Digital marketing is a form of marketing for promoting and selling products or services on the Internet. It’s the process of leveraging different online marketing channels like search engines, social media networks, and email to reach your target audience.
Through digital marketing, you can find people interested in your offering, interact with them, and build trust with your brand.
Digital marketing has a number of types, the most important are website marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, PPC advertising, social media marketing, email marketing, video marketing, and affiliate marketing.
The way digital marketing works is simple.
First, you need to specify your digital marketing goals i.e. what you want to achieve with digital marketing. Some common examples are: to increase brand awareness, to make more sales, or to grow your community.
Then you need to decide which marketing channels can help you achieve your goals. For example, if your goal is to make more sales then running paid campaigns on Google and Facebook is a good starting point.
To make the whole process easier to manage, you can create a plan specifying how much money you’ll spend, define your target audience, define your performance metrics, and other information that will help you control the process.
Online Marketing Channels
- Search Engine Optimization
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website for search engines.
The main goal of SEO is to help a website rank higher in search results and get organic traffic from search engines.
SEO has a number of sub-processes. The main ones are:
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising gives you the ability to reach internet users on a number of networks through paid ads.
You can set up PPC campaigns on Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, or Facebook and show your ads to people searching for terms related to your products or services.
PPC campaigns can segment users based on their demographic characteristics (age, gender, etc.) or even their particular interests or location.
Every time a user clicks on your ads, you pay a fee to the provider (and thus the term pay per click).
The most popular PPC platforms are Google Ads and Bing Ads.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is all about the content. The digital world is a huge collection of content in different forms like text, images, audio, and video.
The goal of a content marketing campaign is to reach potential customers through the use of content.
Content is usually published on a website and then promoted through social media, email marketing, SEO, or even PPC campaigns.
The difference between having a blog versus running a content marketing campaign is that the latter has specific goals as to what content to publish and when to publish it, who to target, and how to monitor the effectiveness of your content campaigns.
The main tools of content marketing are:
- Blogs
- eBooks
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Webinars
Email Marketing
Despite the increased use of social media networks, email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing channels.
Many people confuse email marketing with the hundreds of spam email messages we all receive per day, but that’s not what email marketing is all about.
Email marketing is the medium to get in touch with your potential customers or the people interested in your brand and this entails that these people want to hear from you and you are not hijacking their inbox.
In fact, many successful online businesses and marketers use all other digital marketing channels to add leads to their email lists, and then through email marketing, they create a number of funnels to turn those leads into customers.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has to do with reaching people in the various social networks either through content marketing campaigns (postings), paid ads, or both.
The primary goal of a social media marketing campaign is brand awareness and establishing social trust but as you go deeper into social media marketing, you can use it to get leads or even as a direct sales channel.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing that has grown considerably with the rise of Internet usage.
Basically, with affiliate marketing, you promote other people’s products and you get a commission every time you make a sale or introduce a lead.
Many well-known companies like Amazon have affiliate programs that pay out millions of dollars per month to websites that sell their products.
When designing your digital marketing strategy, you should include affiliate marketing as a way to get people involved in your brand and sell your products for a commission.
In other words, when you have a product or service to promote online, you should consider setting up an affiliate program where people can sign up and find resources and material they can use to promote your products on the Internet.
They will get a commission as a reward but the benefits for you as a provider are much more.
Your affiliates cannot only drive more sales but they can become the best representatives of your brand and positively influence other people to buy or connect with your company.
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