What is Digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies on the internet, through mobile phone apps, display advertising, and any other digital mediums.

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication.

Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones, and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services.

Digital marketing can be broadly broken into 8 main categories including: Affiliate Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing Analytics, Mobile Marketing, Pay-per-click, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing.

What are the 8 Contents of digital marketing?

1.     Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing model in which third-party publishers promote a merchant's goods or services and receive a percentage of the sales or web traffic generated as a result.

With the increased prominence of online marketing, affiliate marketing — also known as influencer marketing — has become popular among many organizations in bridging the gap between consumers and organizations. But what is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing utilizes the ever-growing popularity of industry experts and social media influencers. In working with these third-party influencers, your organization will collaborate to promote your products or services for compensation. In collaboration, influencers will engage their audience with posts, blogs or videos to bring in more business for your organization and create new leads.

2.     Content Marketing

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of useful, relevant content to attract and engage your brand's target audience

Content marketing uses storytelling and information sharing to increase brand awareness. Ultimately, the goal is to have readers take action toward becoming a customer, such as requesting more information, signing up for an email list or making a purchase. “Content” can refer to blog posts, resources like white papers and e-books, digital videos, podcasts and much more.

 In general, it should first and foremost provide value to the consumer — not just advertise the brand or try to make a sale. Content marketing is about building a sustainable, trusting relationship with your customers that can potentially lead to many sales over time, not just a single transaction.

Content marketing works in symbiosis with other types of digital marketing: It is a way to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) into fresh website content, and the content created can be shared as social media posts and in email marketing publications. Looking at the analytics for your content marketing can tell you a lot about your customers

Content marketing is a great avenue for people who enjoy writing and/or video and audio production. But as with digital marketing in general, it also calls for strong strategic and analytic skills.

 There are tons of website-building platforms and blogging sites you can use to get into content marketing. For free and low-cost options, you can consider:

 o   WordPress

o   Medium

o   Hubspot CMS

o   Wix

Some of these tools include features that provide tips on how to incorporate SEO, social media, email marketing, website design and more, so you can get the full digital marketing experience.

 

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a marketing strategy where you communicate with potential customers through email. Explore how a well-executed email campaign has the potential to help you meet your marketing goals.

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses email to connect with potential customers, raise brand awareness, build customer loyalty, and promote marketing efforts.

In the world of online marketing, email marketing can often be a low-cost and high-impact tool with the ability to increase customer engagement and drive sales. As a result, it is a cornerstone of many digital marketing strategies today.

Email marketing pros not only know how to create compelling campaigns, but they also understand optimal audience outreach and are skilled at analyzing customer interactions and data, and making strategic decisions based on that data, according to the American Marketing Association (AMA).

 Email marketing software can offer many different analytical measures, but two that marketers are always striving to improve are the open rate — the percentage of recipients who opened the email — and the click-through rate — the number of recipients who opened the email and clicked on a link in the email.

 

4. Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics is the practice of analyzing marketing data from multiple systems to gain insights and make informed decisions.

One of the major advantages of digital marketing is that it is highly trackable and measurable. Once, the only trackable marketing pieces were coupons and similar direct mail offers. If a customer used the coupon, you knew the message resonated.

5. Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is any advertising activity that promotes products and services via mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. It makes use of features of modern mobile technology, including location services, to tailor marketing campaigns based on an individual's location.

This digital marketing type is focused on reaching your target audience on their smartphone or tablet. Mobile marketing reaches people through text messages, social media, websites, email and mobile applications. Marketers can tailor offers or special content to a geographic location or time, such as when a customer walks into a store or enters an event.

6. Pay-per-click (PPC)

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an online advertising model in which an advertiser pays a publisher every time an advertisement link is “clicked” on.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is all around us. Whether you’re conducting a Google search or scrolling through social media, there are PPC ads. Pay-per-click marketing is a form of digital advertising where businesses display ads on sites like Google (paid search) and Facebook (paid social) and only pay when someone clicks on the said ad. PPC ads are considered to be a low-cost and effective form of advertising, making them a popular choice for businesses of all sizes.

 

What Is Pay-per-Click Marketing?

Pay-per-click marketing is an advertising model wherein advertisers pay publishers, such as Google or Facebook, a fee each time someone clicks on their ad. Because businesses only pay a fee (known as the cost-per-click or CPC) when a user clicks on their ad, it is regarded as a very cost-effective form of marketing that generally yields a good return on investment.

 

Here are some of the most popular PPC marketing platforms:

 Google Ads

Facebook Ads

Microsoft Ads

YouTube Ads

LinkedIn Ads

Amazon Ads

Etsy Ads

Yelp Ads

Pay-per-click refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning that once you are no longer paying, the ad no longer exists. Like SEO, PPC is a way to increase search traffic to a business online.

 

Pay-per-click can refer to the advertisements you see at the top and sides of a search results page, browsing the web, watching YouTube videos and using mobile apps.

7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is method of stratigies, techniques, and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors (traffic)

The goal of SEO is to get a business to rank higher in Google search results, ultimately increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website.

To accomplish this, SEO marketers research words and phrases consumers are using to search for information online and use those terms in their own content. According to leading SEO software company Moz's "Beginners Guide to SEO," SEO encompasses many elements, from the words on your web pages to the way other sites link to you on the web to how your website is structured

here are a few of the most important things for SEO strategists and marketers, in general, to understand about how SEO works today, according to Moz:

 Content indexing – It is important to allow search engines to clearly “read” what your site content is, by doing things like adding alt text for images and text transcripts for video and audio content.

Good link structure – It is important that search engines can “crawl” your site structure to easily find all the content on your site. There are many things that an SEO specialist can do to properly format links, URLs and sitemaps to make them most accessible to site crawlers.

Keywords and keyword targeting – Properly deploying your keywords (i.e. the search terms you want your site to be found for) in your content and headers is one of the fundamental building blocks of SEO. It is no longer good practice to “stuff” your content with as many keywords and keyword variations as possible. Writing high-quality content that uses keywords in the headers and a few times in the crawl-able page content is now considered better practice and will make pages rank better in search results.

8. Social Media Marketing

This includes everything a business does via social media channels. Just about everyone is familiar with social media, but marketers must approach social with an integrated and strategic approach. Social media marketing goes far beyond simply creating posts for social channels and responding to comments.

 To be effective, efforts must be coordinated and consistent rather than an afterthought. To help keep posts consistent, there are many online tools available to automate and schedule social media posts, although marketers only should use automation as a tool, not a “set it and forget it” solution. Users will figure it out quickly if there is no real person behind the posts.

 Social media marketers should not be in a silo separate from other marketing functions. Social marketers need to work with the company’s wider marketing team to coordinate their message across all platforms, online and off, so that every part of the brand is telling the same story.

A crucial part of social media marketing is analytics. Social media marketers must also be savvy at analyzing the performance of their posts and creating strategies based on that data. It’s important to measure how well your current social media posts are performing before continuing to implement your new strategy.