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Digital Marketing Basics to Help You Get Ahead

Digital marketing basics

Digital Marketing is the buzzword in today’s times so everyone wants to jump on to the bandwagon but very few have real clue about how to do it. This marketing type has become prevalent since the advent and growth of the internet and more so because everyone’s now perpetually online. Let’s look at some of the Digital Marketing Basics to understand how exactly it works:

Digital Marketing Basics

Digital Marketing is an umbrella term for all your online marketing efforts. Businesses leverage digital channels such as Google search, social media, email and their websites to connect with their currect and prospective customers. – Hubspot

Let’s understand each channel one by one.

#1 Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites. – Search Engine Land

Social media marketing allows you to reach out to your target audience on channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube etc. These channels have a very high user-base.

Digital marketing basics
Social media users worldwide

You need to create a business profile on these social networks and start building a community of fans and followers. By creating engaging and helpful content on social media platforms, you will be able to garner more traffic back to your site and also get new customers.

#2 Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization enables you to get your site to rank higher up in search engine results. The goal of search engines like Google is to help online searchers find the best answers to their queries.

The top 2 online activities are search and email.- Search Engine Land

The search engine uses advanced machine learning technologies to select sites with the best content, experience, and solutions to online queries. You can use search engine optimization techniques to create a website that meets the guidelines of search engines. Besides that, you can use SEO techniques to optimize your site content for better discovery and traffic.

#3 Paid Campaigns

Paid campaigns help you to improve the visibility of your business on search engines as well as social media platforms. Google provides you with an ad platform to run campaigns on specific search phrases. It helps you to get your site to show up higher in search results by simply running these campaigns. You can use Google Adwords to run paid campaigns with a minimal budget.

Similarly, social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, all provide you with inbuilt ad platforms to run your campaigns and reach out to new prospects.

The best part of running any kind of paid Digital Marketing campaign is that you can select your target audience and figure out the number people you can reach with your ad budget. Such campaigns help you to predict the results before you start running them. Take a look at this example of simple ad targeting on Facebook:

Digital marketing basics
Facebook ad targeting example

In the above example, I have assumed that we have a Fashion Store looking to target young, urban men.  As shown in the screenshot above, Facebook shows that we can reach out to 16000 – 86000 people and get 190-1100 clicks on daily basis.

#4 Email Marketing

Email Marketing is the best way to build a strong relationship with those who are interested in your business.

In 2017, global e-mail users amounted to 3.7 billion users. This figure is set to grow to 4.1 billion users in 2021. – Statista

The first step in email marketing is to build up an opt-in email list. An opt-in list consists of those of your potential customers who share their email address with you willingly and are open to receiving mailers from your business. There are various ways to build an opt-in list:

  1. Blog Subscription
  2. Website Popups
  3. Contests and giveaways
  4. Free product trials

Once you have an opt-in list, you can segment these lists according to the stage of the buyer’s journey (that is how close is the prospect from buying your products/services) as well as buyer persona and behavioral preferences. You can then send out customized email campaigns to these segments. The strategy will help you to build a long-term relationship with prospects and existing customers, ensuring continuous growth in sales and revenue for your business.

#5 Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. – Content Marketing Institute

The primary motive of content is to educate and entertain your audience thereby converting them into followers of your business.

Content Marketing costs 60% less than outbound marketing and generates 3X as many leads. Demand Metric

Content marketing helps you tell a memorable brand story to your audience helping to build a reputation and trigger conversions. You can make use of a variety of Content Marketing Types including – blogs, social media posts infographics, whitepapers, ebooks, video content, and AR/VR content etc.

#6 Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a simple process of hiring or appointing online affiliates. These could be individuals who have a large online following or can simply get you the desired number of conversions. In most cases, you need to provide them with a unique landing page link that they can promote on their website or social media channels. Once you get any conversion from that unique link, you transfer a percentage of the sale ( as commission) to the affiliate. Many big eCommerce companies such as Amazon have an affiliate program that helps them to generate massive amounts of revenue. Such arrangements work very well for promoting online software applications as well.

#7 Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing enables you to reach out to prospects on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The mobile phone enables you to track the location and share personalized offers and content with your prospects. Mobile has become the preferred choice for online usage across the globe.

Google has also started giving ranking preference to sites which are mobile friendly.

Mobile is the dominant platform for searches, as 48% of the buyers use smartphones to start searching with a search engine. – Google Research

Mobile-influenced offline spending is already over $1 trillion. People do heavy mobile research before indulging in offline purchasing in almost all categories. – Forrester

So, the basic way to ensure that your business is visible to mobile users is to ensure that your website is mobile friendly. Other essential ways of mobile marketing include:

  1. Creating mobile apps
  2. Running in-app ad campaigns in other popular apps
  3. Targeting mobile users in your paid ad campaigns on Google AdWords and Social Media
  4. Use of QR codes to redirect users to specific landing pages
  5. SMS campaigns
  6. Promoting your business through WhatsApp Marketing.
  7. Big Data and Marketing Analytics

Digital Marketing helps you to track and analyze the results you are getting from your Marketing activities. There are a variety of tools including Google Analytics that help you to track the source of your web traffic and conversions. With big data technologies, you can get deeper insights into consumer behavior and sentiment. Big data helps you to find out which websites your prospects are visiting, the challenges they are facing, and stuff they are looking to buy. Such insights are helpful in running tailored campaigns and getting better results for your business. Big data has a whole lot of other applications such as paid campaign optimization, competitive analysis, and market research etc.

#9 Marketing with Chatbots

The popular retail chain Starbucks has started using a chatbot to help customers place their orders and make payments. You can make use of chatbots to automate some of your business processes. Chatbots can offer personalized shopping assistance and customer service to eCommerce customers, making the process highly productive. The bots can provide undivided attention to customers and for as much time as they require. Another benefit of making chatbots communicate with your customers is that they can easily be made to communicate in your brand voice. Chatbots are helpful in collecting feedback and other useful insights, easily and efficiently.

# 10 Video Marketing

The viewership of online videos is growing consistently over the past few years.

YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of total internet users. -Wordstream

Video content, therefore, has become an essential component of Digital Marketing. Most of the social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are now allowing native videos (that is videos are now uploaded directly to these channels). The algorithm on these channels too prefers to show video content over images and text-based content. Other big advantages of Video content include their ability to hook the users for long while providing them with more information in less time.

Over To You

Digital Marketing helps you to find your target audience, reach out, and build a lasting relationship with them. The use of internet and the mobile device is increasing every day and Digital Marketing is an essential medium for every business.

You should pick those Digital Marketing channels first where you feel your target audience would be most active and as you start getting results, you can try out other channels as well.

Looking to get an in-depth and practical knowledge of the latest Digital Marketing techniques? You can enroll in our Certified Digital Marketing Course.

Do you have any other thoughts or suggestions? Please feel free to add them in the comments section below.

Avatar of abhishek talreja
Abhishek Talreja
Abhishek Talreja is curious about everything content and marketing. He loves to keep it short, simple and meaningful. He has been published on sites like MarketingProfs, SitePoint and SEMrush. He is the founder of Prolific Content Marketing.

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