Ayush Verma.
Ayush VermaDigital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.
Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it’s digital marketing.
Digital marketing is often compared to “traditional marketing” such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail. Oddly, television is usually lumped in with traditional marketing.
Some Known Facts
Did you know nine-in-ten U.S. adults go online on a daily basis? Not only that, 41% are online “almost constantly.” As a marketer, it’s important to take advantage of the digital world with an online advertising presence, by building a brand, providing a great customer experience that also brings more potential customers and more, with a digital strategy.
A digital marketing strategy allows you to leverage different digital channels–such as social media, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and email marketing–to connect with existing customers and individuals interested in your products or services. As a result, you can build a brand, provide a great customer experience, bring in potential customers, and more.
Why Digital Marketing is Important?
Any type of marketing can help your business thrive. However, digital marketing has become increasingly important because of how accessible digital channels are. In fact, there were 5.45 billion internet users globally as of July 2024.
From social media to text messages, there are many ways to use digital marketing tactics in order to communicate with your target audience. Additionally, digital marketing has minimal upfront costs, making it a cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses
Types Of Digital Marketing?
• Affiliate Marketing
With the increased prominence of online marketing, affiliate marketing — also known as influencer marketing — has become popular among many organizations in bridging the gap between consumers and organizations. But what is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing utilizes the ever-growing popularity of industry experts and social media influencers. In working with these third-party influencers, your organization will collaborate to promote your products or services for compensation. In collaboration, influencers will engage their audience with posts, blogs or videos to bring in more business for your organization and create new leads.
• Content Marketing
Content marketing uses storytelling and information sharing to increase brand awareness. Ultimately, the goal is to have readers take action toward becoming a customer, such as requesting more information, signing up for an email list or making a purchase. “Content” can refer to blog posts, resources like white papers and e-books, digital videos, podcasts and much more.
In general, it should first and foremost provide value to the consumer — not just advertise the brand or try to make a sale. Content marketing is about building a sustainable, trusting relationship with your customers that can potentially lead to many sales over time, not just a single transaction.
Content marketing works in symbiosis with other types of digital marketing: It is a way to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) into fresh website content, and the content created can be shared as social media posts and in email marketing publications. Looking at the analytics for your content marketing can tell you a lot about your customers:
• What are they looking for when they land on your site?
• What kinds of content make them stay on the site longer and keep looking around?
• What kinds make them lose interest and navigate away?
Unlike a method such as PPC, content marketing is a long-term strategy. Over time, marketers build up a library of content (text, video, podcasts, etc.) that will continue to bring users to the site via search engines.
• Email Marketing
Even with the emergence of social media, mobile applications and other channels, email is still one of the most effective marketing techniques, Rogers said. It can be part of a content marketing strategy, providing value to consumers and, over time, converting an audience into customers.
Email marketing pros not only know how to create compelling campaigns, but they also understand optimal audience outreach and are skilled at analyzing customer interactions and data, and making strategic decisions based on that data
Email marketing software can offer many different analytical measures, but two that marketers are always striving to improve are the open rate — the percentage of recipients who opened the email — and the click-through rate — the number of recipients who opened the email and clicked on a link in the email.
Marketing Analytics
Today, analytics allow marketers to track user behavior at a highly detailed level:
· How many times they click on a link
· How much time they spend on a web page
· How often they open emails and much more
But the vast amount of information available about digital marketing performance can feel like drinking from a fire hose, and marketers must be able to truly understand what the data mean and how they should inform strategy.
Not only does this allow marketers to learn what is successful with consumers and adapt their marketing messages moving forward, it also means they can demonstrate their value to the company. Understanding all of this data and using it to make strategic decisions is an important part of a digital marketer’s work — and one that sets them apart from their traditional counterparts.
There are many tools available for measuring the success of digital marketing campaigns, and many marketers will use some combination of these tools, depending on their needs and their audience. One of the most used tools for marketing analytics is Google Analytics, which can be customized in nearly endless ways to measure:
· How your site is performing
· Which keywords are bringing users to your site
· How users are navigating through your website and much more
Having good, accurate analytics and the know-how to interpret them can help marketers “fail fast,” quickly cutting campaigns that aren’t working and building better campaigns around concepts that have a proven track record of success. Over time, you won’t just be using analytics to measure your campaigns — the analytics will also inform and improve your campaigns.
• Mobile Marketing
This digital marketing type is focused on reaching your target audience on their smartphone or tablet. Mobile marketing reaches people through text messages, social media, websites, email and mobile applications. Marketers can tailor offers or special content to a geographic location or time, such as when a customer walks into a store or enters an event.
• Pay-per-click (PPC)
Pay-per-click refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning that once you are no longer paying, the ad no longer exists. Like SEO, PPC is a way to increase search traffic to a business online.
Pay-per-click can refer to the advertisements you see at the top and sides of a search results page, browsing the web, watching YouTube videos and using mobile apps.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The goal of SEO is to get a business to rank higher in Google search results, ultimately increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website.
To accomplish this, SEO marketers research words and phrases consumers are using to search for information online and use those terms in their own content. According to leading SEO software company Moz’s “Beginners Guide to SEO,” SEO encompasses many elements, from the words on your web pages to the way other sites link to you on the web to how your website is structured.
So, what are some things that can improve a site’s SEO? It’s important to understand that one of the things that makes SEO challenging is that the answer to this question always depends on search engines and their most current algorithm.
• Social Media Marketing
This includes everything a business does via social media channels. Just about everyone is familiar with social media, but marketers must approach social with an integrated and strategic approach. Social media marketing goes far beyond simply creating posts for social channels and responding to comments.
To be effective, efforts must be coordinated and consistent rather than an afterthought. To help keep posts consistent, there are many online tools available to automate and schedule social media posts, although marketers only should use automation as a tool, not a “set it and forget it” solution. Users will figure it out quickly if there is no real person behind the posts.
Social media marketers should not be in a silo separate from other marketing functions. Social marketers need to work with the company’s wider marketing team to coordinate their message across all platforms, online and off, so that every part of the brand is telling the same story.
A crucial part of social media marketing is analytics. Social media marketers must also be savvy at analyzing the performance of their posts and creating strategies based on that data. It’s important to measure how well your current social media posts are performing before continuing to implement your new strategy.
