What is it?

Why is it important?

How to make the best use of it?

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is a subcategory of marketing that uses digital technology to position and sells products or services, mainly on the Internet and mobile phones.

Various digital marketing techniques are:

• Search Engine Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Mobile Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing

One by one we will look into different techniques, but before that let’s discuss why it has become so important in today’s century.

Why is the importance of Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing, in the 21st century, is the need of the hour for businesses to be in the market, beat the competition and position themselves ahead of others.

There are some specific reasons why digital marketing has become so important for the businesses, some of them are as follows:

1. Brand building – The brand building is what every business tries to achieve for long term sustainable growth and digital marketing helps develop your brand equity by promoting it on several platforms and keeping your visitors engaged by having interesting informative content.

2. Better Exposure – Reach thousands of prospects by switching to digital marketing campaigns with a small investment. Be found at the platform where your audience is looking for you. A long term result can be achieved by using digital marketing. 

3. Cost-efficient – You can easily plan a successful online marketing strategy within your budget by the use of several digital marketing techniques. These can be implemented at a very lesser price compared to other advertising channels like radio, TV and more. A well-strategized and well-managed digital marketing campaign can help you reach out to a large audience on a very less budget.

4. Saves Time – Once you have applied the correct strategies, digital marketing provides real-time results within no time. Time is precious for all of us, so why even waste a nanosecond. Digital Marketing allows you to increase traffic to your site, optimize the conversion rate, analyze the behaviour of the visitors, take necessary steps & finally complete the objective or goal.

5. Better ROI – There are several platforms like newspapers, radio, and television where businesses invest to run campaigns so that they can reach out to their audience to promote their product/service. The cost to run the campaigns is way too high compared to the amount that is invested on digital platforms. The platforms such as newspapers, and radios do not have metrics to measure the performance of the campaign, hence it becomes difficult to optimize the performance. Whereas digital marketing campaigns give a better return on the amount invested and further it gives you the option to customize your campaign to get the desired result.

6. Targeted reach – Digital marketing platforms give businesses a customizable option to reach out to their audience based on their interests, behaviour, demographics, etc. Based on the analytics of the campaign you can optimize your campaign to get better results. If a business wants to target a particular set of audiences for their product/service, there is an option in different digital marketing platforms to do so. 

7. Customer-Centric – These days the audience is very precise about what they are interested in, they will spare time for something when it is related to them and it is interesting. Considering these as the most important factor, a digital marketer can take advantage of it and target their audience and give exactly what they need. Digital marketing can be advantageous in this perspective and provide the content in the form of blogs or videos what exactly their audience wants. 

How to make the best use of Digital Marketing?

As mentioned above there are various techniques of digital marketing. Different techniques can be applied to different types of businesses/industries. Understanding the goal of the business, a digital marketer should plan & implement a relevant technique to get the desired result. 

Many times more than one technique can be used for one business to reach a goal. This is called integrated digital marketing, where multiple techniques are integrated to form a cohesive online approach for the business. The individual technique doesn’t have a huge impact on its own, but when used in conjunction, a business can have a more influential online presence.

Now let us look into various techniques of digital marketing

1. SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

Search Engine Marketing involves the promotion of websites, apps, blogs, and videos to increase visibility over search engines through paid advertising.

Initially, the term “search engine marketing” was an umbrella term for the process of gaining both paid and organic search traffic. Over time, the term “SEM”, or Search Engine Marketing, is solely used for paid activities.

These paid advertisements can run based on different types of campaigns, which includes

1. Search Campaign – Campaign based on keyword searches to reach customers interested in your product or service. This is to get more sales with text or call ads that show near search results of Google.com, on Google search partners’ sites, and more.

2. Display Campaign –  Campaign showing visually striking ads across the web (online, in-app, in-store), to drive in traffic or increase awareness.

3. Shopping Campaign – Campaign used by e-commerce companies or retailers to promote their inventory, and boost traffic to their website to find better-qualified leads. Here it shows a photo of the product along with details like title, price, store name, etc.

4. Video Campaign – Campaign to reach out to the maximum audience through video content and encourage them to take action after video plays.

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is a practice of improving visibility and increasing the traffic of the website organically, both in terms of quality & quantity and ranking on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). SEO is done for websites, applications, blogs, videos, etc. SEO gives an organic result to the user

There are various ways to approach SEO for improving visibility and generating traffic. It includes

1. On-page SEO &
2. Off-Page SEO

What is On-Page SEO?

On-Page SEO is a process of optimizing the web pages of the website to rank the pages higher on search engines so that it gets visibility and drive in traffic to the page.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-Page SEO is the activity outside the website to impact the ranking within the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Various activities include link building, social media management, directory submission, article submission, etc. Apart from improving the ranking, it also helps in getting visibility and building the reputation of the website.

3. Social Media Marketing

It is a practice of promoting the brand or content on social media channels by establishing engagement with the visitors. It helps in increasing awareness, driving traffic to the website, build an image of the brand. Various popular social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

Most social media platforms provide two ways to use the platform to promote the business and manage it. One is the organic way, which is widely used to engage the followers by regularly posting some updates about the business or industry. Another is the inorganic way or paid ads, where pages or posts or events are promoted to reach out to the audience and drive traffic to the business page and the website. Social Media Marketing has become one of the most important digital marketing strategies for today’s business.

4. Content Marketing

Content marketing refers to the creation and promotion of content to generate traffic, generate leads, brand awareness, and engage customers.

Contents are in the form of blogs, videos, ebooks, whitepapers, infographics, articles, newsletters, case studies, podcasts, magazines, etc.

Creating interesting and informative content and marketing efficiently helps to develop a site into a trusted authority in your field, increase your site conversion rates, rank higher in the search engines for competitive keywords, build a permanent source of targeted links and traffic and generate lots of leads and sales. It enables brands to showcase the subject matter expertise and helps to build a relationship with the customers. It helps in influencing the customer and sets you apart from your competitors. Optimized content helps in improving SEO efforts.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is the act of sending messages, typically to a group of people, using email.

Emails are often used to promote content or send a transactional message to the customer based on the customer’s action with the company. It is more effective than social media for customer acquisition. It is an action-oriented strategy where messages can be tailored as per the need to establish communication with the customer.

There are various free & paid email marketing service provider which provides both the services, i.e. promotional & transactional. Some of the well-known providers are Zoho Campaign, MailChimp, GetResponse, AWeber, sendlane, Sendinblue, etc.

6. Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing is a marketing technique to reach out to a specific audience on their smartphones or tablets. Mobile Marketing can be through websites, email, SMS, MMS, social media or mobile applications.

Mobile is disrupting the way people engage with brands. Everything that can be done on desktop computers is now available on mobile. More than 80% of internet users own smartphones.

Effective mobile marketing strategies can result in a very fruitful outcome for businesses.

There are various strategies for mobile marketing: SMS marketing, MMS marketing, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Push notifications, App-based marketing,   mobile marketing, 

7. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is an online sales tactic that let businesses increase sales by targeting their audience with the help of affiliates. Affiliates promote the product or service through blogs, websites, social media, and emails, and once the product is sold, they earn a commission for it. 

Mainly there are four parties involved in this industry. Merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), Networks (it contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of payments), Publisher (also known as ‘affiliate’) & Customer.

Do you have any clarification about the topic? Let me know in the comments below.

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