Digital marketing is one of the latest buzzwords we keep on hearing in our daily conversations. For most of us this a vague term and our understanding are in bits and pieces. Digital marketing made simple is an effort to give a holistic view of digital marketing and it’s components.
We won’t go in detail of basic terminology but the idea is to understand the high-level boundaries of a digital buzzword.
What is digital marketing?
In simple terms, digital marketing is the process of using various digital channels to market or to promote a product or a service.
So, what are digital channels?
Digital channels can include Email, Social Media, SMS, PPC, retargeting ads, Microsites, and Mobile apps to ensure they reach their customers effectively and meaningfully.
Also, there are campaign management tools to create and manage campaigns across digital channels and personalize user experiences.
And why digital marketing is trending these days?
Well, there are plenty of reasons for it, but we will look into some of the crucial reasons.
- Accessibility of the Internet: Accessibility of the internet has improved exponentially over the years.
- Rise of digital device users.
- Digital marketing is cheaper, as compared to traditional marketing channels.
- Other reasons include, digital marketing gives you user insights, and everything is traceable. You can retarget your customers, you can work from anywhere for any client from any country, and so on.
If you are a business owner who hasn’t included digital marketing in their marketing strategy, you are missing something essential.
Now that we have a fair appreciation of digital marketing and its relevance in today’s competition, let us understand the 4 basic platforms that marketers have at their disposal to engage with their customers.
Four pillars of digital marketing are:
- Search Driven Marketing (SEO/SEM)
- Social Media Marketing
- E-mail Marketing
- Mobile/Web Apps and Sites
Above all lies the Content and Context. These together help deliver the most remarkable experiences.
1. Search Driven Marketing (SEO/SEM)
In an online world where the quest for everything starts with a search, search marketing is one of the most powerful ways to reach your target customer.
There are two ways to improve the Search presence of a Brand.
1. Paid Search Marketing
2. Search Engine Optimization
Paid Search Marketing
Paid Search includes bidding and purchasing relevant keywords to your business.
Paid search results appear at the top of the search as sponsored results.
Paid Search gives higher control to ensure the sites/pages are listed in Google Search Results Page (SERPs), Google Display Network or partner websites.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consists of a set of practices to improve its position within search results. It is an organic way to ensure the products and services are featured prominently in other relevant search situations.
To be able to list at the top of the organic search results, web pages need to have higher rankings.
All search engines have ranking algorithms that are driven by various factors like content quality, keywords, backlinks, metadata, etc.
2.Social Media Marketing
Social Media is a place where most consumers are present. It provides a new way to get insight into your customer behavior and allows you to target your customers.
You can also plan and buys ads on the social media platform and target your audience.
Social media is a great way to create brand awareness and understand your user behavior. It provides you ample opportunities to interact with your customers and get feedback
How much value you can add to your stakeholders depends on which platforms you choose to use. For example, a platform like Facebook is best suited for B2C companies, and a platform like LinkedIn or Twitter is preferable if you are a B2B company.
3.Email Marketing
One of the most important tools that you would use in your Internet marketing is electronic mail, better known as email.
Email marketing is a direct medium to communicate with your potential customers; it’s a faster and inexpensive medium to get in touch with your visitors.
You should have your domain for your email address to make your business look professional.
There are important aspects that need to be taken care of when writing emails for your marketing.
1. The subject line should be short, to the point, and should provide a summary of your message
Grabbing your reader’s attention is a very important factor, just because the visitor is your customer or a buyer, does not mean that he or she will open your message. They should be intrigued to open up your mail; you must be able to steal their attention and to achieve this attention. The subject of your email, which is the most important part of your message
2. Format your message
You’ll need to decide which format you would like to allow for emails; your two main choices are between HTML or plain text formatting. Although there has been a lot of controversy on this, a text message is the better option.
The reason for this is that not all your readers will be capable of viewing your email messages in HTML format. If you want to go for HTML messages, the best way to accommodate all your readers is to create two versions and allow them to make the choice themselves.
3. Keep line length under 65 characters.
Some email programs do not have the feature of automatic text wrap. So even if your message looks pretty good to you, your email recipient may receive your message as one long sentence, which looks unpleasant.
So as you start writing your email message, you should keep this in mind that your line length should be limited to fewer than 65 characters per line.
4. When linking keep your web addresses short and include colons.
When you place a web address in your messages, you should always include the full URL, beginning with https://. When you are including an email address within your email message, you should always include male two colons directly in front of the email addresses. This will enable most email programs to create a live email link.
Try to keep your web addresses, short, so that the URL does not get divided into two different lines, which may cause only a part of the web address to become a live link.
4.Website Marketing
The website is the face of your brand and a trusted source of information about you and your business.
All your marketing approach like SEO, email, Social media and paid channels marketing link back to your website. The design and user experience of your website is critical for your business
Consideration for website design
- Design with a mobile-first approach.
- Navigation should be simple and intuitive.
- Test your website for load speed. Slower loading of the page leads to bad user experience and a more bounce rate.
- Prominent primary and secondary call to actions.
Mobile is not Web
Over half of the website visits, these days are done from mobile devices, and it’s only going up over time.
Do not treat the mobile site as an afterthought, this can lead to it loading slowly, or just looking like a really small version of your desktop site.
- Take advantage of the mobile responsive concept of website design.
- Your website to be optimized for mobile so that it loads quicker and people don’t have to endlessly scroll to get to the info they want.
- Use lighter images for mobile.
- Use bullets and short sentences.
In conclusion, because so many people are doing online advertisers are giving more preference to digital marketing as compared to traditional offline marketing. But this also doesn’t mean that offline marketing would be dead or will be overtaken entirely by digital marketing. A perfect marketing strategy will use the combination of both offline, as well as online marketing by blending.