The concept of marketing in today’s world exceeds only the promotion of a product or service. It is implemented in every aspect of business development - to achieve greater outreach and output.
A company who understands the importance of digital marketing throughout the development of a website see a higher gain in sales and revenue than those who implement it later. From a well-optimized web page to a user-specific content, everything affects the future outcome of digital marketing.
A few years back, Digital Marketing for business was an entirely new concept. It was mostly referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is only a misnomer for the same.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing refers to a marketing approach through the use of digital channel and mediums such as websites, social media, search engine, web applications, and smartphone.
Although digital marketing describes the sole purpose of promoting a product, service or an entity (person or business) for the growth of sales or revenue, digital marketing in true sense covers the entire aspect of branding and long-term business outreach.
5 Key Functions of Digital Marketing
- Acquisition – the part where you get a customer’s attention
- Clickthrough – the part where a customer comes onto your site
- Call-to-action – a customer takes the desired action
- Conversion –the desired action leads to the completion of a goal
- Retention – make your customers keep them coming back?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization remains the most popular among much digital marketing scape mainly because it is the oldest digital marketing method.
Types of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing encompasses different forms of marketing that spread through multiple medium and channels. Some of the most sought after digital marketing are as follows;
Content marketing
“Content is King!” is a famous slogan adopted by many marketers! Everything on the internet is basically driven by content. YouTube is run by videos, Twitter is run by assertive messages or tweets, and Instagram is run by photos. Everything we see on the internet is a form of content.
The idea for content marketing is to create or curate contents that are valuable, relevant, and consistent. Great contents are like bait for attracting an audience. It focuses on providing useful and relevant content to the audience rather than pitching a product!
Research suggested that a marketing campaign driven by great content results in higher conversion.
Another big advantage of content marketing is that it costs less to produce and market content than any other forms of marketing.
Some of the most popular forms of content marketing are as follows
- Articles
- Audio
- Blog Post
- E-books
- Images
- Infographics
Content curation is a process to gather information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest and add value to it. It helps to market content through a niche medium.
Some of the major content curating sites are;
- Quora
- Pinterest
- BuzzSumo
- Feedly
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimizing web pages to gain higher prominence or higher ranking in the search engine. Higher prominence mixed with great content helps to garner better click-through rate (CTR) and conversion.
It remains the most popular among much digital marketing scape mainly because it is one of the oldest methods of digital marketing.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to make it search engine friendly.
i. Crawling
To make your website easily accessible to search engines, you provide access to search engine robots through XML sitemap and robots.txt (In case of Apache servers). These two files are always kept in the root directory. XML Sitemap includes all the links of webpages whereas robot.txt gives a direction to search engine robots to either crawl a certain page, folder, or directory or not along with other directives.
ii. Content
Content encompasses anything textual, visual (images and graphics), and audible elements in a website. Producing rich and relevant content plays an equally important role as any other SEO processes. A relevant and niche content is more likely to be crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines.
iii. Title Tag
The title tag is a brief outline of any webpage that shows up in browsers, social media posts, and search engine results. The relevant the title tag, the more likely it is to be clicked by an audience.
iv. Meta Description
The meta description gives a brief description or the summary of the page. Unlike the title tag, it shows up only in social media posts and searches engine results.
v. Headings or H-Tag
Heading are the HTML-specified headers that appear inside a webpage The smart use of keyword-targeted H-tags offers an extra prominence to any web page. Some of the examples of H-tags are H1, H2, H3, H4, and H5.
vi. Interlinking
Interlinking basically means hyperlinking keywords or important phrases to other relevant webpages inside the website. This helps to interlink relevant pages and help visitors to access different webpages in a website.
vii. 404
404 redirect is useful when a web page is deleted. It implies that the requested URL may be available in the future, but may not contain the same content.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO implies the optimization done outside of a website. Off-page basically helps to boost search engine ranking through backlinking, content marketing, blogging, and social media marketing.
Experts suggest that the best marketing includes 15% On-page and 85% Off-page SEO.
Search engine marketing
Search engine marketing or SEM is a popular form of digital marketing that encompasses the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility or prominence in search engine results pages. It is also called paid advertising. SEM is solely concerned with increasing search engine rankings.
Google Adwords, Bing Ads, and Yahoo: Search Ads a few of the most prominent platforms used for SEM. These platforms use the model of targeted keyword, Cost per Click (CPC), and impressions, and Click-through Rate (CTR) to determine the success of any advertisement.
Pay per Click
Pay per Click is the paid marketing technique for any business. PPC channels such as Double Click, Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Yahoo: Search Ads cover more than one medium of advertising. The ads are shown in both search engines and websites.
Google Adwords, Affiliate websites and social networks are part of Pay per Click channels. Alike Google Adwords, the price a marketer pays depends on keyword relevance, geographical region, competition, the total number of users and exposure.
Social media marketing
The advent of Social Media Marketing for business took rise with the opening of popular social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Social networking is one of the keys of effective marketing, and along with networking, a business can run ads that directed the visitors to their social media page, e-shopping portal, or website landing page.
With most people spending time on social media, social media marketing can be the most effective and profit-oriented marketing approach.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a technique of employing others to generate business for you, however, you must share a certain profit with them. It includes recruiting potential ‘affiliates’ for your business through commission, which encourages them to market your product through their website or online channel.
Instant messaging marketing
Instant messaging marketing accounts for marketing through Short Message Service or SMS. People carry cellphones at all-time which makes it possible for the marketers to reach their audience at a go. It is also called Pro-active marketing.
75% of consumers are OK with receiving SMS messages from brands (after they’ve opted-in).
Other than marketing, instant messaging plays an important role in retaining the customers too. For example, say a customer has logged into their account on your site and started shopping. Their cart has a few items in it, but they’ve left. Automated emails or even SMS can be sent out to remind them about their basket.
Follow-up SMS is another great way to retain a customer.
Text messages have a 209% higher response rate than a phone, email, or Facebook.
Why the role of digital marketing is vital to your business growth?
We start a business to thrive and not to sustain. To thrive, a business must make a leap and adopt technology to make greater returns.
The advent of high-speed internet and smartphones has known no bounds when it comes to reaching an audience. The traditional form of marketing such as prints and banners have a limited reach, however, the online advertisement can reach thousands or millions of audience.
According to Every Channel Marketing, companies that implement a solid digital marketing strategy have a 2.8x higher revenue growth expectancy.
a. It suits any size of business
Digital marketing can be adopted by any size of business. The ease in implementing digital marketing technique is affordable. A small and medium business can focus on increasing their sales through SSM and SEM which are rather affordable. A large corporation can focus on sustaining its brand and finding new market segments through the effective use of SEO, SMM, SEM, and instant messaging.
b. It is cost-effective
Digital marketing is known to be way cheaper than implementing a traditional form of marketing such as prints, newspaper ads, and billboards. A business budget marketing expenses and pay only for what they can afford, hence making it a cost-friendly marketing method.
c. Easily measurable
With the availability of online and desktop tools with the user-friendly console, it has become easier to measure the success of any marketing campaign.
How to track digital marketing?
The biggest advantage of running any digital marketing campaign is that it is measurable. You can track user flow in a website, measure CTR and bounce rate of a landing page, online conversion and revenue. With the availability of many online and desktop, it has become easy to measure the success of a marketing campaign.
Here are some of the digital marketing measuring tools.
Website Analytics
Website analytics is the most basic of the tools to measure the success of any website, social media campaign, paid ads, and landing pages. Website analytics generally cover the entire measurable aspects of any marketing campaign. You can measure the following demographics.
- Visitor inflow/outflow
- Geographic location (City, State, and Country)
- Langauge
- Digital device (Desktop, Tablet, or Cellphone)
- Bounce rate
- CTR
- Conversion Rate
- Social media visits, CTR, and Conversion
- Ad Campaigns’ worth (CPC, Cost per Campaign, CTR and Conversion, and Revenue)
- Landing page’s stats etc.
The best thing about web analytics is that it offers the historical data, so a marketer can compare the same data from two different time periods.
Google Analytics is the most reliable web analytics tool that offers results data on the go. It compiles data for you in an easily manageable way and makes it possible to track the success of your marketing.
Ad Network Conversion Tracking
All ad networks, including Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, etc. provide the ability to set up conversion tracking. This is critical because conversion tracking shows how effective your campaign is performing in areas such as phone calls, website purchases, newsletter sign-ups, app downloads, and more.
CRM Tracking
CRM or Customer Relationship Management platform is a reliable database that helps the sales team to stay organized and track results. Using CRM, sales professionals create profiles for all of their prospects, listing their name, company, phone number, lead source, and any information that presents itself throughout the sales process.
Searchable Design LLC specializes in digital marketing for business in Des Moines. We believe that digital marketing should measurably drive leads, sales, and deeper engagement with the customer.