Digital marketing has become the most popular marketing technique in the last few years. Everyone talks about digital marketing and businesses demand it to improve their online presence.
In this article we will give information about; What is digital marketing? What are the various digital marketing channels? What is your digital marketing strategy?
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is a broad term that includes all of the marketing channels and methods you can use to promote products or services on the internet. It targets a specific part of the customer base and it is interactive. It is also a type of marketing that targets electronic devices. Digital marketing instruments, which we divide channels such as social media, mobile applications, e-mail, web applications, search engines, websites offer a wide area where we can adapt advertising campaigns for products or services.
The main difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing is digital marketing campaigns are run exclusively through digital channels. It provides to buyers more control, tools and data to analyze the effectiveness of a campaign.
Digital marketing channels
Digital marketing has a number of channels and these can be divided into online marketing channels and offline marketing channels.
The main difference between the two is that online marketing channels are based solely on the internet, while offline marketing channels are related to digital devices that are not necessarily connected to the internet.
Online marketing channels
- Website marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Pay-per-click ads (ppc)
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Mobile marketing
- Video marketing
Offline marketing channels
- TV marketing
- SMS marketing
- Radio marketing
- Billboard marketing
Web marketing
A website is the focus of all digital marketing campaigns. It is a very powerful channel on its own, moreover it also worth to see as a helpful factor in running most other online marketing campaigns.
Your website should represent your brand, product and services in the best possible way. It should be fast, mobile-friendly and easy to use. In addition to your website’s structure and functionality to act in conjunction with the digital marketing strategy, the content must be developed to get more traffic and increase customer gains. With a successful web marketing strategy, you can take the right steps in the digital marketing process.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimizing your website for search engines.
The main goal of SEO is to increase the ranking of the website in search results and get organic traffic. SEO’s main mission is to provide users with a great experience and give them exactly what they want. It’s not just about keywords and links.
SEO has a number of subcomponents, the most important of them are:
Technical SEO – crawling and indexing
On-Page SEO – page optimization
Off-Page SEO – website promotion
Content SEO – optimizing content
Pay-Per-Click advertising
PPC campaigns give you the ability to reach internet users through 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 classify users by their demographics (age or gender) or even target specific interests or locations. Every time a user clicks on your ads, you pay a fee to the provider.
The most popular PPC platforms are Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
Content marketing
The purpose of content marketing is to reach potential customers through the use of content. Content is often posted on a website and then promoted through social media, email marketing, SEO or even PPC campaigns. It is a huge collection of content in different forms such as text, images, audio and video.
The strategy of a content marketing should include elements such as what kind of content should be, when the content will be published, who it targets and how to monitor the campaign’s effects.
The main tools of content marketing are:
- Blog
- E-Books
- Online courses
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Webinars
Email marketing
Email marketing is a digital marketing process that allows you to communicate with an audience through e-mail messages. In simple terms, email marketing is the process of using email as a marketing channel. Despite the growing use of social media networks, email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing channels.
E-mail marketing and spam e-mail messages should not be confused. Email marketing is one of the key tools to get in touch with your potential customers or people interested in your brand.
Social media marketing
The primary goal of a social media marketing campaign is to build brand awareness and social trust, but when you dig deeper into social media marketing, you can use it to gain leads or as a direct sales channel.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a form of digital marketing that is growing significantly with the rise of internet usage. Basically, affiliate marketing is about promoting people’s products and building a profit partnership by selling them for a commission.
Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which a company uses third-party publishers to generate traffic or directs them to the company’s products and services. Third-party publishers are affiliate organizations and for a certain fee, encourage them to find ways to promote the company/brand.
Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is another term that basically means how you can use various digital marketing channels to reach new customers in the content creation process and how to follow a path until you perform a conversion.
The main elements of inbound marketing are content, attention, engagement, trust and satisfaction. All of these elements have one purpose; to help businesses connect with their potential customers and create a two-way communication channel that will drive more sales with them.
All digital marketing channels have similar sales processes. It is the terminology used to describe each stage of the process that differs in many cases. In general, a digital sales process has 3 main goals; to enable people to learn about your brand, to enable them to interact with your brand (through your website or app) and to enable them to perform conversions.
Mobile app marketing
Mobile marketing refers to the process of reaching customers in different mobile app stores such as Google Play, Apple App Store or Amazon Marketplace.
These app stores have thousands of apps and millions of users a day. With mobile marketing, you can promote your applications with paid advertisements or other methods (in-app promotions, etc.). So you can reach more users.
Video marketing
Video marketing has become so popular lately that we can’t ignore it in the digital marketing space.
YouTube has become the second most popular search engine and many users turn into YouTube to learn something or just relax without making a purchase decision. YouTube is just one of the mediums where you can begin video marketing. There are many other platforms like Facebook Videos, Instagram, Vimeo to use to run a video marketing campaign.
The best way to benefit from video; SEO is to integrate content marketing and social media marketing campaigns.
Posting independent video campaigns can be costly and don’t always generate a positive return on investment, but the campaign’s impact will increase when video is used as a part of your other campaigns.
TV marketing
TV marketing is seen as a marketing channel that will experience an increase in the coming years. Currently, TV advertising is not 100% targeted, but marketers can only make assumptions based on statistics from a limited number of people. The adoption of Web TV will change this significantly. Marketers will be able to target audiences based on a number of factors and be informed about the decisions of content to product.
SMS marketing
SMS marketing is not the most powerful of offline channels. It is still an effective option for reaching to potential customers. There have been better alternatives on the web and mobile recently (such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger). However, SMS marketing can be used to get more visits to your local store by making campaigns and promotions.
Radio marketing
Radio marketing is another tool you can use, but not as effective as other methods. The main problem with radio marketing is that you don’t know the exact return on your investment.
When you pay for a radio ad, you can only assume the number of people who heard the ad, based on the number of listeners the particular radio station has.
Radio marketing is still a useful tool for local businesses and small communities not heavily influenced by social media.
Billboard marketing
Billboard marketing is considered to be part of digital marketing. Electronic billboards are located in some public places and are a more traditional channel within digital marketing channels.
Digital marketing strategy
A digital marketing strategy is a detailed plan of how you can leverage different digital marketing channels to achieve your business goals. By strategically managing the elements within digital marketing channels, you can enable it to turn into a successful campaign.
Click to learn how to create a digital marketing strategy.