What is digital marketing? – and why is it still relevant?

We live in a world where colleagues meet over Zoom instead of in conference rooms. Neighbors envy each other on Instagram instead of over garden fences. Children play FIFA instead of kicking a ball on the soccer field. Teenage girls use digital filters instead of sneaking their mom's makeup. Investors discuss cryptocurrencies instead of securing their money in natural resources.

Facebook calls it the Metaverse, and we describe it as digital profiles, experiences, and channels becoming more crucial than physical ones.

Like a bolt from the blue, digital marketing has taken over the lead at nearly all growth companies. According to Statista, traditional marketing budgets at companies in the USA have decreased since 2012 while digital marketing budgets have increased between 8.2-15.8% per quarter during the same period.

To all marketers' delight, digital marketing has gone from being a support leg for the sales department to a leading directive for business development and growth with strong names like content marketing, marketing automation, and search optimization in the starting lineup.

Together in this blog, we dig deeper into what strategies exist, which channels you can use, and what segmentation is. Before that, we go through what digital marketing is and how to work with it. Last but not least, we reveal what the secret ingredient is to become really sharp at digital marketing and how to stand out in the digital land of lagom (moderation).

Because even we Swedes have defied the Law of Jante and ventured into the digital world with big, confident voices to be seen and heard a little more than everyone else!

What is digital marketing and how do you work with it?

If you ask five different business leaders, you'll probably get five different answers, so let's establish the most comprehensive answer once and for all: digital marketing encompasses all digital marketing efforts a company makes. That is, all digital processes that create awareness of the company and its offerings.

Whether you work with B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-consumer), digital marketing is about meeting the challenges around strategies, channels, and segments to reach the right people, through the right channels, and with the right message.

However, both for better and worse. Digital marketers today often scratch their heads over the endless possibilities and frequently get stuck in choice and dilemma. Rightly so—knowing how to allocate resources and where to focus efforts is becoming increasingly difficult. Therefore, it's extra important that you who work with digital marketing are well aware of the tools available to effectively organize activities and maximize profitability.

What are the best strategies for digital marketing?

There are many different strategies and techniques for approaching digital marketing. Which strategy is best for you naturally depends on your target audience and the business you operate, but here are some of our favorites:

Content marketing

Regardless of what you work with, you will inevitably encounter content marketing, a strategy that involves creating valuable content for your target audience.

Content marketing is an organic marketing strategy that has proven to be enormously effective for lead generation, the process of attracting and converting potential customers into actual customers.

When creating a strategy for your content, you should think value-based and long-term. Organic marketing must be natural and authoritative to produce results.

To know if your content contributes to actual results, it's important that you divide your content based on purpose and clear KPIs. For example, do you want to increase your follower base or do you want to create more conversions? That decision will guide what type of content is created and how its results are measured.

The most common types of content are:

1. SEO-optimized blogs
2. Social media posts
3. Infographics
4. Webinars/podcasts
5. Guides/whitepapers
6. Converting articles
7. Landing pages/service pages
8. Your story
9. Customer recommendations
10. Customer cases

Lifecycle marketing

As your content develops, it's important to get to know your audience in depth. You do this by linking interactions to specific customer profiles. In this way, you create what is known as lifecycle marketing. Others call it marketing to the different phases of the sales funnel. Both concepts emphasize the value of creating content for all parts of the sales process.

Take another look at the list above. Do you notice anything special? It's organized by conversion rate. This means that, in most cases, SEO-optimized blogs and social media posts are created to reach high traffic with low conversion rates, while landing pages and customer recommendations are created for a more specific audience with high conversion rates.

Ultimately, you want to try to spread your content as evenly as possible across the lifecycle or sales funnel. After you've done that, it's time to analyze which form of content gives the best results in each phase.

Remember – continuous improvement is always better than delayed perfectionism.

The importance of a calendar

If you succeed with content marketing, it can undoubtedly become one of the strongest strategies in digital marketing. But you can't do that without organizing your content in a calendar. Without a calendar, your work easily becomes unstructured and difficult to improve.

Download Apsis content calendar to start structuring your content today.

Email marketing

Email marketing is the oldest but smartest trick in the box for reaching both existing and potential customers. You who work with a clear email strategy often see strong ROI through increased activity, traffic, and sales on your website.

The biggest challenge with email marketing today is standing out in the otherwise overcrowded inbox. To break through the noise:

1. Write an eye-catching subject line
2. Show the most important message first
3. Have a clear CTA
4. Use a brand-consistent design
5. Make sure to follow all GDPR rules

Marketing automation

Once you have all your contacts, templates, and messages in place, you can take your email marketing to the next level by automating your processes. You can do this by creating workflows of emails linked to specific activities on your website or your customer profiles.

These workflows, also called marketing automation, give up to 5 times higher open rates than regular bulk mailings and can provide up to 25% return.

Because who doesn't like to receive personal offers on their birthday or a reminder when they've forgotten products in their cart?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization, abbreviated SEO, is the art of ranking high among results in search engines like Google and Bing. SEO is often used as a strategy to reach new customers who otherwise don't know the company exists.

To succeed with SEO, you must conduct thorough keyword research. Three simple steps to follow are:

1. Decide which keywords you want to appear for
2. Analyze which keywords your competitors appear for
3. Identify how difficult the keywords are to appear for

Once you've designed the strategy around keywords, it's time to create content. You do this by creating a blog post (like this one!), a video, or an image. The purpose is for it to appear among the top search results under each respective tab in Google or Bing.

Let's be honest – sometimes SEO can feel hopelessly difficult. Our best tip is to start with simpler keywords or longer search phrases with less competition to start appearing.

Remember that Google bases its search results on E-A-T: expertise, authority, and trust.

Here it's about becoming 1% better every day, marginal improvement all the way. You can do it!

Social media

Social media marketing is increasingly moving from being a channel for linked content to your website to being a megaphone for your brand voice. This is because new social media algorithms punish those who share linked content with lower reach. So if you work with social media and your impressions have decreased over the past year – now you know why!

Therefore, we see more and more companies using their social media to entertain and build relationships with their target audience by participating in trends and creating conversations (though we can probably all agree that enough colleagues have done the Jerusalem dance now...).

Regardless, social media is an excellent way to attract, engage, and activate your target audience.

Paid advertising

Paid advertising is a strategy you turn to when you want to drive results quickly and directly. For example, when you have quarterly goals to achieve and the results haven't quite caught up yet. It's a much more pushing strategy compared to other more value-based strategies.

Paid advertising today can actually give fantastic results for a relatively low cost, if used correctly. In recent years, both the supply and demand for paid digital advertising have exploded through all possible roofs.

However, many have become immune to paid advertising as a result and readily refrain from clicking on an ad. Therefore, a marketing strategy that only builds on paid marketing is superficial and thin. To attract and convert, you should create an authentic relationship with the customer through a combination of both paid and organic marketing.

The most common types of paid advertising include:

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

When SEO feels extra difficult and it's impossible to land on the first page for the keyword you so badly want to appear for, then you can turn to search engine marketing. Those who say money can't buy happiness haven't used SEM...

Social media advertising

As a result of new algorithms giving your linked content lower reach, you sometimes have to turn to paid advertising on social media to spread the outstanding content you spent weeks creating.

Display advertising

You can also choose to pay Google to appear in image and display form around the web. However, a warning finger must be raised for these types of advertisements. Many of the websites that allow advertising from Google have low credibility. Be careful so it doesn't damage your brand!

Video advertising

Video ads on YouTube and other streaming services are the next generation of commercials. They may cost more than other paid ads, but they have higher conversion rates than most and are excellent for brand building.

Affiliate advertising

Affiliate advertising is what we all say we don't fall for but maybe do unconsciously anyway. It's when you pay for another person or another brand to market your products or services. That is, when the influencer you follow on Instagram tells you they've tried something that has completely changed their life – do you fall for it?

What digital channels are there?

So you've determined which strategies you want to focus your resources on. Now you must decide which of all digital channels are best for your purpose.

Right now, the landscape of digital channels is bigger than ever before. The range of channels is larger than most marketing managers can keep track of.

Here it's important to think strategy first and channel second. Many make the mistake of distributing on a channel just because they can, but that doesn't mean they should.

To make it easy to understand why you should use a certain type of channel, channels are usually divided into three categories: owned, paid, and earned.

Owned channels

Owned channels are those you completely control yourself. That is, the channels you have full control over down to every little detail level. Your owned channels play a crucial role in the battle for customers' attention.

Owned channels are your website, your email, and your social profiles. However, it's important to be aware here – social media is only an owned channel when you publish your content.

Paid channels

Paid channels are those you pay to appear in. Here you usually have control over what is presented but not how or where they appear. Paid channels create authority by showing that your brand has enough resources to be visible in the market.

Examples of paid channels are paid ads on Google and social media. In this context, social media is a paid channel when you sponsor your posts.

Earned channels

Earned channels are the channels you don't own but where others talk about your brand anyway. A channel where you have no control over what is said. Earned channels can create strong trust in your brand – if what is said is good. If what is said is bad, it can just as quickly turn the other way.

An earned channel can be an article in a newspaper that a journalist has written about your brand, without you paying them to write about you. Social media is also an earned channel when others talk about your brand in groups or other public discussions.

Which digital channels should you choose?

Try to appear at least once from all types of channels. You will probably work most with your owned channels, but both paid and earned channels are important for increasing your brand's authority and trust.

Who should I market to and how?

Once you've decided which strategies and channels you want to use, it's time to decide who you should market to. You do this by segmenting.

Segmentation provides the right marketing to the right person by dividing your existing and potential customers into segments to create powerful and effective marketing for each group.

Just like in lifecycle marketing where you want to make sure to market to customers at the beginning, middle, and end of the sales journey, it's important to do the same when it comes to customers' personas, industry, and region.

Digital marketing has made it easier for you to decide exactly which target audience you want your paid ads to target for best results. Therefore, it's important to be aware of the different parameters that exist.

Demographic segmentation

In demographic segmentation, you use hard values such as age, gender, marital status, education, religion, and occupation.

Geographic segmentation

In geographic segmentation, you primarily focus on where the target audience is located. But you can also use geographic parameters such as population density and climate zone.

Psychographic segmentation

Psychographic segmentation uses soft values such as hobbies, interests, and opinions. Recently, behavioral segmentation has also emerged where marketing is adapted to the target audience's purchases, user status, and user frequency.

Both psychographic and behavioral segmentation have shown fantastic results when it comes to segmentation. Therefore, it's important that companies identify both hard and soft values when analyzing target groups and customer profiles.

Has digital marketing replaced traditional marketing?

Digital marketing is becoming increasingly crucial in converting customers, but traditional marketing is still an effective way to stand out from the crowd if resources allow it. In such cases, the most important thing is that activities are well-synced and coordinated.

An excellent example of this is Oatly. To stand out from the crowd, they have chosen to spend enormous resources on print advertising such as road signs and posters with a very clear strategy and tone. Two of their ads read:

"We made this mural instead of an instagram post. Hoping a barista walks by and sees it."

"Maybe a social media celebrity will take a picture of this poster and you will see it on instagram and like it way more than you do right now".

And it has created tremendously much buzz online. Everyone is talking about Oatly - in the digital channels. That's precisely why digital marketing is so crucial in the end. It allows a dialogue between customer and company that leads to action and conversion in a way that is easy to track and analyze.

What is the secret ingredient to successful digital marketing?

If you've come this far, you're probably very curious to know what that little extra is. What is it that takes you from being an everyday specialist to a sharp expert in the digital world? What is it that makes you actually reach the right people, in the right place, in the right way? How do you go from being lost in choices to having a data-driven direction in your work?

Drum roll... Let us introduce the ultimate tool, MarTech. The (not so) secret trick in digital marketing. A MarTech platform is created to help you drive traffic, optimize conversions, and achieve valuable insights.

Apsis One helps you, among other things, create specific customer reports, analyze campaign results, streamline customer activation, track web activity, manage loyalty flows, and adapt your email marketing to what works best for your target audience.

That is, Apsis One gives you in-depth insights into the digital experiences that are most crucial for your target audience so you can organize your activities for the best possible return with just a few clicks.

Doesn't that sound interesting? Book a free consultation with one of our experts to learn more about how we can help you.