So you spend all your time on social media?

What digital marketing actually involves… 

Digital marketing, in a nutshell, refers to the variety of marketing techniques used to reach consumers online. These are often used in conjunction with more traditional marketing strategies to reach a more diverse audience. 

Quite often when you meet someone new the question of “what do you do for work?” comes up. After responding with “digital marketing”, 9 times out of 10, the conversation is immediately on social media. Now, we are well aware that a good proportion of our work involves social media, but it is not simply spent scrolling through feeds as people may assume. 

So, what does digital marketing actually involve?

Content marketing: this is a strategy that involves sharing information that is relevant and valuable to your audience. It is important here to know exactly who it is that you want to be seeing your content to ensure it has the most impact. Ultimately, the goal here is to have people take the next step to becoming a consumer of your product or service. 

Examples of content marketing include:

• Blogs

• Newsletters

• Infographics

Social media marketing: this involves so much more than simply creating posts for social channels and responding to comments. A crucial part of this component is running the analytics to ensure that the strategy can be altered and improved as needed. It is also important to ensure that your content is adapted for each social media channel; for example, posting at the best time, using the relevant amount of hashtags and ensuring the graphics are sized correctly. 

Influencer marketing: this type of digital marketing relies on working with an individual who has a large following, such as a content creator or industry expert. With this, it is crucial to ensure that the person who is promoting your product or service is doing this in a way that is inline with your brand values and is genuinely interested and passionate about what you have to offer. Lots of influencers will have rate cards for their services, but some smaller or growing accounts will be happy to do gifted collaborations.

Email marketing: although a slightly older concept in comparison to all things social media, this is actually still a very effective digital marketing technique. Personalising emails is extremely important, such as using the recipient's first name or sending a special offer on their birthday. For marketers, email marketing is great as it is quite straightforward to see the success of campaigns by looking at things like the amount of people who opened the email and the click through rate. 

There are also plenty of other types of digital marketing, including search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click marketing (PPC), but we thought we might save these for another blog as they are slightly more in depth concepts. 

Digital marketing can therefore be described as an umbrella term that covers a whole multitude of strategies. Here at JV Communications we use the most relevant ones for you and your business tailored to a budget that suits you. If you would like to discuss anything to do with digital marketing, or enquire about a bespoke package, we would love to hear from you! 

Sunny wishes, 

Jo & Vic