BroadVision Marketing Blog

[This article was originally published in February 2024 and has been updated and revised.]

Content marketing has been a powerful force in the realm of digital marketing for decades. And today it is more effective than ever before.

Digital marketing incorporates a wide variety of tactics and strategies, but content marketing is not only a mainstay strategy, it is the core component of successful digital marketing practices.

Everyone says you need their product or service. We get it. But in today's digital world there really is one thing your business needs: Digital Marketing.

Whether you undertake it yourself or hire a digital marketing service, marketing your business online is a necessity for most every business.

So, What Is Digital Marketing Exactly?

Every business needs to be seen and heard.

One of the most fundamental and basic requirements for any commercial endeavor, be that a simple lemonade stand or a multi-national services enterprise, is attention. Potential customers or clients must take notice of you.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

One could reasonably ask, "If you have a business and no one knows, does it exist?"  

In the days prior to April 30, 1993, there was no Internet, no World Wide Web, no marketing "online" as we often refer to it today. There was only advertising, public relations, and publicity. And word of mouth, of course.

Without any of these platforms promoting the existence of your business, it would not exist for all practical purposes.

Today is no different.

Almost everyone goes to the Internet - usually with their cell phones - to search, to shop, and to find businesses. If your business is never seen online then it may as well not exist. Which is why digital marketing is so essential to your business.

The purpose for teams is to combine a group of members to work together to accomplish certain goals that cannot be achieved effectively by an individual. Do you wonder why I keep repeating this? It’s because sometimes teams can get off-track like an elementary school student who starts reading an encyclopedia entry for a class and ends up following a cow path far from the subject because he loses focus.

Digital marketing isn't really an option in today's world. If your business can't be found online, your business may as well not exist.

Think that's an exaggeration or a bit of journalistic hype? Think again.

Digital Marketing for Everyone - The New Normal

Consider your own consumer behavior. How do you look for a service or a product? The statistics tell us that you most likely use your mobile phone to search. 

When you find a likely prospect, what do you do next? Read reviews? Count how many there are and how well they're rated? Do you take time to check out their competition to see how they compare?

And here's what you most likely don't do:

• Look for a business in your local Yellow Pages
• Jot down an address or phone number you saw on a billboard
• Keep a stack of old business cards from service providers you used before

While some people may still do some of these things, most people in most situations go online. For almost everything. Which means if they can't find your business online easily and quickly, you don't exist as far as they are concerned.

There is more to marketing objectives than simply increasing sales, and the key to achieving your objectives is to have a plan or three!

Achieving your marketing objectives hinges on having a solid strategy and a consistent commitment to follow through with your strategy.

The problem that arises for many marketers, however, is that they tend to start the process backwards. In other words, their tendency is to simply start with their proposed budget and use that to dictate what they can or can't do with marketing.

But this is not only unnecessarily limiting, it is short-sighted and focuses on the wrong parameters.

While it is true that your budget will, in fact, be a real determining factor in what tactics you can afford to employ and what resources you can actually make use of, it should not be the overriding factor. Flexibility, creativity, and agility may be required to "do more with less" when it comes to an affordable and effectivemarketing strategy. But without clear cut goals, or objectives, and a clearly defined plan of action and accountabilities, any money you do have will be poorly spent.

Remember, your marketing efforts are not like a pasta kitchen: you cannot afford to simply "throw spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks." You must plan, allocate, monitor and measure everything. And that requires planning beyond simply setting a budget.

I have been stumbling over the words “internal”, "inbound" and “outbound” for the last few weeks and it seemed that no one could explain why. I have finally figured this mystery out.

There are “internal, inbound and outbound links" and “inbound and outbound marketing”. Links and marketing are entirely different things with the some of the same words just made to trip people up.

Here are the tricks: Links refer to sites that are not on the current blog post. Marketing is about how we send out the message that we have a product or service for sale.

Digital Marketing for Everyone - The New Normal

• "Internal links" are links that go from one of your website pages to another of your own website pages. This week I learned that each blog post is a website page and you are more than welcome to link your current blog post to previous ones that are written along the same lines. You can also link to pages that tell about your website, your services, your contact information, in fact anything at all having to do with your website.

• An "internal link" is different from an "inbound link" which Wikipedia says refers to what we have been calling backlinks—links where someone links to your page, or where you link to someone else’s website. According to Wikipedia,  “Google's description of their PageRank system, for instance, notes that Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. So an inbound link is a vote for your page, whether from another of your pages or from someone else.

• "Outbound links" within your blog are websites that you quote from that are not a part of your website. Yes, this sounds like just what I said for an inbound link that comes from an outside source to you, but in this case you are giving credit within your blog to an outside site, just like I did with Wikepedia. They did not vote for me by leaving a backlink. I used them to give credit from the outside to what I have written to improve the credibility of my blog.

Confused yet?