What Are The Parts of Digital Marketing Pt. 2

Whar Are the Parts of Digital Marketing Pt. 2

This concludes the three-part set of posts about digital marketing and its parts.

Marketing continues to evolve. Understand that digital marketing isn’t one thing, but it’s many things. Many digital tactics are executed through various digital outlets to achieve brand awareness and generate leads.

Email Marketing

Naturally, email is a big part of digital marketing. So much so that it has its own subset. Sending these digital messages allows you to do which of the following:

a. Solicit new clients

b. Nurture existing clientele

c. Procure leads

d. Provide updates and announcements

e. All of the above

The answer is “E” for all of the above. How many of us have received unsolicited emails presenting a solution to a problem we didn’t realize we had? Have you ever received an email about deals and discounts from your favorite store? What about a simple email wishing you a happy birthday or providing tips for the new season?

It takes a bit of market analysis and research for initially building an email list. It also takes great visual design, a consistent schedule, a clear call-of-action and content of interest to your target audience to compose a successful email campaign.

Stay in your customers’ minds with occasional emails filled with holiday messages or resources to help their lives. You’ve now got a newsletter that can be weekly, monthly or quarterly! This digital form of marketing does wonders for maintaining customer relationships and loyalty.

“Email marketing helps you connect with your audience to promote your brand and increase sales. You can do a lot of things with emails, like sell products, share some news, or tell a story.” – Mailchimp

Email Marketing

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Web Development & Web Design

Design, programming, coding, server database management and user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) can overlap. But they are different mindsets that operate on different wavelengths towards similar goals. To oversimplify something that’s already simply misunderstood: think of web design as the creative force and think of web development as the technical force.

“Web design is a process of conceptualizing, planning, and building a collection of electronic files that determine the layout, colors, text styles, structure, graphics, images, and use of interactive features that deliver pages to your site visitors.” - Network Solutions

Web Design - Image courtesy of Tranmautritam

“Among web professionals, "web development" usually refers to the main non-design aspects of building web sites: writing markup and coding.” – Wikipedia

Web design is concerned with creating a meaningful experience for the user, ensuring functionality, look and style. Web development is concerned with clean coding and programming that enables functionality. Development is also concerned with client-side/server-side scripting and network security configuration.

How does this all factor into digital marketing? Nine times out of 10, your digital strategy includes driving traffic to your website. People may come to your website organically as a result of your SEO efforts. When users get to your site – via discovery or any means of marketing – you want them to explore your website. You ultimately want people to convert by consuming your product or service. How optimized your website is for conversion is affected by the design and functionality.

Landing pages are a part of your website. This is where your conversations happen. Ad campaigns lead visitors here to prompt them to take the next action, leading to the “point of conversion.” That page is designed with a goal in mind and has a clear call-to-action (i.e. sign up for our newsletter, download our e-book, fill out our contact form for a free consultation).

Web development coding. Image courtesy of Negative Space

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Digital Marketing Analytics

Without measuring your marketing efforts, you’re wallowing blindly with no sense of direction. If you’re spending money on your marketing efforts, you’re likely losing and wasting it without the use of analytics. Web traffic from the use of Google Analytics is powerful, but it’s part of a comprehensive digital measurement analysis. Social media insights and email clicks and open rates help marketers understand the effectiveness of our efforts.

It’s important to track just about everything. Building a UTM link to include in a Facebook ad or post can tell us how many visitors were driven to our website from that medium. Observing how many users out of the total subscriber list actually opened an email can give us an idea of how useful or relevant users found the content - or how striking the subject line is.

Studying analytics, building a report and forming an analysis requires great attention to detail and numbers. It requires an analytical and technical mind to compute results that validate a digital marketing strategy.

“Using marketing analytics allows marketers to identify how each of their marketing initiatives (e.g., social media vs. blogging vs. email marketing, etc.) stack up against one another, determine the true ROI of their activities, and understand how well they're achieving their business goals.” – Hubspot

Digital marketing is powerful. It encompasses different segments that require expertise. It requires specialists and designers, experts and ideally a whole team to tackle each field. It takes marketing creatives and marketing technicians to handle all parts. To plan and execute successfully, it demands strategists and tacticians.

Digital Marketing Analytics

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Want to learn more about digital marketing and how best to use it alongside other marketing efforts? Connect with J. E. Hill Digital Marketing on social media.

J. E. Hill Digital Marketing specializes in content writing and website content management. Learn more about my services.