How often you come across the word “Digital Marketing,” and when you search the word on the search engine, your eagerness to know more about it keeps growing as you try to know the concept’s meaning. Sun Media Marketing has an exclusive “FREE GUIDE” to the Digital Marketing module for beginners, intermediate, & advanced. In this blog, we will cover all the topics related to Digital Marketing in detail, which are offered by institutes & digital marketing companies for monetary. Yes, you read that right. We will cover all exclusive topics in this blog for “FREE.” After reading this blog, you will be familiar with almost 95% of Digital Marketing topics.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing, also known as online marketing, is a widely used term. It means promoting your brand to connect with your target customer segment to generate potential customer lead through the utilization of internet platforms & digital communication.
Digital Marketing includes vast marketing channels like social media platforms, emails, google ads, website ads, other forms of web-based advertising, and marketing channels involving text & multimedia messages. Any marketing campaign that has employed digital communication for promotion is Digital Marketing.
Are Inbound Marketing & Digital Marketing the same concept?
People often mix the concept of Inbound Marketing & Digital Marketing by using the terms interchangeably, which is an incorrect practice. Both are different concepts and often need clarification because of the employment of the same marketing channels like email, online content, and text messages, to name a few.
Both marketing concepts aim to generate quality customer leads for sales conversions by capturing viewers’ attention to lure them to the business website to shop online for their products & service offerings.
Both concepts have a different methodology for the tool & goal.
Digital Marketing focuses on the tool first to target individuals through digital channels to convert into promising prospects. A brand can use multiple platforms as part of its Digital Marketing Strategy or target customers through a single platform only. E.g., a business (brand) can opt only for social media platforms for content creation & generation of leads and ignore other forms of digital channels.
In contrast, inbound marketing is a holistic concept focusing on the goal first. Then it moves to the digital channels (tools) for determining which is the best for targeting their desired consumer segment & generation of target customer segment leads. E.g., In Inbound marketing, to generate quality & desired consumer segment leads, you will first write content in the form of blogs, landing pages, or website service offering and then move towards doing its SEO.
To summarize, Digital Marketing is how you will promote your brand, and Inbound Marketing focuses on delivering the actual message.
Digital Marketing is best for qualified leads & meeting short-term goals. Inbound Marketing is best for qualified leads & meeting long-term goals.
B2B vs B2C Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing Strategy primarily involves two types of Digital Marketing – B2B and B2C. Both use digital marketing in their targeting & reaching out to potential prospects & segments. Let us walk you through the difference between both for better clarification.
Decision-Making Process
Regarding the decision-making process, B2B clients have longer decision-making processes as there is more than one person involved, leading to longer sales funnels. It focuses on directly reaching out to other businesses for trading, leading to better relationship-building strategies.
On the other hand, B2C customers’ decision-making has shorter & instant decision-making as there is only one person’s input, favoring a one-on-one connection with a brand.
Communication
B2B transactions are based on logic & evidence, whereas B2C transactions are more likely based on emotions, focused on connecting emotionally with the customer for making a purchase.
In B2B marketing, the focus on more on educating your potential prospects about your business products & service offerings, your portfolio of delivering successfully to the clients, convincing prospects about your quotation and outcome of the project, and more.
On the other hand, B2C marketing focuses on alluring customers to buy your product or service by creating brand awareness and story-telling.
B2C marketing principally focuses on using LinkedIn for the lead generation of potential prospects.
Parts of Digital Marketing
There are numerous ways of doing Digital Marketing by utilization of different social media platforms, search engines, websites, & other forms. However, nine parts of Digital Marketing stand out when it comes to proven-results types by delivering the businesses their desired outcome.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is a widely used digital marketing tool & one of the vital tools for growing your business online. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) optimizes your website to give a higher ranking in Google & other SERPs to increase quality organic traffic to your website. It uses blogs, landing pages, website products & services, & infographics for doing SEO.
Organic traffic earned through Search Engine Optimization has a massive influence on search rankings, helping you increase website visibility by utilization of targeted & most searched keywords & phrases for building long-term customer relationships.
Parts of Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is divided into three parts:
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO focuses on the entire content existing on a page. This helps drive traffic to the website by answering questions for readers ranking higher on SERPs. It means that when anyone searches for a keyword, your website keyword will show up in the top results of SERPs.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO focuses on all the activities that take place off-the-page for optimizing your website. Off-Page uses inbound links, commonly known as backlinks. Your website keywords higher ranking depends on the number of publishers that will link to your website & their relative authority.
Off-page also involves writing guest posts on different publishers websites by creating backlinks that link back to your website for generating external attention & moving your website to the top results of SERPs.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO primarily focuses on the backend of your website for checking the coding of the pages, Image compression, CSS file optimization, structured data & other technical forms for increasing the website’s loading speed for the best impression on SERPs.
Types of Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is primarily of two types:
Local SEO
Local SEO is one of the most effective & best SEO types for small local businesses for targeting & reaching out to the local audience. Thousands of people search on Google & other SERPs for the products & service offerings near them (in their region), and more than 50% of the searches on Google are done to find a local company. It is crucial to optimize Local SEO to get a grip on driving these potential customers to your website.
E-Commerce SEO
E-Commerce marketing is growing every day as new businesses & existing businesses are doing their business online through E-Commerce platforms. E-Commerce SEO uses a holistic approach to increase the visibility of your website for generating traffic, lead generation, sales conversions, & creation of brand awareness.
E-Commerce SEO uses keywords to boost your website products & service offerings on SERPs. It means if any customer searches to buy (shop) a product online by typing a keyword, your business will show in the top results.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is one of the most potent forms of Digital Marketing for fostering your business online. It is the best tool for generating leads, enhancing brand awareness, driving quality organic traffic to your website, and increasing revenues. Content Marketing is best for getting qualified leads in a long-term period.
Content Marketing uses different forms of content marketing strategy for fostering your business online, which are as follows:
Blog Posts
Writing & Publishing blogs & articles on the company’s products & services to demonstrate your industry expertise, achievements, and product & service information is the best form of generating organic search traffic to your business website, giving you potential customers for sales conversion.
E-books, Newsletters & Whitepapers
E-Books, Newsletters & Whitepapers play a vital role in educating your website visitors regarding your company’s product & service, and essential content for readers that will help them make the buying decision and generate leads for your company.
Infographics
Infographics are the quickest & effective way to give website visitors a visual representation for visualization about your products & services offerings.
Audio & Visual Content
Radio Marketing has been a proven marketing strategy in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even today. Creating audiobooks online about your products, services offerings, company information, & other valuable information helps the audience visualize your content by listening to the audio.
Social Media Marketing
One of the remarkable & quickest tools for reaching the audience & potential customers is “Social Media Marketing.” Nowadays, almost the entire world is on social media platforms; hence, every business should take their products & services offerings online to reach more audiences, generate potential leads & boosting revenues. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, one marketing resource you need to include in your business strategy is – Social Media Marketing.
The best Social Media Marketing platforms that are trending are:
- Snapchat
- WhatsApp Business
Many marketers are employing the above Social Media Marketing platforms to create campaigns to spread their brand awareness and divert viewers to their business website.
Social Media Marketing also includes “Influencer Marketing.” It means partnering with popular content creators with thousands & millions of subscribers & followers to reach a wider audience.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
We all have heard about “click & bait” links & content on social media platforms. These links are pretty handy if you want to divert the viewers to your business advertising. Pay per click means that each time a viewer clicks on your advertising image or link, you will get paid at “price per click.” You can use Pay per Click (PPC) advertising through multiple forms of channels like:
Paid Ads on Facebook
Facebook Ads allow businesses to pay to customize & promote a video, image post, slideshow of images, or small reels. Facebook will publish the content by showing it in the news feed of businesses targeted & potential audiences.
Paid Ads on Instagram
Instagram Advertising is similar to Facebook Advertising, which allows businesses to pay to promote their products & service offerings, and spread brand awareness through Instagram campaigns, promoting a video, image post, slideshow of images, or small reels that Instagram shows in the news feed of target audience.
You can even promote the content on Instagram that you post on Facebook to drive the audience from Instagram to Facebook to gain Facebook followers.
Paid Ads on YouTube
YouTube Ads allow businesses to pay to promote their brand product or service offerings in the form of videos shown at the start & middle of the videos. Also, businesses can advertise on YouTube by using an image post with their website URL below the video to draw viewer attention.
Twitter Ads Campaigns
Twitter allows businesses to pay to place a single post or a series of posts or their profile badges in the news feed of their targeted (specific) audience to drive quality traffic to their business website.
Sponsored Paid messages on LinkedIn
LinkedIn allows businesses to pay for sending messages directly to their potential business prospects based on the industry & segment they want to target. B2B businesses mostly use LinkedIn advertising.
Search & Display Advertising
Search & Display Ads are run on Google & other SERPs. Whenever a user searches for a product or service by typing the keyword, your Ad will show on top of the results, allowing users to click. Once the user clicks on your Ad, you will get paid per click.
These ads are best suited to drive ready-to-buy consumers to your website & generation revenues. Google Paid Ads is one of the best examples of Search & Display Ads.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is a widely used marketing strategy offline. However, Affiliate Marketing has shifted online and become a promising Digital Marketing tool. It lets a person make money as a promoter to promote another person’s business. Affiliate Marketing works on a revenue-sharing model.
The promoter gets paid every time a customer purchases your promoted product or service. If you are working with a merchant, you will get paid per sale.
Popular content creators mostly do Affiliate Marketing through their videos, posts on social media, and small reels.
Email Marketing
Email marketing promotional messages mostly go into spam messages, but it is still considered a prominent Digital Marketing Tool to generate leads & drive customers to the website. It is vital to have engaging, captivating, alluring, interactive, relevant, & informative email campaigns not to be left unread in users’ Inboxes.
Also, checking that all email addresses are genuine & not fake before sending promotional messages is essential. Below are the types of emails you can send as part of your email marketing campaign:
- Welcome emails to the customers
- Follow-up (reminder) emails to complete the purchase of the product or service they saw online on your website
- Blogs & newsletters of your business to allure customers to visit your website
- Holiday promotions, loyalty programs, discounts, offers, & subscription benefits to lure users to visit your website
Once you have selected the type of campaign for email marketing, the next step is to ensure to keep below things for drafting promotional email messages:
- Ensure to individualize the content for both body & subject line
- Work on the content you will put in the body to draw the attention of the user
- Give an option to “unsubscribe from receiving emails from us” in the email signature
- Make a promotional message by integrating both transactional & promotional purpose
- Ensure to keep your email marketing campaign as a valued service to the users instead of a mere promotional tool
Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation is an integral platform that uses software to integrate all digital marketing campaigns for automating basic marketing operations, helping in improving the relevancy & efficiency of the advertising.
Marketing Automation helps you in improving your communication & engagement with your audience. Marketing Automation helps in automating below tasks:
Email newsletters
Email automation not only restricts you from sending emails automatically to your subscribers. It helps in compressing & expanding your contact list into the list of subscribers who are interested in receiving your email newsletters in their inboxes.
Scheduling for Social Media Posts
It is essential to post regularly on social media to stay active with the users & keep them engaged with your business by posting interactive & captivating content. Marketing Automation offers you social media scheduling tools to automatically post content on your social media channels, allowing you to utilize the saved time for other productive work.
Lead Generating Workflow
Marketing Automation allows you to send the email to your targeted subscribers & potential prospects. Once you send the email, you can download it as an E-Book to check how many users downloaded your sent content.
Tracking & Reporting of the Email Campaign
Marketing Automation helps you keep track of the campaign progress by giving you insight into the generated lead report and compiling it into structured data, making it easier to access over time.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile Marketing is a commonly used Digital Marketing Strategy for engaging with your target audience through sending SMS & MMS messages, push notifications from mobile apps, social media notifications, and more. Ensure to keep the content captivating & alluring for mobile devices.
Online Public Relations (PR)
Online PR is similar to traditional PR, which focuses on securing earned online coverage via blogs, digital publications, infographics, and more website-based content. You can use the below channels to maximize your Online PR:
Communicating with Press Media
You can use Twitter to communicate with reporters & journalists online to develop a long-term relationship with the press to benefit your company from Press Media.
Genuine & Engaging Reviews
Ensure to keep your social media company reviews free from any negative reviews to keep the reputation & creditability of your company high. It will help you connect your brand with your target audience & allow you to deliver powerful messages to create brand awareness.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing offers numerous benefits that help businesses meet short-term & long-term goals by generating quality leads, converting sales, and fostering brand awareness. Let us walk you through the salient benefits of Digital Marketing.
Cost-Effective
Digital Marketing helps you reach a vast audience compared to traditional marketing at a lower cost. It helps you cut down on traditional marketing overhead costs by helping you create captivating, alluring, enticing, & professional content at smaller costs, be it promoting on social media or PPC advertising.
Digital Marketing helps you reach your target audience and gives you a return for your smaller investment, making it a cost-effective strategy.
Quantifiable Results
Digital Marketing’s most significant benefit is that it allows you to measure the progress & results of your digital campaigns. You can see the deeper insights & accurate results in real-time, right from the start when you set the goals for each channel to the finish. You can track impressions, the number of clicks, views, shares, average time visitors spend on your website page, the number of lead generation and sales conversions from them, and much more.
Engagement with the audience
Digital Marketing allows you to understand & engage with your audience in the early stage, helping you formulate the offers & messages accordingly. You will also get an insight whenever users visit your website during peak times.
Digital Marketing allows customers to interact with you on social media by commenting on your posts & sharing your posts, which increases visibility and makes you reach a wider audience. Customer engagement in your social media posts shows their connection with your brand.
Easy to Personalize
Formulating a Marketing Strategy requires a lot of efforts. In Offline Marketing, once you implement the strategy, it will be the same from start to end and not allow you to make necessary changes in the middle. Digital Marketing overcomes this challenge and will enable you to change the strategy if any mistakes or amendments are required during the halfway, allowing you to personalize the strategy as per customer trends & preferences.
Also, Digital Marketing allows you to personalize the strategy as per the different digital marketing channels, including content, image compression, & hashtags.
Improves Conversion Rate
Digital Marketing makes it simpler for you to measure marketing efforts that help in improving in sales conversion rate. You can measure the effectiveness of each tactic and fine-tune your strategy & methods to foster your conversion rate.
Also, Digital Marketing helps target a specific audience to yield higher ROI. Investing in Digital Marketing helps you in optimizing your conversion rate.
Wider Geographic Reach
Posting an ad on a Digital Marketing Channel allows your audience to see your ads from any part of the city, state, country, and even globally in multiple time zones. This overcomes the shortcoming of traditional marketing by allowing you to grow your market & expand your business globally. You can seamlessly connect with a massive audience with Digital Marketing Channels.
How to plan & create a Digital Marketing Strategy?
For many small-scale and even large-scale businesses, it isn’t easy & challenging to plan & create an effective Digital Marketing Strategy. However, by following the seven steps below, you can create a potent & efficacious Digital Marketing Strategy that will help you generate quality leads, increase traffic to your website, & foster brand awareness.
1. Define your goals
In the foremost step, it is vital to identify the set of goals & define them, as they will be a crucial part of your strategy.
E.g., if your goal is to foster brand awareness, you need to focus on penetrating new customer segments with the help of social media platforms. If your goal is to increase sales on a particular product segment, then you need to focus on SEO to get potential prospects to your website. If your goal is to increase sales on all product segments, then you must pursue PPC advertising to drive traffic through paid ads.
2. Identifying Target Audience
Once you have set & define the goals, the next step is to identify your target customer audience. To identify the target audience, you must jot down the attributes you want to focus on, such as age group, demographic region, purchasing behavior, pricing point, and more critical attributes. This will help you determine your target audience, and it will help you in knowing which digital marketing channels you want to use for your campaigns.
E.g. if you want to target a younger age group, Instagram is the best platform. LinkedIn is the best platform if you want to target the professional and mature adult age group.
3. Establishing a Budget
Once you have identified your target audience, the next step is to establish a Budget which will depend on the digital marketing elements that you will be using.
If you want to opt for inbound tools like SEO services, social media platforms, or content development for your pre-existing website, then you need to focus on creating high-quality content for your target audience. You will be required to invest your time, not a high budget.
If you want to opt for outbound tools like PPC or email advertising, you must invest a substantial amount.
4. Selection of Digital Marketing Channels
Once you have formulated your budget, the next step is the selection of Digital Marketing Channels that you want to use that will give you the best results by meeting your defined goals, target audience, and set budget.
If you want organic traffic, it is best to go for SEO by developing rich content and matching the relevancy of your company’s product & offerings to gain top rankings in Google & other SERPs. If you want inorganic traffic, it is best to go for PPC Advertising, Google Paid Ads, and Social Media Platforms Paid Ads.
We recommend you go with the combination of both organic & inorganic traffic to get maximum results from both.
5. Creation of an Engaging Content
After selecting the digital marketing channel, the next step is to create the content you will post on digital marketing channels. The content can be blogs, social media posts & captions, PPC ads, YouTube video captions, Twitter captions, email marketing newsletters, & more.
To get the best content development services, visit our website.
6. Optimization of digital assets for mobile marketing
Mobile Marketing should be your next priority after content development. It is essential to optimize your digital marketing ads, social media images, video advertising, web pages & other critical digital assets for mobile marketing.
You must ensure that your website & mobile app both are user-friendly to operate effortlessly on mobile devices for customer delight experience on your website & app through their mobile device. It will help you reach a wider audience, penetrate more customer segments, and earn massive revenues.
7. Implementation of SEO
Digital Marketing is incomplete without SEO services. To reach the targeted audience, it is vital to conduct SEO for effective keyword research. The keywords in the top ranking in Google & SERPs drive more traffic to the business’s website.
Contact a Digital Marketing Company that will perform SEO and will bring your website keywords to the top of Google Rankings.
Pivot-based Analysis
Digital Marketing Strategy is futile without analytics. It’s vital to do a pivot-based analysis of the strategy implemented to check where you are lacking & what measures you need to take to get the maximum out of the Digital Marketing Channel.
E.g., the content you post on Instagram is loved by your targeted audience. However, the same target audience doesn’t find the content on YouTube captivating.
Hence, it is vital to do pivot-based analytics to measure the progress & outcome of the implemented strategy to ensure that your targeted audience loves all digital marketing channels content.
Conclusion
In this blog, you learned about Digital Marketing in-depth regarding its types, benefits, how to plan & create a Digital Marketing Strategy, B2B Digital Marketing vs. B2C Digital Marketing, and Digital Marketing & Inbound Marketing.
We have covered almost all topics of Digital Marketing. If you have any questions regarding any topics or want to get Digital Marketing services from Sun Media Marketing, then feel free to contact us. You can reach out to us via call at +1 (917) 267-8626 & +91 -9898-630-296 via email at info@sunmediamarketing.com.