If you own a business, chances are you are already engaged in digital marketing to some extent. The tools, strategies, and trends in the digital marketing arena offer an array of opportunities to reach and engage with consumers. The main categories of digital marketing include content marketing, email marketing, social media, search engine optimization, and advertising. When considering your digital marketing strategy and determining where to focus your resources, look at the latest digital marketing statistics.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the creation of consistent, relevant, useful information about your product or service that withstands time and drives consumer transactions. Compound blog posts, posts that steadily generate more traffic overtime by solving readers’ problems in an easy to scan format make up only 10% of all posts across companies but account for 38% of blog traffic. In a 2015 analysis, companies that blogged 16 times or more per month got 4.5 times more leads than companies that blogged 0-4 times monthly.

Email Marketing

By 2020 approximately 3 billion people worldwide will use email. There are many uses for email in marketing, including segmenting audiences with targeted messages, using email to track orders, remind consumers of items left in their online “shopping cart,” solicit feedback, and sending out information about brands, specials, and product updates to all past, current, and potential consumers. In a recent survey of 1007 consumers, nearly half prefer to receive brand emails weekly from their favorite retailers and restaurants.

Social Media

Your customers and potential customers may never search for or find your website on their own, never mind find out all that your brand has to offer. With 79% of adult internet users using Facebook and with Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn quickly catching up as regular parts of adults’ daily lives, social media offers a fresh and easy way to reach customers where they are and drive them to your product or website. In 2017 Facebook reported an advertising revenue of $9.16 billion in the second quarter, a 47% year-over-year increase.

Search Engine Optimization

Blogs and social media posts can also add ways for your name to come up in internet search results. Eighty-one percent of consumers search online before making a purchase and 75% never scroll past the first page of search results. While paid pop-up ads may seem like the short cut to reaching your audience, 70-80% of users report that they ignore pop up ads. It pays to be discovered on top by those looking for something in your arena.

Advertising

Advertising is inherently part of marketing; however digital advertising needs to be done tactfully. On the one hand, The average clickthrough rate for a mobile search ad on Google in the first position is 27.7% and eight out of ten companies plan to use mobile advertising to target customers. On the other hand, adblocking is increasing and in 2015 cost publishers an estimated $22 million. Consumers can find digital ads intrusive and over 50% have lower opinions of automatic video ads.

Whether you are just starting out or you have been in the game a while, learning about digital marketing tools and keeping up with the latest trends and nuances can help you determine your best strategy to maximize marketing reach and engagement.