What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital channels such as search engines of Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Facebook, websites, social media, email, and mobile application.

It’s referred to all forms of online marketing efforts. Digital marketing isn’t about advertising; it’s about reaching the right customers at the right time with correct information.

Online marketing is far the most important segment of digital marketing. As traditional channels like TV and radio become less valuable. Online marketing has taken up bigger and bigger segments of companies’ marketing budgets.

Traditional marketing focused primarily on new customer acquisition, but digital marketing is highly active throughout the entire conversion process.

Digital marketing, as a result, designates the set of strategies to be implemented on digital media in order to optimize:-

• Acquisition and retention of new customers
• Promotion of products and services
• Development of brand awareness and branding

Digital marketing mostly covers up marketing applications linked to the traditional Internet. It’s also related to mobile phones, tablets, GPS and other applications and connected objects.

Mobile marketing (mobile websites + mobile applications) is becoming more and more important.

Digital marketing can reach its target through digital media in a personalized way with the targeting of the actions to be carried out online.

Digital marketing has three characteristics: the use of digital media, access to customers in the digital environment and interacting with customers.

#13 Important Aspects of Digital Marketing:-

# Website Marketing – A website is a crucial part of every digital marketing campaign. It’s a powerful channel and a medium to execute other online marketing campaigns.

Your website would represent your brand, product or services in the best possible way. It must be fast, mobile-friendly and easy to use.

Your next step is to come up with a digital marketing strategy and promote your website and content to getting more traffic and customers.

# Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – It’s the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the website appears high on the search engine result pages (SERPs).

It’s the techniques of optimizing your internet website to rank better in search engine results pages by growing the number of natural website visitors.

The SEO channels encompass websites, blogs, infographics, and content marketing. It systematically browses the web and sends back information on the millions of browsed pages.

This data is then indexed through the search engine’s algorithm in order to provide relevant results when a user searches for a given keyphrase.

# Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – It’s related to SEO in that they both deal with digital marketing outreach on search engines like Google and Bing.

SEO refers to internal, organic website optimization while SEM is known as advertising through a paid media budget.

SEO helps your website traffic increase through natural algorithm means and SEM earns traffic through the process of purchasing ads on search engines.

The paid advertising or search engine marketing where a brand has paid Google to display their ads at the top of the page for a specific keyword.

In Google AdWords, you can choose the location and other factors to improve the efficiency of your paid advertising campaign. This form of SEM is called pay per click (PPC).

# Social Media Marketing (SMM) – It’s the process of acquiring attention and website traffic through social media platforms.

SMM refers to both organic and paid digital marketing efforts on social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

This exercise promotes your logo and content on social media channels to growth logo awareness, force traffic and generates leads for your enterprise.

Social media marketing is one of the main branches that digital marketing focuses as its using platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.

It’s a platform which provides the most direct, fastest and widespread connectivity between the brand and its customers.

# Affiliate Marketing – In affiliate marketing, you promote other people’s products and you get a commission every time you make a sale or a lead.

This channel will include hosting video advertisement through the YouTube partner program, and posting affiliate hyperlinks in your content.

# Native Advertising – It refers to classified ads that are typically content material led and featured on a platform along with different, non-paid content material.

Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising are instances of native ads.

# Marketing Automation – It refers back to the software program that serves to automate your simple advertising operations.

It’s become increasingly important to digital marketing where companies are trying to reach a broader space of potential customers.

Many advertisers can automate repetitive activities with email newsletters, social media scheduling, contact listing updating, lead-nurturing workflows, and campaign tracking and reporting, etc.

# Email Marketing – It’s the process of sending direct marketing communications to users via email. It’s generally considered to have ROI of any digital marketing channel.

It’s a much direct method than the other forms. The email has been around for decades and people check their emails at least a few times a day.

It’s the most direct way to reach customers. We can analyze all sorts of customer engagement after an email has been sent out.

Companies are able to in continuous contact with their audience and bring new offers, products or announcements to their subscribers’ attention at any time.

# Mobile Marketing – It’s the process of reaching customers in the different mobile apps stores such as Google Play, Apple app store.

It’s one of the most recent forms of digital marketing. Mobile is the most looked at devices around the entire world. Mobile marketing is an important aim that every brand should try to achieve.

# Content Marketing – It’s the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content.

It attracts, acquires, and engages the target audience with the purpose of driving profitable customer action. Content marketing is all about creating and promoting content which is attractive to the target audience.

Content marketing has got popularity as Google’s algorithms have become further highly developed.

# Influence Marketing – It’s the process of targeting key influencers in a given niche with the goal of getting your business in front of their audience.

The Internet has grown and more individuals, blogs, organizations, and businesses have audiences large enough to qualify them as influencers.

An Influencer could be anyone with a large online following. Influencers can be celebrities, authorities, journalists, and bloggers.

Influencer marketing can take on a number of forms depending on what you are hoping the influencer will do for your business.

# Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – It’s a systematic approach for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website who take the desired action.

It makes use of analytics, user feedback, and other insights to help businesses. It uses the most of their existing traffic by defining, refining and meeting key objectives through their webpages.

# Paid Advertising – Paid acquisition is any form of advertising or traffic acquisition in which a business pays directly for incoming traffic. The standard models (CPM, CPC, & CPL) for the paid advertisement include:-

##### Cost Per Mille Impression (CPM) – Advertisers pay for ad views in units of 1000 views. CPM is only used in combination with other models.

It’s a low-cost model to increase brand awareness and can give up minor results.

##### Cost Per Click (CPC) – The advertisers pay every time their ad clicked on by a viewer and also referred to as PPC.

It allows direct ROI tracking and it’s the most popular model used in online marketing. It’s a method of riding traffic on your website by means of paying a writer every time your ad is clicked.

Google AdWords PPC allows you to pay for top slots on Google’s search engine result pages at a fee. The PPC consist of paid commercial of Facebook promoted Tweets on Twitter and sponsored messages on LinkedIn.

##### Cost Per Lead (CPL) is referred to how much it costs a business to generate or acquire a lead. Paying directly for leads have a tendency to only makes sense in industries where customers spend high amounts per transaction.

Digital Marketing Segments (B2C & B2B) –

Digital marketing is a grand opportunity for any business. You can use digital marketing to target anyone, anywhere if you know your target customer.

You can take a look at which strategies tend to work best for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies:-

# B2C Companies – B2C companies have much lower price points than B2B counterparts. The most important objective of B2C companies is to get people into and through their marketing funnel.

B2C companies often see great results higher-funnel marketing channels like social media marketing or paid social advertising. This channel does a great job of reaching your business in front of potential customers.

# B2B Companies – Paid search is a great option for B2B companies. Most B2B companies have very specific niche audiences which are hard to target via social media.

B2B companies have a much longer and more complicated sales cycle than B2C companies. The long-term strategies like content marketing or email marketing are often necessary to close a deal.

What is Digital Marketing Strategy –

A digital marketing strategy is a detailed plan to utilize different digital marketing channels to accomplish your business goals.

You need to consider which channel to use, the resources (people, time and money) to assign to each channel and what to expect in terms of results.

# Digital marketing is most powerful – Digital marketing has the potential to transform the way that you reach and engage your customers.

With the right strategies and effective implementation, small businesses can increase their reach and conversion in a few months.

# Digital marketing is cost-effective – It’s the most cost-effective ways to market your business. In traditional marketing, it’s very difficult for small businesses with limited budgets to compete with larger businesses for ad space.

In digital marketing, small businesses can get more for their marketing spends. The cost of digital marketing is the only time. SEO, social media, and content marketing engagement take time to get the results.

There are still tactics like pay per click (PPC), display, and social media advertising that can produce quicker results.

# Digital marketing is more measurable – It’s difficult to track the success of a traditional marketing campaign like a radio advertisement or mailer. Every digital marketing tactic is measurable.

Digital marketing analytics capture the guesswork whether your marketing is actually working. You can see which tactics are working and which are not by measuring your digital marketing campaign in real-time.

You can adjust your campaign for greater success. You can take the insights from the gained process to improve future campaigns.

# Digital marketing allows targeting ideal buyers – You can ensure that the right consumers are viewing your content. SEO allows you to reach those consumers searching the web for relevant content and topics.

The pay-per-click (PPC), display and social media advertising allows you to target potential customers in your products/services based on demographic information and general features.

It allows you to choose your tactics and focus your marketing efforts on strategies that actually work.

Conclusion – Digital marketing is future marketing. The core of the digital marketing process is made of the conversion funnel which can be broken down into stages: Acquisition, Conversion, and Retention.