Marketing discovers and stimulates buyers. Branding makes devoted customers, supporters, and even evangelists out of them
Marketing refers to any activities that a company uses to promote its products and services and improve its market. Marketing requires a combination of advertising savvy, sales, and the ability to deliver goods to end-users. This is normally undertaken by specific professionals or marketers who can work internally (for companies) or externally with other marketing firms.
Traditionally, corporations focused on marketing through print, television, and radio. Although these options still exist today, the rise of the internet led to a shift in the way companies reached consumers. That’s where digital marketing came into play. This form of marketing involves the use of websites, social media, search engines, apps—anything that incorporates marketing with customer feedback or a two-way interaction between the company and customer.
Increased technology and newer trends forced companies to change the way they marketed themselves. The email was a popular marketing tool in the early days of digital marketing. That focus shifted to search engines like Netscape, which allowed businesses to tag and keyword stuff to get them noticed. The development of sharing sites like Facebook made it possible for companies to track data to cater to consumer trends.
Smartphones and other digital devices are now making it easier for companies to market themselves along with their products and services to consumers. Studies show that people prefer using their phones to log on to the internet. So it should come as no surprise that 70% of individuals make buying decisions (usually on their phones) before they actually hit the purchase button.
Research
Learn what customers want and how they behave/interact with your brand. To a large extent, understand the market forces at play that help or hurt your chance for success; think SWOT analysis and marketing mix.
Planning
Align research with business goals and capabilities (often limited by resources) to attract leads to a paying customer or donor.
Implement
Identify and create content offers and promotion strategies that will get your message out to a qualified audience.
Measure
Prove to leadership that the investments made yield incremental results toward your goals.
Optimize
Report on goals and refine your strategies that increase the productivity of input > output. Then double down on investment in areas that show promising results.
A digital marketing process is a broad term to explain any number of steps you take to achieve a digital strategy. You might have a digital marketing process to curate content, schedule posts, and engage with your audience as part of your social media strategy.
And another process is been used in developing your lead nurturing campaigns as part of an email marketing strategy. Through this period I’ve struggled to understand how best to tackle the content marketing process, until now. For example, we use MailChimp to automate email workflows, list populations from contact forms, as well as schedule emails in advance.
Of course, not every marketing process will immediately achieve the goal of optimization.
It’s through experimentation, tweaks to your approach, and being patient and persistent that we improve.
