Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.
Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it’s digital marketing.
Types of Digital Marketing
There are as many specializations within digital marketing as there are ways of interacting using digital media. The examples are as follows:-
1. Search Engine Optimization or SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is technically a marketing tool rather than a form of marketing in itself. Balance defines it as “the art and science of making web pages attractive to search engines.”
The “art and science” part of SEO is what’s most important. SEO is a science because it requires you to research and weigh different contributing factors to achieve the highest possible ranking. The strategic use of the factors makes SEO a science, but the unpredictability involved makes it an art.
2. Content Marketing
SEO is a major factor in content marketing, a strategy based on the distribution of relevant and valuable content to a target audience. The goal of content marketing is to attract leads that ultimately convert into customers. But it does so differently than traditional advertising. Instead of enticing prospects with potential value from a product or service, it offers value for free in the form of written material.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in discussion online. The most popular platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind. Social media marketing offers built-in engagement metrics, which are extremely useful in helping you to understand how well you’re reaching your audience.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing lets someone make money by promoting another person’s business. You could be either the promoter or the business who works with the promoter, but the process is the same in either case. It works using a revenue sharing model. If you’re the affiliate, you get a commission every time someone purchases the item that you promote. If you’re the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.
6. Native Advertising
Native advertising is marketing in disguise. Its goal is to blend in with its surrounding content so that it’s less blatantly obvious as advertising. Native advertising was created in reaction to the cynicism of today’s consumers toward ads. Knowing that the creator of an ad pays to run it, many consumers will conclude that the ad is biased and consequently ignore it.
7. E-mail Marketing
The concept of email marketing is simple—you send a promotional message and hope that your prospect clicks on it. However, the execution is much more complex. Email marketing is a proven, effective technique all on its own: 89% of surveyed professionals named it as their most effective lead generator.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people, but it offers a number of other advantages as well. These are a few of the benefits.
1. Abroad Geographic Reach
When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (provided you haven’t limited your ad geographically). This makes it easy to grow your business’s market reach.
2. Cost Efficiency
Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also carries a lower cost. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television spots, and other traditional marketing opportunities can be high. They also give you less control over whether your target audiences will see those messages in the first place.
3. Easier Personalization
Digital marketing allows you to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can’t. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise and specific.
4. More Connection with Customers
Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real-time. More importantly, it lets them communicate with you.
5. Easy and Convenient Conversion
Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope for is a phone call shortly after someone views your ad. With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the sales funnel right away. They might not make a purchase immediately, but they’ll stay connected with you and give you a chance to interact with them further.
Digital Marketing creates Growth
Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business’s overall marketing strategy. Never before has there been a way to stay in such consistent contact with your customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalization that digital data can provide. The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you’ll be able to realize your company’s growth potential.
Frequently Asked Questions:-
1. What is the main purpose of social media marketing?
Social media falls in the brand awareness and consideration stage of the sales funnel. Social media platforms allow businesses to connect with their target audience and slowly but surely nudge them down the funnel with content and links to learn more.By providing relevant information about products and services, engaging with their audience, and providing free trials or specials, businesses are able to nurture leads into buyers.
2. What is the difference between digital marketing and digital advertising?
Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business’s overall marketing strategy. Never before has there been a way to stay in such consistent contact with your customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalization that digital data can provide. The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you’ll be able to realize your company’s growth potential.
3. What is local SEO?
As compared to standard SEO, local SEO refers to Local Search Engine Optimization. Local SEO comes into play when users are searching for products, services, or resources near them in real-time.
4. What is UI?
UI stands for the user interface. This refers to anything that the user sees and interacts with on a digital platform.
5. What is UX?
UX stands for user experience. It refers to how a user feels while interacting with the interface. You always want the user to enjoy the experience on your site.
6. What is marketing automation?
Market automation is the process of using technology or software to automate repetitive marketing tasks across multiple channels. Rather than manually controlling campaigns, brands can use automation services to successfully plan, manage, and measure efforts on social media, email, text, and website.
7. How can I post links on Instagram?
If your business account has over 10,000 followers, the best way to share links is through the swipe up feature on your story. If you do not have 10,000 followers, small businesses can easily add links to your profile bio, include links in your captions, and create shoppable posts or stories.
8. What hashtags should I use?
While there is no right number of hashtags, standards best practices recommends using an average of 11 hashtags on each social media post for ultimate reach and growth. Always use hashtags that fit your brand, message, community, and industry. Branded hashtags are great for specific products, services, and campaigns.
9. What is conversion optimization?
Conversion optimization is the process of increasing the number of website visitors that convert into active customers. By improving your website’s user experience, users are more likely to complete the desired action on the page, whether that is signing up for emails or completing a transaction.
10. What is content creation
Content creation involves generating topic ideas and creating written or visual content around those ideas in the form of a list, email, blog, video, infographic, or ebook.
11. Why should you hire a digital marketing company?
There are a number of reasons to hire a professional digital marketing company. First of all they are experts at what they do and their digital marketing services will include a lot more than what you know. Some of the key reasons are:
- Expert assistance
- Better digital marketing tools
- Cost effective
- Scalable services with measurable results
- Better outreach and results
- Increased Return on investment
12. How to choose the right digital marketing company?
Choosing a digital marketing company is not an easy job to do, but we are here to help you with some basic points to check before hiring a digital marketing company.
The right digital marketing company must come up with new and creative marketing ideas to stay ahead of the competition and provide you quality services that make your business stand out.
Being passionate about what they do, Saffron Chariot Technologies is the leading digital marketing company in Chandigarh. They have successfully served a number of clients in and outside India.
