Digital marketing: Definition, levers and strategies for success

What is Digital Marketing and What Are Its Advantages?

Digital Marketing: Definition

Digital marketing is a branch of marketing focused on the relationship between consumers and brands across digital media in the broadest sense.

Among these digital channels, we find:

• Websites (e-commerce or non-commercial sites, blogs, etc.)

• Social media (SMM: Social Media Marketing)

• Mobile marketing (particularly mobile applications)

• Search engines (SEM: Search Engine Marketing)

• Voice assistants (Alexa, Siri...) and other connected devices

• Even street marketing, which shouldn't be digital, has gone digital (QR codes, for example)

Today, over 93% of the French population is connected to the internet, and French people spend an average of 2 hours 27 minutes per day on social media! We can therefore understand that for a company to grow, it can no longer limit itself to "traditional" marketing channels.

What Are the Advantages of Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing has numerous advantages:

• The main advantage of digital marketing is its reach: Today you can reach anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world. This was totally impossible just 30 years ago. Communication is more accessible than ever.

• The second advantage is its cost: Digital marketing is actually relatively inexpensive. Yes, companies' marketing spend is increasing, but anyone can launch their website and create social media accounts for a handful of dollars. You can't say the same about a 4x3 poster campaign in the Paris metro or a TV commercial spot.

• The third advantage of digital marketing is its resilience: Ask e-commerce businesses and companies strong in digital marketing how they experienced 2020 and 2021, then do the same with companies that were barely digitized and nowhere to be found online. Case closed.

Why Is Digital Marketing Important?

I could tell you about the global digitization we're witnessing everywhere in the world. I could tell you that your market is now global and only the web can be everywhere at once.

But digital marketing is essential for an even simpler and more obvious reason: your competitors are all just one click away from your prospects. Whatever your marketing strategy and whatever your acquisition efforts, if you leave them your spot on the internet, they'll gladly take it along with your customers.

Digital marketing offers you numerous channels—there are inevitably several that are suited to your business.

B2C Digital Marketing vs B2B Digital Marketing: What Are the Differences?

Digital marketing is just as important for B2B companies as for B2C companies. However, we generally use very different channels in B2C versus B2B.

For example, we'll much more easily invest in Facebook advertising and email marketing for B2C. While B2B is much more demanding in terms of content marketing and will rely on social networks like LinkedIn, for example.

But digital marketing works for ALL sectors. We support companies doing industrial plumbing, dietary supplement e-commerce sites, SaaS companies... The result is decisive: wherever we implement good marketing, there's growth.

Major Digital Marketing Strategies and Their Principles

Inbound Marketing: Attracting Consumers to You

Inbound marketing was practically invented by HubSpot and is based on the principle of permission marketing. We don't approach consumers with advertising or cold calling—instead, we seek to produce useful content that consumers will naturally find throughout their online buying journey.

This strategy creates a trust relationship between your brand and consumers and is extremely profitable!

Outbound Marketing: Creating Lead Acquisition Campaigns

Outbound marketing is more "traditional" marketing that aims to proactively seek leads through advertising acquisition campaigns or email marketing, for example. It's easier to manage than an inbound marketing strategy and quite effective. In B2C, for example, email marketing still offers the best ROI and is a form of outbound marketing.

It's important to understand that inbound marketing and outbound marketing aren't opposing but complementary strategies.

Growth Marketing: A Modern Strategy Combining Inbound and Outbound Marketing

We've been hearing a lot about growth marketing or "growth hacking" lately. Let's be perfectly clear—nothing very new. It's a way of doing marketing based on the idea that all channels can be relevant, that growth also means finding innovative or counter-intuitive techniques, and that we can only know if something works if we've tested, measured, and analyzed it.

Be careful sometimes of a tendency toward short-termism. Measuring and analyzing is important, but just because we don't immediately have data doesn't mean the strategy is bad. And sometimes we can quickly get a lot of data, but it's not necessarily relevant.

Content Marketing: An Essential Channel, Not a Strategy

We often talk about content marketing—it's not really a strategy but rather the most important channel for fueling the three previous strategies. They all rely on varying amounts of marketing content.

Among this content, we can find website pages, blog articles, white papers, templates, guides, etc.

Digital Marketing: Building Your Digital Marketing Strategy in 5 Steps

Step 1: Define Your Buyer Personas to Better Understand Your Target

You'll never achieve anything good if you don't take time to really ask yourself who your brand is addressing. For this, two tools are at your disposal: buyer personas and jobs-to-be-done.

Working on buyer personas allows all marketing teams to start from a common base for writing content and planning marketing actions. It's impossible for the answer to "who do our products address" to be "everyone." It's impossible, and if you think you're the exception, you'll end up like all the companies that believed it before you: in bankruptcy court.

Step 2: Map Out Purchase Journeys to Position Yourself in the Right Place

Beyond buyer persona work, it's important to analyze the purchase journey. The principle is simple: just answer the following question: "What actions will my persona take to solve the problem that my products or services solve?"

If you have customers, it's because your products help them solve a problem. If your target has a problem, they'll look for solutions. Your digital marketing strategy must make you visible at each stage of their search.

Simple to understand. Difficult to master.

Step 3: Understand the Marketing Funnel and Conversion Principles

Digital marketing's overall mission is to attract, convince, and convert your prospects to your solutions. This has always been true, but the way to achieve it has changed significantly.

For about a decade, inbound marketing logic has dominated the web. The idea isn't to "bombard" your target with advertising messages but to help them during their journey with different types of content so they come to you naturally.

Thus, a web visitor will go through different phases:

• A lead: an identified visitor we can contact

• An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): A lead who has shown significant engagement with your content and should therefore be "fed content" to accelerate their awareness that they need you

• An SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): An MQL ready to be converted by your sales team

Understanding how the marketing funnel works is crucial for properly structuring your digital marketing strategy. It's through this concept and the data you'll collect that you can ensure its effectiveness.

Step 4: Define Clear and Relevant Marketing Objectives

"There is no favorable wind for the one who doesn't know where he's going"

Digital marketing is a very vast and exciting discipline, but you can easily get lost. If you want to succeed, you must set clear and precise objectives. Don't hesitate to use tools like the SMART objectives method to define them precisely.

Some advice for avoiding traps set by today's data profusion:

• Just because information exists doesn't mean it's relevant: Choose your key indicators carefully and make sure you perfectly understand what they represent

• Too many indicators kill indicators—stay focused on just a few

• For each indicator you want to work on, keep this in mind: If I significantly improve this indicator, it will cause a negative effect on something. Anticipate this negative effect so you don't suffer from it. Example: If you multiply leads by 10, there might be a quality drop in these leads, and you'll overwhelm your sales team with bad appointments

Step 5: Choose Your Digital Marketing Channels Wisely

Digital marketing offers an extremely vast range of online tools. For your future marketing plan, you must combine several of these channels. We'll give you some understanding keys for each marketing channel in the next section.

Main Digital Marketing Channels

SEM (Search Engine Marketing): SEO and SEA

The first thing a human being on this planet does when they have a problem is go online. The reason every company exists is to solve a problem for clients. So it seems like a great idea to consider your search engine presence as essential.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

This is what we call "organic search"—the ability to position yourself in free search engine results. The subject is vast; it's probably the most powerful and profitable channel but the least understood by marketing professionals. I invite you to consult our SEO guide—if you have a spare day off, it will reveal everything you need to know.

SEA (Search Engine Advertising)

This is what we sometimes incorrectly call "paid search." It's not search but a bidding system allowing you to appear in sponsored search results. Each click is paid.

The advantage is that unlike SEO, it's completely controllable—you pay, you get traffic. The disadvantage is that by nature, SEA is increasingly expensive and you don't build equity on it.

SMM (Social Media Marketing): SMO and SMA

Obviously, when we talk about digital marketing, we necessarily talk about social media. Just like search engines, we have two main axes for working on social media:

SMO (Social Media Optimization)

This is organic—everything you can do to get views and engagement without paying on social media. Your marketing plan, whatever it is, must include a social media communication plan. It's not optional.

SMA (Social Media Advertising)

This is social media advertising or social ads. It has the particularity of being extremely precise in its targeting and will allow you to gain awareness very quickly with your target. However, it's expensive.

Keep in mind some elements about social media:

• They have a lifecycle—organic is very effective when a social network is recent or new. As it gains users and maturity, natural reach (your ability to reach an audience for free) decreases. Social media platforms aren't charities—in the end, they want you to pay for the traffic and visibility they provide you

• Search engines have the huge advantage of being Intent-based—your visitor was originally looking for something. Social media, conversely, are Attention-based—they seek to capture a user's attention online, whether they're in a buying process or not

On-Site Marketing: The Heart of Your Digital Marketing

The great forgotten element of SME digital marketing strategies... Social media is fantastic, but the unavoidable HUB that your visitors will pass through in practically 100% of cases is your website!

It's the cornerstone of digital marketing, and if well-designed, it should convert the traffic you've attracted through SEM and SMM.

For this, you'll need to work on its architecture, UX design, UI design, and also implement tools like marketing automation.

The best sites can not only feed your main activity with qualified leads but also generate additional revenue with, for example:

• Display advertising: ads placed on your site for other brands through advertising platforms like Google AdSense or Ezoic

• Affiliate marketing: links to products or services that pay you for conversions when they come from your site

If your website doesn't enable any of this, it's time to conduct a site audit and/or consider a redesign!

3 Advanced Digital Marketing Strategies

Tired of digital marketing trend articles updated for 10 years with exactly the same so-called secrets? We agree—it's pointless, and mobile-first or video aren't trends when we've been talking about them for over 10 years!

If you want to understand what can really transform digital marketing careers and isn't found anywhere else, here it is!

Strategy 1: Revolutionize Your Marketing Action Production Process

• Reality 1: Everyone does digital marketing today—those who don't are dead or will be soon. That's brutal to say, but you're here for truth, not sugar-coating

• Reality 2: You're not the richest, most creative, or most brilliant in your sector. There's always someone stronger than you

• Reality 3: Winner takes all

Once we've said that, we think: "Damn, we're screwed."

No, be the smartest! The heart of your digital marketing is content marketing. You must succeed in implementing a production process for this content that allows you to create a very large quantity of relevant content to win.

How to implement an effective production process?

Actually, it's very simple—have a global approach to your digital marketing.

Step 1: Create top-quality proprietary content on your site. A blog article, for example. It will be important in your visitor conversion process but also in your ability to attract visitors through organic search.

Step 2: Create publication templates. A well-designed article contains all the information needed to create social media posts, web stories, videos, etc. For each type of network you want to exploit, create templates for the ideal post.

Step 3: Adapt this content into as many different formats as possible. Adapt each idea into as many different templates as possible. Because today, quantity is just as important as a post's "quality." Whether you like it or not, 100 average posts will have more impact than one genius post. And if you've worked your templates well, the production time is the same.

How far can you go with this strategy? For one of our clients on a B2C project, we produced 2,400 different posts for 3 different social networks in less than a month. That's 7,200 posts—7 posts per day per social network for 365 days. Who can beat that?

Strategy 2: Leverage AI to Accelerate Your Digital Marketing

Compatible with strategy 1 and to be handled with caution, artificial intelligence will revolutionize digital marketing. Without going into technical details, you should remember two algorithms:

GPT-3 (now GPT-4): Simply put, it's an automatic content generation algorithm. The largest ever trained. Many tools are emerging using this algorithm. They help you produce blog articles, website copy, video titles, etc. In good hands, in a coherent process, this tool can save you precious time.

DALL-E: GPT-3's cousin, this AI is an artist. Give it a description of an image you'd like to see, and it will create it for you. It's quite impressive. We're just at the beginning, and its use addresses an important pain point—visual creation, so precious for internet users but so complex for marketing teams.

These algorithms will change the digital world. Probably not as you think, and many sorcerer's apprentices will fail to use them. But marketing careers will change, and a good manager or marketing director must today master these tools and understand how to integrate them into their content production processes and web marketing strategy.

Strategy 3: Rethink Your Vision of Marketing and Sales Team Interactions

We've been hearing the obvious for years: "You need to align sales and marketing teams."

NO, REALLY?

This isn't a marketing problem—it's a management problem. And if you have two teams in your company whose mission is to acquire clients but who aren't working in the same direction, yes, you have a problem, but it's nothing new.

However, yes, there will be change. Tomorrow's acquisition teams will be made up of people capable of understanding both what it means to sell to a client and to attract them through marketing. The two processes shouldn't be aligned—they should be integrated.

This means that successful sales processes are abundantly enriched by marketing, and successful marketing strategies have the same insight and empathy capacity as the best salespeople.

It will be difficult, competition will be fierce. You ask me how to win—I'm telling you.

Working with a Digital Marketing Agency: Good or Bad Idea?

What Does a Digital Marketing Consulting Agency Do?

You'll say we're judge and jury on this one, and it's true. But if we didn't have the intimate conviction and proof of our activity's usefulness, we'd do something else.

When you work with digital marketing agencies or freelance consultants, what you're buying is:

• Considerable empirical experience: agencies work for many clients and consist of consultants from different backgrounds. These teams' cumulative experience is considerable and enables fine knowledge of what works and why it works

• An internal marketing team has considerable cost, as do the tools necessary for today's marketing strategies. The vast majority of companies have neither the means nor the need to invest so much in an internal team. But all companies need digital marketing to exist in today's world and especially continue to exist tomorrow

• We're pretty darn nice (and effective): That's mainly true for us, but it counts. Don't take my word for it—discover our digital marketing agency and contact us!

The Right Time to Get Support from a Digital Marketing Company?

Lack of results: Your actions haven't achieved expected results

You invested in a website, but it's not generating anything? That's not normal, whatever anyone tries to tell you. A website isn't an overly expensive business card—it's your acquisition engine.

Your advertising campaigns aren't working as expected? There might be a flaw in your landing page's conversion structure or lack of consideration for different purchase journeys on your website.

An outside perspective, brought by experts no less, can change everything. Don't deprive yourself!

Raised ambitions: A working marketing strategy is good alignment between means and objectives

A strategy is only relevant and effective if aligned with your objectives and means. During major company life moments, ambitions often change, usually upward. Problems start when we believe the strategy implemented to go from 0 to 1 will suffice to go from 1 to n. And that... We often realize too late.

Activity launch: Give a project every chance

The great myth of companies launching or launching new products is that a good product sells itself. It's unbelievable that we still think this.

It never happens, and most companies don't die from bad products but from not giving them any chance to meet their market.

Activity launch is a critical moment—not all strategies are equal. Unfortunately, short-termism often prevails, with a quick and painful end as the result.

Digital Marketing Training

Digital Marketing Masters to Become a Marketing Consultant

For initial training, you should turn to marketing masters at major business schools, for example.

The interest in these programs is that they're highly recognized by digital marketing companies and will provide you with a solid skill foundation. You also have schools specialized in digital that have emerged—they often better prepare for digital careers but are still little known.

However, know that most of the time (and I'm not trying to make enemies), these programs are quite far from today's digital marketing reality. Everything evolves very quickly, and you absolutely must train additionally by creating content, testing tools, or even developing your own website to really develop useful experience for your future company.

Online Digital Marketing Training

There are thousands of online training programs in digital marketing. It's very good supplementary training to become a better marketing consultant or prepare for more strategic positions.

However, I especially recommend highly specialized training on Google Ads, Bing Ads, SEO, or no-code tools like Webflow, Make, Airtable, etc.

The future of digital marketing careers is the T-Shaped marketer—a marketer competent across all digital marketing components with sharp expertise in some of them. This is even more true with AI's rise.

Digital Marketing Careers

There are hundreds, and half of those that will exist in ten years probably don't exist yet. Among the most common careers, we find:

Marketing Consultants and Project Managers:

Marketing is obviously very project-intensive with many stakeholders to coordinate, so naturally the most common job is digital or marketing project manager. Possible career progressions are numerous and depend on experience level. We often become marketing managers after a few years, then digital marketing directors.

Traffic Managers:

Their role is to increase website traffic through all available channels for optimal online presence. We regularly find them at e-commerce companies, and some will have a very online advertising-oriented profile, others more organic search. Traffic manager stars are those who perfectly master both.

Community Managers:

Community managers are numerous because social media has become essential in marketing strategy. They're responsible for managing company social media by creating quality content but also often for monitoring brand e-reputation.

Copywriters:

Essential link for inbound marketing success and outbound marketing actions, copywriters must write quality content for lead-to-client conversion. Beyond writing skills, they're masters of persuasion techniques and human psychology. They write to convince.

Digital Marketing Salaries

They vary greatly by company and region, but here are some guidelines:

• Digital Project Manager (0-3 years experience): $35-45k (regional) and $45-55k (major cities)

• Community Manager (0-3 years experience): $30-40k (regional) and $40-50k (major cities)

• Traffic Manager (3-5 years experience): $50-60k (regional) and $60-70k (major cities)

• Copywriter (0-3 years experience): $35-45k (regional) and $45-55k (major cities)