The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing

Business today looks a lot different than it did fifty years ago. There are eCommerce sites, online schedulers for setting service appointments, and social media posts that bring attention to exciting new products.

If you’re not making the most of digital marketing for your enterprise, you’re missing out.

Having a website isn’t enough. Sure, you want to make sure your WordPress site is attractive, engaging, informative, and relevant. It needs to be optimized for SEO, and it has to perform well, with fast loading times and clickable elements that work.

But none of this is enough if you’re not getting a steady volume of motivated visitors to look at your great site.

That’s where digital marketing comes in. It’s a way to make your site visible so that your website actually helps your business. It’s also a way to get visitors motivated to take action once they are on your website.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a multifaceted online approach to getting the word out about your brand.

It’s the way businesses, large and small, connect with a wider audience to reach potential customers well beyond their geographical range.

When you use a variety of digital channels to market your business and promote your brands, you’re engaging in digital marketing.

A successful digital marketing strategy brings more eyes to your online WordPress website. Even better, it brings you relevant traffic—users who are ready to engage with you in some way. They will browse your site, read your pages, download your offers, join your mailing list, and consider doing business with you. They will subscribe to your newsletter or membership pages, and they’ll buy from your online shop.

Regardless of what type of business you run, you can benefit from a sound digital marketing strategy.

Why Is Digital Marketing Important?

There are so many reasons digital marketing matters.

This form of marketing shares elements with traditional marketing methods. At the same time, it enables you to extend your reach to more people.

This type of marketing is also referred to as online marketing. It makes use of these entities and tools and more:

• Websites
• Social media
• Paid online ads
• Search engines
• Data analytics
• Mobile devices
• Desktops
• Organic SEO
• Email
• Videos
• Content
• Keywords

The reason digital marketing is so important is that it broadens your reach.

If you run a brick-and-mortar shop, for example, the people who walk into your store might be those who’ve passed by and seen your sign, read about you in local publications, or heard about you from a friend or coworker. Your buyers are limited to people in your geographic area.

But if you create a WordPress website for your business, you now have a way to reach people well beyond your geographic boundaries. You can set up an online store to increase your sales and grow your business. You can be selling to people not just across town but clearly across the nation.

But how are you going to reach those people? The answer is through your digital marketing efforts.

Inbound, Outbound, and Digital Marketing

Some people use the two terms interchangeably, but there are noticeable differences.

Inbound marketing methods strive to attract, engage, and entertain through content. Digital marketing goes beyond content, using paid ads as well as content, social media, and many other channels.
You can say that inbound marketing is a subset of digital marketing.

Inbound Marketing

This type of online marketing focuses on creating valuable content. Customers are attracted to your WordPress website or your brand by the content you create and the experience they have when interacting with your brand.

Inbound marketing is a way to:

• Develop connections with your visitors
• Solve your visitors’ problems
• Keep visitors engaged on your site
• Share your brand voice
• Encourage prospects to journey with your brand
• Empower prospects to act when they are ready

Examples of strategies that apply inbound marketing techniques include writing a series of engaging blogs that are optimized for search engines with some of your best keywords. In other words, writing blogs that have both user and SEO value. Include your unique selling points in your blog posts. When you promote your products, focus on the benefits and solutions more than on the products themselves.

Or offer special guides users can download that explain how to use your products to solve an issue they might be experiencing. You can create how-to YouTube videos and embed them in your site or include links to these videos. Posting videos, along with specials, offers, and announcements, on your social media channels is another great way to attract and engage more members of your audience through inbound marketing methods.

Outbound Marketing

Whereas inbound marketing is more passive—you’re posting information that is hopefully engaging enough for visitors to want to interact—outbound marketing is more active, using messages you send out directly to your audience members.

Outbound marketing is about actively initiating conversations with members of your audience. It encourages them to take action.

You engage in outbound marketing when you run Google ads, for example, or when you email your entire mailing list with a time-sensitive offer (you’re encouraging them to act before a specific date when the promo ends).

Outbound marketing is a way to:

• Proactively reach out to potential customers
• Generate excitement and even a sense of urgency for your products and services
• Present offers people want to act on quickly
• Encourage people to subscribe, buy, or leave a review, among other possible actions
• Promote your top products and services
• Generate more immediate results

With inbound marketing, you’re raising awareness, growing your audience, and establishing long-term relationships. With outbound marketing, you’re creating a sense of urgency that motivates your audience members to take action.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing strategies use both inbound and outbound marketing approaches—and beyond—making it a great choice for WordPress website owners who run any type of business. The broad scope of digital marketing gives you the flexibility to develop a strategy that works best for you.

Digital marketing gives you the freedom to use the best of inbound and outbound marketing techniques, letting you customize your marketing strategy and modify it, as needed, as you go.

You can incorporate as many different inbound and outbound marketing methods as you want, so that you can garner the many benefits available from a comprehensive approach to online marketing.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

People engage in digital marketing because it works! Everyone customizes their online marketing approach to suit their specific needs, but just about every WordPress site owner—from attorneys to window washers and from artists to eCommerce store owners—makes use of some form of digital marketing to promote themselves and their brand.

The top benefits of digital marketing include:

• Increased awareness of your brand
• Expanded audience
• More traffic to your site
• More targeted traffic consisting of motivated users
• Many low-cost and no-cost marketing channels are available to you
• A higher return on investment (ROI) for your website
• Results are measurable—check your analytics to see how your marketing is doing
• Greater engagement
• Better conversion rates
• Flexibility and freedom to try different methods and then focus on what’s working best

When you use a combination of inbound and outbound approaches, you can leverage your marketing strategy to your greatest advantage.

B2B vs B2C Digital Marketing

Another distinction some people are confused by is B2B versus B2C digital marketing.
B2B (business-to-business) digital marketing involves appealing to your business customers’ needs by using logic. What works best in this sector is a no-nonsense, practical approach since businesses make process-driven decisions when it comes to making a purchase.

For your B2B markets, your online marketing needs to focus on:

• Educating your audience about the benefits of your products and services
• Using a logical approach and emphasizing features that are available
• Long-term goals and benefits
• Building relationships with the businesses you sell to
• Mutually beneficial interactions

B2C (business-to-consumer) digital marketing focuses more on emotion. Consumers often weigh their options when comparing products but then make a purchase based on how they feel about the brand.

B2C digital marketing emphasizes:

• Entertaining potential buyers and focusing on the convenience of what you offer
• Appealing to buyers’ emotional sides while highlighting benefits to them
• Immediate response and instant gratification
• Making it easy to complete transactions on your website
• Streamlined, efficient shopping experiences

To handle your digital marketing effectively, you need to know something about your target market. Who are you selling your products or services to? Who would benefit most from your offerings? These people make up your target market.

Your target market is the segment of buyers likely to purchase what you’re selling. Your buyers can be within the B2B category, the B2C category, or a mixture of both.

Understanding who your target market is will help you choose which types of digital marketing will be most effective and help your business the most.

Types of Digital Marketing

As we’ve mentioned, there are many ways to go about doing digital marketing for your WordPress website and your brand.

As you delve into digital marketing to promote your brands and boost your business, give these five common types of online marketing methods a try.

Email Marketing

Email marketing makes the most of the mailing lists you’ve built up over time while also growing those lists. As a very effective marketing technique, successful email marketing is about creating compelling email campaigns with irresistible content.

There are two main goals. One is to communicate news, such as current deals or new offerings, to generate excitement and encourage action among your list members. The other is to add more people to your lists, such as by offering an enticing download in exchange for an email address.

Pay-Per-Click

The pay-per-click (PPC) digital marketing approach lets you leverage your marketing dollars through effective paid advertisements. It’s a way to get short-term results reasonably quickly. PPC is a great way to drive a lot of traffic to your WordPress site for a specific length of time.

For the ads you create, you’ll want a great landing page that can turn curious visitors into motivated buyers. Make sure your landing page has a clear call to action.

Social Media Marketing

Especially if your target market spends time on social media liking and sharing posts, this type of digital marketing can be effective, partly because of the social proof element that’s involved.

Create posts that are just the right length—not too long, but long enough to convey your message clearly. Strive to make your posts shareable. Social media marketing requires coordinated, consistent effort.

Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing your content for searches and your WordPress site for a better user experience will lead to featuring more prominently in searches. A successfully run search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that blends strong elements of storytelling with keyword-centric, SEO-boosting techniques will accomplish a lot.

SEO is a must if you want to rank higher in search lists.

Marketing Analytics

How will you know if your marketing efforts are working? By checking your analytics. Marketing analytics, like Google Analytics, let you track and measure results. It’s incredibly important to understand your website KPIs so you know if your website is hitting the right targets.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

Here’s our step-by-step, quick-summary guide to building a winning digital marketing strategy.

1. Determine your target market.
2. Write keyword-rich blogs aimed at your target audience.
3. Create email list-building and brand-promoting PPC ads that encourage immediate action.
4. Make helpful how-to guides consumers will find want, and offer them as downloads in exchange for an email address.
5. Go through your WordPress site and optimize pages for SEO.
6. Run email campaigns to get people to go to your site for deals, new products, new features, or additional services.
7. Streamline completing purchase transactions on your site.
8. Offer online support features to build long-term relationships.
9. Get creative and come up with other great ways to make digital marketing work for you!

3 Successful Digital Marketing Examples

1. American Express, Guest Blogging

You don’t have to write all your blogs yourself. Do like American Express did with their Open Forum campaign—invite industry experts to create guest posts for your site. It’s a cross-promotional way to market your business.

2. GoPro, Engaging Users

The camera seller GoPro came up with a novel way to engage users and encourage interaction. They invited people to share their experiences, thus generating both interest and social proof.

3. Mint, Leveraging Content

The financial newspaper Mint propelled itself to the top by creating a series of engaging personal finance blogs aimed at young professionals. These blogs drove a lot of traffic to their site.

Wrapping Up

Digital marketing is a must in today’s business world. It doesn’t matter what products you sell or what services you offer—engaging in different types of digital marketing will bring you more traffic so you can have a more profitable business.