If your business is having trouble selling products, it probably comes down to one thing: Your marketing strategy.

An effective marketing campaign is key to attracting customers to your business. It spreads awareness of your existence and then encourages shoppers to buy your products or services.

Without a sound marketing campaign, it’s nearly impossible for shoppers to find and purchase from your business.

But what if you’ve already invested in marketing and people still aren’t shopping at your business? What if you’ve rented every available billboard in town and put up flyers on every street corner, all with no results? In that case, the problem may be that you still haven’t used the right kind of marketing.

In today’s world of computers and mobile phones, digital marketing is a resource no business can afford to miss out on. Billboards and flyers still have value, but they can only do so much by themselves. To reach your biggest audience, you need to go digital.

But what exactly is digital marketing, and how can you use it? Most of all, how can digital marketing help you? We’ll go over the answers to all of those questions below.

Read on to learn more, and then subscribe to Revenue Weekly to get more tips from the digital marketing agency with over 20 years of experience in the industry!

What is digital marketing?

By its broadest definition, digital marketing refers to any kind of marketing done through online channels and electronic devices.

In practice, though, when people say “digital marketing,” they’re referring to marketing that occurs primarily on the Internet.

Digital marketing can appear in your inbox, in the margins of the websites you visit, and even in your Google searches.

Types of digital marketing

One of the great things about digital marketing is its versatility. It can appear in many different forms across the Internet.

With that being said, there are a few main types of digital marketing content that tend to dominate the industry and drive the most results. Here’s a brief overview of four such categories.

1. Content marketing

One of the most longstanding and reliable forms of digital marketing is content marketing. Content marketing gets its name from the fact that it relies on written content to market to online users.

Unlike billboards and flyers, content marketing isn’t usually outright advertising. More frequently, it provides people with genuinely helpful information. The value of the content causes more people to engage with it willingly, drawing them to your brand.

For example, if you sell office supplies, you might put out a short piece of content on how to fix a jammed stapler. Or if you run a pest control service, you could write an article about how to seal up holes in the outside of a house.

The goal of content marketing is to land your website pages at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) by targeting keywords that your ideal audience searches for.

When you incorporate these keywords into your content, you’ll have a chance at ranking for those keywords, and driving qualified traffic to your website.

2. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial digital marketing strategy that can help your content rise to the top in SERPs. SEO is the process of optimizing your web content to rank highly, and includes a number of strategies.

When someone searches Google for something related to your business, you want a page from your website to appear on the first page of search results, where hopefully the searcher will click on it. But for that to happen, your website has to meet all of Google’s ranking criteria.

SEO relies largely on integrating relevant keywords — the terms people search for — into your content. It also involves making sure your content matches user search intent. If someone Googles “what is a carburetor,” for example, and visits your page, it needs to tell them what a carburetor is.

Some high-level SEO strategies to help you rank highly include:

1. Keyword implementation
2. Internal linking
3. Title tag and meta description optimization
4. Image optimization
5. And more

3. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

While content marketing and SEO don’t try to sell your products or services directly,, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is more overtly salesy. To some extent, it functions similarly to SEO, targeting specific keywords and appearing in search results.

But where SEO works to earn high-ranking spots in search results, PPC lets you buy ad slots above the organic search results. You can bid on keywords you want your ads to appear for, and whenever someone searches for them, the highest-bidding ads will appear at the top.

When users click on your ads, they’re directed to a landing page on your website that advertises your products or services. Best of all, you only have to pay for ads when people click on them.

4. Social media marketing

More and more people join social media every day, making it the source of one of the largest audiences on the Internet — the average user spends 28% of their Internet time there. And that’s something you can’t afford to pass up.

Social media marketing can take different forms depending on the network and format you use. You can link to your latest blog post on Twitter, hold a contest on Facebook, or any number of other things to draw people to your brand. You can even run PPC ads on social media!

Here are some of the best social media platforms you can use to market your business:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. LinkedIn
4. YouTube
5. Pinterest
6. Instagram
7. Reddit
8. Snapchat

How does digital marketing help your business?

Now that you have a sense of digital marketing and how it works, let’s talk about what makes it valuable to your business. There are countless ways digital marketing can benefit your business, but here are three of the biggest advantages it offers.

1. More potential customers

Perhaps the main advantage of taking your marketing online is that your audience will expand dramatically. Traditional marketing typically only reaches a certain number of people, but online, you have the potential to reach almost anyone.

Even if your business only works within a certain geographical area, it’s nearly impossible for everyone within that area to see your billboard or flyer. However, if you can get a large enough number of users to follow you on social media or find you in their search results, it can make all the difference.

2. Better targeting opportunities

Opting for a digital marketing strategy will not only give you the chance to expand your audience, but you’ll also have a chance to target interested users. When you set up a billboard, it will be seen by plenty of people who aren’t a part of your target audience.

Online though, tactics like PPC give you the opportunity to target people by demographics or geographic location. That ensures that you’re using your resources almost exclusively on your intended audience.

3. Better inbound marketing

When you run radio ads or put up flyers, you’re using what’s known as outbound marketing — that is, you’re projecting your ads into people’s paths, whether they like it or not. This can be helpful for getting people’s attention, but it works best when balanced with inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is marketing that entices potential customers to come to you rather than the other way around. Strategies like content marketing are great at using this method, and it’s a very effective way to generate leads.

Get digital marketing help from WebFX

Hopefully by now you can see how much your business stands to gain from implementing a digital marketing strategy. If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency to help you get started, look no further than WebFX.

We offer digital marketing help on everything from SEO to social media, and our team of over 200 experts would love to drive marketing results for your company.

Just call us at 888-601-5359 or contact us online to get started with us today!