What is Digital Marketing? Know everything

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You hear the term digital marketing all the time.

And that's not all, you experience digital marketing every day.

Every time you go on the Internet, someone is trying to sell you a product or service directly or indirectly.

Businesses today simply cannot thrive without internet marketing. Brands need to take advantage of digital marketing strategies to generate sales, which are increasingly moving across the internet and to consumers.

The global digital advertising market is expected to reach over 600 billion dollars in 2021. In the United States, ad spending is expected to increase by 6.5% in 2022 alone, and most of this spending is on major ones advertising agencies.

And if we look to the future, the trend is towards upward mobility.

Global digital ad spending will represent 60.5% of total media spending inBy 2023 :

With the explosion in the number of devices connected to the Internet, businesses are increasingly adopting digital marketing strategies, including SEO, social media marketing, paid advertising campaigns, email marketing, etc.

According to another study, 36% of marketers are trying to integrate traditional and digital marketing strategies.

Fortunately, this boom in digital marketing is beneficial for businesses, big and small. After all, digital marketing allows businesses to:

  • Reach their target audience wherever they are.
  • Use the data to observe their online behavior.
  • Use analytics to understand what marketing messages to send to them.

Whether you're new to digital marketing or just wandering around the world of digital marketing, this comprehensive guide is for you.

We'll cover everything you need to know about digital marketing, including what it is, its history, and how you can start using it to your advantage.

First of all, what exactly is digital marketing?

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a generic term that refers to the promotion and sale of products or services using internet marketing strategies.

Here are some of the key areas of any digital marketing strategy :

  • Content marketing
  • Email marketing
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Social media marketing
  • Pay-Per-Click (paid ads)
  • Affiliate marketing

These areas of digital marketing allow you to reach your customers wherever they are, engage with them, and encourage them to buy something from you. You create brand awareness, generate leads, convert new buyers, build trust, and increase sales.

Types of digital marketing.

Essentially, digital marketing encompasses 6 different branches, including:

  1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
  2. Social Media Marketing
  3. Content Marketing
  4. Pay-Per-Click
  5. Email Marketing
  6. Affiliate marketing

Let's look at all of these types of marketing in a bit more detail:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO).

The SEO is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your site via organic search engine results.

Your main objective is to attract as many visitors as possible to your site. At the same time, you want them to be genuinely interested in your products or services.

SEO helps you get organic traffic from search engine results (SERPs) — traffic you don't have to pay for.

Search engine rankings take into account numerous factors such as content quality, page speed, mobile-friendliness, and backlink profile.

If you want to know more about SEO, you can read my guides here:

2. Social media marketing.

Social media marketing is the use of social media to connect with your audience and promote your products and services.

It allows you to reach new customers, strengthen your brand awareness, increase traffic on your website but also your sales.

Among the main social networks are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, SnapChat, Twitter, etc.

Facebook is in the lead — with nearly 2.8 billion active users in the world.

réseaux sociaux les plus populaires monde
Source: SEMrush

Your social media marketing strategy may include publishing content on your social media profiles, engaging with your followers, reviewing your results, and running ads and campaigns.

But to do well, you need to execute your social media strategy in 4 steps:

  1. Listen
  2. Influence
  3. Networking
  4. Loyalty and Sales

3. Content marketing.

Content marketing involves the process of planning, developing, distributing, sharing, and publishing relevant content to reach your audience.

It is also the tactic of Inbound Marketing on the internet the most effective used in a digital marketing strategy.

In a recent survey, 58% of participants placed the Content marketing in the lead of their list in terms of efficiency.

Businesses use the content marketing to achieve various goals, including:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Nourish/Educate their audience
  • Building creditability/trust
  • Generate leads and sales
  • Engage in dialogue with prospects in order to maintain leads.
  • And more

Some of the most popular content marketing channels that you can incorporate into your strategy include the following:

  • Blogs
  • Infographics
  • Social networks
  • Podcasts
  • White papers
  • Paid video ads

My favorite form of content marketing is creating traffic to a blog, like this one.

Check out my guide to learning to create and launch a blog for more details.

4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model in which advertisers pay a fee every time someone clicks on one of their ads. It's basically a way to buy visits to your site instead of gaining organic traffic.

Businesses use PPC to get instant traffic and to target and retarget audiences. Additionally, paid traffic allows you to control the direction of your traffic and measure your efforts. Your audience also benefits from PPC because it's easier for them to find the information they're looking for.

In fact, statistics indicate that customers have 70% more likely to convert on your site after seeing your retargeted audience.

Google Ads, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Quora, and Twitter ads are some of the most popular platforms for paid traffic.

Google Ads is the advertising agency the most popular and allows you to pay for the highest ranking locations in Google SERPs at a fixed price per click based on auctions.

You can also use PPC on other channels, for example:

  1. Facebook Ads : With paid Facebook ads, you'll pay to personalize an image post, video content, or slideshow.
    Facebook will then publish it in the news feed of people who match your company's target audience. The main appeal of Facebook ads is their powerful demographic targeting, which allows ads to be shown to users based on geography, purchase history, age, gender, interests, and more.
  2. Twitter Ads : To use Twitter ads, you pay to place a series of messages or profile badges on the news feed of targeted audiences.
    Depending on your goals, you can increase website traffic, Twitter followers, app downloads, and more.
  3. LinkedIn sponsored posts : By using LinkedIn sponsored messages, you pay to send direct messages to LinkedIn prospects to drive immediate action.
    Ads that include case studies, white papers, and product demonstrations are a great option.

Ideally, you should start with Google and Facebook ads, as ad agencies together generate approximately 80% of total referral traffic.

5. Email marketing.

Email marketing is a form of direct digital marketing that consists of sending emails to prospects to promote your products or services. It can also play a critical role in improving relationships with current customers, keeping customers informed, or reaching prospects.

You can send many different types of emails, including:

  • Newsletters
  • New product announcement emails
  • Welcome emails to customers
  • Purchase confirmation emails
  • Abandoned cart emails
  • Emails loaded with information for customer follow-up
  • Follow-up emails
  • Promotional emails
  • Review request emails, and more.

With a huge return of interest (ROI), email marketing is also one of the most profitable digital marketing strategies.

When using a email marketing software, you can expect an average return on investment of 4400% of what you spend.

As such, many businesses are still using massively email marketing, both for the acquisition and for the retention of their customers.

And if you add videos to your emails, you'll get even better results. Statistics show that dynamic emails increase click-through rates by 300%.

Here is a list of some standard email marketing practices:

  • Use welcome emails to build strong relationships with customers
  • Send emails at the right time (from 9 to 11 am and from 3 to 5 pm), the email open rate are generally the best).
  • Use a memorable sender name
  • Create engaging content to improve click-through rates
  • A/B test your email campaign before sending
  • Avoid the spam folder
  • And more

6. Affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is promoting products from other businesses and getting paid when someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link.

As an affiliate, you can search for a affiliate program or a product you like, promote it and earn a commission for each sale.

Affiliate marketing is profitable for your business because it's performance-based, since you only pay your affiliates based on sales.

It also allows you to expand your audience, improve your reputation, increase your traffic, and ultimately generate sales.

The most common affiliate marketing channels include:

  • Influencers
  • Bloggers
  • Email lists
  • YouTubers
  • Media
  • Comparators

Statistics indicate that 81% of marketers and 84% of publishers use affiliate marketing.

This digital marketing strategy is growing rapidly with no signs of slowing down to date.

History of digital marketing.

The history of digital marketing dates back to the 1990s, when the term was invented. That said, it cannot be uncorrelated with technological change.

A notable point in the beginning of was in 1971. That year Ray Tomlinson sent the first email. This technology established the platform that allowed businesses and individuals to send and receive files through different machines.

But digital marketing was officially recognized in 1990 - the same year that the search engine, Archie, was created as an index for FTP sites.

1990 - Creation of the term “digital marketing”.

The term “digital marketing” was invented in 1990. In the same year, Tim Berners-Lee developed the Web 1.0 platform.

The Web 1.0 platform refers to the first stage of the World Wide Web that limited users to finding the information they were looking for. They were not allowed to share this information on the web.

1993 - The first clickable banner goes online.

The first clickable banner has been put online. After that, HotWired became the first company to buy banners to advertise their brand.

Around 44% of people who saw the ad actually clicked on it. This is the beginning of a gradual foray into the era of digital marketing and advertising.

1994 - Yahoo is launched.

New technologies have begun to enter the market.

In the same year, Jerry Yang launched Yahoo, also known as Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web, named after its founder. Yahoo was successful right from the start, with nearly one million visits in the first year.

As a result, businesses have started optimizing their websites to rank higher in search engine results.

1995 - LookSmart is introduced.

In 1995, Martin Hosking, Evan Thornley, and Tracy Ellery launched a new search engine called LookSmart. LookSmart is a content and media management company for internet and technology.

1996 - Alexa is launched.

Alexa was originally founded by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat as an independent web analytics company in April 1996.

The tool was hugely successful and started to provide valuable information for each site visited. Alexa also started archiving web pages after crawling them using automated “crawlers” or “bots.”

In 1999, Amazon acquired Alexa for approximately $250 million in Amazon shares.

1998 - Google is launched publicly.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin launch Google to market Google Search.

In the same year, Microsoft launched the MSN search engine, and Yahoo introduced Yahoo web search.

2002 - LinkedIn is launched.

Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn in December 2002, making it the very first social networking platform oriented for B2B. LinkedIn is mainly used for professional networking or for the publication of job offers.

LinkedIn has become wildly popular in the B2B marketing space. Statistics show that in 2017, 94% of B2B marketers used LinkedIn to deliver content.

2003 - Myspace and WordPress are launched.

Myspace, launched in 2003, is an American social network.

It eventually overtook Yahoo and Google to become the most visited website in the United States. However, in April 2008, Facebook surpassed Myspace in terms of unique visitors worldwide.

In the same year, American developer Matt Mullenweg and English developer Mike Little presented WordPress. WordPress is one of the most used CMS in the world, used by over 75 million websites worldwide.

2004 - Use of the term “Web 2.0" at a public conference.

O'Reilly Media uses the term Web 2.0 at a public conference. Web 2.0 allows users to actively participate by taking actions such as commenting on published articles, creating website user accounts or profiles, etc.

In the same year, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook.

Facebook finally became one of the most popular social networks, with 2.50 billion monthly active users in April 2019.

Google also launched Gmail on 1 April 2004. Gmail is a free email service that allows you to receive and send emails up to 50 megabytes in size.

2005 - YouTube is launched.

YouTube was started by 3 PayPal employees (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim) as a video sharing website.

As of March 2006, YouTube had over 25 million videos uploaded and generated approximately 20,000 downloads per day.

Recognizing this huge success, Google bought YouTube on October 9, 2006, for $1.65 billion in shares.

Today, YouTube has 2 billion users worldwide.

2006 - Search engine traffic exceeds 6.4 billion per month.

The year 2006 was marked by significant advances in the world of digital marketing. Search engine traffic grew by around 6.4 billion in one month.

Microsoft also introduced Live Search to compete with Yahoo and Google.

In the same year, Jack Dorsey launched Twitter, one of the most popular social networks today.

Twitter - First Tweet

In 2020, Twitter had 330 million monthly active users and 145 million daily active users. Additionally, statistics indicate that Twitter users spend 26% more time with ads than other social media users.

2007 - Marketers started using automation tools.

Marketing automation has been promoted to keep up with the rapid pace of the Internet.

Around this time, businesses started using more sophisticated digital marketing products, like marketing automation software.

These tools have begun to automate traditional processes like segmenting prospects, launching multi-channel marketing campaigns, and providing personalized information to customers.

2009 - Google made changes to AdWords.

Google has made substantial changes to its AdWords program. Now, you can measure your conversion rate that occurred within 30 days of placing your ad, but without getting clicks.

In the same year, Google introduced a new feature in its AdSense program, which allows you to “enable multiple networks to show ads.”

2010 - Instagram launched.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Instagram, a social media platform for sharing photos and videos, on iOS in October 2010.

Instagram gained around one million registered users in the 2 months following its launch and 10 million in one year. And as of May 2019, Instagram has 1 billion registered users.

Since then, Instagram has become a pivot in the digital marketing space. Studies suggest that 200 million IG users visit at least one business profile per day

In the same year, the growth of digital media was estimated at 4.5 trillion internet advertisements broadcast every year. At the same time, digital marketing spending grew by 48% in 2010.

2011 - Google Panda launched.

First released in February 2011, Google Panda made a significant change to Google's search engine ranking algorithm.

It aimed to lower the rankings of “low quality sites” and put “higher quality sites” at the top of the search results. This measure would have influenced Google's ranking for about 12% of search results.

2014 - The number of mobile phone users soared.

This year, the number of mobile phone users has surged and is expected to reach 1.75 billion in 2014.

2014 also saw the launch of the Facebook Messenger app and the iWatch.

2015 — Snapchat introduces its Discover feature.

Snapchat introduced its Discover feature, a daily feed that includes content from brands like ESPN, National Geographic, Yahoo News, and more.

In the same year, several other new technologies such as predictive analytics, content marketing, and wearable technologies were invented.

The cookie is another major breakthrough in digital marketing. The first cookie was designed to record user habits. However, its use has changed dramatically over the years. Today, businesses and marketers use coded cookies to collect accurate user data in a number of ways.

The digital marketing sector is constantly evolving. Currently, some of the hottest technologies are chatbots, voice search, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) ads, AI, and machine learning.

Impact of digital marketing.

Digital marketing has a remarkable impact on customer interactions, purchases, work, and habits.

In this digital world, where the number Internet users around the world is around 4.13 billion, businesses cannot afford to neglect internet marketing campaigns.

Digital marketing aims to connect businesses and their target audience through digital media such as internet content, social networks, email marketing, etc.

Here are some of the biggest impacts of digital marketing on businesses and brands:

1. Connect directly to the target audience.

Numerous digital marketing channels allow you to connect with your customers and prospects through private messaging and one-on-one conversations. This is in contrast to offline marketing, where you have to spend a lot of money to place banners and ads.

With digital marketing, prospects can see your content directly since you can promote your brand in their inbox or on their social profiles.

Naturally, small and medium-sized businesses are the biggest beneficiaries of digital marketing.

For example, social media marketing allows SMEs to promote their products and services by interacting with the public, publicly or through private messages.

Therefore, 96% of small businesses use social networks in their marketing strategy.

Additionally, around 90 million small businesses use Facebook services such as pages, groups, and Facebook Messenger.

2. Evolution of brand transparency.

Now, more than ever, consumers are demanding transparency from a business. Fortunately, digital marketing makes it easier to be transparent and to highlight business ethics.

Here are a few statistics that reinforce the importance of transparency in the digital marketing era:

  • A study found that 94% of consumers are more likely to stay with a company that offers transparency.
  • 66% of consumers consider transparency to be one of the most attractive qualities of a brand.
  • 73% of customers would be willing to pay more for a product that offers transparency.
  • Customers are ready to recommend a brand to their acquaintances if it is transparent. In fact, 31% of online shoppers share something positive about brands that are transparent.

Digital marketers have understood this and inform their audience with relevant and truthful information.

3. Create a new influencer category.

Social media and video channels like YouTube have allowed ordinary people to become influencers.

These internet influencers have their own niche follower base and have the power to encourage your target audience to buy your product.

Source: Statista

As a result, businesses no longer need to pay millions to celebrities to support their products. They are now hiring micro-influencers to spread the word and get people interested in their products.

Influencers also add a touch of privacy to a brand because they don't support a particular product. They are like friends who interact with their followers and recommend products in a personal way.

Even big brands are now taking advantage of these new influencers to persuade and engage customers.

4. Businesses have begun to take a more personalized approach.

Digital marketing has fostered the need for authenticity and a human approach to marketing.

Here are a few quick statistics that show the importance of a personalized approach:

  • 79% of customers only accept personalized offers that reflect past interactions they may have had with the brand.
  • 63% of millennials, 58% of Generation X and 46% of baby boomers are likely to share their personal data with a brand if they receive a personalized offer or discount.

Today, small and large businesses first try to gain the trust of customers before presenting their product.

For example, Apple organizes events that are broadcast live on social media channels, allowing millions of people to support its products even before they launch.

Apple livestream event

5. Customers now expect instant results.

Online shoppers are impatient, and they want quick information and results. And with so many options available, they could abandon your landing page if it doesn't load right away.

Studies indicate that a 100 millisecond delay in the load time of a site can reduce your conversion rates by 7%.

In addition, millions of mobile users search for products on various e-commerce sites and make instant decisions. Studies indicate that 70% of smartphone users take action within the next hour.

So providing quick results is just as critical as providing relevant or valuable content.

6. Better understand customers.

Digital marketing allows businesses to acquire an incredible amount of knowledge about their customers.

Understanding customers better can help businesses optimize the customer experience, win new customers, and keep them coming back.

According to statistics, 56% of customers stay loyal to brands that understand them better or that “understand” them.

Fortunately, there are many dataviz tools like Google Analytics, Facebook audience insights, and Zoho Analytics to get detailed information about your target audience.

Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing provides comprehensive reports with accurate numbers.

This allows businesses to determine how their strategies work and what they need to adapt to achieve better results. By achieving measurable results, business owners can streamline their processes and put more effort into areas that deliver desired results.

Benefits of digital marketing.

Digital marketing is crucial today, no matter what type of business you own.

It has a lot of different benefits, including

  • Profitable
  • Enables individual communication
  • Improves customer service
  • Allows businesses to target specific customers
  • Higher conversion rates
  • New marketing channels
  • Multichannel marketing creation and automation

Let's take a look at some of the significant benefits of digital marketing one by one:

1. Low cost and high efficiency.

Cost-effectiveness is one of the most important factors where digital marketing has an advantage over traditional marketing.

You can start with content marketing, even on a small budget. A business cannot consider doing digital marketing without implementing an excellent content marketing strategy.

First of all Start your blog and post content once a week. Writing your blog posts yourself would even save you a lot of money.

According to statistics, 90% of organizations use content in their marketing efforts

Content marketing also costs 62% less than traditional marketing, while generating around 3 times as many leads.

Content marketing cost statistics

Like content marketing, businesses that use email marketing also benefit from numerous low-cost benefits. Email marketing makes it possible to generate leads, sales, distribute targeted messages, increase revenue, create brand awareness, etc.

Statistics show that email marketing has a 4200% return on investment ($42 for every dollar spent).

That's why many businesses are actively exploiting email campaigns. According to a Adobe investigation report, 52% of businesses say email marketing is their main communication tool.

Adobe email marketing survey

2. Personalized communication.

Thanks to data analysis, digital marketing facilitates the publication of personalized content and the sending of messages adapted to customer characteristics.

Personalized communication is key to making customers happy, engaging them personally, and driving sales.

A Gartner survey shows thepositive impact of personalization on customers :

  • 62% of customers say personalization helps them get a better price
  • 49% think personalization saves time
  • 46% of respondents were able to extract information that they did not have before
  • 45% say their buying process has become easier

3. Earn customer trust and quickly build brand reputation.

Offering high-quality products or services isn't enough to win the trust of your customers, especially if you're a new business. However, digital marketing can help you quickly gain the trust of your customers if you take advantage of the right channels.

For example, you can use social proof to convince customers to buy a product or service. Your social proof can consist of social media followers, blog posts, influencer or celebrity endorsement, and customer reviews.

BuzzSumo relies on customer stories to show how its existing customers benefit from its products.

Social Proof Example BuzzSumo

This type of social proof not only popularizes your brand, but also generates more quality leads and increases sales.

Today, customers are reading at least ten customer reviews before buying a product. Additionally, customer testimonials are likely to increase your 34% conversion rate.

4. Better customer service.

Customers are more likely to buy from you if you provide quality customer service. A study found that buyers are ready to spend 17% more for brands that provide exceptional customer service.

Another report states that 78% of consumers are likely to abandon a purchase due to a poor customer experience.

Digital marketing can boost customer service to a great extent. You can use social media and chatbots to communicate with your audience in real time and quickly resolve issues.

Additionally, you can implement self-service and automation to meet growing customer demands. Self-service makes it easier for customers to resolve service issues on their own.

Here are some revealing statistics aboutImportance of automated self-service :

  • According to a report, 73% of customers want to solve their problems themselves when shopping.
  • 70% of customers expect businesses to include a self-service application on their site.
  • Over 60% of American consumers prefer automated self-service for simple customer service tasks.

5. Higher search engine rankings.

Blogs or business pages can achieve high search engine rankings and a large number of readers by implementing the right content marketing and SEO strategy.

For example, you can target long-tail keywords and topics that your customers are likely to search for. Publishing good and relevant content is just as important.

This is also why it is important to rank as high as possible in search engines to be visible through voice search:

Source: SEMrush

Businesses are also turning to voice search optimization. In fact, it's one of the next big trends in the digital marketing industry.

And why not? Voice search is more convenient for some searches at home or on the go, and you can use it to find local products and businesses.

6. Measure the results of marketing campaigns

An important advantage of a digital marketing strategy is the ability to measure the results of your marketing.

When running marketing campaigns, each campaign offers a tracking system. You can track the results and see if your efforts are paying off or not, whether it's a social media campaign, an email campaign, or a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

For example, tools like Google Analytics allow you to monitor your SEO performance by tracking key metrics like impressions, clicks, shares, comments, conversions, and more.

So you can improve your campaigns and know what works and what doesn't work for your business. In addition, knowing the performance of your campaign while it is in progress allows you to optimize it in the meantime.

7. Target a specific audience.

The ability to target specific audiences on the Internet is another important advantage of digital marketing.

You can reach buyers who are specifically interested in your business, services, or products, without wasting time persuading curious people.

Les Buyer Personas can help you in this area. You can gather buyer personas (invented representations of your ideal customers) from your contact database, using form fields, interviewing prospects and customers, advertising, etc. Once you've gathered these personas, you can use them to target prospects.

Finally, you can implement digital ads to target a specific audience and get better results.

For example, if you use Facebook, you can be extremely specific and define your audience by characteristics such as age, gender, interests, hobbies, profession, etc.

Facebook Ads: Targeted Audience

This allows you to better target your efforts and spend your budget more effectively to acquire quality leads.

8. Improve as you go.

With digital marketing, businesses can make changes as they go. You can also make changes when something doesn't work as expected.

For example, you can adjust PPC campaigns, optimize SEO campaigns, or change your content whenever necessary to get the best results.

Disadvantages of digital marketing.

Digital marketing also has its drawbacks.

It is essential to know them in order to be able to implement digital marketing in full knowledge of the facts.

Here are some of the disadvantages of digital marketing:

1. Global competition.

Indeed, you can reach a global audience through digital marketing. At the same time, you will also have to face competition from global marketers, especially in English-speaking markets where the battle is very competitive and advertising costs are more expensive.

It is difficult to stand out from the competition and attract attention among the many global brand messages.

2. Negative feedback and brand reputation.

When you put your business on the Internet, the public does not fail to leave comments, whether positive or negative. Naturally, your brand reputation can go downhill if you receive a lot of negative feedback.

A study highlights that a negative opinion Scare away 22% of prospects, representing approximately 30 customers.

3. Security and confidentiality.

You need to follow various legal rules and regulations when collecting and using customer data for digital marketing purposes. Plus, there's always the fear that your website and customer data will be compromised.

4. Patience.

Optimizing your advertising campaigns on the Internet or creating a lot of content does not happen overnight. This can take a long time, so you will need to remain patient to get results. Additionally, you'll need to measure your results to get a great return on investment.

Future of digital marketing.

Digital marketing is constantly evolving. And your business may fall behind if you don't keep up with the latest trends.

So what will be the future of digital marketing? Things like voice search, AI and automation, personalization, and influencer marketing are likely to take the lead.

Let's look at them one by one.

1. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.

Numerous surveys and research predict the importance of AI in digital marketing.

In a survey where participants were asked Why businesses needed AI, 84% answered that it allowed them to gain a competitive advantage, while 75% said that AI would open up new business opportunities.

Businesses are also increasingly using AI to cut costs and match supply and demand.

Marketing automation is already being used on a large scale, in 2022, nearly 83% of companies have already implemented marketing automation strategies (a market of more than $25.1 billion per year forecasted by 2023).

Marketing automation is useful for generating leads, converting leads, increasing sales, improving the customer experience, etc. Businesses just need to know when to use it.

2. Voice search.

Voice search is growing in popularity thanks to smart speakers and assistants like Siri and Alexa. As a result, many businesses are optimizing their businesses for voice search.

By 2024, the global market voice-activated smart speakers could also reach $30 billion.

Businesses must now focus on providing the most accurate answers. Right now, Google Home offers the most accurate answers - by answering correctly to 81% of questions.

Other factors to consider are personalization, compatibility and integration, tactile interaction (merging voice and visual displays), and security.

3. Social networks.

Experts believe that marketers will be increasingly dependent on social media management tools to automate, adapt, and engage more effectively. But at the same time, they are striving to become more humane, more trustworthy, and more transparent.

Businesses that want to reach and engage with a broad global audience can no longer ignore social media.

Experts also predict that the Videos are going to be more popular than ever.

According to statistics, the average person will spend 130 minutes per day watching videos on the internet in 2023.

4. Chatbots.

The popularity of chatbot software or livechat is constantly growing, as is the demand to improve the customer experience.

Currently, there are over 300,000 chatbots on Facebook alone.

In addition to offering an efficient service, businesses can save a lot of money in customer support expenses by using chatbots.

Likewise, voice robots are becoming more widespread with the growing demand for messaging platforms equipped with voice and text interfaces.

5. Influencer marketing.

Previously, brands had to pay celebrities millions to promote their products, which was technically impossible for small businesses to implement.

And that's where influencer marketing comes in.

Today, many businesses are turning to micro-influencers. Micro-influencers are influencers who have more than 10,000 followers in their niche. They have enough followers to be “influential,” but are easy to reach and don't need to be sponsored.

Businesses prefer micro-influencers because they are not expensive but deliver results.

An investigation report showed that 61.9% of marketers are now working with influencers to generate content.

Additionally, businesses automate influencer marketing systems in order to find the right influencer to promote their image and message.

With the help of AI, businesses can conduct an influencer-brand affinity analysis. This allows them to quickly sift through millions of images and choose influencers based on specific characteristics.

FAQs

Why is the use of digital marketing services crucial for businesses?

Any business that aspires to grow in the current era should use digital marketing services. These services help you establish an internet presence, connect with customers around the world, and generate sales and profits through various channels and platforms. In addition, it allows you to communicate with your audience individually.

What are the best digital marketing tools?

Crucial digital marketing strategies include SEO, analytics, content marketing, social media, email marketing, etc. Many digital marketers prefer tools that can provide an all-in-one digital marketing solution.

It's a great idea to use tools like HubSpot, Omnisend, SendinBlue, etc., to run different marketing campaigns transparently.

If you're looking for the best digital marketing tools, first read my detailed reviews on best marketing automation tools.

Is digital marketing the same as digital branding?

Digital branding is a branch of digital marketing. Digital branding focuses on the awareness of a brand or a product or a service. On the other hand, digital marketing is a comprehensive approach that helps businesses create awareness, convert, and maintain a good relationship with their customers.

What is pay per click (PPC) in digital marketing?

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model in which the advertiser pays for ads shown to the relevant target audience on platforms like Google and Facebook.

Summary.

That's it for my guide to digital marketing. Many of the digital marketing strategies discussed will help you grow your digital business.

There is no ceiling when it comes to digital marketing - there is always more room for innovation and improvement.

Take the time to learn digital marketing. It is a sector that is evolving rapidly and constantly.

To succeed, you need to stay on top of the latest trends and understand the basic principles in order to gain visibility on the internet this year.

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Stephen MESNILDREY
CEO & Founder

🔍 My passion? Decipher, analyze and share powerful strategies, cutting-edge software and new tips that boost your business and revolutionize your sector.

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