What Is Digital Marketing?
In a nutshell, Digital Marketing, also known as Online Marketing, refers to any marketing that is done online. However, Digital Marketing is the umbrella term used when explaining all your online marketing endeavours.
What Are The Most Popular Facets Of Digital Marketing?
The 7 most popular facets of Digital Marketing include:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is where you ensure that your website is appealing to search engines and let’s face facts… You need to be appealing to search engines or your website will NOT rank high enough for it to matter.
The beauty of SEO is that it has rules for ranking high. Google change its algorithm on an almost daily basis and for this reason, it is not possible to make accurate predictions. However, it is possible to monitor a page’s statistics and make minor or major changes as required.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is an integral part of any Digital Marketing Strategy that involves sharing relevant, interesting and valuable content with your target audience.
The ultimate goal of Content Marketing is to attract leads that convert to happy and loyal customers. This is achieved by offering information and storytelling, at no cost to them, in the form of written content while also increasing lead generation and brand awareness.
10 Types Of Content Marketing To Consider If You Want To Get Ahead Of Your Competitors:
- Blog/Article posts
- Infographics
- eBooks
- Digital videos
- Checklists
- Case studies
- Reviews and testimonials
- How-tos and guides
- Memes
- Influencer marketing
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing involves brand awareness and driving traffic by getting people to engage online. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter remain the most popular social media platforms.
Social Media Marketing remains a popular means of getting attention as it requires and involves active participation from your audience. The fact that Social Media platforms provide built-in metrics to measure engagement is extremely attractive to any business.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)
This form of Digital Marketing involves posting an advert on a platform and paying every time somebody clicks on your advert. How anyone gets to see your advert is a bit more involved.
When a slot becomes available on SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the search engine fills that spot. The spot is allocated according to their algorithm that prioritises the available adverts according to several important factors. These include:
- Keyword relevance
- Landing page quality
- Advert quality
- Bid amount
Each of these PPC ad campaigns has 1 or more target actions that the person who clicked, needs to complete. This is known as conversions and can be either non-transactional or transactional. Anything, from signing up for a newsletter, completing a Call-Back sheet or purchasing a product is known as a conversion.
No matter what you choose as your target conversion, it can be tracked via the platform you chose to use and you will have accurate data indicating how your campaign is fairing.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing as a concept is fairly simple. You send a promotional message/email and cross your fingers that your potential customer clicks on it. To be fair, the execution of this is a bit more complex. You want your potential customer to see your email as a value-added offering and not just another promotional tool. The types of Email Marketing you might be interested in trying, include:
- A follow-up email to visitors to your website who
- Purchased one of your products
- Requested more information
- Customer welcome emails
- Blog subscriptions
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Promotions to all past customers or subscribers
- Customer nurturing emails
Email Marketing has been proven to be an effective technique used by digital marketers for many years when it is done right and not seen as spam by the recipient.
Affiliate Marketing
Ever clicked on a “sponsored post” or “affiliate link” when visiting websites? Well that, my friends, is what Affiliate Marketing is. If you also purchased the product or service after clicking on said link, you are sure to have earned someone a small commission from your purchase.
The process is as follows:
- Find an Affiliate Program that interests you
- Study the program overview
- Products
- Services
- Payment methods
- Commission offered
- Sign up
- Receive confirmation of acceptance
- Create content that includes custom links provided to you
- Earn commission
OR you can:
- Register with an Affiliate Network
- Search categories and make your selection
- Await approval
- Start promoting your Affiliate Links
- Your website
- Social media
- Your newsletter/s
- Receive payment when you have reached the minimum payment level
- Paypal
- Cheque
- Bank transfer
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This is a way to increase traffic to your website by placing paid adverts on search engines such as Google Ads or Bing Ads. These adverts are placed at the top of the search results page making it the first thing you see. This form of Digital Marketing is highly effective but also costly.
Is SEM And PPC The Same Thing?
No, SEM and PPC are not the same things. PPC (Pay Per Click) is a ‘type’ of online advertising. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a ‘blanket term’ for a variety of activities aimed at improving your ranking on search engines.
BTW… If you have a fetish for acronyms we will give you a minute.
What Are The Top 10 Benefits Of Digital Marketing?
It makes no difference what type of business you have, you can, and will gain enormous benefits from subscribing to a Digital Marketing Service. There are immense advantages compared with traditional marketing channels and listed below are only 10 of these:
- Cost
- Return on investment
- Measurable
- Adjustable
- Brand building
- Sharable
- Targeted
- Global reach
- Allows for segmentation
- Greater engagement with your audience
Cost
The cost of marketing and advertising remains one of the largest burdens that any business has to face and for the owner of a small business, it remains an ongoing nightmare. Getting assistance from a Digital Marketing/Content Marketing agency and marketing via digital platforms offers you an affordable alternative. Digital Marketing creates as much impact as traditional marketing but costs you a lot less.
Return on investment
We can all agree that return on investment (ROI) is uber-important to any business. Digital Marketing delivers on ROI and then some. It costs a lot less to run an advertising campaign on social media than a traditional marketing campaign using, as an example, print media.
Measurable
The success OR failure of a Digital Marketing campaign is easily established when compared to traditional marketing methods. With traditional marketing methods, you have to wait weeks, if not months, to assess the success of a campaign. With Digital Marketing you have almost instant access to the data required to see how a campaign is performing.
Adjustable
Brand building
A well planned and executed website, a blog that contains relevant and consistent articles and interactive social media channels are a few of the ways that your business can use to build your brand/brand awareness.
Sharable
Almost all Digital Marketing channels offer their users the ability to share content. This is a way of creating what is known as a multiplier effect which can improve your sales.
Targeted
We can NOT get away from the fact that traditional marketing uses, what is known in Afrikaans as the ‘moer en soek’ method. For my fellow English speaking readers, this would be the equivalent of ‘spray and pray’. We can all agree that ‘moer en soek’ has a more satisfying ring to it, but I digress. Ultimately it means that an advert is run via a platform with a large reach in the hope that a couple of people really like, or perhaps fall in love, with what they see, read or hear.
Almost all Digital Marketing platforms have clever algorithms that study and gather user preferences. This way, specific campaigns are only shown to users who may be inclined to gravitate toward your product or service. This, not only, increases your chances of converting to sales but also drastically reduces your marketing costs.
Global reach
Digital Marketing gives your business the ability to reach a global market. There is no shortage of success stories about a small start-up that became hugely successful due to access to this market.
With a strategic Digital Marketing campaign, you can outrank bigger and more well-known brands in your industry. It is worth remembering that search engines do not give a damn about which brand is bigger, they only prioritise content that is best suited to a target audience.
Allows for segmentation
Segmentation is the process of breaking down a large group of customers into smaller, more targeted, groups according to specific classifications. Segmentation, therefore, increases your chances of making sales while also cutting down on costs.
Greater engagement with your audience
Let’s face facts, the online world is complex and busy. Unless you have invented a new product or service that no one has ever encountered, you will have thousands of competitors in cyberspace.
The bounce rate on websites increases year on year and if a visitor to your website is unable to find what they are looking for immediately, they leave for another site. This is reflected in the increases in bounce rates on websites across the board.
The solution is simple and extremely complex at the same time. The key to remaining relevant to your customers is to commit to and ensure continuous engagement with them. This is done most successfully by communicating with your customers; answering questions, alleviating misconceptions and building a trust relationship between you and them.
As we have stated before; it makes no difference what line of business you are in, Digital Marketing should be part of your business strategy. If it is not yet, you can bet your bottom dollar it is part of your competitor’s.