Introduction to Digital Marketing
66% of the global population use the internet as of December 2020. Pandemic driven penetration of smartphones has increased in Asia primarily led by India and China. Through this penetration, there’s a new market out there for taking on the businesses.
Traditional ways of marketing include mediums like publications, television, radio and billboards. Through these advertisers have controlled people’s exposure to brands for decades. It has been a one-way communication in marketing, influencing people’s choices and creating and ruling markets.
With the explosion of the internet and digital marketing, the audience and their styles of consumption have changed. The old mediums of print, radio are in decline. And, the general consumer has also become an empowered publisher, author and critic for brands and products.
Small and big business owners alike now would like to prefer non-traditional ways of marketing their product, be it, a B2B or B2C business. All types of industries now recognize the importance of brand image, it has the power to even impact the hiring of its employees. And, Digital Marketing is the answer to help them penetrate the new surge of population logging in for the first time on the internet.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is promotion using means of electronic devices such as email marketing, social media marketing, and websites ads, not excluding multimedia and text messages to advertise either products or brands.
This new form of marketing has more than one purpose, to help people connect to brands and also to convert them to clients like traditional marketing.
More people online don’t necessarily convert to more people as clients for businesses. Now that we have an informed user, we have even more informed businesses promoting using digital marketing. It is tricky navigating this landscape because:
- Traditional means of marketing transpired one-way which is not how this internet generation prefers. It likes to interact; it would like to participate. Now, trends are not set by making a jingle worthy Oscars, but by the audience interacting and sharing to make it in the Top 10 most shared tweets for the day.
- As more and more smartphones penetrate people’s lives, so has the way people consume media changed. More content is created in a day than what one can consume in a year. This reduces people’s attention span towards advertisements which in turn creates a high-level competition for advertisers to stay above the competition.
The way Digital Marketing has created more challenges for businesses to engage with an audience, the same way it has also provided a solution. Digital Marketing also means there are:
- Sophisticated means of getting feedback about the advertisements. We now have tools like Google Analytics, Facebook insights, Instagram insights, engaging steps on website ads or email marketing to understand how many of the targeted audience either interact with the marketing post or convert as leads.
- Digital Marketing can now more than ever make personalized ads tailored to the persona of clients. The tools to advertise allows people to customize emails to refer to the particular person being written to by their first name, allows targeting geographic-specific ads for local merchandise, age-wise specific ads for specific products of interests, etc.
Types of Digital Marketing
Now that we have a foundational understanding of Digital Marketing. Let’s explore a few of the popular means of Digital Marketing:
Email Marketing
Email Marketing consists of sending a promotional or informational email to the customer base with their due permission.
Email marketing tends to be successful when the user doesn’t view the subscription as just a promotional tool. They need to be able to just interact or consume your email. Few topics for the same are:
- Marking the email with user-specific customizations such as their first name, etc.
- Integrating both transactional and promotional email campaigns done for you digital marketing agency.
Email marketing is one of the time-tested means of Digital Marketing. Roughly 89% of surveyed professionals attest to the fact that email marketing has helped them engage with customers regularly and develop a long-standing relationship.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing works by engaging an audience and driving traffic on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
Since it is a two-way communication medium where the audience can also interact with the brands or promoters, it has a very high success ratio. Of late around 96% of B2C businesses have attested to the importance of having a good social media marketing presence for their brands. It is also gaining ground with B2B businesses.
If your business caters to an older audience or is not one for an impulse buy, the marketing campaign would focus on creating a relationship with the targeted audience first and then interact with them. Social media marketing just fits the bill in such cases.
Another advantage of social media platforms is their in-built metrics to analyse the engagement of their marketing campaigns. This will help advertisers understand the kind of engagement the audience prefers, how best to reach them, and is the campaign working?
Content Marketing
Content Marketing’s goal is to publish and distribute information to customers. Using this, they can showcase their expertise in the domain and build an audience. It provides value to customers for free to create a loyal base of potential customers. 84% of customers expect companies to produce entertaining and informative content.
It could be in the form of blogs, website articles, podcasts, video tutorials, etc. Since this can be showcased either on their private platforms or the popular social media platforms, this can be showcased as part of social media marketing too.
Pay-per-Click (PPC)
Pay-per-Click or PPC marketing sets up ads on preferred platforms and pays for them only when a customer clicks on them. This could be on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing, etc. The two most popular ones are Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
How the ads show up for specific users is based on an algorithm set by the platform which could consider a few of these:
- Ad quality
- Keyword relevance
- Landing page quality
- Bid amount
PPC usually is created with a targeted end goal in mind which could be something like a purchase, call to the business number or a newsletter sign-up. These can be tracked for their efficiency based on the targeted action.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO SEM)
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is technically a marketing tool rather than a form of marketing. Most businesses online have a website of their own but need it to list in the top searches of the search engine.
SEO can help drive a lot of organic traffic to your website. And few of the deciding factors could be:
- Quality of website
- Level of user engagement
- Mobile-friendliness
- Number and quality of inbound links (other websites having links to your website)
Search Engines refine their algorithm almost constantly, which makes this an unpredictable yet powerful marketing tool. Advertisers can constantly monitor the traffic to their websites to understand the efficiency of this tool.
Conclusion
Though each of the above discussed Digital Marketing means can each have a course of their own. We at Great Learning offer a free beginner’s course to help delve you into this arena with a complete view of the same. Take up the and enhance your skills today!