What is Included in Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the most commonly thrown around word these days, but what does it mean? In a nutshell, it is an umbrella term used for engagement and marketing activities done through the internet. It helps you get noticed, generate leads, and turn them to customers.
Digital Marketing 101: What Is Digital Marketing About?
Digital Marketing is the most important form of marketing today because it is everywhere. To gain an idea of how pervasive it is, we’ll just have to look at the average U.S. consumer who receives more than 10,000 brand messages a day.
There are various forms of digital marketing in today’s fast-changing scenario. However, not every marketer knows about how to leverage the power of the holistic digital marketing experience.
Here, we will take a look at the most important ways of conducting digital marketing with the help of a comprehensive beginner’s guide.
Inbound Marketing
According to Hubspot, “The inbound methodology is the method of growing your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.”
Inbound marketing includes various methods of pull marketing – blogs, content marketing, SEO, events, social media, etc. – to spread brand awareness and find new business.
It can be applied in three ways.
Attract: Draw the attention of people with valuable and relevant content so that they want to engage with you.
Engage: Offer ideas and solutions that address their goals and pain points so that they buy from you.
Delight: Provide support and help whenever needed to empower customers.
When you empower customers, they share the story with others, thereby promoting brand awareness. It also helps you attract new prospects to your business and create a self-sustaining loop.
Search Engine Optimization
Did you know that the website with the first organic position on Google mobile SERPs has a 31.35% clickthrough rate? Have you ever wondered how does a website get there?
The answer lies in SEO.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a principal source of directing traffic to your website. The process involves optimizing websites with relevant keywords, landing pages, invaluable content, and easy navigation to help the website appear at the top of search engine results.
SEO is one of the best digital marketing channels to invest in, as it has been found that leads have a 14.6% close rate as opposed to a meager 1.7% for outbound leads.
SEO also acts as a gateway to various other digital marketing strategies. Since it drives organic traffic to your site, it has higher relevancy when compared to Ads. This is because people generally trust organic search results more.
Pay Per Click
An umbrella term used for online paid Ads pay per click advertising is a method of advertising where you pay every time a user clicks on your Ad.
PPC is one of the best forms of advertising. Paid Ads have been found to have an 11.38% CTR on Google. Additionally, 75% of people are of the opinion that paid search Ads make finding information on a website or search engine easier.
There are many types of paid Ads, but there are two that are the most common and bring the best results: paid Ads and display Ads.
1. Banner Ads – Display Network Ads
Display Ads are a kind of PPC Ad that can be used to get through to people who might be interested in your offerings. These Ads typically comprise an image along with a text and appear on the partner websites of Google.
2. Search Ads (Google AdWords search Ads)
The most common type of paid Ads, search Ads, are usually seen in SERPs. As the name indicates, these Ads appear on the top and bottom position of Google’s search results page. These Ads are very easily distinguishable because they are tagged with a small subtext on the left of the URL that reads Ads. Paid Ads don’t contain visuals and are all text.
Social Media Marketing (Organic + Ads)
The latest addition to the digital marketing landscape, social media marketing involves marketing through social media platforms. With the help of social media marketing, you can reach out to and market your services and products to your target audience on social media.
Social media marketing is considered as quite a hit among marketers. Almost 73% of marketers believe that SMM has either been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business. It’s not surprising to believe that. Facebook, the biggest social media giant, has more than 2.45 billion active users. Twitter, on the other hand, has 330 million active users. With a target audience as wide as this, SMM is undoubtedly a goldmine for marketers.
SMM involves organic and paid promotion strategies to connect with and engage your desired audience. Brands use images, videos, text, pins, hashtags, stories, etc. to engage target audiences, increase brand awareness, gather leads, and convert them.
Content Marketing
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:
“A marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
In digital marketing, since time immemorial, the content has been said to be king. If you are just about getting into digital marketing, and you want your efforts to bear fruit, you will have to be on top of content marketing.
Content marketing is a marketing initiative that focuses on making, producing, and distributing relevant and valuable content consistently to attract customers. According to Aberdeen Group, companies that create novel content consistently see a YoY growth that is 7.8x more than those who don’t.
Content marketing focuses on building brand value. It is used to convey offerings and relevant guidance to users from different niches. It is used to keep audiences engaged from the time they are introduced to your product to the time they are converted into a customer, creating a likelihood that product viewers today will become buyers tomorrow.
Email Marketing
Here’s an unbelievable stat about email marketing. For every dollar spent behind it, email marketing generates a 4400% RoI. It comes as no surprise that it is used by as many as 82% of B2B and B2C companies.
Optinmonster defines email marketing as:
“Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to prospects and customers. Effective marketing emails convert prospects into customers and turn one-time buyers into loyal, raving fans.”
Despite social media’s rampant rise and steep growth in the number of unsolicited spam emails, email marketing is still the most efficient way to rear leads and convert them into buyers.
A clearly-defined email marketing scheme has a 40 times higher chance to capture a customer than Twitter and Facebook campaigns combined.
A well-defined email marketing campaign involves using custom emails to engage prospective buyers, build a connection with them, and then inform them of your offerings while subtly asking them to try/buy it.
Affiliate Marketing
Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income probably defined affiliate marketing the best. He says:
“Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.”
Did you know that 84% of publishers and 81% of brands use affiliate marketing?
In affiliate marketing, the responsibilities of product marketing and creation are divided among parties. It leverages the capabilities of a group of individuals to create a more efficient marketing strategy while sharing the profits with the contributors. It usually involves three parties: the product creators, the affiliate or advertiser, and the consumer.
In this process, the affiliate looks for a product or service that they enjoy, and then promote it to earn a share of the profit from every sale that they make. The sales are tracked through the help of affiliate links.
App Store Optimization
App store optimization involves enhancing app visibility within native app stores like Play Store and the App Store and also improving app conversion rates.
Apart from ranking high in search results, ASO also includes paying attention to the clickthrough rate (CTR). This means that you have to persuade users to click on your app listing after they find it.
The central activity of ASO is an expert resource application that’s concerned with upgrading mobile application rank within the app store. Apart from that, its complementary goals also include:
- Higher brand exposure
- Favorable app ratings and reviews
- Improved engagement
- Supplemental channel diversification
Conclusion
Digital marketing strategies don’t follow a one-size-fits-all approach. With the help of this guide, you can decide which type of marketing is best suited to sell your product or services. Determine the right channel, the right strategy, and the right time to target your audience. If you encounter any difficulties in implementing your strategy, you can just as well contact professional digital marketers to help you devise a strategy that works for you. With the right partner, you can also get a roadmap of which marketing channels are the most efficient for your business.
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