Digital marketing: a complete guide to take your business to the next level

The Digital Marketing has become an essential tool for the promotion of brands and their products or services. After the covid pandemic, there was even a tendency to use social networks, which are closer to consumers.

For this reason, as it is such a fundamental resource, we will explain below its generalities, types, elements, importance and how you should put it into action in your company.

What is Digital Marketing?

Marketing, in general, is a series of processes on which a brand relies to be recognized, market its products or offer its services, while providing value to its consumers. 

For this reason, the Digital Marketing is nothing more than the sum of these processes in a technological environment, that is, through the use of digital tools and electronic devices.

Here are some statistics on the effectiveness of digital marketing. Digital Marketing in terms of Latin American development in 2022. These are:

• On 96.38% of the search market corresponds to Google.
• The most representative contents in the digital media are photographs (74.3%) and videos (19%).
• Nearly 92% of adult users read their emails, which provides a starting point for strengthening email marketing. Email Marketing.
• Specifically in Colombiafrom 2021 to 2022, investment in Digital Marketing was US$502.2 million.

4 Types of Digital Marketing

In this section, we will expose you to the 4 types of Digital Marketing with the greatest significance.

• Outbound Marketing

This type of marketing is also called Traditional Marketing. It is characterized by reaching the consumer directly to promote the product or service. Its main intention is to sell and, in many occasions, it tends to be invasive and recurrent.

While that may be the case, when balanced with a well-defined strategy, you can achieve your goals. For example, some success stories of successful campaigns of Outbound Marketing campaigns in Latin America were:

• The campaign Patched Days campaign of Poker Beers (Colombia), which offered a pay 5 promotion, carries 6 beers for interacting with the codes on the labels.
• The comedy dramatizations of Wachu, the star of Open Englishwhich allowed the consumer to identify the problems of not studying English and offered the brand directly as a solution.
• Promotional advertisements for Grammarlywhich ranked first in the ranking of the most viewed most watched on YouTube in Honduras during 2021, with 2.91%.

• Inbound Marketing

Another type of marketing that has been receiving attention is Inbound Marketing. Inbound Marketing. This seeks to create value for the person you want to reach. To execute it, content strategies are promoted that help the leads to solve a problem or guide them in their consumer journey. consumer journey..

Although products are promoted, the focus is on the customer. In other words, to sell in a more human way; the consumer consumer consumer is empowered to make critical decisions about his or her purchases.

In Latin America, the Inbound Marketing has reached a reliability rate of 75%, which shows that more and more companies are opting to create innovative, useful and creative content.

• Content marketing 

The Content Marketing is one of the most widely used types of marketing today, especially after the lock-in caused by Covid 19, which forced companies to rethink how to reach their consumers and how to differentiate themselves from thousands of competitors.

In Latin America, 59.5% of the participants in a study about Content Marketing said they would produce more content in 2019 than during 2018, within 81.6% of the total number of companies analyzed. By 2022, this figure of content producers increased to 65%.

This type of marketing has emerged and evolved to create, as its name suggests, content with purpose. Its intention is to nurture the consumer with relevant and useful information to be identified as brands with a differentiating touch. 

• Social Media Marketing

This type of marketing is the closest to the consumer, since nowadays most people have a mobile device.

According to a study by Hootsuite y We are socialby July 2022, the approximate audience consuming advertising worldwide was:

• 2.17 billion in Facebook
• 2.48 billion on YouTube
• 1.44 billion on Instagram
• 1.02 billion in TikTok
• 1 billion in Messenger
• 849.6 million on LinkedIn
• 616.9 million on Snapchat
• 486 million in Twitter
• 251.8 million on Pinterest

Therefore, the objective of this type of marketing is to reach consumers through eye-catching, concise and interesting content. Short texts, images, videos or audios that facilitate the connection between the audience and the brand are usually promoted.

Can I combine different types of Digital Marketing?

The answer is yes. Use different types of Digital Marketing that allow you to generate content that is really interesting and that reflects the values of your company. 

For example, it is feasible to mix Content Marketing with Inbound, as they are both focused on the user experience. It also combines Inbound processes, such as consumer journey analysis, with Outbound techniques, such as ads in traditional media.

Another recommendation is to mix Content with Social Media Marketing, so you will make advertising campaigns based on useful content with techniques such as Storytelling, which at the same time are compatible with the formats and searches of people in social networks.

There are multiple possibilities even with other more specific types of marketing such as NeuromarketingMarketing, the Generational Marketing and Viral Marketing.

Marketing essentials

The Digital Marketing has several essential elements that must be taken into account at the time of implementing any strategy and are also known as Marketing Mix. They serve to reach the company's marketing objectives in a more precise and effective way.

These components can be classified in different ways according to the time in which they emerged and their characteristics. Some classifications are more detailed than others; however, in general, the elements of marketing focus on the analysis of the product or service, who it is aimed at, in which media the strategy will be presented, which collaborators are involved in the customer experience and how much budget is available to carry out the marketing plan.

Digital Marketing, an indispensable tool for companies

Global internet usage will rise from 54% to 63% between 2019 and 2021 54% to 63% between 2019 and 2021.. This also gave rise to the initiative of companies, which had not previously been encouraged to use the Digital Marketing as a tool to maintain their commercial activities.

In addition, for those businesses that had already consolidated strategies with this type of marketing, there was the challenge of innovating and enriching their content. All this in order not to get lost in the vast sea of new companies that were forced to migrate to the digital environment.

For these reasons, the Digital Marketing has become an indispensable tool for today's companies, representing an opportunity to reach new markets and consumers.

Some of its advantages are: 

• You can measure your results and clearly analyze if they are in line with the marketing objectives set by your brand.
• It allows consumers to feel closer to your brand and facilitates interaction between both parties.
• It allows you to share your brand value and humanize your content.

How to plan a Digital Marketing strategy?

Plan your Digital Marketing strategy with these steps:

1. Determine your objectives for the development of the strategy and how you will measure its efficiency. 
2. Your strategy must be achievable, so you must identify how much you will invest in it.
3. Define your buyer persona or ideal customer. This way you will be able to know what their purchase motives are and what digital channels you need to carry it out.
4. Examine the performance of your competitors to know what aspects can make the difference in your marketing strategy.
5. Establish a fixed time frame for your strategy and try to schedule it in the short, medium or long term.
6. Implement your marketing strategy and evaluate its results.

5 Digital Marketing trends for 2023

The following are some of the trends in Digital Marketing expected in 2023:

• User-generated content (Prosumer):

A 2022 study on User Generated Content (UGC) shows that only 50% of consumers trust the authenticity of branded content. Similarly, it states that UGC has a strong impact on the purchasing decisions of 80% of people and that 88% look for product reviews on YouTube before buying.

Thus, the critical consumer will be the one who will produce the content and will favor the voice of your brand to transmit reliability and authenticity to those who will buy your products.

• Inclusion and diversity in content: 

Some 85 million people with disabilities live in Latin America, and other factors such as economic stability, race and sexual orientation account for between 40% and 60% of the reasons for discrimination. 40% to 60% of the grounds for discrimination in the region. in the region. As a result, consumers today are increasingly looking for content that promotes differences as positive characteristics and empathizes with today's world.

In addition, 90% of the young public is willing to buy products with some to buy products with some social impact.. This is associated with greater attention on their part to inclusive advertising when making purchasing decisions (between 23% and 35% compared to those over 46 years old), which is distributed among industries such as textiles, furniture, automotive, electronics and others.

• Metaverse: 

Experiences in interactive virtual worlds are a new digital revolution and could undoubtedly represent an opening to millions of marketing opportunities. In Colombia, companies are already using the metaverse as a marketing tool:

• Cola & Pola in the creation of NFTs of their beverages in a CryptoBakery.
• Offcorss through its sustainable design of garments for augmented reality, which transformed the vision of fashion to a more ecological one by wearing avatars first.
• Pony Malta with its Cryptoamorcampaign, which encouraged young people to share their love experiences without fear of being judged and to convert them into tokens during Valentine's Day 2022.
• Colombian y Sajú through the collection of digital glasses as NFTs, which sought to promote the use of accessories made from recycled materials.
• 10kaalso with its tokens and filters to create authenticity and digital identity.

• Podcasts that sell:

The Podcast Marketing continues to grow steadily: as of August 2022, there were 4,117,607 registered worldwide (Podcast Index). The audio channels will not only allow to approach the senses of customers, but will be a way to nurture digital content.

This is rectified by the fact that approximately 64% of Latin Americans are monthly listeners of podcasts. monthly listeners of podcasts and the production of this audio content in Spanish has increased to 66%.

• TikTok, the network in constant growth

TikTok has gained relevance by connecting brands with their consumers in a close, agile and fun way. This social network allows brands to to disseminate a message with great speed and reach. In addition, as it is a platform that has not yet been explored by many brands, as it is a platform that has not yet been explored by many companies, competition is still low. In 2022 and by 2023 it is expected to be an exemplary reference for the Social Media Marketing.

Some data from TikTok:

• The network is estimated to have more than 136 million users in Latin America by 2022.
• 75% of people go to TikTok for entertainment (TikTok).
• 56% of users feel more receptive towards a brand after seeing its ad on TikTok (TikTok).

• The hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, had more than 7 billion views.