What is Digital Marketing? And a Free Digital Marketing and SEO Course

Naeem Ur Rehman August 13, 2021

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The act of selling items and services using digital channels such as social media, SEO, email, and mobile applications is known as digital marketing. In a nutshell, digital marketing refers to any type of marketing that uses electronic devices.

What is the definition of Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing, at its most basic level, is advertising provided via digital channels like as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. Digital marketing is the process of corporations endorsing goods, services, and brands via the use of various online media platforms. Consumers rely significantly on digital tools to conduct product research. According to Think with Google marketing insights, 48 percent of customers start their searches on search engines, while 33 percent go to brand websites and 26 percent go to mobile apps.

While current digital marketing is a vast network of channels into which marketers must simply integrate their brands, online advertising is far more difficult than the channels themselves. Marketers must go deep into today’s large and complicated cross-channel world to uncover tactics that create an effect via engagement marketing in order to realise the actual potential of digital marketing. The process of creating meaningful relationships with new and returning consumers based on the data you collect over time is known as engagement marketing. By engaging customers in a digital environment, you may increase brand recognition, establish yourself as an industry thought leader, and position your company at the top of the customer’s mind when they’re ready to buy.

Marketers may get important insights into target audience habits while also introducing new means of consumer involvement by using an omnichannel digital marketing strategy. Companies should also expect to see an improvement in employee retention. Firms with effective omnichannel consumer engagement strategies maintain an average of 89 percent of their customers, according to a research by Invesp, compared to companies with bad omnichannel programmes, which keep only 33 percent of their customers.

Consumers should anticipate to see a continuous growth in the range of wearable gadgets accessible in the future of digital marketing. Forbes also predicts that in the B2B arena, social media will become more conversational, video content will be improved for SEO purposes, and email marketing will become even more customised, according to Forbes.

Digital marketing may help with a variety of issues.

Digital is required to enhance your marketing strategy. Digital marketing may assist you in getting to know your target audience, learning crucial facts about them, and providing analytics that will provide credibility to your marketing team.

Problem: I don’t know enough about my target audience to get started. It takes time to get to know your audience, and while your marketing team may have created audience profiles that might be useful, customers who spend time online may not behave the way you expect. You’ll need to test various wording with different audiences, bearing in mind that different descriptions will appeal to different consumers at different stages of the purchasing process. When you pay attention to your audience, you’ll develop credibility that will help you stand out from the crowd.

The issue is that I have not optimised my channels for SEO. It’s critical to grasp SEO best practises no matter what role you play in the marketing process. SEO can reinforce and support your campaign testing and optimization to guarantee you’re producing high-quality, valuable content that your potential consumers desire, in addition to increasing search engine rankings.

The issue is that I don’t have a social media plan. It’s critical to have some sort of social marketing in place, whether you want to build an organic social media plan, a sponsored social media strategy, or a hybrid of the two. While social media is great for branding and engagement, it can also be a good place to showcase your digital marketing. Find a niche and a consistent voice, be patient, and as your audience grows, so will the effect of your advertisements.

My marketing teams are segregated, which is a problem. To develop agile, flexible structures, it’s critical to break down silos. Because your clients aren’t confined to a single channel waiting for advertisements, your marketing efforts must include cross-channel capabilities and teams with diverse skill sets to engage them wherever they are. Because each social network and platform has a unique audience and set of expectations, marketing efforts may differ drastically. This covers everything from tone to images to offers to the time of day you post.

Problem: My CMO is pressuring me to report on KPIs that benefit the company’s bottom line. The wide array of metrics available in digital marketing may be used to assess the efficacy of your marketing activities, but these indicators should be picked carefully. Each situation will be determined by the demographics of your audience and the channel’s focus. With this in mind, begin by establishing your goals for each channel and the KPIs that your CMO will be most interested in seeing.

Digital Marketing Components List

Digital marketing encompasses a vast network of digital touchpoints with which clients interact often throughout the day. To make the best use of these channels, you must first learn about them.

Pay-per-click. Paid search, often known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, is the sponsored result that appears at the top or side of a search engine results page (SERP). These advertisements charge you for each click, and they may be customised to display only when specific search keywords are entered, so your advertising are only shown to those who are looking for something specific. These advertisements may be quite effective since they are based on data gathered from people’s online activities and are used to increase website traffic by providing relevant advertising to the appropriate people at the right time. These advertisements also use retargeting, which means that marketing automation solutions may create unique, personalised cross-platform ads based on the behaviours of clients.

SEO stands for search engine optimization (SEO). The act of optimising your website’s content, technical setup, and reach such that your pages appear at the top of a search engine result for a specified set of keyword words is known as SEO. When visitors show behaviour indicating that they’re looking for related items, SEO can bring them to your site, which can be a game changer considering that 90% of individuals searching haven’t formed an opinion about a brand yet (Status Labs, 2018). While PPC and retargeting have their uses, organic internet traffic derived from search engine optimization has a significant impact on search results and, by implication, organic site traffic. You may utilise SEO to dramatically improve exposure and start a long-term client engagement by employing keywords and phrases. SEO is described as employing popular keywords and phrases to improve a website’s ranking in online search results, and hence its organic site traffic. Because exposure is the first step to a long-term client connection, strong SEO techniques are extremely important in digital marketing efforts.

Content marketing is a term that refers to the process of Effective content marketing isn’t blatantly commercial; instead, it educates and inspires people who are looking for knowledge. When you provide relevant material to your audience, you establish yourself as a thought leader and a reliable source of information, making it less likely that your other marketing efforts will be lost in the shuffle. Content marketing generates three times more leads than paid search advertising in the age of the self-directed customer, so it’s well worth the extra work.

Marketing on social media. Having active social media accounts isn’t the only key to good social media marketing. To establish as many peer-to-peer sharing possibilities as possible, you must incorporate social features into every part of your marketing activities. The more engaged your audience is with your content, the more inclined they are to share it, perhaps influencing their friends to become clients as well.

Email marketing is a type of marketing that involves sending emails to Email is still the quickest and most direct means to reach clients with crucial information after more than two decades. To avoid being buried in your customer’s inbox, successful email campaigns must be extremely engaging, relevant, educational, and amusing. To be successful, your marketing emails must meet five key criteria. They must be reliable, timely, conversational, cross-channel coordinated, and strategic.

Mobile marketing is a term that refers to the use of We keep our phones in our pockets, keep them next to our beds, and check them regularly throughout the day. This makes mobile marketing crucial—two-thirds of customers can recall a specific brand they saw advertised on mobile in the previous week—but mobile marketing is also complex due to its personal nature. SMS, MMS, and in-app marketing are all ways to contact your consumers on their mobile devices, but you also need to think about how your marketing efforts are coordinated across your other digital marketing channels.

Marketing automation is a term that refers to the process of Marketing automation is a critical platform that connects all aspects of your digital marketing. In fact, firms that automate lead management report an increase in revenue of 10% or more in six to nine months. Your campaigns will resemble an incomplete puzzle with a critical missing component if you don’t have it. Marketing automation software helps you increase revenue quicker by streamlining and automating marketing processes and workflow, measuring outcomes, and calculating the return on investment (ROI) of your digital initiatives. Marketing automation may give KPIs that allow you to speak to the impact of digital marketing on your company’s bottom line, as well as useful insight into which initiatives are working and which aren’t.

Is Digital Marketing Effective?

Any firm may benefit from digital marketing. We’ve utilised digital marketing to help businesses of all sizes expand, from mom-and-pop shops to internationally known institutions and beyond, at Disruptive. That is the allure of online advertising. You can use digital marketing to target anybody, anywhere if you know who you want to reach.

However, some firms will profit more from particular forms of digital advertising than others. Let’s take a brief look at which tactics work best for businesses that sell to consumers (B2C) versus businesses that sell to businesses (B2B):

COMPANIES THAT PROVIDE SERVICES TO INDIVIDUALS (B2C)

B2C firms, on average, have lower pricing points than their B2B counterparts. After all, selling a $150,000 drill bit (trust me, they exist) to a hurried parent may be difficult. But $10 for a pair of children’s pants? That’s a rather simple sell.
The good news is that B2C businesses don’t require large sales teams or sophisticated marketing funnels because they aren’t attempting to offer extremely expensive goods or services. They only need to get their products or services in front of the proper audience with the correct messaging, and the rest will take care of itself.
As a result, most B2C firms’ primary objective is to attract consumers into and through their marketing funnel. If you can get that stressed-out mom onto your kids’ clothes website and offer her a great price, there’s a high chance she’ll purchase today. Before you can close a transaction, you don’t need a lot of brand awareness or trust.
With this in mind, higher-funnel marketing channels such as social media marketing and paid social advertising frequently produce excellent results for B2C businesses. These platforms perform an excellent job of putting your company in front of potential clients who might otherwise be unaware of its existence.
Supplementing with other digital marketing techniques such as sponsored search or SEO is always a smart idea, but if you only have time to focus on one channel, paid social advertising or social media marketing are excellent choices for B2C.

BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS (B2B) ENTITIES

Paid search, on the other hand, is a fantastic choice for B2B businesses. Most B2B businesses cater to highly narrow niche customers, which might be difficult to reach via social media. If you sell $150,000 drill bits, you want to be the first result when someone searches for “diamond-tipped oil drilling bit manufacturer.” Yes, you’ll pay more for your click than with sponsored social advertising, but with a price tag of $150,000, it’s money well spent.
Furthermore, unlike B2C firms, most B2B companies have a considerably longer and more complex sales cycle. If you’re selling a $150,000 drill bit, most consumers aren’t going to your website, calling you, and saying, “I want one.” As a result, longer-term methods such as content marketing or email marketing are frequently required to complete a transaction.

Of course, the ideal mix of digital marketing methods will vary by sector and business, but merely comparing B2C and B2B should give you an idea of how various strategies might be beneficial for different firms. Not every method is suitable for every firm, but with a little trial and error, you should be able to figure out which technique is the most profitable for you.