Digital marketing

What is digital marketing?

In a world increasingly connected to the internet, it's unthinkable to have a business and not invest in a digital marketing strategy. More than just managing a brand's online presence, digital marketing is a set of techniques developed and executed through digital media.

Its goal is to establish and expand a brand, generate new business and build a relationship with your target audience, impacting them positively, with the goal of transforming them into loyal customers.

There are many ways digital marketing can boost a business: inbound marketing, social media management, lead generation, SEO, and more. The truth is that the possibilities, like technological advancements, are practically endless.

Don't forget…

The most important thing is that brands understand the power of the web and use it to their advantage. After all, just as it can boost a business, it can also ruin a reputation in a matter of minutes. Often, this damage is virtually irreparable.

So, as you can see, it's no wonder that digital marketing has grown and taken on prominent positions in the business plans of many companies.

How to do digital marketing?

One of the main questions for those who want to create a digital marketing strategy is how to do digital marketing efficiently. Here at Kaizen, we know this isn't easy, so we've prepared an exclusive article on this topic.

How did digital marketing come about?

Digital marketing emerged with the creation of the internet, although in a very different way than we know today.

Back in the late 80s, non-clickable banners began appearing on early internet subscriptions in the United States. But it wasn't until 1994 that HotWired named this format and began marketing it more intensively, offering click-through rates to its advertisers.

A new era on the internet

This was only possible because restrictions on commercial use of the internet had been lifted a year earlier. This marked the beginning of a market that has continued to grow ever since. In just four years, from 1994 to 1998, the internet reached 50 million users worldwide. This is small compared to today's number, but a strong indicator that, from that moment on, it was already the ideal place for those looking to invest in advertising.

It was during this period that the first service and navigation portals, such as MSN and Yahoo!, emerged. These portals integrated various functionalities, with their own search engines.

Years passed and the internet evolved

In the late 1990s, Bill Gross created the first sponsored search engine, called GoTo.com. It allowed people to search for topics of interest. The system displayed paid results alongside organic results.

As you may have noticed, this model was improved by Google, which separates the sponsored links of organic results, currently.

In the 2000s, with the worldwide internet boom, the web became more democratized, and digital marketing began to resemble what we know today. Audiences became increasingly interactive, and online content production needed to diversify and, consequently, segment.

Why has marketing changed?

The answer is simple: because consumer behavior has changed. What may not be so simple for companies is recognizing this and adapting to the new reality.

They say traditional marketing is dead, but the truth is that as long as offline channels survive and have an audience, traditional marketing will survive too. However, without the same prominence it once had.

If we stop to think about how many times our consumer needs and desires change over the years and what influences these changes, it's not difficult to understand what we're talking about.

Everything at your fingertips

If what we saw on TV used to influence our thinking, now the power of choice and the diversity of offerings is in our hands. We're increasingly drawn to brands and products that bring a sense of exclusivity.

Traditional marketing was shaped by the industrial revolution, where products were produced on a large scale and advertising was responsible for educating the general public to consume them en masse.

What does new marketing look like?

New marketing was shaped by the digital age, which literally empowered audiences by giving them choice. The internet provided unlimited access to information, transforming consumers into market players.

It was to accompany this evolution that digital marketing emerged, helping big brands reinvent themselves to survive, making the market even more competitive by providing opportunities for everyone.

How does the consumer spend their time?

Another change in consumer profiles is how they spend their time. While previously people listened to the radio or watched television, today they spend a significant portion of their time online.

Whether using a laptop or mobile device, consumers spend many hours browsing the web. Therefore, the internet is the ideal place to assertively find potential customers. Unlike traditional marketing, where the salesperson is the primary approach, digital marketing focuses on attracting people to your business.

In other words, with digital marketing the flow is reversed.

Advantages of digital marketing

As we've just seen, the internet and new technologies have not only changed consumer behavior, but also the way companies do marketing.

This change was necessary not only to adapt to the new scenario, as a way of "surviving," but also because organizations discovered and attested to the advantages of digital marketing for their businesses.

As a result, it's become not just an alternative, but the primary option. Learn the key concepts of digital marketing below.

Key digital marketing concepts and how they apply to your business

As we know, digital marketing consists of a set of strategies aimed at promoting a product, service, or brand online. It is linked to various tools and channels, thus providing advantages for the company.

1. Interactive communication

The main advantage in terms of communication is interactivity. This is because, unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is a two-way street, an open channel of communication between brands and consumers.

Whereas previously all that was left for audiences was passivity, they can now interact with content produced by companies, facilitating communication. And thanks to the internet, this can happen at any time.

This scenario allowed for the construction of a rich, positive relationship for both parties: for the company, which, through consumer feedback, will be able to build loyal audiences and speak directly to its target audience; and for the consumer, who will be listened to by the company and will receive better products and services in return.

4. Segmentation

One of the major limitations of traditional marketing was the lack of tools to create a clear and objective segmentation of your ideal target audience. To capture data from a specific audience, you had to commission surveys. This was time-consuming, involved a large number of people, and costly.

Today, with digital marketing, it's possible to capture user data through their online behavior, such as search engine searches and social media profiles. Obviously, this facilitates campaign targeting.

This way, you're much more likely to reach the right audience. After all, communication is always easier when you know who you're talking to.

3. Measurement

Another advantage is measurement. On the internet, everything can be measured, analyzed, and transformed into performance indicators.

While with traditional marketing you had to wait for your actions to convert into sales to know whether they were successful or not, and even then you couldn't be sure whether the result was truly linked to a particular campaign, with digital marketing you can analyze various metrics, run tests, and gain insights at any time.

With the ability to measure everything, you can know exactly where your investment is going, which channel is most effective, and whether your campaigns are delivering the expected return.

Say…

It's important to emphasize that there are short-, medium-, and long-term campaigns. To evaluate results, it's important to consider the timeframe.

4. Effectiveness

Do you know another advantage of the internet? It's that anything that can be measured can also be optimized. And this can be done at any time and as often as necessary.

While an ad in a magazine cannot be changed after it is printed, nor can a video on TV have its script rewritten after it is aired, on the internet everything can be adjusted in a practical way, which consequently increases the chances of campaigns being more effective.

On online platforms, it's possible to run various tests, change the line of communication, and even the initial planning, as long as you use common sense, of course.

5. Great value for money

The combination of all these characteristics makes digital marketing very cost-effective, especially when compared to the considerable costs of offline actions.

Furthermore, digital marketing has democratized communication between companies and their consumers, making the market more competitive, especially for small and medium-sized companies.

Today, with an internet connection, the right tools, and a lot of creativity, it's possible to create campaigns with little investment and generate great results.

Digital marketing for companies

In the business context, digital marketing emerges as an innovative solution that will allow companies to:

• Spend less to reach potential customers;
• Have more assertiveness through metrics and fingerprints digital information about who your customers are and what kind of habits they have in the digital environment;
• Collect important data about your products and services;
• Increase your reach with consumers by delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

Digital marketing is a trend that continues to grow

According to the Marketing Investment Guide for small and medium-sized companies prepared by RD Station, in 2021, Brazil registered a 74,2% higher investment in the digital area compared to 2019 and 2020.

According to the 2022 Marketing Investment Forecast survey, Forrester, investments in marketing initiatives, especially digital marketing, are expected to grow considerably in a short period of time. The increase is estimated at 30% by 2025.

The annual report of the Advertising Market Self-Regulation Forum, the CENP-Media 2021, found a 38,8% growth in media investments compared to the previous year, representing a total of R$19,7 billion.

More data on digital marketing investments

As you can see, the virtual environment is fertile ground for both large and small- and medium-sized companies. After all, all of them can boost their businesses and grow consistently through digital marketing.

• Facebook has, on average, 2 million advertisers worldwide
• Instagram has 500 advertisers worldwide, and Brazil is second on the list, behind only the United States.
• Twitter has approximately 100 advertisers worldwide
• 93% of purchasing decisions are influenced by social media (Source: Ironpaper)

It doesn't stop there...

• Inbound Marketing generates 54% more Leads than Outbound Marketing (Source: WebDAM.com)
• 72% of companies should increase their investment in sponsored links (WebDAM.com)
• Three million advertisers use Facebook to reach their consumers (Source: Adweek)
• 50% of companies already invest in content marketing strategies (Source: WebDAM.com)
• B2B companies that have blogs generate 67% more leads than companies that don't (Source: WebDAM.com)
• 78% of marketing directors believe personalized content is the future of marketing (Source: WebDAM.com)
• Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to achieve a positive ROI (Source: Socialemedia)

Website Optimization: SEO Success Story

If you have ever heard about website optimization, you've probably wondered about the effectiveness of your techniques, right? After all, can simply applying SEO metrics to your website yield effective results, even without a large investment?

To learn more about search engine optimization, discover the SEO success story from Porto Vistos, based on the work of the Kaizen Agency's team of experts. It demonstrates the profitability of investing in Search Engine Optimization. Your website can dominate organic search and reach the people who truly matter to your business.

To better understand…

Porto Vistos, a visa consultancy based in Porto Alegre, serves people from all over Brazil interested in obtaining visas and passports. This SEO success story is one of the best ways to illustrate the power of good search engine rankings for business success.

Dominating the organic search for visas in Brazil, the company's website saw a 31,57% increase in visibility per month, just with Website Optimization work. Kaizen Agency.

By ranking in the top 5 for most keywords relevant to the business, Porto Vistos gained visibility and relevance in search engines, increasing sales obtained by the channel.

The 8Ps of Digital Marketing

Every marketing professional has certainly heard of the 4 Ps of traditional marketing, also known as the "marketing mix." Initially, strategies based on the 4 Ps consisted of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

As expected, the advancement of digital marketing has resulted in an improvement in methodology, now based on new elements. See:

1. Search

Knowing who you're targeting is always the first step to any successful marketing campaign. Therefore, the first step is understanding the market and your target audience through their online behavior, such as defining personas and keywords.

The good news is that there are now several free tools, such as Google Analytics, that can make this task easier. They allow you to access online search data and user demographics.

2. Planning

As economists would say, planning is everything in life. And it's the same with digital marketing. Especially with all the different strategies, channels, and actions it offers, analyzing and planning your actions is essential.

Therefore, any digital marketing strategy must have a well-defined plan, according to the target audience. This plan should clearly define the actions to be executed, in which channel, and the available budget, for example.

This will make measuring the campaign's effectiveness much easier in the future.

3. Production

Production is a crucial step in digital marketing. This is where all the materials already defined in the planning process are produced, as well as the quality and relevance of the content for the audience are verified and certified.

4. Publication 

Once produced, this content needs to be published on the platforms already defined in the planning process. Hence the importance of this stage, as it's where the most relevant locations for the content will be determined.

If your focus is social media, you need to be aware of the specifics and best times for each social network. Just as blog content must be optimized for SEO, email blasts must follow a specific frequency. And so on.

5. Promotion

Once published, it's time to promote your content so it reaches a wider audience and impacts the largest number of people.

As you may know, organic reach on social media is quite limited, and Google search results depend on many factors that are not easy to achieve in a short period of time.

Therefore, promoting your material on social media, highlighting your website or landing page through an ad on Google Ads, or promoting your video on YouTube, for example, are fundamental actions to give visibility to what you've produced.

6. Propagation

Propagation will depend on the power of the content created to engage the public.

That's why it's important to develop content that encourages your audience to interact with your brand, with persuasive headlines that generate shares and comments.

Don't forget that promotion is also important in building this relationship, since by promoting your content and your brand, you are automatically increasing the chances of interaction between the public and your company.

7. Personalization

Knowing your audience makes it much easier to produce content and deliver personalized messages to each profile you want to reach. Right?

So, if you have a product or service that can be targeted at more than one audience, you can create personalized delivery strategies for each. This ensures better reception for your brand and makes your potential customers feel valued.

8. Accuracy

By this point, you'll be ready to measure the effectiveness of your strategy. By following all the previous steps, you can measure your actions to see if they're generating the best results.

If not, there's no need to despair. After all, after identifying areas that can be improved, your online campaign can be optimized.

To achieve this, digital marketing has several metrics, as well as specific tools for each objective.

Digital Marketing Channels

The internet is a platform where new things emerge all the time, offering countless formats and channels to bring your digital marketing strategy to life. Here are a few:

Social Media

It's undeniable that social platforms have an extremely loyal following. In fact, a large portion of users connected to the network have at least one social media profile.

Facebook alone, for example, has 2,96 billion users worldwide. In other words, it's close to reaching the 3 billion user mark. Next is Instagram, also owned by Meta, with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is also among the social media giants, with 2 billion active users.

It's important to remember that each social network has its own specificities regarding formats, language, and audience profile. Therefore, it's crucial to develop specific content for each one.

E-mail marketing

Despite being overlooked compared to all the possibilities of digital channels, email marketing was one of the first channels used in digital marketing and continues to be essential in building customer and brand relationships.

Over time, it reinvented itself and became more than a direct sales channel, losing its aggressive nature that so annoyed users. Today, it has become an important lead nurturing tool.

But remember: it's important to use your own mailing list, with leads that are genuinely interested in your brand.

paid advertising

Paid advertising is currently one of the highest-converting channels within digital marketing, delivering significant results with a relatively low investment.

The most common methods are advertising on social networks, such as Facebook and Instagram, paid search on Google Ads, which places your link in the top positions of the search engine, and sponsored links on display networks, which are the famous banners and other graphic ads displayed on Google affiliated sites.

Blog 

Having a blog, even if it's a little more laborious than maintaining a social media page, is a worthwhile endeavor that deserves serious attention in digital marketing strategies.

With a blog, you can show your audience that you have the solutions they need, increasing the chances of converting a simple website visitor into a loyal customer. With good content, you become an authority in your field.

Furthermore, when your blog content is relevant, produced and posted using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, it can greatly help improve your website's ranking in search engines.

Many possibilities to reach your audience

There are also other channels that can help with a digital strategy, such as videos, eBooks, and webinars, which are still gaining popularity and traction. The important thing is to know how to use them best and evaluate the most appropriate strategy to reach your audience.

Digital marketing tools

Now that you know everything about digital marketing, the 8Ps, and the most commonly used channels to reach your audience, it's time to learn a little more about its tools.

As before, here we are also talking about a series of possibilities that aim to facilitate your work and help you execute your strategies with maximum productivity.

The truth is that no matter how elaborate a plan is, it would be simply impossible to be successful with digital marketing without the support of technology and some fundamental programs in your daily life.

Think about it…

A blog post is never just text. And a Facebook ad is never just an ad. After all, behind them there's always one or more tools used in their production, publication, indexing, etc.

In digital marketing, tools are integral to the process, and the best professionals understand this. Therefore, they use them intelligently to improve their results.

Discover the main digital marketing tools 

Facebook Ads

A facebook ad platform is essential for social media work and offers the possibility of creating targeted and dynamic ads in various formats. The objective of a Facebook campaign can be either lead generation or even campaigns for page likes and engagement.

Google Ads

The flagship of paid advertising in terms of conversion and ranking, Google Ads allows the creation of ads on the search and display network within the search engine, as well as video ads on YouTube.

Another free Google tool worth highlighting is Analytics, which is used to monitor traffic on websites, blogs, and online stores.

SEMRush

One of the most popular and comprehensive keyword monitoring tools, SEMRush It's not free, but it's worth the investment for anyone looking to improve their digital marketing results.

With it, you can check the organic performance of keywords, helping you choose the best ones for good ranking of your blog content and creating campaigns on Google Ads.

Ahrefs 

Widely used by SEO analysts, Ahrefs is a tool that allows you to analyze backlinks (external links pointing to your website) and check the positions your pages occupy in Google. This allows you to create strategies to achieve better rankings.

Infusionsoft 

O Infusionsoft It is a very complete program, which among many interesting tools offers email marketing automation software, allowing you to create and manage campaigns within the platform itself.

Furthermore, it is a CRM tool that offers sales automation, payments, integrations, analytics, and several other features.

Digital marketing metrics

Many people associate digital marketing with being present online, having a social media profile, or simply having a website. But, as you've seen so far, things aren't quite like that.

After all, to achieve effective results through online platforms, you need to go further. You need to create a strategy that guides your online actions and truly impacts your customers.

And then comes the question: how do you know if the strategy is working? Simple, through metrics.

Unraveling the metrics…

Just as important as developing a campaign is knowing whether it is producing results, whether it reached the expected audience, and whether the investment is yielding a return.

These days, nobody wants to waste money, right? That's why metrics are crucial. By measuring data, companies will know whether the campaign met expectations, whether it's time to increase the budget, or even pivot and change strategy.

7 digital marketing metrics

Leads

Lead generation is generally the main objective of any digital marketing strategy. Therefore, quantifying leads is one of the key ways to determine whether a campaign is successful or not.

Capturing a lead means that the ad had the desired effect and the person demonstrated interest in your offer, either by registering on a landing page or clicking on the call to action and submitting their data.

This points to an opportunity, that is, the possibility of receiving a contact for your sales team to work on or, at least, enter the lead qualification process.

Engagement

When it comes to social media, engagement is one of the most important metrics because it determines the level of customer engagement with the page and its posts. To determine engagement, we consider all user interactions with the page, such as likes, comments, shares, mentions, etc.

Engagement levels are also one of the easiest data points to measure, as the platforms themselves typically provide this information in an organized and accessible way for administrators.

But it's important to remember that while page engagement is essential to increasing audience identification with your brand, it doesn't mean these numbers will translate into immediate sales.

Cost per click (CPC)

Cost per click is one of the main metrics to consider if you invest in Facebook campaigns and Sponsored Links, for example.

CPC is used to measure the effectiveness of an action by calculating the average amount paid for each click. This helps evaluate the performance of chosen keywords, text and visual language, and targeting, for example.

Return on investment (ROI)

ROI determines how long it will take your company to recoup its investment in communication. This calculation requires considering not only the average ticket price for your product or service, but also the length of time a customer remains active and the time you have to make them profitable.

Generally speaking, ROI is the metric that matters most to investors, as it shows whether the amount spent on digital marketing actually converted into sales and generated profit.

Lifetime value

Lifetime value is the metric that determines the value of a customer compared to the amount spent to attract them. One of the advantages of measuring lifetime value is that knowing the lifetime value of each customer allows you to refine your strategy to generate better long-term results.

Total traffic

Total traffic is used to track the progress of your website or blog. It measures the total number of users visiting your website and can be measured by day, week, year, or even the total lifetime of the page.

Sales conversion rate

Ultimately, conversion rate is what really matters, right? And the math is quite simple: just check how many leads actually purchased your product or service.

If the number is too low, it's a warning sign and it might be time to change your strategy, investing more in lead nurturing or changing your sales team's approach, for example.

Conversion rates are also important for testing which digital marketing channels bring the most returns to your business and which type of campaigns are most effective.

How to create a good digital marketing campaign?

It's easy to launch a website or create a professional social media profile. You've probably already done both. However, it's the expertise behind constant research and updates that makes the difference between an amateur positioning and an assertive digital marketing campaign.

Analyzing the market before and after the popularization of digital marketing, we can say that it revolutionized the purchasing journey. Today, especially with the presence of social media, consumers play a more active role in the purchasing decision process than in the past.

Things are simpler

In the past, consumers had very few channels to research products; they often had to travel to a store and trust the salesperson's word. This is a far cry from today, where access to information is unrestricted and just a click away.

Today, consumers can research all options for as long as they want before making a final decision about whether or not to purchase a product. Therefore, it's crucial that brands pay attention to presenting their unique selling points to these consumers.

In other words, the brand needs to be discoverable online. Therefore, ranking well in search engines like Google through SEO, as well as maintaining quality content associated with the brand, is essential.

What is a digital marketing company?

As a market that is growing increasingly with the advent of technological transformations, companies have emerged whose core business is the delivery of digital marketing in a variety of formats.

Meet Kaizen, your digital marketing agency

Kaizen specializes in creating digital marketing initiatives that elevate and consolidate brands and products. We provide website design, press relations, and comprehensive online advertising campaign management for companies of all sizes and segments.

We know that sales and marketing processes are closely interconnected. Furthermore, customers are increasingly informed and demanding about what they consume. Therefore, developing initiatives focused on the objectives and specific characteristics of each business is essential to ensure the message reaches the right audience.

Google Partner

We have extensive experience in online sales strategies for local businesses and online stores. As such, we are a digital agency that offers an incredible range of advanced tactics designed to take your business to the next level.

We're proud to be one of the 80 agencies with the greatest growth potential and relationship with Google for Partners Elevator, Google's Acceleration program with ACE Startups, since 2019. Furthermore, we're ranked first on Google as a Digital Agency, which certifies our commitment to elevating our clients' reputations to the desired level.

Invest in your digital presence

Count on our team to structure your digital presence and consolidate your business. Contact us and together we will discover the best solutions for your company!