Digital marketing has now become the new face that is driving the internet world. Many people have heard the word internet but they do not fully understand how it works and its benefits, and this has raised curiosity in them wanting to know more about digital marketing.
Digital marketing has been in existence since the 1990’s, it gained its popularity in the early 2000s and is still a growing field and it has shifted the way businesses use technology for marketing their products.
Marketing is about creating a connection with your audience at the right place and time and offering value to your customers and society at large.
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This guide is for people who want to know what digital marketing is.
So what is digital marketing?
Digital Marketing is any form of creating awareness or promoting products or services that involve using an electronic device.
Digital marketing can be operated in both online and offline.
Offline is any media channels that aren’t connected to the internet. These channels include billboards, television ads, telemarketing, radio, print advertising, signs, and pamphlets.
In this article, I will be focusing on online marketing because offline marketing is no more functioning as it used to be. Online marketing is the future now.
Let’s take a tour and discuss some of the areas of online marketing that will give us a clear overview of the online world.
For the sake of not beating about the bush, let’s get straight to the point.
Here are 7 big tactics of online marketing:
1 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2 Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
3 Content Marketing
4 Social Media Marketing (SMM)
5 Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
6 Affiliate Marketing
7 Email Marketing
This is a great infographic created by Unbound that sum up all online marketing in one chart.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an act of optimizing your content or using strategies and methods to direct and increase the amount of traffic to a website, by enhancing its high ranking on the search results page of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others.
SEO can be grouped into two sides, you will have to choose the path you want to take, and some are into it just for a short term to make quick bucks out of it and off they go and others are into it for a long term.
As an entrepreneur, I believe in building a real business and adding value to my customers.
The two sides of SEO are:
White Hat and Black Hat
White hat SEO is the right way of building a natural online business. Using this method will let you have your audience in mind by trying to add value to your customers.
Black hat SEO, on the other hand, is the dangerous way of building your business. In this method, people use short cuts and tricks to get their website rank high on search engines. If these short cut tricks are discovered by the search engines operators, your website will be banned leaving you without a business and you will have to start all over again.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting your website online, by using organic search listings or paid advertisement that shows on the top search engine result page to drive targeted traffic or customers to your business. Advertiser bid for keywords in a search engine like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, for users who are searching for products or service by typing in their keywords to get solutions to their problems.
Organic search
Organic search listings are those that show in the wide left column of a search engine page. It is known as free search and it takes time before you can rank your page to the top or at the first page of search engine. There is a lot of grinding you will have to do when you are going for organic traffic.
Paid search
Paid search, on the other hand, are the listings that appear on the top left column of the organic search page and shows at the right down side of a search engine page. You will have to pay in order to get your ads listed there but you will see results more quickly.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing Institution has done a great job by defining what content marketing is. It is defined as:
“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content marketing helps build a healthy relationship with your targeted audience, by adding value to them through your content on a consistent basis.
Here are some forms of content that can be used in content marketing
Video
Videos are a great way of marketing your content because it is able to reach a massive amount of audience. Today there are lots of video platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and much more that one can easily market his/her content.
Podcast
A podcast is the same thing as audio. With podcast marketing, all you have to do is to convert your content into an audio form and promote it to a place like iTunes to your audiences that prefer listening to audios.
Articles – Blogging
This content you are reading now is an article about digital marketing made simple for beginners: A step by step guide. This is another great way of marketing to your audience.
Images
You can use an image to market your content. Sites like Instagram was built based on images and Pinterest is another place that you can drive massive traffic to your content with high-quality images.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the form of internet marketing that uses social media networks to help a business increase its reach in audiences.
Social media sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ can all be used to draw in traffic and generate leads to grow your business if it is done well.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) is a model of internet advertisement that advertisers use to drive traffic to their websites. Advertisers pay fee to publishers each time a user clicks on the sponsored ads. They bid on targeted keywords phrases that people are searching for on search engines like Google AdWords and Bing ads to gets leads or sales to their business.
Pay-per-click can generate fast drive at any given time and it lets customers see your ads first, which will lead to targeted visitors clicking your ads that can convert into sales to keep your business growing.
But organic traffic will take days or weeks to generate traffic to your business, and so with this method it will take you time to know the changing interest of your customers.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting someone else’s products or services in exchange for commissions from the sales of the products. Each time you recommend a product or service using your unique affiliate link and it leads to sale or completing an action set by the company, you earn a share of the money from the revenue made.
You don’t have to only market someone else’s products or services, you can create your own products and services and market both and still make a profit as a product creator and a marketer.
In order to become an affiliate marketer, you will have to sign up to an affiliate network such as Amazon Associates, Clickbank, maxbounty, peerfly and many others in order to find offers to promote.
Click here to get more overview on affiliate marketing and how to make money as an affiliate marketer with your blog.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is a method marketers use to communicate or send commercial content to their target customers using email. It is used to promote content and direct audience to their business site. Email marketing helps in building customer relationship and brand awareness.
In exchange for their emails, marketers offer audience free courses or pdf to help them solve their issues. After getting their emails, they will now send newsletters to customers promoting offers that will help them in their field of need.
Does digital marketing work for business?
The answer is yes it does work
When you use the right methods and strategies, you will surely take your business to the next level. Many businesses fail because they do not follow the right methods in approaching digital marketing.
Digital marketing has its guides and steps that you must follow in order to succeed in the digital world.
What are the benefits of digital marketing?
Digital marketing has given you an in-depth knowledge on how the online marketing works. Through digital marketing, you will be able to strategize and put proper measures into building your business and reaching a large number of targeted customers.
Here are the 7 big tactics of online marketing again:
Online marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Content Marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Affiliate Marketing
Email Marketing
I hope this guide has given you an overview of what digital marketing is, how it works and its benefits in the online world.
Which tactics will you implement in your online business?
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