Digital Marketing And It's Components: A Beginners Guide

Online Marketing encloses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet to reach potential buyer

In a fast moving world where use of traditional ways of marketing like print ads are on a decline, Companies are focusing on marketing online ie. Digital Marketing. It relies on strategies that leverage the internet and mobile devices. In most of the cases, the goal of marketing digitally (especially for small scale businesses), is to directly increase the sales by targeting potential customers using different online channels.

Typically Digital Marketing consists of various components:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Pay Per Click (PPC)
  • Website Designing
  • Social Media Marketing (SMM)
  • Content Marketing
  • Email Marketing

All of the above components play an integral part in online marketing. Let's do an in depth analysis of the components.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The main base for a successful digital marketing campaign is an excellent SEO strategy. Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website to "rank" higher on search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (free) traffic your website receives.

Why do companies strive to rank higher on the search engine results page?

It is estimated that around 80% of people don't look beyond the first two pages of search results. You can have a wonderful website designed for your company but if it doesn't appear on the first two pages of the search result, majority of the traffic won't be able to find it.

Qualified leads will find and contact you when they're searching for products or services related to your business when your website ranks at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Higher search rankings translate into increased website leads which in turn increases the revenue of the company.

There are a number of ways to approach SEO in order to generate qualified traffic for your website which are as follows:

  1. On page SEO: On Page SEO focuses on the content which is “on the webpage” when you’re looking at it. Researching on the keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank on top of the search engine results page (SERPs) those questions produce.
  2. Off page SEO: Off page SEO focuses on the content which is “off the webpage” when you’re wanting to optimize your website. The number of publishers that link to your website, and the relative “authority” of those publishers would affect how highly you would rank for your keywords.

Pay Per Click (PPC): Pay Per Click advertising is a very useful tool for maintaining presence in the search results on the SERP whilst you organise organic rankings with SEO. With the help of PPC, your rankings can be boosted quickly. This helps in driving qualified leads directly to your website the very minute the ads go live.

Do you know what is the main advantage of using PPC? You only pay when a person clicks on your ad. This would in turn be advantageous because you will be saving money by not trying to reach people who aren't interested in your products or services.

One of the most common types of PPC is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) at a price "Per Click" of the links you selected. Other channels where we can use PPC include:

  1. Paid ads on Facebook: In this method, users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the new feeds of people who match your business's audience.
  2. Twitter Ads campaigns: On Twitter ads, users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges on the news feeds of specific audiences, all dedicated to accomplish a specific goal for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
  3. Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: On LinkedIn, users can pay to directly send sponsored messages to specific LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.
  4. Paid YouTube Ads: The advertiser can also advertise on YouTube. In this method, the advertisement is played to the user before the beginning of the video. The advertiser only has to pay when someone chooses to watch the ad for at least 30 seconds or clicks on your ad.

Website Designing: Another main ingredient of Digital Marketing is Website Designing. 97% of website visitors judge a website on the way it's made and as we all say, the first impression is the last impression and you never get a second chance for it.

If your site looks like it’s straight from the 2000s or takes a generation to load, it will most likely send the visitors searching for the back button and visiting another website instead. In order to keep the visitors interested and engaged on your website, you need to implement a custom design that reflects your brand and makes it easy for people to find the information they need on your site.

Social Media Marketing (SMM): A staggering 3.96 billion people in the world use social media making it a suitable platform for Digital Marketing. Social Media allows us to connect with the existing and potential customers and keep developing the relationship with the customers. If a customer has any complaints regarding the products or the services, they can reach out to the company through social media.

Most social media platforms allow us to run paid ads to target and reach our ideal customers. We should maximize our social media effectiveness by responding to the comments on various social media platforms in a timely manner and in a way that makes your followers feel seen and valued. This ultimately will help you establish trust with your audience and encourage them to become loyal customers.

Content Marketing: If we need to boost our search rankings and also help potential customers learn more about our business, we need to include quality content into our marketing strategy. For generating more leads and revenue, content marketing is very effective as it generates 5x more leads as compared to traditional marketing. Quality content is a vital component of content marketing as it allows you to target keywords that are related to your business and addresses the searchers’ questions, which ultimately helps you achieve higher rankings.

Posting blog posts, videos, or photos through your website and social media can help you increase brand awareness. Posting fresh content regularly can help you improve traffic to your website which can benefit your website’s position on the search engine results page.

Email Marketing: It is a great way to keep in touch with customers as well as give them an in-depth description of your products and services. It’s also an excellent way of promoting specials and getting customer feedback. It can turn a prospect into a sale and a sale into a loyal customer. Since people opt into receiving your emails, you know that they are interested in your products and services that are offered. Using segmentation, you can personalize your emails based on the subscribers’ needs and interests and deliver content that relates with them.

One of the best reasons why to do email marketing? You can automate your email strategy to email your customers when they subscribe, after they purchase, or when they take a specific action on your site. This is a great way to keep engagement with your customers and to make your marketing work smarter which allows you to focus on running your business.

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