Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies via the internet, social media, mobile phones, or any other digital medium.
How digital advertising can benefit you
Today, digital advertising expands beyond banner ads with basic targeting. It’s now possible to zero in on prospects based on specific demographics, intent, their stage in the sales funnel, and engagement patterns. These insights can then be used across display, search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), social media, native ads, pay-per-click,retargeting, affiliate, mobile marketing, and more.
Digital advertising has created a world in which you can—and must—develop a holistic plan to find and engage with your next customer, then keep in touch with them until they’re ready to buy. In 2019, eMarketer projects that U.S. advertisers will spend 54.2% of their ad budgets on digital ads, and by 2023 that figure will reach 66.8%. That’s a lot of competition, so you need to know how to make your media spend count.
The good news is that once you take the plunge into a more sophisticated approach to digital advertising, the benefits will outweigh the cost of change. Increased relevance turns into increased engagement, both in terms of attracting and nurturing leads until they are ready to become customers.
Sneak peek: One of our case studies shows how one customer used cross-channel campaigns to increases leads per click by 850%.
What’s in the guide?
- What is digital advertising?
Digital advertising spans across channels, including email, display ads, App Store, mobile advertising, SEM, and paid social ads. Learn about the progression of digital advertising and how you can reach larger audiences in real time to drive sales. - Digital ad strategy
Learn how to develop the foundation of your digital ad strategy with our step-by-step process to create goals and persona segments for your campaigns. You will also learn cross-channel methods for acquisition, nurturing, building customer loyalty, and branding. - Digital ad types and ad design
Break down the differences between pay-per-click (PPC), display, and social ads as well as the benefits and best practices for each. Find out how to write relevant ad copy, headlines, lead generation forms, and calls-to-action (CTAs). Also learn about relevant imagery content, including cinemagraphic, video, flash, banners, pop-ups, and mobile ads. - Digital ad landing pages
No matter how much time or money you spend on a digital advertising campaign, if your landing page doesn’t resonate with your audience, they will leave. Optimize your forms, ads, and landing page design by platform, and set lead generation and social media goals to ensure a seamless and personalized experience for every visitor. - Ad targeting
Discover various ways to reach your target customers, including ad content, geographic location, behavioral and buying patterns, audience behaviors, specific demographics, and more. - Digital ad pricing
Develop a comprehensive understanding of different bidding and buying price models for digital advertising, and what these models mean for your personal strategy. Cover manual and automatic bidding, cost per click (CPC), cost per thousands (CPM), dynamic cost per thousands (dCPM), cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per lead (CPL), manual buying, programmatic buying, and real-time bidding. - Digital ad technologies
The maze of ad technology can get complicated. This resource will break it down by examining the major players: Data management platforms (DMPs), demand side platforms (DSPs), supply side platforms (SSPS), and ad exchanges. - Ad testing and optimization
Start with our seven steps to analyze the effectiveness of your digital ads as well as what to test for, then apply best practices for A/B and multivariate testing for your landing pages, pay-per-click, display, and social ads. - Ad measurement
We’ll cover front-end metrics like impressions, reach, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), engagement rate, conversions, CPL, effective cost-per thousands (eCPM), as well as back-end metrics like return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), first- and multi-touch attribution, and lifetime customer value (LCV).
It is also an umbrella term that encompasses different marketing strategies such as Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Email Marketing.
In 1848 a carpenter by the name James Wilson Marshall made the discovery of a lifetime. While building a sawmill James saw speckles of gold in the river. Thus began the great American Gold Rush.
At the time the California territory had less than 1,000 non-native residents living in it. By the end of the gold rush, the non-native population exploded to over 350,000, all of them hoping to stake their claim on the land. The call of opportunity attracted people from around the world. They migrated to California to strike it rich. Some made their fortunes through mining the precious metal. Some weren’t so lucky and ended up in other jobs and industries that had sprouted in the area.
Welcome To The New Gold Rush
169 years later, and we are in the middle of the second Great American Gold Rush. This time around, though, it’s not gold that we are looking for. This time people are staking their claims on Google rankings and Facebook timelines.
There are billions of dollars worth of ideas on the internet. Buried beneath all the selfies and porn sites is a limitless opportunity. Much like the first Gold Rush, some people are striking it rich from these opportunities. Others are logging off, with little to no return for their efforts. The main difference between being one or the other is knowing how to go about it.
You can’t throw money at a computer and expect it to throw more money back. Like many people who never held a shovel that decided to try mining, you’re likely to spend more money than you are going to make getting started in the digital industry.
You have to be smart about where you invest your money. You need to optimize Pay-Per-Click Campaigns and target keywords to attract traffic. Let’s look at the first American Gold Rush for an example of how smart marketing brings in profits.
Do you know who dominated the gold rush when it came to profits? Surprisingly, it wasn’t the miners searching for gold. Most of them made modest but not large amounts of money from the venture. It was the people selling supplies to the miners. They saw the real opportunities of the Gold Rush, and took full advantage of them.
Let’s look at the first millionaire of California, Sam Brannan. Sam Brannan created hype about the Gold Rush with his newspaper The California Star. He then stocked his store with mining supplies and watched the profits flood in. It was estimated that Sam Brannan was averaging $5,000 a day. That was back in 1848. With inflation that $5,000 would be equal to $125,000 by today’s standards.
In many ways, the Second Gold Rush works by methods much the same as Sam Brannan’s. It’s not about going out to find gold. It’s in making that gold come to you. It’s creating hype around your service or product, and using that hype to bring in customers with Digital Marketing.
People have personalities that transfer to the web. They search for their interests and buy things related to those interests. By using strategies such as search engine optimization and Facebook marketing, you can attract potential customers to a product or service. In a way, you are mining their interests to get the best return on investments. Once you set up a successful campaign, you can watch as the sales flow in.
Now, we can’t all be Sam Brannan. However, we can hire Sam Brannans to work for us. What we mean by this is hiring a digital marketing company, such as Web Daytona. We can help you connect with your target market, the same way Sam Brannan got business to come to him. We can do the same work, for you today, that he did all those years ago.