What Is Digital Marketing? – A Beginner’s Guide 2024
MDigital marketing is not a bandwagon, but the essence of establishing your business in the overcrowded online competition. With people using the internet more than ever, this industry has amplified its horizons to every sect/industry. Today we’ll discuss what is digital marketing, how it works, and what its advantages are. Shopping, booking tickets, bill payments, ordering food, phone recharges, etc. all have become accessible online. This integration and inclination towards internet usage has given birth to digital marketing. Digitalization evolved into a huge revolution globally that not only connected people but also opened a hub of avenues for businesses. Online marketing has become an inevitable part of the world, especially after the pandemic. Consequently, this sector is expected to reach $786.2 billion in the coming two years, GlobeNewswire reports. That’s why marketers are going the whole nine yards to ace their digital marketing approach. What Is Digital Marketing? Digital marketing is the branch of marketing that utilizes online channels (websites, social media sites, email marketing, programmatic marketing, etc.) to promote business offerings. In short, it is advertising through online means to reach out to prospective buyers over the internet. Although print media advertising is still in use, digital advertising has caught a wide share of marketing. As per Statista, the count of Internet of Things (IoT) has spiked by 6.54 billion from 2019 to 2023. This is to say that there is an enormous increase in the usage of internet-friendly mobile devices. For this simple reason, marketers have shifted to digital marketing for optimum exposure. Importance Of Digital Marketing Now knowing what the need for digital marketing is as important as discovering what is digital marketing: In this era, where technology has overpowered almost every sector, internet marketing has seen a drastic upward shift. And its graph has been going upward ever since, especially after the Covid outbreak. Digital marketing has saved plenty of time, now rather than physically visiting the store to grab stuff, we can order whatever we want in a few clicks/taps. Online marketing has made it possible for people to discover various color/design options or features of a particular product. Similarly, one can avail customization in services from the comfort of their home. This all was so much time-consuming before digital marketing. Strategies Used In Digital Marketing Here are key tactics utilized in digital marketing, which are also referred to as its various types: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO is the process of optimizing a website with the intent to make it rank among the top spots in search results. For this purpose, three key SEO aspects need to be worked on: on-page, off-page, and technical. These factors are regulated to make the website SEO-friendly. To improve page ranks, businesses typically focus on: Improving content quality Increasing user engagement Enhancing user experience (desktop and mobile) These three components together yield improvement in ranking because people hardly go beyond the 2nd page of the search engine results page (SERP). On-page search optimization techniques are focused on tweaking on-site aspects that the audience generally interacts with. For instance, keyword research and natural integration are focused on improving content discoverability. Off-page search engine optimization aims to improve your website visibility off-site. That’s why it mainly includes generating backlinks and company profile listing on third-party sites. Google and search engines other than Google are highly inclined towards the quality backlink profile of a website. Technical SEO is to deal with backend improvements that determine how search engines will crawl your website. Your site’s architecture, coding, page load speed, metadata, etc. are thus major nucleus parts that are worked on to obtain improved SERP ranks. This is how SEO aims to improve a website’s organic ranking to attract organic traffic. Social Media Marketing (SMM) SMM is an integral part of digital marketing which incorporates promoting business offerings on social media platforms. Today, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Pinterest, etc. are heavily used for business promotions. Social media ad spend has increased to $226 billion in recent years, DATAREPORTALS confirms. This evidently says that social media sites have become a go-to option for marketers for advertising purposes. Social Media Optimization (SMO) Social Media Optimization is the process of optimizing your social media presence to direct the audience from social channels to your website. It is a way to engage and interest audiences more profoundly. This in turn gives a strong boost in lead generation and conversions. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing Pay-per-click marketing involves running paid ad campaigns that only charge advertisers when their audience/prospective buyers take a desired action after seeing their ads on third-party websites, search engines, or social media platforms. It is one of the most economical digital marketing campaigns that charges only if you get the desired result. Banner ads, shopping ads, and native ads are a few examples of PPC marketing. Online Reputation Management (ORM) Online reputation management is the branch of digital marketing that deals with the social image of a business. It utilizes social listening tools to assess what your audience is looking for and how they perceive your brand/products/services. This includes assessing public reviews and complaints about your business. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) SEM is the branch of digital marketing that involves making websites and e-commerce stores visible on search engines. It includes paid ad campaigns that drive traffic and uplift ranking. This further helps in making business more discoverable in local searches or searches with geographical locations, for a certain price range, for a specific brand of a product, for a particular color, or any other attribute of the product, etc. Content Creation & Marketing Digital marketing revolves around creating optimized content and marketing to grab opportunities. Content writers prepare SEO-optimized content with the help of keywords that have higher search volume. Blogs, articles, white papers, social media copies, videos, infographics, presentations, podcasts, newsletters, etc. are a few examples of content. Link Building SEO is highly dependent on link-building tactics. White hat link building techniques fetch high-quality and authoritative links from trusted and relevant