The Ultimate Guide of Digital Marketing
Things you should know about Digital Marketing and its different departments
Today, the internet has less cost even a burger of McDonald’s. This is the main reason that users of the internet are increasing day by day. About 5% of users increase in the last three years who continue using internet services. (according to Pew Research). Or we can say that people changed their way to buy and sell things online, which means offline marketing isn’t that effective before It was.
Marketing is all about connecting the right audience at the right time to you. Present-day, the internet makes things easy for the marketers, as they can directly interact with that audience who really have an interest in that specific genre. People spend a lot of time on the internet, all you need to show up your promotions at the right time when they looking for one.
What is Digital Marketing?
All tools or marketing efforts in which we use any electronic device or internet comes under digital marketing. From the business view, digital marketing tools like search engines, social media, email, or other blogs, websites to interact with your current or prospective audience.
Role of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has way more opportunities to promote your brands through email video, social media, or any website while traditional marketing stuck into print ads, phone communication, or physical marketing. You can interact with more customers online rather than going door to door marketing.
Before you go in, I would like to share my personal experience. Nothing works without any strategy and when it comes to marketing then there should be any strategy. Otherwise, you will end up with a down graph. You should have a social media presence or digital ad strategy if you can’t or don’t have a blog or website. In short words, you need to think out of the box as a business owner to leave your presence. You have to keep learning new things and tricks used for digital marketing.
Because digital marketing doesn’t come with any strategies associated with it. You have to be creative and keep experimenting with your ideas to promote your business online. Only your experience can help you to learn new things. You can try various tactics while being in your budget. The analytics dashboard can prove helpful for you to monitor your success and ROI with almost accurate results.
How does digital marketing present a business?
There are many ways by which digital marketing can go which includes — digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures and there are a lot of tactics that can be used in digital marketing. It's all about spending the time with customers through various channels to connect. A business website is itself an online branding asset.
Digital marketers have a clear vision of their marketing strategies and have a good idea about its success rate. Larger campaigns can be supported marketers by free and paid channels. The success of the strategy depends on the marketer campaign. How they initiate and run a campaign? Which tools and tactics they used for promotions?
For example, A content marketer can write up a series of blog posts whose main goal to generate leads and attract the audience towards. The company’s social media marketer can help by promoting these blog posts through social media accounts by paying and organic posts. Or email marketer can create an email campaign to send those are permanent customers with more detailed information about the company and their product. This is how digital marketers work to run a campaign.
Types of digital marketing
· Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
· Email Marketing
· Content Marketing
· Social Media Marketing
· Pay per click (PPC)
· Native Advertising
· Marketing Automation
· Online PR
· Sponsored Content
· Inbound Marketing
Here is a quick introduction to some of the most common digital marketing channels and tactics attached to each other.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing your blogs, websites, and infographics to “rank” on the first search result page of the search engine to increase the organic reach and drive more traffic to your website. There are a number of ways to optimize your website by doing SEO to generate immense traffic for your blog or website which includes: -
- On-Page SEO — It is all focused on the content available on the web page that you can read. It starts with the keyword research and its volume. You can search the questions having keywords and answer them to get on first-page search engine results.
- Off-page SEO — It starts with the optimization of a website and all other activities that do off-page. Backlinks or inbound links are helpful and first come in off-page SEO. The more links you have on a high authority website, your website also gets recognization from the search engine faster. It is all about the blog or website authority that increased by backlinks. You can create backlinks by guest posting on the various high authority websites or using any other trick to successfully leave a backlink over there. But guest posting is a very effective way to drive traffic and easily identify from SERPs.
- Technical SEO — The term technical defines its value in blogging or website. It mainly focuses on the coding of pages, image compression, CSS file, and structured data optimization. These all are technical SEO and responsible for the loading speed of your website which is very important to drive more traffic to your blog. If your blog or website loading speed is slow, then visitors will exit and search for another option. While if you have good loading speed, then they might stay for a few minutes and explore more information or blog posts.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a very common tool that marketers use to communicate directly to their customers. It is mostly used to promote discounts, content, and tell them about upcoming events or drive peoples toward their business website. Here are the few types of emails sent in an email marketing campaign:-
· Send download links to registered visitors to download something.
· Blog subscription newsletters. (You might get many of them)
· New customer or member welcome email.
· Holiday promotion or discount to paid members of the program.
· Tips or suggesting something similar via email for customer nurturing.
Content Marketing
Content marketing includes creation and promotion for the purpose to increase traffic growth, brand awareness, lead generation, and audience. Here are some ways which included in content marketing strategy:-
· Blog Posts: writing a promotional blog post and publish on the company website helps you to give an overview of the company and its vision. It will help you to grow awareness about brands in the market and among customers as well. The ultimate goal of content is to turn visitors into customers for the company.
· Ebooks and whitepapers: All form of content like ebooks, whitepapers, and similar long-form articles helps you to show the vision of your company. The content also helps you to get the contact information and generating the leads for the sales team to turn them into buyers.
· Infographics: Infographic is a form of content in which you show the actual vision rather than writing something. Sometimes, readers want to see more about your idea more than reading it.
Social Media Marketing
This marketing strategy will help the business or content to be noticed on social media handles to increase brand awareness, traffic, and generate more leads for the business. These social media channels are:
· Snapchat
You can promote your content with more success rate on these platforms and monitor the analytics time to time accurately.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a more effective and efficient way for new marketers to drive more traffic for your business. You will pay to publisher every time when your ad got clicked by visitors. One of the common types of PPC is Google Ads, that allows you to pay on the top slots on Google’s search engine results page on the price of “per click”. Other platforms that use PPC method:
· Paid ads on Facebook: You can use any customized video, image post, or slideshow that will be published by Facebook in the newsfeed of peoples who have an interest in the same business or product.
· Twitter Ads campaigns: Users will pay for a series of posts or profile badges to appear in the newsfeeds for the specific audience. The goal could be to drive more traffic, more twitter follows, or even app downloads.
· Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: On this platform, users will able to send direct messages to the specific Linkedin users who come from the same industry or background.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is basically promoting the content with nonpaid content on the platform. Buzzfeed is a good example of such type of advertising. But many other marketers consider social media advertising as “native” — Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising are good examples of it.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation actually referred for software used for marketing to make many basic things easy for marketing. There are many repetitive tasks that can quickly be done by software rather than going manual.
· Email newsletters: It will not help you to prepare and send the email newsletter to your subscribers but can help you expand and shrink the contact list of those who want to see those promotions in their inboxes.
· Social media post scheduling: Sometimes it is not possible to sign in and publish the post one by one. So, to be noticed on the social media platform, you have to be consistent about that. You can schedule your post about time and date to publish. It will be automatically published at that specific time you will schedule that particular post. So, in that meantime, you can actually more focus on your other or upcoming content.
· Lead-nurturing workflows: This process got a much workload and hard to do manually on time. So, it is a long process of generating leads, converting those into customers. You can automate few processes like sending predefined emails and content once they got to fit into certain criteria, such as send an email when your customer download and open your ebook.
· Campaign tracking and reporting: prepare a report on the response of thousands of people's emails, content, web pages, phone calls, and more seems impossible. But marketing automation sorts all things just in a few minutes and give you an accurate report of the campaign. Also, you can track the currently running campaign reports.
Online PR
This practice is almost the same as traditional PR but in online space. Online PR is all about earned online coverage with blogs, publications, and other online content-based websites. Various channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts:
· Reporter outreach via social media: You can get into interviews with journalists on social media platforms to get interact and to get into the notice of the audience. It will help you to develop a good relationship with your followers on social media handles.
· Engaging online reviews of your company: When you got reviewed by someone online whether it's good or bad, it leaves a sign of your brand on their mind. Get your company reviewed to help you to increase the reputation of your brand.
· Engaging comments on your personal website or blog: Responding to the peoples are the getting interest to your company. By responding to their comments, you are actually building a bond between you two. So, it will generate a productive conversation about your company around.
Sponsored Content
As a brand, you will pay another firm or company to promote content to generate more leads to create a buzz about your company in the market. This is a very common kind of marketing stunt today to create a high buzz before launching any product in the market.
Influencer marketing is another popular type of sponsored content. The brand contacts to an influencer to publish posts and videos related to the company on social media handles. Another way to sponsored content is to highlight topics, service, or brand in any blog post or article about your brand.
Inbound marketing
This type of marketing method is all about to attract, engage, and delight customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. You can also use the various tactics of digital marketing discussed above in inbound marketing strategy, to make your customer experience good not worst. Here are a few classic examples of inbound marketing vs traditional marketing:
· Video marketing vs commercial advertising
· Blogging vs pop-up ads
· Email contact list vs email spam
Work of a Digital Marketer
Digital marketers are in charge to raise your brand awareness and attract audiences throughout all digital channels by means of both free and paid. These channels include the company’s own website or blog, social media handles, search engine rankings, email, display of advertising.
They usually concentrate on the different Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for every channel so they can measure the current performance of the company. For example, the SEO marketer will focus on the traffic comes from search engine results and other sources.
Here are the different specialists in digital marketing:
SEO Manager
Main KPIs: Organic traffic
The main aim of SEO mangers to increase the rank of website or blog on google search ranking. This person might directly with the content creators to make sure that content is good enough to rank on Google. Even, if the company needs to publish content on social media.
Content Marketing Specialist
Main KPIs: Overall blog traffic, time on page, Youtube channel subscribers
These marketers need to work in a creative way and even have to link with other departments to ensure the products and campaigns the business going to launch. They have to work earlier on the promotions before any product launch and even after the launch of the product. These are specialist digital content creators. They need to keep tracking the blogging calendar and prepare a strategy that includes videos as well.
Social Media Manager
Main KPIs: Follows, Impression, Shares
The social media manager’s main aim to develop your reputation on social media handles by increasing your reach to peoples and making posts to get more impressions. They will manage your posting schedule to go through the content of the post before publishing. This person also can work with the content marketing specialist to grow more increase in impressions.
Marketing Automation Coordinator
Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate
The coordinator of marketing automation helps to choose and manage the software that allows all marketing team members to understand customer’s behavior and see the growth of business in real-time.
I tried to cover almost everything related to digital marketing. I am planning to come up soon with more posts about digital marketing. But it will depend on the performance of this particular post. Let me know your reviews in response to this one.