Digital marketing covers all marketing efforts that use the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with existing and prospective customers.
Digital marketing is the act of promoting and selling products and services by leveraging online marketing plans such as social media marketing, search marketing, and email marketing. It offers many options and strategies to get creative and experimental with a variety of marketing tactics on budget. With digital marketing, you can also use tools like analytics dashboards to monitor the success and return on investment of your campaigns more than you could with a traditional promotional content, such as a billboard or print advertisement.
Any business can define the digital marketing by the use of numerous digital tactics and various ways to connect with customers where they spend much of their time online. Digital advertising, email marketing, e-brochures etc. all fall under the category of digital marketing.
The best digital marketers are those who have clear and precise picture of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overextended goals and make their choices whether free or paid in their favor.
Digital marketing has a various channel that can be separated into online marketing channels and offline marketing channels like:
[1] Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-
This is the method of optimizing your website to "rank" on top in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic which your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include websites, blogs, and info-graphics. There are number of ways to approach SEO to generate the qualified traffic to your website:
On page SEO: It focuses on all of the content that exists "on the page" when looking at a website. By re-searching keywords to increase the volume and meaning, you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the search engines
Off page SEO: It focuses on all of the content that exists "off the page" when looking to optimize your website with the help of back links.
Technical SEO: It refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO, you can help search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problem.
[2] Content Marketing
Content Marketing refers to the creation and promotion of the content to generate awareness, growth of traffic, lead generation, and customers. The channels that play their part in your content marketing strategy are as follows:
Blog posts: Writing and publishing articles on a company website helps you demonstrate your industry expertise and generates organic search traffic for your business. This ultimately gives you more opportunities to convert website visitors into leads for your sales team.
E-book and whitepapers: E-books, whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps educate website visitors. It allows you to exchange content for a reader's contact information, generating leads for your company and moving people through the buyer's journey.
Info-graphics: Sometimes, readers want you to demonstrate, not tell. Info-graphics are a form of visual content that helps website visitors visualize a concept you want to help them learn.
[3] Social Media Marketing
This practice encourages your product and content on social media channels to increase product market and generate leads for your business. Some channels you can use in social media marketing include: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Snapchat, and PinInterest
If you're new to social platforms, you can use tools like HubSpot to connect channels like LinkedIn and Facebook in one place. This way, you can easily schedule content for multiple channels at once, and monitor analytics from the platform as well. On connecting social accounts for posting purposes, you can also integrate your inboxes of social media into HubSpot, so you can get your direct messages at one place.
[4] Pay per Click (PPC)
Pay per Click is a technique of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. Most commonly used PPC is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google's search engine results pages at a price "per click" of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC include:
Paid Ads on Facebook: Here, users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the newsfeeds of people matching your business's audience.
Twitter Ads campaigns: Here, users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges to the news feeds of a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplish a specific goal for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.
[5] Affiliate Marketing
This is performance-based advertising, where you receive commission for promoting someone else's products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include- Hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program; Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.
[6] Native Advertising
Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be "native" Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising are the good examples.
[7] Marketing Automation
It refers to the software that serves you automate basic marketing operations. Many marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks they would otherwise do manually, such as:
Email newsletters: Email automation doesn't just allow you to automatically send emails to your subscribers. It can also help you shrink and expand your contact list as needed so your newsletters are only going to the people who want to see them in their inboxes.
Social media post scheduling: If you want to grow your organization's presence on a social network, you need to post frequently. This makes manual posting a bit unruly process. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your social media channels, so you can spend more time focusing on content strategy.
Lead-nurturing workflows: Generating leads, and converting those leads into customers, can be a long process. You can automate that process by sending leads specific emails and content once they fit certain criteria, such as when they download and open an e-book.
Campaign tracking and reporting: Marketing campaigns can include a ton of different people, emails, content, web pages, phone calls, and more. Marketing automation can help you sort everything you work on by the campaign it's serving, and then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress all of these components make over time.
[8] Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business's website. The types of emails you might send in an email marketing campaign include:
Blog subscription newsletters.
Follow-up emails to website visitors who previously downloaded something.
Customer welcome emails.
Holiday promotions to loyalty program members.
Tips or similar series emails for customer nurturing.
[9] Online Public Relations (PR)
Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It's much like traditional PR, but in the online space. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:
Reporter outreach via social media: Talking to journalists on Twitter, for example, is a great way to develop a relationship with the press that produces earned media opportunities for your company.
Engaging online reviews of your company: When someone reviews your company online, whether that review is good or bad, your instinct might be not to touch it. On the contrary, engaging company reviews helps you humanize your brand and deliver powerful messaging that protects your reputation.
Engaging comments on your personal website or blog: Similar to the way you'd respond to reviews of your company, responding to the people who are reading your content is the best way to generate productive conversation around your industry.
[10] Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to a marketing methodology wherein you attract, engage, and delight customers at every stage of the buyer's journey. You can use every digital marketing tactic listed above, throughout an inbound marketing strategy, to create a customer experience that works with the customer, not against them. Here are some classic examples of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing.
Blogging vs. pop-up ads.
Video marketing vs. commercial advertising.
Email contact lists vs. email spam.