Introducing the term ‘Digital Marketing’

In a world where everything is digital - (cue movie theater bass sounds) - having an online presence is key for any business to keep up with the competition. Digital marketing is a secret weapon for strategizing your online presence, using channels such as social media, email, search engines, analytics, and more. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that digital marketing has everything to do with everything you do online.

Think of digital marketing as Batman's toolbelt, helping businesses towards their high-level marketing goals like generating leads or boosting revenue. Batman always has the right tool for the situation he’s in - and digital marketing is the same.

And the best part? You don't have to go it alone. Digital marketing as a service is having your very own in-house team to help you every step of the way in analyzing your progress. In this article we’re going to break down what it takes to do digital marketing properly, and why it might be a good idea to have some experts backing you up.

Three Pillars

We like to break Digital Marketing down into three pillars to make the concept a little more digestible for the uninitiated. The umbrella term has a lot of individual services that make it up. So let’s take a look at the three pillars that support it. There is definitely overlap between them but this structure makes it a little easier to assign experts to appropriate tasks.

One crucial thing to remember is that all three pillars are equally important.

Development

We define development as anything having to do with technology. This varies from server related infrastructure to website development to data tracking. If your website is loading slowly that’s probably a development issue. Having SEO issues? That might be a development issue - and you’ll probably need a programmer and a marketer to confirm.

Development tasks often have a lot to do with code but not necessarily always. Sometimes development tasks are related more to infrastructure than they are to code. 

You might need somebody to set up a dashboard or connect multiple apps together and troubleshoot that work. It can be done by a programmer as well as anyone but the programmer will be able to understand if an issue arises and it's code related or if it's related to the dashboard itself.

Creatives

In the modern internet, content is king. content is the best way to get your messaging and branding across effectively. It can be anything from copy, images, icons, videos, to colors and typography. When every single business online is fighting to stand out, creatives are incredibly important to that goal.

One important thing to remember with creatives is that you need to follow brand guidelines. They allow you to be consistent across all of the assets you make, whether they're for web design, concept art, or ad creatives.

Advertising

Is advertising any different from marketing? Yes, it is!  Advertising is actually the creation and management of ad campaigns on ad platforms. These ad platforms can be things like Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. Not only is it the management of these campaigns, but it is also the analysis of the data collected by these campaigns.

Ad campaigns and data analysis allow for data-driven decision making. That means that you don’t have to blindly guess which decisions are correct.

These pillars need to be synthesized to form the complete strategy. On their own, each is important but incomplete. Let’s take digital tracking as an example and break it down. 

1. First you need to determine what your Business Level Goal is. Let’s say ‘generate more leads through your website’.
2. So, you take a look at your website and determine what the conversion action is.
3. You then install tracking code to start analyzing how people get to that action.
4. The data collected indicates some website modifications are needed.
5. New copy and creatives are added to the website.
6. The UX or UI is changed to complement the creatives.
7. Advertising campaigns targeting your conversion action are created.
8. More data is collected to drive next steps.
9. Repeat

You can see here that digital tracking is just one step of the whole strategy! Without the others you’re left on the last step of a staircase with nowhere to go.

Why we do Digital Marketing as a service

The three pillars above can be a tremendous amount of work, so it might be no surprise that we have our own department for each one! Switching between all three as one person would be an inefficient use of time and energy, not to mention the cost of finding someone who can do all of them expertly.

That’s why Drive Marketing provides digital marketing as a service - all the benefits of having a professional team at your disposal at a fraction of the cost to our clients. Not only do we find, hire, and manage the employees, we also coordinate across all three departments to bring the very best advice and service.