Inbound marketing vs. digital marketing can be easily mixed up, and with good reason. Digital marketing uses many the same resources as inbound marketing—email and web content, to name a few. Both exist to catch the interest of prospects through the purchaser’s path and turn them into customers. But the two methods take a different view of the relationship between the process and the target.
Digital marketing is concerned with how each particular tool can turn prospects. The digital marketing strategy of a brand may use several channels or concentrate all of its efforts on 1 platform.
Inbound marketing is a holistic approach. It considers the objective first, then looks at the resources available to decide which can efficiently hit the target customers. Then, at which point of the sales enclosure it should happen.
The most important thing to note about digital marketing or inbound marketing is that you don’t have to choose between the two as a marketing specialist. Probably, they work well together. Inbound marketing provides the framework and intent of effective digital marketing to digital marketing activities, ensuring that each digital marketing platform works towards a target.
B2B vs B2C digital marketing
Digital marketing works with both B2B and B2C businesses, but the best practices vary significantly between the two.
- Clients of B2B tend to have longer decision-making cycles and, therefore, longer revenue funnels. Relationship-building techniques work best for these clients, while B2C clients tend to respond better to short-term offers and messages.
- B2B purchases are typically focused on logic and proof, which is what professional B2B digital marketers are offering. B2C content is more likely to be emotionally focused, concentrating on making the consumer feel good about the purchase.
- B2B decisions tend to require more than 1 person’s feedback. Marketing materials, which best drive these decisions tend to be shared and accessible. B2C consumers, on the other hand, prefer one-on-one connections to a brand.
There are exceptions to every law, of course. A B2C business with a high-ticket product, such as a car or a computer, offers more severe and insightful content. Your approach must always be customized to your own client base, whether you are B2B or B2C.
Digital Marketing Forms
While Inbound marketing vs. digital marketing can be mixed up, there are as many experts within digital marketing as there are ways to communicate with digital media. Here are a couple of primary instances.
Optimization of search engine
Search engine optimization, or commonly known as SEO, is technically a marketing technique rather than a method of marketing itself. The Balance describes it as the art and science of making websites attractive to search engines.
The “art & science” part of SEO is the most important thing. SEO is a science because it allows you to study and consider various contributing factors to obtain the highest possible ranking. Today, the most critical things to consider when optimizing a web page include:
- Content of the contents
- Degree of engagement of the customer
- Mobile-friendliness
- Number and nature of inbound links
The strategic use of these variables makes SEO a science, but its unpredictability makes it an art.
In SEO, there is no highly quantifiable heading or consistent ranking rule. Google is updating the algorithm almost continually, so it’s difficult to make reliable predictions. What you can do is closely track the output of your page and make changes accordingly.
Marketing of Content
SEO is a critical element of content marketing, a technique focused on delivering appropriate and useful content to the target audience.
As in any marketing strategy, content marketing aims to draw leads that eventually turn to customers. But it does so differently from conventional advertising. Instead of attracting prospective consumers with future benefit from a product or service, it provides value free of charge in written content.
Content marketing matters and there are a lot of figures to prove it:
- 84% of customers expect businesses to deliver enjoyable and beneficial content experiences.
- 62 percent of companies with at least 5,000 employees generate content regularly.
- 92 percent of marketers agree that their company value content is an essential commodity.
As successful as the marketing of content is, it can be difficult. Content marketing writers have to be able to rank high on search engine results while also attracting people who can read, share, and further engage with the brand. When the content is essential good relationships can be built in the pipeline.
Marketing of Social media
Social media marketing is a way of driving traffic and brand recognition by involving people in an online conversation. The most prominent social media marketing channels are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind.
Since social media marketing requires active audience engagement, it has become a common way to get exposure. It is the most common 96% content medium for B2C marketers, and it is also gaining ground in the B2B sphere. According to the Content Marketing Institute, whooping 61 percent of B2B content marketers have expanded their use of social media this year.
Social media marketing provides built-in engagement metrics that are incredibly useful to help you understand how well you reach your audience. You may determine the types of most essential interactions, whether that means the number of likes, feedback, or overall clicks on your website.
Direct sales may not even be the target of your social media marketing campaign. Often companies use social media marketing to participate in dialogs with audiences rather than persuade them to spend money right away. This is particularly common in brands that target older consumers or provide goods and services that are not suitable for impulse purchases. It all depends on the objectives of your business.
Marketing Pay-per-Click
Pay-per-click, or PPC, can post an ad on a website and pay every time someone clicks it.
How or when people see your ad is a little more complex than that. When a spot is open on the search engine results list, also known as the SERP, the engine will fill the spot with what is effectively an instant auction. Each accessible ad is prioritized by an algorithm based on a variety of factors, including:
- Value of the ad
- Relevance of keyword
- Value of Landing Page
- Number of bids
Each PPC campaign generally has 1 or more target acts to be performed by viewers after clicking an ad. These acts are known as conversions and can be either transactional or non-transactional. Purchasing is a conversion, but so is a newsletter sign-up or a call to your home office.
Whatever you want to be your target conversions, you can track them through your chosen platform to see how your campaign works.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing helps someone to make money by supporting the company of another person. You may be either the promoter or the company that deals with the promoter, but in either case, the method is the same.
It operates by using a model of revenue sharing. If you’re an affiliate, you get a fee when someone buys the item you’re promoting. If you’re a merchant, you’re paying the affiliate for any sale they’re helping you make.
Some affiliate marketers prefer to review only one company’s goods, maybe on a blog or other third-party website. Others have relationships with several traders.
If you want to be an affiliate or find one, the first move is to link with the other side. You can employ a platform designed to connect affiliates to retailers, or you can launch or enter a single-seller program.
Suppose you are a retailer and you want to partner directly with affiliates. In that case, you can make many things to make the program appeal to potential promoters. You’re going to need to provide those affiliates with the resources they need to succeed. This provides bonuses for high performance, as well as marketing help and pre-made materials.
Native advertising
Native advertising is masked marketing. Its goal is to blend in with its surrounding content so that it is less noticeable than advertising.
Native advertising was created in response to the skepticism of today’s customers against advertisements. Knowing that the maker of an ad pays to run it, many viewers would assume that the ad is biased and, as a result, disregard it.
A native ad can get around this prejudice by providing details or entertainment before it gets to something commercial, downplaying the “ad” element.
It’s important to always clearly mark your native advertising. Use terms like “promoted” or “sponsored.” If those indicators are covered, readers can end up spending a lot of time engaging with content until they know it’s advertising.
If your customers know exactly what they’re getting, they’ll feel better about your brand and your content. Native ads are intended to be less obtrusive than conventional ads, but they’re not meant to be misleading.
Automation of Marketing
Marketing Automation uses software to guide digital marketing campaigns and increase the quality and relevance of advertising.
Based on the statistics:
- 90% of US customers find personalization either very” or somewhat” attractive.
- 81% of customers would like the companies in which they engage to understand them better.
- 77 percent of businesses believe in the importance of real-time personalization, but 60 percent are struggling with it.
Marketing automation helps businesses to keep up with their demands of personalization.
Allows brands to:
- Collect and evaluate the information for customers
- Design of targeted marketing campaigns
- Submit and post-marketing messages to the right audience at the right time
Many marketing automation systems use prospect engagement (or lack thereof) with a specific message to decide when and how to reach out next. This degree of real-time customization means that you can build an individualized marketing plan for each customer without any additional time commitment.
Marketing emails
The idea of email marketing is simple—you send out a promotional message and hope that your prospect will click on it. But the execution is much more complicated. First of all, you’ve got to make sure your emails are wanted. This means that you have an opt-in list that does the following:
Customizes the content, both in the body and in the subject line
State specifically what kind of emails the subscriber would receive.
Offer a simple choice to unsubscribe.
Integrates both transactional and promotional email
You want your prospects to see your campaign as a precious service, not just a promotional tool.
EmailEmail marketing is an established, successful strategy all on its own: 89 percent of the surveyed professionals described it as their most powerful lead generator.
It can be even better if you implement other techniques, such as marketing automation, that allow you to segment and schedule your emails to better meet your customer’s needs.
Advantages in digital marketing
Digital marketing has become popular mainly because it reaches such a wide group of people. Still, it also provides a range of other advantages. These are just a couple of advantages.
A wide geographical scope
When you post an ad online, people will see it wherever they are (provided you haven’t restricted your ad geographically). This makes it easy to expand the market scope of your company.
Cost Efficacy
Digital marketing not only reaches a larger audience than conventional marketing but also has a smaller cost. Overhead costs for newspaper advertising, TV spots, and other conventional marketing opportunities can be high. They also give you less control over whether your target audience can see the messages in the first place.
With digital marketing, you can build only one content piece that attracts visitors to your blog as long as it’s running. You can set up an email marketing plan that sends messages to targeted client lists on a schedule. It’s easy to adjust that schedule or content if you need to do so.
When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you a lot of versatility and customer contact to invest your ad.
Quantifiable outcomes
To know how your marketing campaign succeeds, you need to find out how many clients it draws and how much money it eventually creates. But how are you going to do that with a non-digital marketing strategy?
There’s always a convenient way to ask each customer, “How did you find us? “
Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen in all sectors. Many businesses don’t have one-on-one meetings with their clients, and surveys don’t always get full results.
With digital marketing, tracking performance is easy. Digital marketing tools and channels automatically track the number of conversions you need, whether it’s open email rates, visits to your site, or direct sales.
Easier customization
Digital marketing helps you to gather consumer data in a way that offline marketing can’t do. Digitally collected data appears to be far more reliable and precise.
Imagine that you are selling financial services and giving promotional deals to people who have looked at your goods. You know that you can get better results if you tailor the deal to the person’s interest, so you decide to prepare 2 campaigns. One will be for young families who have looked already at your life insurance, and the other for millennial entrepreneurs who have considered your retirement plan.
How do you collect all the data without automatic tracking? How many phone records do you have to go through? How many customer accounts do you have? And how do you know who did or did not read the brochure you sent out?
With digital marketing, all this material is already at your fingertips.
More customer interactions
Digital marketing allows you to communicate with your consumers in real-time. Most importantly, it allows them to communicate with you.
Think about your social media strategy. It’s awesome when your target audience sees your new post, but it’s even better if they comment on it or retweet it. It means more buzz about your product or service, as well as increased exposure any time someone enters the conversation.
Interactivity often benefits your consumers. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in the story of your company. This sense of ownership will generate a strong sense of brand loyalty.
Simple and convenient conversion
Digital marketing makes it possible for the consumers to take action directly after seeing your ad or content. For conventional advertising, the most immediate outcome you can hope for is a phone call soon after anyone sees your ad. But how often would anyone have the time to reach out to a company when they’re preparing dishes, driving down the highway, or reviewing records at work?
With digital marketing, they may click a link or save a blog post and pass down the sales enclosure right away. They will not make a purchase instantly, but they will remain linked to you and give you a chance to communicate with them more.
Digital marketing is generating growth.
Digital marketing should be one of the key goals of almost every business’ overall marketing plan. Never before has there been a way to stay in such constant communication with your clients. Nothing else provides the degree of personalization that digital data can provide. The more you accept the power of digital marketing, the more you will understand the growth of your organization.