The concept of Digital Marketing has been around for a pretty long time, but there has never been a time where it was more needed than now. Ever since brands started shifting online to ensure smooth and safe operations, digital marketing concepts and skills have become an invaluable necessity for career-holders in the field and business owners and potential new entrepreneurs.

If you’ve just started your business and are looking for ways to make the most of your online marketing efforts, you’re on just the right page. Here’s everything you need to know about what digital marketing is and what channel optimization means in times of today. 

Let’s get right into it!

So, what even is digital marketing?

You’ve probably heard of marketing and promotions, right? In a nutshell definition, digital marketing is the entire marketing and promotions process—shifted fully online. That means that all communication, advertising, and even brand-building activities are done using the internet and technology. 

Digital marketing spans all facets of a marketing strategy and includes everything from website-building to email promotions and even social media and maintaining an online presence. Basically, everything you do online in your company’s name that promotes or pushes it forward in front of its target audience contributes to digital marketing efforts. 

A digital marketing strategy usually includes, but is not limited to, the following checkpoints:

• SEO or Search Engine Optimization
• PPC ads or Pay Per Click Advertisements
• SEM or Search Engine Marketing
• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• Social media management and marketing
• Lead generation efforts and strategies
• Influencer marketing 
• Affiliate marketing

Using these channels, digital marketing experts can get a company or a brand in front of a larger group of its target audience, make more sales and collect data from those sales to optimize their strategy further and create a more significant impact. 

An intro to digital marketing optimization

Now that you know what digital marketing is let’s talk about digital marketing optimization. Optimizing your digital marketing efforts and strategy means using the data you’ve already collected with your existing strategy to improve it. 

This is important because with the market getting more and more saturated, it is getting harder and harder to stand out against the sea of brands, grab your target market’s attention, and get your message heard!

Contrary to popular belief, a marketing optimization model affects many different departments in a company, not just digital—unlike while creating the initial strategy. 

A digital marketing optimization process is carried out in two main steps. The first is collecting and analyzing the data, and the second is using it to refine the existing strategy. Let’s look at these two steps in greater detail. 

Step 1: Marketing data collection and analysis

Different phases of a digital marketing strategy collect different forms and types of data, giving marketers a comprehensive picture of who their actual audience is and how much the strategy they created is resonating with them.

These data points can consist of things like what devices the customers are using, what time of the day they are most online, what section of your target location are most of your customers from, their interests, and what advertising campaigns have been most successful for your business. 

But this isn’t as simple as it sounds. The data collection and analysis step have three different phases:

1. Generating warm leads: The whole aim of marketing optimization is to attract the kind of audience that is already interested in buying from you and is actively looking for products and services like the ones you offer.
2. Converting these leads into paying customers: leads are important, but they aren’t of any real benefit to a business unless they convert into paying customers, making this the next phase of this step.
3. Finally, we have the ‘close.’ This is when your lead has completed the sales funnel, made the purchase, and submitted the payment. At this point, you want to make sure that you have complete information regarding this customer’s journey, including things like the point and time of the first contact, time taken to make the sale, and the last time this customer was in touch with your company.

Once you have ample data from these three phrases, you can then use it to make your sales process easier, quicker, and more catered to the customer. This data could provide valuable insight into what steps are causing the most delays, what steps of the buyer’s journey do customers bounce off the page from, and what is making your customer back-out from purchasing an item they have put in their shopping cart.

Once you have the answers to these problems, you can then solve them to give other potential customers a smoother, quicker, and overall better experience with your company. This brings us to the second step in this process. 

Let’s take a look. 

Refining the existing strategy—and automating it

By now, you probably have a good view of all the areas in your buyer’s journey and your sales funnels that need improvement; now, all you need to do is make those changes—and automate them. 

You don’t want to waste time and resources doing every single task manually, do you? Automating your procedures saves time, effort, and resources to spend those on things that really matter while also keeping a close eye on the new data generated and used—automatically.

Digital marketing optimization tools

There are several digital marketing optimization tools that you can use to make sure that you make the most of your data and resources. If you’re new, aren’t starting with a huge marketing budget, and are interested in getting things going for free, here are three of the best FREE tools that you can use to optimize your digital marketing strategy:

1. Google Analytics: If you’ve been reading up on marketing, optimization and remarketing, you’re probably already familiar with Google Analytics. If you aren’t, this analytics beast is a free tool by Google to help give you the true picture of how your marketing efforts and campaigns are performing—we’re talking numbers! 
2. DemandJump: If you find Google Analytics to be a little complicated, DemandJump is another great point to start off with. This tool lets you observe your buyers’ journey in a lot more detail and even compare it to your competition so that you can align and optimize your strategy accordingly for greater reach.
3. SumoMe: Want to know what your readers are doing while they are on your page? Are they scrolling? Have they opened the page up but are busy on their cell phone? Or do they get too bored to continue halfway through? This app will let you track your user’s behavior while they interact with your content and website.

Ready to shoot for more and start optimizing your digital marketing strategy? You can start here and let us know how it goes!

About the author:

Maryam Sattar is a content producer at Ivacy vpn for windows 10 and writes about cybersecurity, tech, and VPNs among other fun stuff. When not working, she can be found lost in a book which is more likely than not, a mystery, a fantasy, or a thriller.