You open YouTube, Instagram or Facebook or any website. How many ads did you see? Were you interested in that ad or did you just skip it? There are many ads that you stumble upon in everyday life. These are examples of digital marketing. They are showing these ads because they are relevant to your search query or your interest. Let’s take a look at what digital marketing is and how this is going to be important.
Introduction: what is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is the way of marketing through the digital platform and channels to promote products or services of the company. It is the key to achieve a company’s goal through a tactic to engage a target audience, driving traffic to the product or services. Digital marketing uses analytics and data to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. It uses various online channels like search engines, social media, email and website to get connected with targeted audiences. The ultimate goal is to boost brand awareness, generate leads, increase sales and build customer loyalty to the brand.
Types of digital marketing
In traditional marketing there was no measure of its effectiveness, how many people saw it and came to a company through it. So looking at the disadvantages of traditional marketing, the concept of digital marketing was invented.
Digital marketing can be performed on different platforms and target audiences looking at their needs, interests and ages. Here we have present the 8 types digital marketing
1. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization or SEO, is the process of optimizing a webpage on a search engine or global leader of search engine google. SEO helps to appear on your page at the top of SERPs when people are searching for related keywords or queries. Also it helps to build trust and credibility to the consumers as well.
SEO itself is a marketing tool more than a way of marketing. Unlike any form of marketing once you appear at the top, you’re always at the first page of SERPs. What’s more is that you can get more traffic for a long term without paying google.
More importantly, search engines change their algorithm constantly, so there is no exact way how you can rank at top. On-page SEO, Off-page SEO and Technical SEO as well as the other factors like searcher’s intent etc. affects where your page appears at SERPs.
So using analytics tools like google analytics, google search console etc. helps you to know how people are reacting to your article and make adjustments accordingly.
2. Social Media marketing (SMM)
With billions of people on social media, connecting with consumers is easier than ever. Social media marketing leverages social sites to connect with targeted consumers and build brand awareness. The most popular social media are like facebook, instagram, TikTok, pinterest, YouTube etc.
Social media offers wider reach and engaging content for consumers. Based on where your target audiences are, you can choose the platform you use and personalize the content based on their needs and behavior. For example if you’re an online clothing store, you can use instagram where the younger generation of fashion enthusiasts are.
And through social media provide all the information and quality content related to your service or product . do a comparison and engage with them to emphasize why you’re best at all the options out there. Which helps to convert and promotes customer retention.
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Furthermore, if you want more traffic you can simply run ads for more targeted reach and personalization. This allows you to reach specific demographics and interested people relatively at low cost.
3. Content marketing
Content is any kind of information on a specific topic and content marketing is using information about your product or services to attract potential consumers. You can create valuable content to build trust with consumers and guide them through the buying journey and increase conversion rate. The content marketing could be any form that is blog post, videos, infographics or e-books that attracts leads for future conversion.
To create highly effective content you need a lot of practice. First identify the actual audience for your company. Based on your consumers their preference and interested content can be different. Regardless of whichever content you’re creating it should be easy to read, understand and backed by real research data and valuable to the consumers. Through this information it can form a great relation with the consumers. Creating measurable steps throughout your content can be helpful to understand what type of content is most engaging and what kind of content needs to be created in future.
4. PPC Advertising:
PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is one type of digital marketing, where you place a targeted ad on a search engine or social media platform and other websites. And when the link of the ad is clicked, advertisers need to pay for each click. Basically, you will be paying for every link clicked and cost effective way to drive traffic in website.
PPC generates fast traffic and leads which is also great if you’re promoting new launches or time sensitive information. It also helps to personalize targeting and reach specific customers based on their demographics, online behavior and interest. It is also cost effective and flexible to adjust the budget according to the ROI.
For example if you’re running an organic fruit shop and want to run a PPC marketing campaign on google. When someone searches for that keyword, your ad might be on top of the page and they click on your website. For that click you have to pay a certain small fee that depends on your budget ranging from $1 to $50+. And if the campaign runs great you will make a great profit too.
5. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the way of digital marketing that involves third parties or affiliates for the traffic generation on the website. Affiliates are those who promote companies’ products or services and take commission for each lead or sale that goes through their link. They do it by running ads, posting links on social media and websites or sending the link through email. They share infographics, videos, and images to engage the audience.
Affiliate marketing was popularized by Amazon by creating affiliate marketing programs. Their website owners and bloggers put links to the Amazon page for related items on the blogs or review and discussion for a certain product. It is a similar form of pay-per-click advertising but it will be done through affiliate links.
An internet based company that wants to increase sales might opt for affiliate marketing and pay a certain fee for affiliates. In Nepal, you can join affiliate programs like daraz, khukuri Nepal, nest Nepal and agm hosting etc.
6. Email marketing
Email marketing involves sending emails about your service and product to the targeted consumers through an email. It does not only help with the promotion but with informational content and build a strong relationship with the consumers.
With billions of people using email for their personal use and work, the email marketing game is going strong. According to the hubspot you earn $36 on every $1 you spend on email marketing. This data shows the progress done with the help of email marketing.
Through email marketing you can segment your audience based on demographics, needs and behaviors. Also you run automation for welcome messages, abandon carts, birthday mail, survey mail and many more based on the action done by a consumer. These automation and segmentation tools help for a higher engagement and conversion rates as well as customer retention.
Email marketing tools offer built in analytics to measure the success of a campaign. It tracks open rate, delivery rate, unsubscribe and click through rates to see how effective the campaign. These metrics help to track and adjust the strategy according to the needs.
7. Mobile marketing
People are carrying their phone 24/7 and constantly checking for updates. So to target that large audience, mobile marketing uses mobile devices to promote products and services. Mobile marketing include the following channels:
SMS marketing
In-app marketing
Mobile search bar ads
Location based marketing
QR codes and NFC(near field communication)
Mobile marketing segments audiences based on online behavior and location of consumers.it helps to create personalized content for a target audience and increase traffic to the website. Features like push notification and chatbots we can engage with an audience in real time. But we do need to consider the privacy and data of the consumer and ensure safety. Using mobile apps not only helps to boost sales but with personalized user experience too.
Track the key elements like app downloads, in-app purchases and conversion rates to see how successful the marketing campaign did.
8. Influencer Marketing:
Influencers are those who have a followers or a group of people who are influenced by opinion or experience. And influence marketing partners with them to leverage their influence to get more exposure to those particular people and get leads.
In the competitive landscape of marketing winning the trust of consumers is more important rather than just creating brand awareness. Before buying any product and services people are comparing and taking opinion on what people think. An influencer’s recommendation just helps with that. Their positive and negative opinion and experience can sway user decisions. That’s why many brands are using influencer marketing to boost sales. But figure out which influencers suit your company needs. And companies can compensate them with a certain percentage of revenue generated from it.
So all these digital marketing fulfills different company needs and drive traffic and conversions. Technology and human needs are changing quickly so we need to adapt the strategies accordingly and stay up to date.