You might have come across this term “Digital Marketing” quite a number of times. Be it on Google, FB or YouTube, this is a popular term and a popular career choice among people these days. And as you have crossed paths with this term for a memorable period of time, you may have garnered a sense of curiosity towards what it actually is.
Today, let me help you take a deep dive into this world of Digital Marketing and hopefully by the end of this post you should garner a good sense about what digital marketing is and how you might use it for your advantage.
Digital Marketing basics | The beginners guide to digital Marketing
Digital Marketing is much about marketing rather than just digital. Digital is just a medium. Marketing through internet and the various sources or platforms within the internet like websites, Social Media, Ads, emails etc is what Digital Marketing is.
Now let’s look at a simple example: Say I run a cosmetic business and I post a random image of a product on a Social Media channel like Facebook or Instagram.
Does that mean I am doing Digital Marketing for my business?
The answer is no, but why?
It is because I posted a picture without creating a strategy, like who is my target audience, what time I should post, what should the content be and what I’m trying to achieve by posting the picture.
These are the key ingredients a Marketer should never miss out on and without these key ingredients in mind, it’s not marketing.
The goal of marketing is just getting to a point.
You may want to increase brand awareness, or get more leads, or drive more engagement. Marketing is just a means to reach that goal. And digital marketing is all about achieving those goals with the help of digital medium.
Now, in the digital age( the online world) achieving your goals is a lot easier, cost effective and faster as compare to what it used to be in the non – online world.
When the Internet had not become such a hit and had not spread as much as it is today, businesses used traditional means of marketing to achieve their goals.
That was the Traditional marketing, it is a form of marketing that mostly targets offline users and costs a lot.
A simple example of traditional marketing is billboards and it costs a lot of money to put up a billboard and the cost rises even more if you are in a competitive space.
Other examples of traditional marketing include direct mails, newspaper ad or print ads, broadcasts etc.
It offers less control over your target audience and is expensive and tracking the data is also pretty difficult.
But with Digital Marketing you get the option to track your data, measure and improvise as the need of the hour.
And with digital marketing anyone with knowledge, skills and even little budget can think of advertising their products, getting leads or increasing brand awareness.
Digital Marketing makes it easy for business whether small or large to achieve their business goals.
In Digital Marketing, you can use various channels to achieve those business goals.
Now, let’s take a look at those various channels that you can use for your business or for your clients business.
Different Digital Marketing channels
Whatever it is that you have set as your digital marketing goal, there are a plenty of channels and plenty of ways to get to that goal.
The popular Digital Marketing channels include
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
These are some of the popular channels of digital marketing. These different channels or modules can be used as per your strategy. However, rather than utilizing just one of the channels, you can use as many channels as your need and get maximum results.
That is to say, you are now not relying upon just one channel but multiple channel , sort of like integrated Digital Marketing.
Since, now you have become much familiar with the basic definitions and channels, let take a peek at what these Digital Marketing Channels are. Just a basic overview in this post and later I will get into each segment in much more detail.
Digital Marketing Channels and Popular Modules for 2022
Let’s start with Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization is the practice of improving your website, content, authority and various other metrics to push your rankings higher in the search results.
Major types of SEO include On-page seo, off-page seo, technical seo and local seo.
How can SEO help your business?
SEO includes practices like keyword research, quality content, getting backlinks or optimizing your website ,getting it indexed on search engines etc.
If you optimize your website with good SEO practices, the major benefit is the ranking. Say at this moment you are ranking at 11 position in the search results and you improve your SEO, chances are within sometime you are likely to see a improvement in your rankings.
Higher rankings in the search means more organic traffic. Traffic you get for free.
SEO is much of a long-term game and it takes time for the results to kick in.
If you own a local business, setting you a google My business account is a great start.
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing is also referred to as Paid search.
It’s paying the search engines to gain more visibility in the search engines. Be it for conversions or traffic or brand awareness, whatever your goal is , to achieve that you pay the search engines to run your ads to fulfil your goals.
How can Search Engine Marketing help your business?
By using Search Engine Marketing, you can achieve your business goals faster. Unlike SEO, which is a long term game, Search Engine marketing provides you instant results.
You can use search engine marketing to drive traffic to your landing pages, website , content or products. A classic example is google ads, paying google to get more traction in the search.
Social Media Marketing
Facebook, twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc are some of the popular social Media platforms and has users for almost any niche.
Social Media Marketing is using the social media channels to drive traffic, sales or increase brand awareness or meet whatever business goal you have in mind.
There are two ways to approach Social Media Marketing, Organic and paid.
Organic is mostly about getting traffic, engagement etc without paying for it.
Paid includes using ads to get your goals met.
How can social media marketing help your business?
With so many social media users, there is a audience for almost any niche. By creating social media content around that niche, you can improve your brand awareness, get more traffic to your website and make sales.
If you own a business and your are missing on social media, you are missing out on a lot of potential customes.
Social media helps people find out about your business.
The best way to start using social media to your advantage is by creating content around your niche and publishing it on different platforms. That’s the starting point.
After, that you can try using ads and see what happens.
Content Marketing
Are you creating content for your business or not. Most business today consider content marketing a part of their marketing strategy.
Content Marketing is all about creating content like blog posts, videos, podcasts etc that will help your audience.
The content can be about how to use a product, or how it can help them.
With Proper keyword research and strategy you can create a good piece of content that can bring in a lot of attention to your business.
How you monetize that attention is totally up to you.
How can content marketing help a business?
Content marketing will help bring in lot of traffic, new customers, and increase brand awareness. It is also a great way to gain more engagement with your audience.
Having a blog or a YouTube channel is a great way to start with content marketing.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is still a great way to market your products and form a relationship with your customers. Once you gain some attention for your content, you can create a email list and send updates about products or do upsells.
The biggest advantage of email marketing is that you can form a relationship with your customers. And that can lead to forming a good community.
How can email marketing help a business?
Well, emails are great way to engage with people who have interacted with your content. And emails help to turn new visitors to buyers.
There is a lot of way to do that. Emails are also a great way of communicating with your audience and understanding them better.
You can use those insights to figure out what they actually want and that may eventually lead to you creating a new product or even improving your previous products.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is basically when someone gets a commission for helping a business get a sale, in most cases.
The commission could be 10% or 20% etc, but the buyer is not charged extra money. The brand or business pays the commission for the actual price.
Most brands and business use this model , like Amazon.
How can affiliate marketing help a business?
Creating a affiliate marketing model helps your brand drive more sales as the person who is the affiliate is doing most of the job so that you get a sale and he gets a comission.
And driving a sale is not a easy job, a lot of effort has to be put into it, like running ads, or creating content etc.
This improves your brand awareness and makes you more visible.
Conclusion:
These digital marketing channels if used together can do a lot for a business. The key is to not rely on one but use most of the channels available.
Like using the content to drive attention and then driving that attention to your mailing list and then trying to convert them.
I personally like that method as it helps to build trust, and without trust transaction becomes very difficult.
That is what I personally feel, what’s your thought ?? let me know !
