What is digital marketing - a simple guide to the new era of marketing
If you happen to be up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and tools, chances are that you’ve heard about digital marketing.
Not only have you constantly come across the term but also seen how Facebook and Google ads are taking over traditional advertising. You’ve noticed how billboards are going out of trend and YouTube ads are the norm.
Well, all of this falls under the large umbrella of Digital Marketing.
We will take a look at what digital marketing is and the various tactics one can use to fully utilize the digital era.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is the method to reach your product to the consumers via digital tools like,
- Internet
- Mobile devices
- Social media
- Search engines
- And other channels.
Digital marketing is also considered as the latest and quickly accessible mode of advertising.
It rescues the companies from the burdens of running behind the advertising firms, spending a lot on them. Why waste your time and money while you have the easiest mode right at your hands!
Furthermore, digital marketing also helps in understanding the pulse of the costumers and developing your brand within the frame of the consumers’ thoughts.
In other words, it is a broad field to attract costumers via search platforms, content marketing, social media, and all types of possible ways.
So why is digital marketing becoming the new trend amongst marketers?
Let’s say, for instance, your company put out a billboard in a populated area of your city. How many people do you think bought from you after seeing it?
The answer is: you wouldn’t know. Because there’s no way to measure how many people saw it, opened their phones and bought your product, or even what type of people were interested in it.
After all the money and efforts, your datasheet will still be empty.
This is exactly the reason why marketers are turning towards the means of digital marketing. They not only help you measure the metrics but also help you precisely target the audience that will be most interested in your product or service.
This saves a lot of time, effort as well as money and well frankly, who doesn’t like smart work...
Tactics used in digital marketing
As we have gone through the term digital marketing, let us take a quick journey through some digital tactics used by the companies for bagging their customers:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Social media marketing
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Native advertising
- Native Advertising
- Marketing automation
- Email marketing
- Online PR
Search engine optimization (SEO)
The main channels that get the benefit of SEO are Blogs, websites, and infographics.
What ‘Search Engine Optimization’/ SEO is all about?
SEO is the process of making your website eligible to rank higher in search results. As a result, it increases the amount of traffic your website receives.
The recipe includes the following as the ingredients or in simple words, the types of approaches towards SEO to get qualified traffic to a website are,
- On-page SEO - In the SEOs of this genre, we focus on the content that is “on the page”. By their search volume and meanings. In this way we can answer the queries of readers, helping us to earn our (SERP), making our website rank higher.
- Off-page SEO - focus on the things happening “off the page” or outside your website that helps in improving your ranking.
What are the activities happening outside our website that can affect my ranking?
They are the inbound links or the backlinks. The number of publishers that link us and the relative “authority” affects our ranking of keywords and how much we care about them.
- Technical SEO; focus on the coding of our website. Image compression, CSS file optimization, structuring of our website, etc. are the factors that increase the loading speed of your website. These are the components that affect the ranking of our website in the views of major search engines like Google.
CONTENT MARKETING
It is our creation and promotion of content for creating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and costumers.
What are the factors that play a vital role in our marketing strategies?
- Blog Posts - writing and publishing work in a branded company, blogs make us depict as expert hands and create an organic flow of traffic to our website. Moreover, they help us improve our business, by generating leads and better traffic to the website.
- E-books and white papers - generating ebooks and white papers help your website create long forms of communication with the visitor.
- Infographics are our contents that aim to visualize the contents rather than making the viewers read the whole thing.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social media marketing refers to marketing and advertising using various social media platforms.
Some of the commonly used platforms include;
- Facebook, Instagram
- Snap chat
- YouTube
What if you are new to the social media platform?
Don’t worry, tools like “HubSpot” can be used to connect multiple channels in one place. This will help you schedule as well as monitor your content for multiple channels much easier.
PAY PER CLICK (PPC)
PPC involves you paying a publisher every time somebody clicks on your ad. You don't pay a lot per click, however, PPC is a great method to drive traffic to your website.
Google Ads is the most common example of PPC. You can get your ad on top o a search result page.
Ever searched for something and found a couple of links having “Ad” written on the top left?
That is an example of PPC
Other channels where you can use PPC include:
- Paid ads on Facebook
- Twitter Ads campaigns
- Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn
AFFILIATE MARKETING
It is a performance-based advertising method, where one gets a commission for the promotion of other’s products or services on their website.
So, what are the types of marketing channels?
- Hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program
- Posting affiliate links from our social media accounts
Affiliate marketing is a cheeky way for both businesses and individuals to conduct business together. The online presence of an individual helps them sell the product for which they are rewarded in cash.
NATIVE ADVERTISING
‘Native advertising’ points to the advertisements that are primarily content-lead, and are featured on a platform along with other non-paid content.
Buzzfeed sponsored posts are a good example of native advertising. Social media advertising is also considered to be "native" by the new generation.
Facebook advertisements as well as Instagram advertising are examples of native advertising via social media, which is the best way to advertise in the present scenario.
MARKETING AUTOMATION
The term refers to the software, which automates our basic marketing operations. It helps us to do many marketing departments but automated.
What are such automated departments?
- Email newsletters allow us to automatically send emails to our subscribers. Moreover, it can make sure that your newsletters are going only to the people who are willing to see it.
- Social media post scheduling helps to grow your company’s presence on a social network. For this, you will need to post frequently. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your social media channels so that you can spend more time focusing on our strategy of the content.
- Lead-nurturing workflows Generation of leads, and converting those leads into customers, can be a long process.
However, we can automate this process by sending leads specific emails, and contents after they fit certain criteria. For example when they download and open an e-book.
- Campaign tracking and reporting - Marketing campaigns can include different types of people, emails, contents, webpages, phone calls, etc.
Marketing automation will help us sort everything we work on, by the campaign it is serving, and track the performance of that campaign.
E-MAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is one of the biggest ways used by companies as a way of communicating with their readers.
Email is also used to promote the content, discounts as well as events. Moreover, it used to direct people towards the website of the business.
What are the types of emails that you will use for marketing?
- Blog subscription newsletters.
- Follow-up emails to website visitors who have downloaded something.
- Welcoming emails to the costumers.
- Holiday promotions to program members.
- Tips or similar types of emails for customer handling.
ONLINE PR
Online PR is known as the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites.
Simply put, think of online PR as earning a reputation amongst the digital media
Here are the channels that can be used to maximize your PR efforts:
- Reporter outreach via social media
Talking to journalists on Twitter or any social networking site is a great way to earn media opportunities for your company.
If a well-known blog or author writes about all the good that your company has been doing, people are bound to notice you, in addition, to even buy from you.
- Engaging online reviews of your company
Engaging company reviews help you humanize your brand in addition to protecting your reputation.
Replying to the comments as well as reviews is a great way to build trust amongst your customers. Moreover, it shows that your company is active and listening to its customers.
