What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing has become so successful over the past decade. In fact, it’s growing exponentially that it is quickly dissolving traditional marketing.

Unlike traditional marketing which is done offline, Digital marketing is done online.

Companies and organizations today are able to interact with their customers and get to know exactly what they need through the power of digital marketing.

In the process, brand awareness and lead generation ultimately comes in handy.

So what is digital marketing?

Digital Marketing simply refers to a form of advertisements that is carried on through digital channels. These digital channels include search engines, blogs, web applications, emails, and mobile applications.

So why is digital marketing so successful?

Digital marketing is so successful because of retargeting. When a customer interacts with your advertisement on Social media, Google, or any other channel, you can easily track all their moves and use the data they provide to retarget them in the future.

This is one of the reasons Google and Facebook generate more revenue than any traditional media company. They simply control more eyeballs.

Types of digital marketing

The most popular types of digital marketing include the following

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The ultimate goal of SEO is to get a website to rank higher on the Google search result.

When your business, organization, or company website ranks high on Google, the traffic to your website increases as well.

But to accomplish this, SEO marketers have to research keywords and phrases that consumers are using to search for information online and use those search terms in their own content.

SEO depends on:

• Keyword targeting & Keywords

Whether you properly placed the keywords that you want your website to be found for. It’s advisable to use keywords in the headers and rarely in the crawl-able page content.

• Good link structure

It’s important that search engines can easily crawl your site structure and find all the content on your site. An SEO special should ensure that the URLs, Sitemaps, and links are in their proper format and accessible to the site crawlers.

• Content indexing

It’s important to allow search engines to clearly read what your site content is about. This can be done by adding alt text to images and text transcripts for audio and video content.

2. Email Marketing

Even with the existence of social media platforms and web applications, Email marketing is still a very effective marketing technique.

Email Marketers not only know how to create compelling campaigns, but they also provide value to their audience and overtime convert that audience into consumers.

Email Marketing pros often use email marketing software to make their emails more appealing to users and more likely to be opened.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves everything a business does through social media such as Facebook & Instagram. It goes far beyond creating posts and responding to comments.

Social media marketers need to be consistent with their posts, automate and schedule social media posts where need be.

They must also be savvy at analyzing the actual performance of their social media posts and create strategies based on the data.

Their efforts must drive users to engage with the business and eventually convert the users into customers hence providing value to the company.

Thus social media marketing goes beyond just managing your personal Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram profile. It requires a blend of objectivity, data-driven strategy and creative thinking.

4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC is a form of paid advertisement and promoted search engine results. It is a short-term form of digital marketing because once you stop paying, the ad ceases to exist.

Just SEO, Pay-Per-Click is another way of increasing traffic to a business.

5. Content Marketing

Content marketing uses storytelling information sharing to increase the awareness of the brand. The goal is to make the reader take an action. Such action includes signing up for an email list or making a purchase.

Content can be a blog post, resources like an e-book, digital video or podcast etc.      

In general, the content should first and foremost provide value to the consumer rather than just try to make a sale. It involves building a long-lasting relationship with your consumers that can potentially lead to many sales over time.

Your content marketing analytics can tell you a lot about your customers. What they are looking for when they come across your site, what kinds of content makes them stay on your site longer and what kinds make them lose interest and navigate away.

6. Mobile Marketing

With this kind of marketing, you reach your target audience on their smartphones or tablet. Mobile Marketing leverages text messages, social media, emails, websites, and mobile applications.

Mobile marketers can direct an offer or special content based on geographical location or time. Take, for example, the time a customer walks into a store or enters an event.

Marketers know that their potential customers are on their phone often time.

Conclusion

Using digital marketing today can make you reach an enormous audience in a way that is both cost-effective and measurable. Staying ahead of the competition has never been more important. Share with us your thoughts in the comments.