Digital Marketing Platform
Modern marketing relies on technology to analyze the comprehensive performance of a marketing campaign, and help guide future strategies and decision-making. Today, digital marketing often focuses on reaching a customer with increasingly conversion-oriented messages across multiple channels as they move down the sales funnel. Ideally, marketing teams will be able to track each of these messages and channels' role in reaching their ultimate goal.?
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, refers to advertising delivered through digital channels to promote brands and connect potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. The following are forms? of digital communication:
? SearchEngines
? Websites
? Social Media
? Mobile apps
? Text Messaging
? Web-based advertisement
What are Digital Marketing Platforms?
A digital marketing platform is a solution that supports a variety of functions within the realm of marketing over the internet. It is important to note that to classify as a platform, the solution cannot claim to support every component of digital marketing – but will rather cover functionality like media buying, performance measurement and optimization, and brand tracking. However, it may not cover other marketing efforts like SEO, and social media.
Types of Digital Marketing Platforms with Examples:
Common platforms for digital marketing include social media, influencer marketing, content marketing, email, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), affiliate, and mobile. Let’s take a deeper look at each:
Social media marketing platforms: Today’s consumers are highly reliant on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. This is why it is essential that brands are active across accounts. Social media platforms allow marketers to reach their prospects in a myriad of ways. First, marketing teams can use these channels to distribute paid ads and sponsored content. Each platform has a way for marketing teams to create paid ad campaigns and segment users so these ads appear on the feeds of target audience members. While each platform is different, most have capabilities that allow marketing teams to place ads based on location, job title, interests, age, etc.
Social media is also a great way to promote products or resources organically to your followers and engage with consumers. Chances are, people that follow your brand on social media have likely purchased from you in the past. Interacting with them on social media or answering customer service-oriented questions is a great way to ensure continued engagement with the brand and cultivate positive experiences and customer loyalty.
Finally, marketing teams can use social media to build their brand and establish a voice that can make them popular to follow and share. For example, Wendy’s flippant and funny tone has made them exceptionally popular on Twitter, commonly earning likes, retweets, and responses.??
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Influencer Marketing: Another effective way to harness digital channels to reach target audiences is with influencer marketing. Brands can partner with celebrities, sites, or others that are considered experts in their field, and that share similar values. Brands can then reach these influencers’ followers with branded content and offers. Here is an example of influencer marketing: Mooala koala partnered up with this Michellerandolph actress influencer, whose followers include many fans. This put their product in front of their target audience, with a recommendation from a like-minded, trustworthy source.
Email Marketing: Email marketing campaigns allow organizations to stay connected with prospects and customers, sending them customized newsletters or offers based on past shopping history or brand engagements. If an individual has interacted with a few of your branded touchpoints – like an email offer for 10 percent off the items they have been considering, or free shipping - that may be what ultimately brings about a conversion.? Nearly 60% of consumers say that email plays a role in their purchase decisions. Furthermore, transactional emails are more likely to be opened by subscribers.
Content Marketing: Content marketing allows marketing teams to be proactive in answering their users’ questions. Marketing teams create content, videos, and other assets to answer questions or provide context to consumers throughout the three stages of the buyer’s journey:
For example, a consumer might realize they need new shoes to wear to the gym. The marketing team for an activewear company may produce a piece about what features you need from a running shoe, as opposed to what you need if you focus on strength training. Looking at this content, the buyer determines they need a pair of running shoes that meets that criteria. Another piece of content might show the most popular running shoes and their price points. Once they are educated on these factors, they decide. The guidance offered by your brand throughout will likely result in them purchasing from you.?
Search engine optimization marketing: Search engine optimization often goes hand in hand with content marketing. When the customer from the above example is conducting research on which gym shoes to buy, they will probably click on one of the first three results that appear on Google. With this in mind, the athletic shoes’ marketing team wants to ensure their article appears in those top results. This is done by optimizing content for user experience and ensuring the technical elements are in place to enable search engine crawlers to easily find and index this content.
Pay-per-click: Pay-per-click is a form of paid advertising that allows marketing teams to essentially purchase traffic to their website. Marketers place ads on websites or search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing and pay a fee each time the ad is clicked on. These ads often appear at the top of the search results page, and are typically determined by bids on specific keywords, while banner ads on websites usually have set prices. ?
Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is similar to referral programs, it involves working with outside individuals or companies under the agreement that they promote your product in exchange for a commission from each sale that can be attributed to their efforts. This is a way to cut down on costs and outsource some of the heavy liftings of promotion, however, you’re putting your brand's reputation in someone else’s hands, so this type of marketing often requires more extensive monitoring and tracking.
Mobile Marketing: Mobile marketing initiatives can include many of the digital marketing strategies mentioned above, and typically will leverage a combination of text messages, social media, email, push notifications, and mobile applications. The importance of mobile marketing is rising, as it is expected that by 2024, the number of mobile shoppers will rise to approximately 187.5 million users. With the clear move to mobile, marketers need to think about how they can optimize their current marketing efforts for mobile to be able to deliver a seamless and user-friendly experience.
Looking at digital marketing platform
Digital marketing platforms are great resources as brands attempt to be present across a multitude of channels and ensure this presence is driving value. Tools enable marketers to measure and optimize marketing performance, sales, and engagement by providing a holistic view of the success of a campaign at every touchpoint. With the ability to track granular data like media exposures, sales, and geolocation, you can derive actionable insights that can inform decisions and guide marketing efforts in the future. Before selecting a platform, determine your goals to find the platform that covers the correct functionality to align with your business needs.