In simple words, Digital Marketing is the marketing of goods and services through the internet. Business uses different channels such as search engines, social media, email, and different sites to connect with present and planned clients.
Why digital marketing is important?
While traditional marketing may exist in print advertisements, telephone communication, or physical marketing, digital marketing can happen electronically and on the internet.
This implies there are various unlimited potential outcomes for brands including email, video, social media, or website-based marketing opportunities.
Since digital marketing has such a significant number of alternatives and strategies related to it, you can get innovative and explore a variety of marketing tactics on a budget.
With digital marketing, you can use devices like analytics dashboards to monitor the achievement and ROI of your campaign which is not possible in traditional marketing.
How business defines digital marketing?
Digital marketing is defined by the use of various digital strategies and channels to associate with customers where they invest quite a bit of their time online.
From the website itself to a business’s internet branding assets – digital advertisement, email marketing, online brochures, and many other strategies fall under the umbrella of “digital marketing.”
The best digital marketers have a clear image of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overall objectives. Depending upon the objectives of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a bigger campaign through the free and paid channels available to them.
Different Categories Under Digital Marketing
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Content Marketing
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Pay Per Click (PPC)
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. Email Marketing
7. Inbound Marketing
Here’s a quick summary of some of the most well-known digital marketing tactics and the channels associated with each one.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the way toward optimizing your website to “rank” higher in search engine results pages, which helps in increasing organic traffic to your website.
There are various ways to approach SEO to produce qualified traffic to your website. These include:
• On page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on the content that is present “on the page” when looking at a website. By researching keywords for their search volume and user intent, you can answer the questions for the visitors and rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Off page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all the activities that happen “off the page” when you are looking to optimize your website. “What type of activity you have not done on your website and could affect your ranking?” You may ask yourself.
The appropriate answer is inbound links, which are also known as backlinks. The more people link back to you will define how high you will rank for the keywords you care about.
By connecting with different people, writing guest posts for them and linking back to your website. This way you can acquire the backlinks you need to improve your website ranking and rank up on all the Search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Technical SEO: This is the type of SEO that focuses on the backend of your site, and how your pages are coded. Image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all included under technical SEO that can help in improving your website loading speed – a significant ranking factor according to search engines like Google.
Content Marketing
This term signifies the creation and promotion of content resources to generate brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers. The channels that can have an impact on your content marketing strategy include:
• Blog posts: Writing and posting articles on an organization blog encourages you to show your industry mastery and generate organic traffic for your business. This gives you more chances to convert website visitors into leads for your sales team.
• eBooks and whitepapers: eBooks, whitepapers, and similar long-structure help further in educating the visitors. It additionally enables you to exchange content for a reader’s contact data, generating leads for your organization and moving individuals through the buyer’s journey.
• Infographics: Sometimes, readers want you to show the information, not tell. Infographics are a type of visual content that enables website visitors to imagine a concept you want them to learn.
Social Media Marketing
This marketing strategy promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to build brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business. Below are the different channels in social media:
• Facebook.
• Twitter.
• LinkedIn.
• Instagram.
• Snapchat.
• Pinterest.
In case you’re new to social platforms, you can use tools like HubSpot to connect channels like Linkedin and Facebook in one place. You can also schedule your content for multiple channels by using different social media tools and monitor analytics from the same tool.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a strategy for driving visitors to your website by paying the publisher each time when someone clicks your ad.
One of the most widely recognized kinds of PPC is Google Ads, which enables you to pay for the top slot on Google’s search engine results pages at a value “per click” of the links you place. Different channels where you can use PPC include:
• Paid ads on Facebook: Here, user can pay for the video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the newsfeeds of individuals who is similar to your business’ audience.
• Twitter Ads Campaign: Here, customers can pay to put a series of post or profile badges on the news feeds of a specific audience, all devoted to achieving a particular objective for your business. This objective can be website traffic, Twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
• Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages straightforwardly to specific LinkedIn users dependent on their industry and background.
Affiliate Marketing
This is promotion-based advertising where you get a commission for promoting other person’s products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include:
• Hosting video advertisements through the YouTube Partner Program.
• Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.
Email Marketing
Organizations use email marketing as a method for communicating with their audience. Email is regularly used to promote content, events, and discounts, also to direct individuals toward the business’s website. The types of email that you can send in an email marketing campaign include:
• Blog Subscription newsletters.
• Follow-up emails to visitors who downloaded something from your website.
• Visitors welcome emails.
• Holiday promotions to loyalty program individuals.
• Tips or similar series of emails for client sustaining.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy wherein you attract, engage, and delight customers at each phase of the buyer’s journey.
You can use each of the digital marketing strategies listed above, all through an inbound marketing strategy, to make a user experience that works with the user, not against them. Here are some great examples of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing:
• Blogging versus pop-up ads
• Video marketing versus commercial advertising
• Email contact lists versus email spam
What does a digital marketer do?
Digital marketers are accountable for driving brand awareness and lead generation through all the digital channels – both free and paid. These channels incorporate social media, the company’s website, search engine rankings, email, ads, and blogs.
The digital marketers focus on different key performance indicators (KPI) for each channel so they can properly measure the organization’s performance over each channel.
A digital marketer who’s responsible for SEO measures their website’s “organic traffic” – of that traffic originating from website visitors who found a page of the business’ website through a Google search.
Digital marketing is done across many marketing roles today. In small organizations, one person may own many of the digital marketing strategies described above simultaneously.
In bigger organizations, these strategies have multiple specialists that each emphasize one or two digital marketing channels.
Here are examples of different digital marketing specialist:
SEO Manager
Important KPIs: Organic traffic
In Short, the SEO Manager must get the business or website to rank on Google. Using different tactics to search engine optimization, this individual may work directly with content writers to guarantee the content they produce performs well on Google – regardless of whether the organization also posts this content on social media.
Content Marketing Specialist
Important KPIs: Time spent on the page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel supporters
Content marketing specialist are the digital content makers. They keep track of the blogging calendar and think of a content strategy that includes video too.
These experts regularly work with individuals in a different department to guarantee the products and campaign the company launches are supported with promotional content on each digital channel.
Social Media Manager
Important KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares
The job of a social media manager is easy to conclude from the title, however, which social networks they manage for the organization relies upon the business.
Most importantly, social media managers build up a posting schedule for the organization’s written and visual content.
This manager may also work with the content marketing specialist to build up a strategy for different content to post on different social networks.
Does digital marketing work for all kinds of businesses?
Digital Marketing can work for any business and different industries. Regardless of what you sell, Digital Marketing still includes building out buyer personas to determine your audience’s needs and making valuable online content.
That doesn’t mean that all business should imply the same digital marketing strategy.
Business to Business (B2B) Digital Marketing
If your organization is business-to-business (B2B), your digital marketing efforts are probably going to be based on online lead generation, with the ultimate objective being for somebody to address a salesperson.
Hence, the job of your marketing strategy is to draw in and convert the quality leads for your salespeople through your website and supporting digital channels.
Beyond your website, you’ll presumably decide to concentrate your efforts on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is investing their time online.
Business to Consumer (B2C) Digital Marketing
If your organization is business-to-consumer (B2C), depending upon the value purpose of your products, then the objective of your digital marketing efforts will be to bring visitors to your website and have them become customers while never expecting to speak to a salesperson.
Consequently, you’re less likely to concentrate on ‘leads’ in their traditional sense, and bound to concentrate on building an accelerated buyer’s journey, from the moment somebody arrives on your website till they make a purchase.
This will frequently mean your product features in your content higher up in the marketing funnel than it may for a B2B business, and you may need to use a stronger call to action (CTA).
For B2C organizations, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.
How long will it take to show results from my content?
With digital marketing, you can expect results a lot quicker than you may with offline marketing because of fact it’s easier to measure ROI. However, it depends upon the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.
If you invest time building buyer personas to recognize the needs of your audience, and you focus around creating quality online content to attract and convert them, at that point, you’re probably going to see great results within the first six months.
If paid ad is a part of your digital marketing strategy, then the results come much faster – however, it’s recommended to concentrate on building your organic (or ‘free’) reach by using content, SEO, and social media for the long term.
What budget do I need for digital marketing?
Likewise, with anything, it truly depends upon what components of digital marketing you’re hoping to add to your strategy.
In case you’re concentrating on inbound strategies like SEO, social media, and content creation for a pre-existing website, the good news is you don’t require a big budget.
With inbound marketing, the main objective is to create high-quality content that your users will want to consume, which except if you’re intending to outsource the work, the main investment you’ll require is your time.
You can begin by hosting a website and creating quality content. For those with a low budget, you can get started using WordPress hosted on WP Engine and use a simple theme from StudioPress.
With outbound tactics like online ads and purchasing email lists, there are some expenses without any doubt. What it costs comes down to what sort of visibility you need to get as a result of the advertising.
For example, to execute PPC using Google Ads, you’ll bid against different organizations in your industry to show up at the top of Google’s search results for keywords related to your business. Depending upon the keyword competitiveness, this can be affordable, or very costly, which is the reason it’s a smart idea to build your organic reach, as well.