  made by the company on an institutional site, and the consumer only passively received the content, without close interaction between the two parties.

In 1993, Internet users began to engage more closely with companies advertising on the web, as around this time the first clickable ads emerged.

However, it was only until 2000 that digital marketing became more like what we know today.

Today he is moving more and more towards personalization, that is,  delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

Main concepts of Digital Marketing

Just as each specialization has its specificities, digital marketing is a universe on its own terms. Before we begin, let's go through each of those main concepts.

Person

Unlike traditional strategies, Digital Marketing works with the concept of individuals, who are semi-fictional profiles, supported their real consumers, and who represent their ideal buyer.

Thus, you can create more segmented actions directed at the right people, saving time and money.

Lead

Leads are business opportunities, that is, the contacts that, through an Inbound Marketing strategy, leave their key information so that you can identify potential customers and nurture them with relevant content until they are ready to buy.

Sales Funnel or Pipeline

This concept represents the stages that a user goes through before becoming a customer of a company. The pipeline or sales funnel is usually divided into three stages:

• Attraction: at this moment the user begins to reflect on the problem they have and begins to search for information on the Internet to clarify their doubts;
• Consideration: here the potential client already knows what problem he has, but he wants to find the best solution to solve it and he still does not know if this will be a product or service;
• Decision: at this stage, the solution is already defined and it is up to the user to choose which company will be the one to deliver the best product or service for their need.

Landing page

They are the lead capture pages, 100% focused on collecting relevant information from users.

The idea is that on landing pages you offer valuable content or material and in return, the most interested visitors leave their contact information and, with that, become leads.

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the optimization of your site so that it is understood by search engines.

These are actions that contribute to improving the positioning potential of your pages and content, helping you meet the main requirements of search platforms such as Google and Bing.

CTA

Calls to Action or CTA, are the buttons or calls that lead to action that users must comply with when visiting a page so that they continue in the flow of your sales funnel and arrive at the time of purchase prepared for consumption.

Conversion

Conversion is the term used to represent the process of attracting users to your contact base and getting them to the bottom of the sales funnel.

The goal of conversion optimization is to discover where conversions are not being properly leveraged within a blog or website. And the best way to do this is to analyze data and perform tests that indicate points of improvement.

User experience

Increasingly, the user has power in their consumption day, both in terms of content and the interactions they make with brands.

That is why the concept in question has been so relevant in the strategies of companies. From performance to visual design, web pages have to be structured to create a pleasant browsing experience that retains the user longer.

In fact, a TopTotal report provided the fact that 88% of visitors would not interact with a website again after a poor browsing experience.

That is, if your pages take a long time to load or they pollute the screen with spam ads, you will be missing real opportunities to turn your users into business opportunities.

The user experience is directly related to factors such as:

• Page interactivity ;
• Information architecture;
• Pages loading speed ;
• Web design;
• Diversity of content manager resources ( CMS );
• Choosing a good hosting service ;
• Among many others.

Segmentation

When we talk about segmentation in Digital Marketing, we are referring to one of the most important and efficient tools available to spread a message to a portion of the audience that has very specific characteristics.

The segmentation allows you to customize campaigns and provides an approach to impact those potential consumers that look like the brand.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

The CAC, or Cost of Acquisition of Clients, is a numerical data that indicates the money that a company has to invest to get a new client.

This data is present in almost any area of ​​the marketing team of a company. Since, since a user enters through the funnel, the purchase is nurtured and executed, costs accumulate for this to be possible.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The focus of companies, especially since the growing popularity of selling 3.0, is to enhance their relationship and customer service.

The CRM management or customer relationship is software designed to manage and control all aspects related to the contact with potential customers to ensure their satisfaction and, in turn, encourage loyalty.

Its main benefits are:

• Saves a lot of time when managing contact details;
• Provides personalized attention to each of your clients;
• Provides specific data to create solutions tailored to customer needs.
• Content Management System (CMS)

The CMS, or content management system, is a super necessary tool for those who have a web page - such as a blog, online store - to administer it, organize it and have full control of its publications and content.

A CMS allows you to perform many tasks, from a single platform to simplify your life.

The main benefits are:

• Develop a website and keep it updated;
• Add new content to it when necessary;
• Apply SEO optimization techniques ;
• Image optimization, keywords and more - to generate more organic traffic;
• Create several projects with different objectives - like a blog and a virtual store at the same time;
• Increase page load speed;
• Lower costs for updating and maintaining the website, among others.

All this contributes to and favors the user experience, at the same time that it provides various resources for the effectiveness of your strategies.

WordPress is the platform that calmly leads the CMS market worldwide, but there are also Drupal, Joomla, Blogger (from Google), Wix, and others.

Engagement

The engagement in Online Marketing can be translated as the level of identification and emotional connection with customers and prospects with a product or service.

It can be measured according to the moments or places where there is an interaction between users and the company. This serves to:

• Determine the quality of interaction between the brand and the audience;
• Understand what products or content they like to see;
• Measure the level of identification they feel with some materials;
• Have user feedbacks for the brand.

Loyalty

Customer loyalty is all those actions and strategies that seek to provoke, through marketing practices, that customers return to consuming products and services that they have already purchased.

This has multiple benefits in addition to the evident increase in the company's sales, such as:

• Retain customers;
• Lower customer acquisition costs;
• Obtain more resources to cover expenses or generate new business opportunities;
• Become an authority in the area;
• Get loyalty customer data to be more competitive;
• That users become brand ambassadors and propagators.
• All this is possible thanks to loyalty strategies and programs that, in addition to offering quality Products and services, seek to reward customers and give them unconditional support.

Growth Hacking

Making a literal translation of the term it can be said that Growth Hacking is equivalent to "learning growth habits" and is an increasingly necessary concept for Digital Marketing in general.

It can be said that the main intention of Growth Hacking is to find ways to develop business. And it is that this refers more to a group mentality than to a specific strategy or practice.

However, to apply it correctly, special attention must be paid to 3 main points:

• Creativity;
• Automation;
• Experimentation with data analysis.

KPIs

The Key Performance Indicators or key performance indicators are metrics on various actions and areas, to identify the effectiveness of a strategy or action in Digital Marketing.

It is very common to see that professionals think that any metric is a KPI. And the reality is that it is not. The KPIs are relevant indicators for your business and your goals.

There are different types of KPIs, according to their level of importance. For example:

• Secondary: cost of each lead in the different stages of the sales funnel, subscribers to a blog, recurring visitors, cost per visitor, and subscribers of a newsletter.
• Practical: bounce rate, page views, Pagerank, most searched keywords, most read content, and more.

Link Building

The Link Building is a set of techniques and practices to generate links on external websites. Its objective is to contribute to the SEO positioning of a site within the search engines.

In fact, the links that drive traffic to your website are known as backlinks and each of them tells search engines that your site or content has valuable material regarding a keyword and this favors uploading positions. on Google, for example.

ROI

The return of investment or Return of Investment is a mathematical formula that helps to visualize the profitability that can be caused after an action, strategy, campaign, or any investment of resources or money that is made.

This calculation is very simple to do, in fact, the only thing necessary to carry out this operation and know the percentage of return on investment is: (Profit ($) - Investment ($) / Total investment) x 100%.

However, ROI is used to calculate the profitability of many things, for example:

• Social networks (sales, customers, among others);
• Specific content;
• From a blog (money to be generated by visits);
• Web page (visits, clients, conversions, among others).

Responsive Design

The Design Responsive is the ability of a website to adapt or displayed to users regardless of the device they are using. In other words, the page is available to be used regardless of the size of the screen or the characteristics of the device.

The possibilities of Responsive Design allow you to be available to:

• Mobile web (site for mobile devices only);
• Apps;
• Responsive web (a single website that adapts to several screens without altering its structure).

Virality

In Digital Marketing, virality is the ability of content, spread on the Internet, to share or receive many visits in a short period of time.

The power of virality is infinite since it allows reaching from thousands of people to billions. This is a golden opportunity to generate business opportunities or to promote a brand and increase your visibility on the Internet.

Nutrition Flow

It is a Marketing automation process where a user action is a trigger for an email message flow, with the aim of helping your visitor walk through the sales funnel.