Everything to Know About Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is also known as online marketing. Businesses use this approach to promote their products and services through different online channels like websites, search engines, social media, email, and SMS.

It will not be an understatement to call this the era of digital marketing. With more than 4.9 billion active internet users worldwide, digital marketing offers you the opportunity to reach your audience individually through digital devices.

In today’s marketing scenario, digital marketing bears extreme importance due to the following reasons:

• Almost the entire world has gone digital
• People spend a lot of time surfing online
• These strategies can be easily planned and applied
• You can target the right audience segment
• You can measure digital marketing performance
• It helps you reach a global audience at a minimal cost

Now, we explore the types of digital marketing.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the most prominent type of digital marketing. It means optimizing your web pages or web content for search engines so that customers can find them easily. No digital marketing strategy will be complete without SEO.

Benefits of SEO

• Cost-efficient digital marketing strategy with higher ROI
• Get traffic organically to your website and landing pages
• Build trust among the audience and improve brand recall
• Helpful to get more visitors to your traditional shop
• Get quality leads with higher conversion rates
• Beat your competitors to become a prominent name in the audience

Types of SEO

SEOs could be of various types. Some of the prominent varieties include:

1. Local SEO: Companies perform this type of SEO for better visibility in the local search results. If a business is purposed to serve the people of a particular area, it should focus on local SEO with the best local SEO tools.
2. International SEO: Businesses targeting multiple countries opt for international SEO. This SEO strategy includes creating content as per the local cultural context, making your website available in multiple languages, hiring local influencers, etc.
3. eCommerce SEO: This category flourished in recent times with the growth of the eCommerce industry worldwide. It involves bringing traffic to your website through PPC advertisements.
4. Mobile SEO: It means making your website optimized for all mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. When you implement a mobile SEO strategy for your website, Google prioritizes it for ranking.

Steps for SEO Campaign

1. Website Audit: Perform a website audit to find its issues and fix these on priority for enhanced visibility of your website in the search engines.
2. Keyword Research: Next, research to get a list of keywords on which you want your website or web pages to rank in the search engines. At this stage, using keyword research tools helps a lot. 
3. Competition Research: You should also know where your competitors stand to get an edge over them. You can use tools like Semrush for competitive research. 
4. On-Page SEO: After finalizing your SEO strategy, start working on the on-page SEO. It means optimizing your website pages for higher ranking. On-page SEO analysis tools can assist you in knowing your mistakes and let you fix them.
5. Technical SEO: You also need to perform technical SEO that focuses on the technical aspects of your website for increased ranking. 
6. Off-Page SEO: Digital marketers should also focus on off-page SEO, primarily consisting of link building and social media mentions. You can use these backlink tools for backlink tracking and analysis. 

SEO Best Practices You Must Follow 

• Have proper SEO title, meta description, and slug, avoiding URL parameters
• Target one page for one keyword and place that keyword with the right density
• Emphasis SEO copywriting to make sure Google loves your content
• Get rid of website issues like loading speed and broken link
• Make additional efforts to make JavaScript websites SEO-friendly
• Focus on image SEO and video SEO
• Manage company reputation on the web 
• Properly interlink web pages of your website
• Build backlinks from quality websites

How to Measure the Success of an SEO Campaign

• Total number of organic traffic
• Ranking in target keywords
• Domain authority
• Lead to conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• CTR (click-through-rate)
• Time spent on each page
• Returning visitors
• Spam score

We live in the era of social media. That’s why it has also become a useful platform for digital marketing. Most businesses have their own social media channels where they regularly post relevant content and engage with their audience. 

While promoting your products through your social account is a cost-effective idea, companies with more direct and aggressive marketing objectives go for social media ads. These are the ads that appear to the users as they scroll through their social media feeds. These ads can be highly customizable and show to the right segment of your audience. 

Types of Social Media

Some popular types of social media advertisements are:

• Single image ad: It consists of just one static image with a caption and call-to-action (CTA) button.
• Carousel ad: This ad appears as a scrolling carousel that contains multiple photos and captions.
• Instant experience ad: Clicking on this ad will take the user to a mini landing page.
• Messenger ad: It appears in between the messages on the Facebook Messenger app 
• Video ad: It is visually appealing content that can get you high viewership and engagement. This can also become viral if made properly.
• Stories ad: These ads appear in between Facebook stories and Google Web Stories.

How to Choose the Right Social Media Platform

• Consider your business industry and audience
• Determine your social objective
• See where your competitors are present
• Understand the difference between social platforms
• Consider your resources for social management

How to Create an Effective Social Media Strategy

There is no one-size-fits-all approach for a successful social media strategy. However, most businesses implement the following techniques while making their strategies.

• Audit your current social performance
• Identify your goals and customer base
• Make content strategy by analyzing social ads
• Create engaging content for the audience
• Post content at the appropriate time of the day
• Measure your performance with the right tools
• Change your strategy depending on the performance

Social Media Marketing Best Practices

• Research your audience and choose the right platform
• Maintain consistency in branding across content and channels
• Plan ahead and schedule your content with social media management tools 
• Create killer social media ad copies
• Track hashtags to use the relevant ones with your content
• Focus on video content for better engagement
• Use attractive images for social media posts and ads
• Quickly respond to comments and DMs
• Tactfully handle the social criticism

How To Measure Social Media Marketing Success

Here are some popular KPIs to watch out for to measure your social media marketing campaign success:

• Audience and follower engagement, including like, sharing, and comments
• Number of likes and followers on your social channel
• Total and individual reach and impression of your posts
• Number of people visited your website from social media
• Leads and conversions generated from the social platform

Email Marketing

Do you remember sending promotional emails to people’s home address some decades ago? Email marketing is the updated version of that approach where you promote your products, services, or brand through marketing emails.  

Benefits of Email Marketing

• Generate more leads and sales for your company
• Collect first-party data from your potential customers
• Reach a large audience at a low budget
• Make sure to reach the right people at the right time
• Freedom to send personalized emails for a custom experience
• Get in touch with the target audience and engage with them
• Make them aware of your promotional offers and discounts
• Get more people directly access your landing page or website

How to Start Email Marketing Campaigns 

1. Have an Email List Handy: An email list is the first thing you need to start building your email marketing campaign. Make sure the email address users have given you permission to send them such emails. Else, your emails will move into the spam folder. 
2. Use Email Templates: Use email marketing templates to create marketing emails quickly and effortlessly. Most of these templates are customization, so you can personalize them with minimum effort.
3. Create Custom Content: The content of the email should be personalized according to the user’s demography and behavior. You need to offer a user when they want most in order to get a response from them.
4. Add Relevant Links and CTAs: Every marketing email you send should include relevant links for the users for instant access. Also, do not forget to include CTAs in all emails.

Best Practices for Email Marketing 

• Use first-party data to comply with data privacy standards
• Apply a double opt-in technique to collect a high-intent email list
• Customize your emails but be consistent with branding
• Use a compelling subject line that includes your offers
• Send emails at optimum time as per the user time zone
• Use engaging email copies that people love to read
• Perform A/B testing before starting off with the campaign

Useful Tools for Email Marketing

There are various paid and free email marketing tools available in the market. You can choose from them according to your budget and requirements. However, you can check our curated list of tools for various purposes:

• Pipedrive for a complete email marketing solution
• MailChimp for small businesses
• GlockApps for email testing
• Zoho Campaigns for a cost-effective solution
• Sendinblue for smooth CRM integration
• Omnisend for eCommerce solutions
• MailerLite for rich template library

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC ad is a digital marketing model where business bids for a place in the search engine to display their ads. However, the companies have to pay only when someone clicks on the ad. Compared to SEO, it tends to offer quicker and better results. To become an expert, you can also participate in different Google Ads courses. 

Benefits of PPC Advertising

• Get instant traffic to your website
• Generate authentic leads
• No dependency on search engine algorithm
• A cost-effective way to reach the audience
• Smart targeting approach, which is easy to generate

 Major Types of PPC Ads 

• Search ad: The most common type of PPC that appears before the organic results when users search for something in the search engine.
• Display ad: It gets displayed to the users who have shown interest in your product.
• Video ad: These ads come in the form of videos and usually appear on YouTube and in between Play Store games.
• Remarketing ad: These ads are shown to the people who have visited your website earlier.

Steps to Set up a PPC Ad Campaign

1. Perform keyword research
2. Target the ads
3. Create ads for PPC
4. Budget allocation
5. Bid for preferred keywords

How the Measure the Impact of an Ad Campaign

1. Quality score: A score that shows the chance of getting original and quality leads.
2. Impressions: The number of people who viewed your ad, whether they clicked or not.
3. Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people who clicked on your ad.
4. Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who converted after coming to your website through your PPC links.
5. Cost per click (CPC): It shows the average cost for one click on your ads.
6. Cost per acquisition (CPA): This compares the total number of conversions against your total ad spend to get the cost incurred for each acquisition.
7. Revenue on ad spend (ROAS): It shows how much revenue you have earned against your total PPC ad spend.

PPC Ad Campaign: Challenges and Their Solutions

1. Low CTR: Targeting a relevant audience and making your ad rank higher could resolve this.
2. Not getting enough impressions: Increasing your budget, using placement targeting, and focusing on exact keyword matches can fix this problem.
3. Clicks not generating leads: To resolve this issue, you must focus on relevant keywords and use a compelling CTC.
4. Increased wastage spend: If this problem arises, you should analyze your PPC strategy and budget. Also, analyze your competitors and lower your budget limit.

Important Tools for PPC Advertising 

• Software for PPC management to manage the campaigns
• Click-fraud protection tools for secured campaign
• Keyword research tools for high-value keyword suggestions
• Ad tracking tools for campaign analysis and overview
• Competitor analysis tools for competitor research
• Conversion tracking tools to check campaign performance

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a popular form of digital marketing where the objective is to attract and engage more users through regularly producing articles, views, podcasts, and other types of content. This method allows you to spend less money to get more loyal customers for your brand.

Impact of Content Marketing on SEO

• Content is the best place to perform SEO
• Content can generate valuable backlinks
• Useful and informative content contributes to higher traffic and website credibility
• Continuous content publishing increases DA and PA
• More content means more opportunities to rank on keywords

Types of Content Marketing

1. Blogs: Blog is one of the most popular types of text content that you can publish for product promotion. 
2. Videos: Video content is another engaging way to promote your brand.
3. Webinars: To make the audience aware of your services and product features, you can arrange webinars.
4. Podcasts: With audio content consumption on the rise, podcasts can be arranged for brand publicity.

How to Start Content Marketing

• Research your competitors
• Set measurable and achievable goals
• Create a content strategy for your brand
• Get new content ideas with sentence expander
• Develop an editorial calendar
• Publish your first content
• Make necessary improvements from its feedback

If you want to start in this field with better preparation, here are some content marketing courses for you.

Various Content Marketing Strategies

• Blogs
• Informative articles
• Checklists
• Case studies
• Infographics
• How-to guides
• Videos
• eBooks
• Product reviews
• White paper
• Newsletters
• Quizzes and other interactive content
• Memes

Influencer Marketing

In recent years, there has been a surprising rise in influencer marketing, which is closely linked to the increased popularity of social media. This type of digital marketing involves utilizing social media influencers to promote your product or services. 

For companies, hiring influencers for product promotion costs less than making advertisements with professional models. The influencers could also include media celebrities and athletes. As they create content around your product, it can create a buzz around the product and instantly reach their huge fan base. 

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

• Help your brand reach the right audience
• Cost-effective digital marketing method
• Grow sales and promote the brand simultaneously
• Establish brand credibility
• Leverage user-generated content
• Get increased sales in a short time

Limitations of Influencer Marketing

• Choosing the wrong influencer affects your brand
• Performance measurement could be difficult
• Less control over influencer content
• Success is not guaranteed
• It might take a long time to get results

How Can Brands Strategize the Influencer Marketing Campaign 

• Set your marketing goals from the campaign
• Confirm your budget for the campaign
• Identify your target audience
• Select the right social platform for your audience
• Find the right influencer for the particular product or campaign
• Promote the content on your platform 

How to Measure Influencer Marketing Impact

• Use affiliate links and promo codes to track unique clicks and purchases
• Track all interactions like reactions, comments, and share
• Monitor the change in traffic after the campaign
• Check the change in impressions and followers
• Track engagement rate in promotional influencer videos

Tools for Tracking Influencer Marketing Success

Once you have determined your KPIs for an influencer campaign, you can use the following tools to measure those:

• Consumer research tools for understanding your audience
• Influencer search tools to find the right people for influencer marketing
• Brand monitoring tools to track brand mentions across the web
• Social media management tools to track and analyze conversations
• YouTube rank checker tools to find the ranking of your promo video
• Influencer management tools to manage influencers

Video Marketing

Video marketing refers to the digital marketing technique where you create videos promoting your products, services, or brand. In this approach, the marketing team creates promotional or informative videos to get more users familiar with your product and brand, make more people engage with these videos, and, ultimately, convert them into sales.

These videos can be shared on your company website and social media channels. Though it is a component of a digital marketing campaign, it bears significant importance considering the popularity of social media and video content.

Benefits of Video Marketing 

• Easily grab the attention of the viewers
• Reach a wider audience through social media
• Increase brand visibility in different channels
• Get a higher position in SERP
• Quickly make people aware of your products

Types of Marketing Videos

• Product demos: This type of video includes demonstrating the product features. The demo videos will not explain the product in detail; instead, they just share the overview.  
• Explainer videos: These videos explain things in detail and often offer solutions to complex problems. You might have an expert do this video or hire people for voiceover. 
• Brand storytelling: You can create brand storytelling videos that include the journey or success stories of your brand.
• Client testimonial: These videos contain the testimonial of your clients who share their experience of using your product or service. 

How to Set up a Video Marketing Campaign

• Choose your target audience and platform
• Set your budget for video marketing
• Create content strategy and timeline
• Get your team or influencers ready
• Create interactive videos
• Test before publishing 
• Decide upon the KPIs to measure performance

Ways to Measure the Success of a Video Marketing Campaign 

To know how successful was your video marketing campaign, you should watch out for the following KPIs:

• Total views
• Unique views
• Impression
• Play rate and replays
• Average view duration
• Reactions
• Comments
• Shares
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing means marketing or recommending some third-party products and services to the audience. If someone makes a purchase through an affiliate link, the marketer gets a commission from the company.

To run an affiliate program for your company or business, you need to attract marketers to join your affiliate programs through affiliate networks or direct brand partnerships.

After joining, influencers or marketers get a unique link for all their promotional materials, like social media videos or blogs. Now, These people will focus on creating content around the product they are supposed to promote and add the affiliate links. Once the users click on that link and purchase your product or service, they will receive a pre-defined commission from that.

Types of Affiliate Marketing

1. Unattached affiliate marketing: These are the regular click-per-action or CPA affiliate campaigns where the marketer has no direct link or involvement with the product.
2. Related affiliate marketing: In the case of related affiliate marketing, there is some kind of relationship (usually niche-based) between the affiliate marketer and products or services.
3. Involved affiliate marketing: This affiliate marketing involves a marketer with a deep and direct connection with the product or service they’re promoting. They usually have the expertise to recommend you the product or use the product to qualify for sharing their experience.

How to Find the Best Affiliates Programs

• Perform thorough online research
• Find what other influencers are promoting
• Find similar products and brands you promote now
• Check CPA affiliate networks

How to Set Up an Affiliate Campaign

1. Understand your target audience 
2. Analyze competitors to set your objectives
3. Choose your channels, like an affiliate marketing site or social media
4. Decide on commission and other program structures
5. Find the right affiliate partners from the website or affiliate networks
6. Support your affiliate team with the necessary tools and resources
7. Track how the affiliate program is performing 

Limitations of Affiliate Marketing

• Chances of affiliate marketing fraud
• No guarantee of leads or conversions
• False ads might harm the company’s reputation
• Performance marketing becomes less efficient
• Results often take time

How to Become an Affiliate Marketer

• Choose your niche or what you are good at
• Be aware of your follower base
• Join online programs to learn affiliate programs
• Select a platform for affiliate marketing
• Find the right affiliate program to join
• Create engaging and value-adding content 
• Use SEO, social media, and ads to get more traffic to your content
• Properly place the affiliate links and drive more people to click on it 

Analytics and Tracking

For digital marketers, it is important to have the right user and website data for planning a successful online campaign. When you know your target audience better, you can customize digital marketing campaigns tailored to their needs.

As you deliver a bespoke experience to them, more conversions will take place, and more sales are bound to happen. 

Digital marketing executives should also track the user behavior on their websites to know the interest of their traffic. The data will also allow marketers to find out at which stage of the sales funnel the visitors are stuck. Tracking your existing campaigns helps you understand what is working for your audience and what is not. You can use this to make future marketing decisions. 

Crucial Digital Marketing KPIs

• Website traffic
• Keyword rankings and impressions 
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Return on Investment (ROI)
• User journey on the website with clickstream data 
• Conversion rate
• Number of Sales Qualified Leads and Marketing Qualified Leads
• Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA)
• Quality backlinks
• Social media traffic and followers
• Engagement and interaction (like, share, comment)
• The reach of social media posts
• Cost-per-Click (CPC) for social media ads
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) for email marketing
• New email subscribers and unsubscribers
• Visitors per channel

Advantages of Digital Marketing

• If digital marketing is done properly, it will drive more ROI than traditional marketing.
• Even with a limited budget, you can run a digital marketing campaign and achieve success.
• You can easily measure the performance and success of your digital marketing campaigns, while performance tracking is difficult for traditional marketing.
• Digital marketing offers you greater flexibility than traditional one as it allows you to customize your campaigns according to your budget and requirements.
• In traditional marketing, targeted campaigns are difficult to achieve. But in digital marketing, you can precisely target the niche audience with ease.
• In digital marketing, you can easily categorize your customers and offer them personalized experiences for better engagement and conversion.
• Traditional marketing allows you to target a limited audience. But it digital marketing, you can reach a global audience.

Challenges of Digital Marketing

Competitive Market

Digital marketing has become a highly-competitive field since every other company is implementing this marketing strategy to get leads and conversions. 

Compliance with International Standards

There are many global and regional regulations about collecting, storing, and using user data for your business. Companies should ensure that they comply with these and maintain transparency about their data policy.

Getting Quality Leads

For digital marketers, generating genuine leads in a competitive market with unpredictable customer behavior is one of the biggest challenges.

Ensuring ROI Against Limited Budget

Many companies have budget constraints for digital marketing. In such cases, marketers have a tough time making sure they have ROI with a limited budget.

Managing Multiple Platforms

As businesses depend on multiple channels for traffic and lead, it often becomes challenging to maintain brand consistency in all channels.

Constantly Creating Engaging Content

To keep attracting new customers, marketers need to deliver catchy and engaging content to the audience. Constantly producing trendy content often gets difficult for them.

Staying Updated with Evolving Search Engine Algorithm

Search engines like Google keep changing their parameters for SERP. As a digital marketer, you always have to stay up-to-date with the latest algorithm changes. 

Conclusion

 That’s it for our discussion on digital marketing. This field of marketing is constantly evolving, and there is no single approach that will work for all businesses. As a digital marketer, you will need some time for experiments that will help you find the meat digital marketing tactic for your organization.

 You can also read related articles on how to learn digital marketing online and free digital marketing certification courses.