What is Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is a big shift from the Traditional way of marketing. Let’s demystify the basic concepts of digital marketing.

Before digging into details first let me tell you something about Traditional Marketing. It refers to any offline kind of marketing. Examples like…

Print ads in newspaper and magazines
Commercial ads on TV and radio
Direct mail
Phone
Outdoor advertising like billboards

Even though traditional marketing has its strength in certain areas but, it has a lot of disadvantages compared to digital marketing. Few cons as below:

Expensive
Difficult to reach people globally
Difficult to measure
It takes a lot of time to execute
Targeting the right people at the right time is very difficult
Difficult to know much more about the people targeting for marketing
Return on investment (ROI) is not good compared to digital marketing
Gradually it is losing its audience

Now let’s come to our main topic Digital Marketing. It is nothing, but online marketing. This means promoting your products or services using the internet or other forms of digital communication.

How does Digital Marketing work?

Now a day’s with the growth of the internet people are spending most of their time online. The number of internet users is increasing so fast (analysis as below).

The Internet has become an integral part of our day-to-day life. People use the internet for various reasons like:

Searching for information
Reading news
Social networking
email communication
Purchasing products online
Entertainment
Education
Self-improvement
Research
Banking, etc.

Online is the place where the modern buying process starts.

Companies use different Marketing strategies to target these internet users to market their products or services through different Digital channels.

Internet user’s analysis:

Key points as per Datareportal Global Overview report published on 27th January 2021:

4.66 billion people around the world now use the internet, i.e. more than half of the world’s total population
316 million new users have come online within the last 12 months
The number of social media users around the world grew by 490 million in the past 12 months
Globally, social media users are growing at a rate of more than 13 percent per year
An average global user spends 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media each day

How to target internet users?

Companies target internet users in two ways only. This is called trafficking.

Paid Trafficking:

Models which involve paid advertisements to improve the website’s visibility on search engine results to help visitors find the website. Details mentioned below.

Organic Trafficking:

Non-paid trafficking. The ranking depends on many SEO factors.

Want to know more about SEO? Check this article: Types of SEO techniques to rank your website

Paid Trafficking:

You might have noticed when we search for anything in Google, the Google search engine displays the search results with a marking of Ad or Sponsor.

Search results with Ad or Sponsor marking along with the product item or list are called “Shopping Ad”. Without any product item is called “Display or Search Ad”.

Search results without marking of Ad or Sponsor on Google are called Organic results.

For better understanding refer to the below image.

Sometimes when you go through the browser pages you may notice an Ad banner these are called Display Ad.

Like this while enjoying the YouTube videos or playing video games you must have noticed some sort of Video Ads.

All these Ads are called Google Ads.

Similarly, companies promote their products or services via different digital channels like

Facebook Ads
Instagram Ads
Twitter Ads
LinkedIn Ads and different other social media ads
Email Marketing, etc.

Importance of Digital Marketing:

It helps to reach people globally where they spend most of their time
Easy to Scale and Adapt
Helps to target the right people at the right time who you like to sell the product
You can save money and reach more customers for less money than traditional marketing methods
In a highly competitive market, your business can reach interested leads using the same methods as big companies are applying
It helps to know much more about the people interacting with
Helps to analyze and monitor the campaigns to optimize them for better results
Digital Marketing strategies drives an awesome return on investment (ROI)
As the number of internet users growing fast scope to scale-up of the business is also high

Strategy:

Digital Marketing strategy is the plan of

How to grow your business
How to reach or target more customers
How your business would achieve its marketing goals through different online channels.

In simple words how to generate more traffic and leads. As mentioned above these can be done in two ways only:

Paid Trafficking
Organic Trafficking

The more you generate leads the more your business will grow. To achieve it, you need to follow the proper strategies.

Here are the 7 Most Effective Elements of a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy: Each of these strategies helps to generate more leads.

An Engaging website
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Content Marketing
E-mail Marketing

To know more on each of these topics please check my next blog on Digital Marketing Strategy

Career opportunities:

If you are not a business holder, by now you may have started thinking about what the benefit is by knowing all these things.

Wait, now the time is to re-think again.

Digital marketing is quite versatile and has a lot of career opportunities. If you know the ins and outs of Digital Marketing then, as a professional, you can come across the following fields.

• Digital Marketer:

The person who knows everything about digital marketing can easily grab any kind of job, related to digital marketing. You can be a Blogger, an Affiliate Marketer and earn money easily.

You can promote your own product or services via digital channels.

Create your e-commerce website or tie-up with an existing e-commerce company to sell your products.

• Blogger:

Write on any topic like health, fitness, beauty, pets, technology, product review. Post regularly to keep your followers in touch. Link your blog page with Affiliate Marketing websites and earn from affiliate marketing sales.

• Affiliate Marketer:

Affiliate Marketing is the process in which you can sell other’s products and services and earn commission from that sale. Write some reviews or blog posts on any products or services.

If someone purchases that product then you get the commission from the Affiliate Marketing website. This is the most attractive process for an individual Digital Marketer to earn a lot of money easily.

• FreeLancer:

Level up your skills in Digital Marketing. Grow your presence in social media. Crack the Freelancing jobs. You can also level up your skills in other segments and use the benefits of knowledge in Digital Marketing for better job opportunities in Freelancing.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Executive:

In the Digital Marketing space, the most important thing is the company’s presence and brand value.

SEO ensures a better ranking or presence for the business in search engine results pages through the organic source of traffic. If multiple bloggers are writing articles on the same topic then search engines will show them in order. The organic search ranking depends on many SEO factors.

SEO is categorized mainly into two different types.

On-Page SEO – Optimize within the website
Off-Page SEO – Comes with external works apart from the website.

Search Engine Optimizer is responsible to manage these SEO factors in such a way that it appears in organic or unpaid results pages.

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Expert:

As SEM you must be an expert in paid advertisements to improve the website’s visibility on search engine results pages to help visitors find your website. You need to manage all paid campaigns. Main responsibilities are to manage the paid search, work with the SEO and marketing team to maximize ROI, drive traffic, and customers.

• Social Media Optimization (SMO) Analyst:

SMO is responsible to manage online profiles in social media networks. Regular updates on social media, engage with the audience, and improve trust factor with customers.

• Social Media Marketing (SMM) Executive:

Like SEM, Social Media Marketing (SMM) also involves paid advertising through social channels. Pay to social media networks to advertise your social media profile, websites, or blogs to increase your brand exposure.

You need to be an expert in running paid campaigns on social media platforms.

• Content Marketing Manager:

Content marketing works as a pull marketing technique to expand your customer base.

You have to prepare the content properly to attract customers based on the value you’re making available online. While preparing the content you must think from a customer’s point of view.

Responsible for content writing, managing blogs, email communications, etc.

• Email Marketing Manager:

The Email marketing technique is where you have a list of existing or potential customers who are already aware of what you have to offer. Target is to generate new sales, repeat sales, cross-sales, or up sales. You must reach out to customers with valuable content that is relevant to their needs and interests.

Email Marketing Manager is responsible for knowing the customer needs properly, creating and segmenting various email lists as per the target audience, designing email templates, and writing content. Also responsible for nurturing the leads and driving results.

• Web Design and Developer:

The website is the first point of contact for potential customers. It helps to build trust with customers. Nowadays without a website, Digital Marketing is quite impossible. Each business needs a website. Simple websites can be developed without having coding knowledge.

Web developers who can create and maintain attractive and user-friendly websites are in high demand.

If you know HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Graphics, and other relevant web design coding languages you can get better opportunities. Along with this, knowledge in Digital Marketing will give you added advantages.

• YouTuber:

YouTube is the 2nd largest search platform.

Many YouTubers are earning huge money on YouTube by creating and uploading videos. Just create content with your niche and upload it.

Take advantage of Digital Marketing knowledge to grow your YouTube channel subscribers and earn more.

You can also link your YouTube content with related Affiliate Marketing products and earn commission from that.

• Google Analytics Expert:

Responsibilities include

Capture web analytics data with Google Analytics.
Develop and execute fact-based reporting and analysis.
Analyze campaign data and adjust strategies to deliver maximum return on investment.

You have to analyze online user behavior, conversion data, customer journeys, funnel analysis.

• Copywriting and editing Expert:

If you have great writing and storytelling skills, then you can be an expert copywriter who creates content for marketing online.

Like garnishing your plate copywriter helps Search Engine Marketing to write better copies. Copywriter helps to make better content which motivates people to click on a website, tells them why they need to buy the product.

Who can do Digital Marketing?

By now you have a basic idea of Digital Marketing. Your basic instinct already started thinking like, “Can I do Digital Marketing”? The answer is a big YES.

You can start your career in Digital Marketing even you are holding a job and professions in other fields. You don’t have to quit your current job to get started. This can be done by…

Anyone who has basic internet knowledge
College Students
Working professionals
Entrepreneurs
MBA/Engineers
Housewives/Moms

There are so many free courses available on YouTube.

Start reading blogs related to digital marketing. We will be posting sequential blogs on Digital Marketing so please keep in touch for new blogs.

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