What is Digital Marketing?
Internet usage among adults has grown significantly in the past few years and continues to grow even now. Which means the ways in which audiences are reached must change as well. Marketing is about connecting with audiences at the right time and, more importantly, in the right place. Where do most adults spend much of their time? On the internet. And so digital marketing comes into play.
Digital Marketing includes any marketing effort that utilizes the internet or electronic devices. In order to connect with potential and current customers, business employ digital networks like email, social media and search engines.
A good digital marketer will know what their end goal is for a campaign and use the free and paid channels at their disposal, depending on the desired scope of their campaign. Here are some of the most common digital strategies.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is involves optimizing your website to rank higher on search engine results pages, which increases how many free traffic comes through your site. There are many different ways to increase traffic to your website. Here are a few:
On page SEO: This focuses on actual content that is on the page of your site. Researching keywords for their intent and search volume, you can help answer questions from potential customers and achieve a higher rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs) that the questions yield.
Off page SEO: This SEO concentrates on the ‘off page’ activity for your website. How can activity outside of your website affect your ranking? Something known as inbound links or backlinks. This happens when other websites link to yours, generating external attention. By partnering with other sites and creating content that links back to your website, you produce the backlinks needed to move your website up on the right SERPs.
Technical SEO: The focus here is the backend of your site, specifically how your pages are coded. Things like CSS file optimization, structured data and image compression are all components in the technical side of SEO that increases the loading speed of your website. These factors are important in the ranking of search engines such as Google.
Content Marketing: Content Marketing involves the creation of content to promote brand awareness, increase traffic and generate leads. There are a number of channels you can use to help in this kind of marketing effort, but here a few great options:
Blog posts: Creating a company blog to write and publish articles specific to your industry demonstrate expertise and help generate ‘organic’ search traffic to your website. This can help to turn visitors of your site into leads for your team.
Ebooks: Long-form content such as e-books or whitepapers help to educate visitors on your business. In addition, you can gather contact information from your readers which can help generate leads.
Infographics: Many times, readers want to you to show them information, not tell. Infographics present information to readers in a visual context to help them better understand concepts your want them to learn about your business.
Pay Per Click (PPC): This way of driving traffic to your site is paying a publisher each time someone interacts with (or clicks) your ad. Google Ads is one of the more common types of PPC. They allow you to pay for prime slots on Google’s search engine results page at a price ‘per click.’
Facebook paid ads: On Facebook users have the option to pay for customized content, like videos, image posts and slideshows. Then, Facebook publishes this branded content to newsfeeds of people who correspond with your businesses target audience.
Twitter ads: Users have the option here to pay to place posts or profile badges to the newsfeeds of their target audience. Marketing this way can accomplish a variety of goals for a business, whether it is increasing web traffic, increases tweet engagements or app downloads.
LinkedIn sponsored messages: On LinkedIn, users can pay to have messages sent directly to other users based on their background or industry.
Affiliate Marketing: This method of marketing is performance-based advertising that allows you to earn a commission for promoting the products and services of someone else on your site. This can be achieved through hosting ads through the YouTube Partner Program or posting affiliate links on your social media accounts.
Native Advertising: This style of advertising matches the content of the site being used to advertised. BuzzFeed-sponsored posts are an example of native advertising, as well as Instagram advertising.
Marketing Automation: This refers the software that helps to automate your most basic marketing operations. Many marketing departments use this software to automate repetitive tasks that they would do manually. For example:
Email newsletters: Not only can email automation help send emails automatically to subscribers, but it can also help you to increase or expand your contact list as necessary.
Social media post scheduling: Posting on a schedule and with frequency helps to establish and grow your company’s social media presence. However this can be difficult if it has to be done manually. Scheduling your posts gets all of your content to the proper social media channels and frees up time for you to focus on other aspects of your branding, such as content strategy.
Lead-generating workflows: Converting customers to leads can be a long process. A way to automate this process is to send out lead specific emails.
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