What is Digital Marketing? An Easy Guide to the buzzword!

Humans are selling and buying products /services from the inception of this world. Historically, sellers try to enhance the positive qualities of their products through different sources. Initially; it used to be done through word of mouth.

With the change of time, advertisements became an essential part of every business. Radio and television ads played a vital role in bringing an incredible change in sales of different products and resulted in the creation of giant brands. Brand awareness can only be created by using ad campaigns.

Since the last decade, the use of computers and the internet have shot up incredibly. People tend to spend more time on the internet using various social and entertainment applications.

Therefore, the Marketing of any product/service is incomplete without making its impact on internet users.

There’ll be a massive increase in the number of internet users as global mobile data traffic is projected to increase 7 times more as of today leading towards 4 billion unique users between 2017 and 2022 according to data collected in April 2022.

Therefore, the importance of digital marketing is unavoidable now...Here comes what actually digital marketing is:

Digital Marketing uses digital channels for reaching out to diversified target market, but the underlying marketing objectives remains the same as in traditional marketing. It is all about identifying a need, promoting any product/service to fulfill that need, reaching the target audience, communicating in a manner to gain and retain customers for building long term business relationship.

Digital Marketing is accompanied by various digital channels for promoting the product and creating awareness about it among the masses.

These are:

 

·        E-mail Marketing
·        Banner Advertisement
·        Sponsored Blog Post
·        Videos
·        Search Engine Optimization

 

Let’s get into the detail of each of these components and develop a better understanding of them.

E-mail Marketing:

E-mail Marketing has been relevant in the field of marketing from a long period of time and still it is. As the term suggests, it is about getting your customers/subscribers know about your latest products, new deals, discounts on their favorite merchandise or latest trends through sending them promotion based e-mails.

E-mail marketing focuses on establishing long term relationship with the customers by getting in touch with them and informing them every new happening in your business that might interest them. It starts with collecting  Email list through subscribe call to action button on your news portal, product website, or contact form on E-commerce websites.

The E-mail list is organized to advertise future business campaigns. However, should be done in an appropriate manner after periodic gaps and through attention-grabbing copy-righting techniques so that potential customers do not get offended.

E-mail marketing is still in the game greatly as it is proved to be a more efficient digital marketing tool in comparison with Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and SEO.As according to research done in 2019,91% of the organization are generating leads through content marketing.

E-mail marketing is the strongest tool for content marketing.

 

Banner Advertisement:
 

Banner the advertisement refers to the display of horizontal or vertical display of an ad on the top, bottom, or sidebar area of any website. They are usually designed in a great manner to grab the user’s attention; leading towards reading the ad and performing the desired action which is usually a click.

The banner advertisement uses the idea of billboard ads. Billboard ads get potential customer's attention while walking or driving on the roads, if they are about any need of the reader then they might end up visiting the outlet, restaurant, buying the gadget being advertised.

The banner advertisement has eased the work, so after clicking they redirect the user to the advertised product’s website. A website with good traffic provides a place for the banner ads in terms of fixed charges that may be different for different terms of ad position.

Banner ads are a great option for new businesses to promote themselves to a large audience by placing ads on websites, with reasonably good traffic.

Banner ads tend to contain more graphics or images than text as a picture is worth a thousand words and serves the purpose well. Famous websites have a virtual bidding system where advertising websites bid on the place of banner ads on the hosted website and on winning the bid the ads got the place.

Sponsored Blog Post:

Sponsored blog post is another type of digital marketing that you will require to market your product/service greatly. Now let’s first understand what a Sponsored blog post is?

In a simpler way, you are running a great blog with plenty number of readers on it. You share a rich amount of high-quality content, then you will be getting a lot of requests from online sellers to promote their product on your blog through a sponsored blog post. In the sponsored blog post they will be talking about their product/service, its benefit, pricing, target audience, and all the things relevant to it.

You might write it for them and present it as your personal experience or leave the writing of the blog to them. You must need to give it an editorial check to match the quality.

Now here comes the best part where the sponsored company is writing for your blog and they will also be going to give you money for it as they will get the prospect customers amongst your audience.

If you are an emerging online marketer, you will require to do it the same for your product/service. There are many platforms providing sponsored blog posts.

An important point here is to take care of relevancy. If you are selling a sports kit, it is not a great choice to advertise on a blog on a cooking based niche.

It will be a perfect marketing tool if you write your sports kit sponsored blog post on sports blog.

Video as a marketing tool:

Video Marketing is becoming more and more popular day by day. Videos are far more entertaining, easily understandable than thick textual data and figures. All big social media platforms encourage and promote video data more than the textual ones.

Facebook as a rival of YouTube is more inclined towards getting and promoting more video ads. Research states that by 2021 80% of internet traffic will be in video form.

High quality videos are essential to promote service/brand. Videos for general public awareness, presenting a social cause are more in trend than ever.

Now, the question arises on how to use this video data to do digital marketing?

Make a video explaining the pros of using your product/service and the cons of not having it. It should be a high-quality video with live representation about the usage of product/service.

Post regular videos for customer engagement on your business Facebook page and YouTube channel. Share these on all social platforms to increase the reach. You can also get sponsorship for videos by advertising Facebook pages, youtube channels, and blogs.

A large percentage of marketers that is 97% claim that videos help customer in understanding the product better.

Create short engaging videos as viewers tend to lack interest in long video ads and find them boring. A great copywriting and hooking tagline is required to spread the message across.

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):   

SEO is the technique to rank a website high in search engine results. It is all about using the correct keywords in your content, descriptions and tags.SEO is a technical approach to building a great connection with your potential customers by making your website reachable to them so that if they do any search related to your website niche, your articles must appear in the top results.SEO works everywhere it is about website/blog ranking, youtube channel optimization, etc.

Search Engines are there to provide the best search results to their users. Therefore they scan every website based on user searches, find the relevancy, readability, site map, and other factors then they crawl a website to top results if the website is up to the mark fulfilling all the criteria.

SEO is a complex procedure, It is about the content a website contains, its readability, easy navigation through the website, user security, relevancy, and uniqueness of the provided information.

The popular Search Engines are:

·        Google:

Google, LLC is American multinational technology company  providing various internet-related technologies. Google Search Engine is the most popular search engine  containing billions of webpages. It is the best and foremost priority of any internet user. Google  now providing a range of internet-based services like online advertisement.cloud computing, Gmail, software, and hardware.It was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998  while they were doing ph.D. from Stanford university California.
To get your website rank high, it is required to get a complete idea of how Google ranks a website.

·      Yahoo:

as        The original Yahoo! company was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1995. Yahoo was the pioneer of the early internet industry and brought a revolution in terms of internet surfing.

It provides a Search engine, Email, online mapping, advertising, and news portal services. Yahoo is the second most used search engine after google.

       MSN: 

         It is a web portal service provided by  Microsoft in 1994. Initially, it started as a web portal for its readers but later on converted to a search engine called Internet Explorer.

        Later on, Microsoft shifted its evergreen web portal to a separate web address WWW.MSN.Com

·     Bing:

b        Bing is another search facility provided by Microsoft as a replacement for its Live search in 2009. Bing provides the search facility for web pages, videos, images, and maps. It is considered as an effective search engine.

 

Search Engine Optimization mainly performed in two ways:

1.     On-Page Optimization

2.     Off-Page Optimization

On-Page Optimization:

  On-page optimization is all about making changes to your website content to enhance reachability and increase readability. It is easy to implement On-page SEO techniques as they are verily in control of the content writers.

On-page SEO focuses on Title tags, Meta Description, Images ALT tags, internal linking.

 

Title Tags:

In simpler words, it is about using engaging titles of your articles. Use search keywords of your niche topic wise in your titles to attract the users.

·        Use Uber Suggest or Google Keyword planner to do keyword research.

·        Use Numbering and ‘How to’ in titles to hook the reader like “5 ways of earning money online”, “How to loose weight without doing day-long exercise?”

       Usage of long-tail keywords tends to bring more traffic. Focus on those keywords possessing low to medium competition and less search difficulty.

·        Articles should focus on highly searched keywords, hot topics, and current political, social scenarios. Do hardcore keyword research to get articles rank and perform well. Buzzsumo is a great website to search for trendy topics all over the world. If you have a news portal website, it will be great to write on trendy topics to attain user attention.

 

Keep titles short and crispy, to the point and use punchy keywords.

Meta Description:

A meta description is the initial lines of your article that comes right under the title of the article and show up in search result. Write these in an appropriate way to give the reader an initial idea of what the article is going to convey so that users feel the urge to click.

 Sub Heading:

 Long paragraphs are difficult to read, it is good to divide the content into smaller portions and give a suitable heading to small paragraphs.

Give H2, H3, H4 tags to help search engines know the order of content.

Links:

On-page optimization highly focuses on internal and external linking. Internal linking is called in-bound linking, it is about linking your content to an already article of your website supporting the current topic. It increases credibility.

External or out-bound linking refers to linking to an external website where you endorse  your information by giving credible website verification.

Image Name and ALT tag:

 You need to give names to images used in articles according to the information shown in them, which helps search engines in making your content reachable to the right audience. Use keywords in naming images so that they can appear in suitable user image searches.

Under the on-page SEO approach, you also submit a site map to different search engines like google, yahoo, bing so that search engine can understand the navigation of your website, this submission is done through google webmaster tool for google search engine and respectively yahoo webmaster tool for yahoo search engine.

 Use All in One SEO or Yoast plugin in WordPress , Shopify, and custom Php website to get detailed analysis and setting of on-page optimization.

Off-page SEO:

Off-page SEO is all about sharing website content on different social platforms. It has a great impact on website ranking.

Off-page SEO has the following factors:

BackLink:

Backlink means that your website link is sponsored or backed by credible websites. In that case, google analysis that if a website is backlinked by credible website, it is also a reliable source of information for that specific niche.

Google also checks the relevancy of backlinking and backlinked website.

If you own an E-commerce store and it is backlinked by an E-commerce base blog it will be great as the relevancy principle is followed here.

Backlinko is one of the best platforms to get backlinks for your website.

 

Social Expressions and Link sharing:

Off-page Seo requires patience and high-quality content marketing. A website with good graphics,well-written content, credible information is appreciated by the readers. You will need to make a presence on all social platforms and sharing of content for getting maximum social expressions. The constant effort will lead to public appreciation and self sharing leading to a higher rank and great reachability.