Digital marketing is the process of using online channels to promote and sell products or services. It encompasses a wide range of tactics and strategies, from social media to email marketing.

When people hear “digital marketing,” they often think of pop-up ads on websites or ad placements on popular platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But there’s much more to this strategy than that.

Targeting

The success of digital marketing campaigns depends on correctly identifying and segmenting audiences. Without a clear understanding of who you’re trying to reach, your content and messages will fall on deaf ears.

Targeting comes in many forms, such as demographic targeting (age, gender, parental status, income), affinity audiences based on lifestyle and interests, and in-market audiences, which are users who’ve shown interest in your product or service. Targeting also includes search retargeting, which serves display ads to users who’ve searched for keywords related to your business or products.

As privacy laws and browser restrictions tighten, contextual targeting is a useful way to target users without tracking their behavior. However, marketers should be careful not to use sensitive information in their targeting, such as health conditions or sexual orientation. This can lead to a backlash from consumers.

Measurability

One of the main advantages that digital marketing offers over traditional marketing is measurability. With the right analytics software, marketers can track almost every aspect of their campaigns in real-time. This enables them to measure the success of a campaign in terms of clicks, impressions, time on page, and conversions.

This makes it easy to identify areas for improvement and make changes accordingly. For example, a brand could set a goal of increasing conversions for product X by five percent over the next six months. It could then establish tangible milestones for this abstract goal that would allow it to experiment with various strategies and optimize its marketing strategy.

This measurability also helps in the customer acquisition phase, as it allows marketers to track the effectiveness of campaigns and compare them with sales data. This helps to bridge the gap between sales and marketing and ensures that both departments are working together towards a common goal.

Conversions

While the ultimate goal of digital marketing is to convert potential customers into paying ones, it also helps businesses find leads and nurture them into loyal customers. Tracking conversion metrics is a vital component of this process, as it shows marketers how hard their content is working. Conversions typically refer to sales, but they can also be sign-ups for an email newsletter or a free brochure download.

In terms of a digital marketing campaign, a “conversion” is any action that meets a specific goal. For example, a click on an advertisement is a conversion because it meets the advertiser’s objective of bringing in traffic to their website. However, there are many other types of digital marketing conversions that don’t always lead to a sale, such as filling out a contact form or video-view conversions. The data gathered by tracking these conversions can be used to optimize campaigns and improve the overall user experience. It can also help marketers identify weaknesses in their website or landing pages.