Digital marketing is a collective term that includes marketing activities done through digital channels that can reach potential customers on digital devices like smartphones, computers, or tablets. Search engines, social media platforms, apps, websites, app stores, and blogs are a few of the platforms used for Digital Marketing.
All Digital marketing activities can be handled by a team, including experts in various aspects of Digital Marketing, or a single professional who can handle all activities.
Let us understand what are the various Digital Marketing Activities:
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization):
Searching for anything online is a habit of every person nowadays. If you search anything online, let's say on a popular search engine like Google, you land on a web page showing a list of various links that are relevant to what you have searched. This web page is known as a search engine results page (SERP). Most of the searchers prefer visiting the first 3-4 results on SERP, the links that appear below the 4th position hardly get any visitors & nobody bothers to visit the next page of SERP.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of performing tactics that help any specific website or web page rank higher in SERP.
SEO is a continuous process and SEO strategies may change when search engines change their set of rules, called algorithms, to rank higher in SERP. SEO activities can be divided into 3 parts, namely on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.
On-page SEO is making changes in content on a website for search keywords. Search engine crawlers(bots) travel through the website and find how the website content is related to search queries. There are other on-page SEO factors including meta tags, URL structure, keyword density, and internal linking.
Off-page SEO deals with building backlinks (links from other websites pointing to our website). Off-page SEO focuses on gaining authority on specific search terms, connecting our website to other high-authority websites & driving traffic from other websites to our website. We may contact other website owners to connect our web pages to their websites.
Technical SEO is improving the technical aspects of the website. Technical SEO activities help crawlers to crawl the website easily & efficiently. Technical SEO activities include improving website loading time & website structure, updating robots & sitemap files, removing duplicate content issues, and making the website more mobile-friendly.
As mentioned above, users prefer visiting higher-ranked websites. More than 65% of users visit any of the first 3 results of any search query and the remaining users may visit all of the below position results. So SEO activities are extremely important so that our website ranks higher in SERP.
2. SEM (Search Engine Marketing):
Search engine marketing (SEM) makes any website appear in a dedicated advertising space on the SERP, by paying search engines. Whenever we search anything on search engines, we find some links appear as ads at the top & bottom of the SERP.
Digital marketers pay search engines like Bing or Google to place their domains at the top position. SEM runs mostly on the PPC(pay-per-click) model. Search PPC ads display an ad in a dedicated space on the SERP when users search for any keywords. Some frequently searched keywords are said to have high search volume & they are usually more costly. On the other hand, low search volume keywords are comparatively cheap.
Another type is display ads, which are usually shown on various websites and are displayed through specific ad-generating services like Google Ads. Advertisers may bid for display ads based on cost per thousand impressions (CPM). Impressions are the number of times ads are displayed to users. CPM ads differ from cost-per-click ads, payment has to be made based on the number of impressions, whether users click on it or not.
3. Social Media Marketing (SMM):
Social Media Marketing is another important type of Digital Marketing. We can promote products, services, or brands through social media platforms, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, etc. A huge number of people of all ages, residing in all locations and speaking all languages are actively using various social media platforms, which makes social media a very important channel.
Social media platforms offer the potential to reach millions either in a free or paid way.
Organic social media marketing mostly deals with handling free activities like posting updates regularly. Creating a social media handle is usually free. Organic SMM may increase an account’s reach & number of followers, thus making the brand more popular.
One can also follow other handles and keep posting content in various formats like images, videos, GIFs, infographics, PDFs, PPTs, and other formats. The content should be educational, engaging, and promotional for getting results on social media. Many digital marketers also use popular, relevant hashtags for organic social media reach and engagement. Hashtags connect any content with other people using that hashtag, which increases the reach and engagement of that post.
Consistent efforts can be made to implement a social media marketing strategy to attract and engage an audience on different social media platforms. We can also divert traffic from a viral YouTube video to a LinkedIn profile or a Facebook page. Such cross-platform promotions build a strong brand identity and attract more users to your brand.
Similar to SEM, paid social media marketing enables digital marketers to buy ad space on various social media platforms. While scrolling through any of the social media platforms, you may have seen sponsored posts. Usually, these posts can be shown to a specific group of people based on their interests or search history. Sponsored posts make it easy to reach an audience that may not have been targeted through organic ways.
4. Influencer and Affiliate Marketing
All social media platforms have some users that have huge followers, usually related to a common field or interest. These users are called influencers as they may influence their audience to engage or follow any brand, being an authority. Digital Marketers can ask these influencers to promote any content within their large followings to get an advantage of their online authority. Brands will pay influencers for such promotions & this overall concept is known as influencer marketing. Any service or product can be presented to a group of people who might be interested in that kind of service or product. This can be best explained by the example of Food bloggers promoting food joints or restaurants on various social media platforms.
In Affiliate marketing, on the other hand, influencers get a commission on each deal by referring customers. Affiliate marketers usually do not create product-specific content, but they promote a product or brand through their content. An example of Affiliate marketing is a Chef sharing a link to purchase any of the ingredients along with their recipe content.
5. Email Marketing:
Email marketing mostly focuses on sending emails to potential audiences with marketing assets, emphasizing to redirect a receiver to a specific link. The people who receive emails are the potential customers who might have shared their email addresses to receive emails or updates, or a digital marketer can also purchase a database of emails of specific people for this purpose.
Email marketing is a way to reach audiences who might be new or returning customers. These users may have accepted receiving such marketing emails because they are interested in a particular product or service brand.
Email marketing can help reach potential customers who had already shared their emails through the website or other online platform. As the targeting of email marketing is more focused, the email marketing activity offers a higher conversion rate compared with SEO or social media marketing.
6. Content Marketing:
Content marketing deals with creating and promoting unique, valuable and relevant content through various platforms. Content marketing enhances the results achieved by other digital marketing efforts.
The types of content used for marketing purposes include blogs, images, audio, videos, infographics, e-books, white papers, podcasts etc. Mostly all types of content can be shared through websites and different online marketing platforms. Content marketing tries to build a brand’s positioning and identity via pieces of content that can be accessed, used, and shared among any audience.
The core of content marketing lies within regularly producing fresh and unique content that is useful for potential audiences. For being consistent while doing content marketing, in-depth research, creativity, and presentation skills are required. Users must find the content valuable, and they should also engage with the content. Content marketing improves brand reach, generates relevant website traffic, and indirectly plays a very important role in increasing business.
Various types of human resources are required for successful content marketing activities, like graphics designers, video editors, voice over artists, copy editors, content writers, and copywriters.
7. Mobile Marketing:
Mobile marketing covers activities such as SMS or WhatsApp marketing. In mobile marketing, we can target specific audiences and send messages to potential customers through SMS or WhatsApp service. Mobile marketing also includes sending push notifications to customers through various apps. Designing mobile-friendly landing pages or accelerated Mobile pages(AMP) is a part of SEO, but it also considers mobile-specific audiences.
Mobile marketing mostly involves instantaneous, simultaneous bulk messaging to many users. Mobile marketing is the best option for promoting sales or events. Messages can be designed to be personalized or general ones based on the type of promotion we are doing. Mobile Marketing is impactful as it establishes an instant, direct connection between potential customers and the brand.
Messages can be sent to the database of previously engaged users or a specially purchased database of users having a common interest or behavior.
Digital Marketing may encompass some new special ways or techniques in the future, or the current methods may get a more detailed approach. You should know how to use various techniques based on your digital marketing requirements, you can use each of the above techniques, or create a combination of any of these techniques.
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