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Digital Marketing for Beginners 2021

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What is digital marketing? 

Digital Marketing is marketing or promoting your product or services online on digital platforms. It helps in connecting the brands to real customers. It is not different from Traditional Marketing but done online.

It ranges from selecting a target audience (according to the product or service) to choosing which digital marketing channel or channels to use to target that audience and with the help of right digital marketing assets. (Don’t worry if you didn’t understand certain terms, they are discussed below.)

 Thus, Digital Marketing is an umbrella term for all your marketing efforts done online from websites and blogs to Social Media, Email Marketing, SEO, Podcasts, Content Marketing and so on……

COMPONENTS OF DIGITAL MARKETING

This is the list of popular and common digital marketing components that you must know 

  1. SEO
  2. SEM
  3. Content Marketing
  4. Social Media Marketing(SMM)
  5. Email Marketing
  6. Inbound Marketing
  7. Marketing Automation
  8. Online Reputation Management(ORM)

 


SEO



SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process of optimizing your online content for a particular keyword on search engines so that they can rank higher.

It is the organic way of getting more and relevant traffic and leads. But, the major drawback about SEO is that it takes time to rank your website on search engines result pages (SERPs).

SEO can be divided into three parts. These are:

  1. On-Page SEO - The practice of optimizing the content which is inside the website, for search engines and users. These are the things which are under your control like alt text for images, keywords in the headings, titles or 1st paragraph of the blog, avoiding keyword density, etc. 
  2. Off-page SEO – These are the actions taken outside of your website that improves your ranking. Unlike On-Page SEO, you cannot control the Off-Page SEO factors. It helps in building the trustworthiness and authenticity of the website.
  3. Technical SEO- These are the actions taken to ensure that the technical requirements of the search engines are fulfilled. It includes crawling, indexing, rendering, 404 pages, 301 redirects and many more.

 SEM


As contrast with SEO, it is the inorganic way or using paid ads to increase the visitors on your site. These are the ads which you saw in SERPs. The good part about SEM is that it does not take a long time (like SEO does) to be on the first page on the search engines result pages. You start your ad campaign and you are on the page 1. But you have to choose the keyword, bidding amount and more wisely.

   

To understand sem more deeply, let’s take a situation.

 AC is a fashion brand and wants to increase the number of visitors on its official website. To achieve this goal, they created an ad campaign (specifying the keywords, bidding amount, place, etc) and started this campaign. Now if someone searches that keyword, then Google show the AC's website in the top 3 lists(which consist of only ad links). Now, if he/she clicks the link of AC’s website, then AC will pay for that visitor.

But the drawback of SEM is that as soon as your ad campaign ends, you will no longer appear on the page 1 unless you are ranking organically also.


 Content marketing

It is a strategic process of creating and distributing content which is relevant and valuable to your target audience. It is a long term strategy which helps in building a strong relationship with your present as well as prospective customers. Content is the medium through which you tell people about your product or services and persuade and convince them to buy it, at the same time, delighting your present customers by giving them more value either for free or for a minimal amount. Content can be in the form of text(blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, etc ), audio(podcasts), video(short videos about your product or services, customer or expert reviews), and images(product images, infographics, etc ). 


Social Media Marketing

It is a process of creating content to promote your products, services, business as well as your own brand on social media platforms. These platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Quora and more.

It can be done both organically and with the help of paid ads.

 I am 100% sure that you are using at least one of the above mentioned platforms.

It is a great place to engage with your audience with tailored content. Thus, helping you to boost conversions and increase brand awareness.

Social media is also a great place to check your online reputation, meaning what people are talking about you, your product, services, business as well as your brand.

We’ll discuss about it more later in this blog.


Email Marketing

It is a process of targeting and engaging with your audience and customers through emails. With the help of emails, you can inform your audience about new offers, products or services. You can also help your audience in the decision-making process whether to buy your product or services by telling more about them and removing their objections by giving personalized emails.

You can target people based on their stages in the Buyer’s journey, place, goals, objections and many more. 

Basic Process of Digital Marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing but still one of the most important.


Inbound marketing

It is the process of attracting, converting and delighting customers with the help of tailored content at different stages of the buying cycle.

Content + Context = Inbound Marketing

It focuses on drawing potential customers deeper into the buyer’s journey. Therefore it is called pull marketing.

Potential customers are the people that are searching for answers online, researching about your industry, checking your product or your competitor’s product and trying to decide which product to buy.

By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interest, you naturally attract traffic that you can then convert, close and delight over time.


Marketing automation

It means using software to automate those marketing tasks that occur repetitively. These tasks can be sending emails, posting on social media, ad campaign, lead generation and more.

With the help of marketing automation, you can reach customers along their journey no matter where they are in their buyer’s journey, very easily and in less time.

Delivers timely, relevant content that reaches customers when, where and how they prefer- converting prospects into lifelong brand advocates.


Online reputation management(ORM)

Orm is the act of monitoring, addressing and mitigating SERPs or mentions in the online media and web content.

It is of great importance to companies to know what people are talking or discussing about them or their product/services and also the reasons behind 

that.

Good pr can translate into increased sales, social acceptability and company advancement. At the same time being mentioned in social media is a threat if there is a criticism.


Conclusion

Nowadays, especially after COVID 19, digital marketing has almost become a necessity for most of the businesses to grow as well as to survive. Companies are now constantly increasing their budget of digital marketing.

So its high time now, if you are still thinking about whether to invest in digital marketing or not, you will lag behind.

Having said that, you cannot just move away from traditional marketing, as it still works. Make a combination of both according to your industry and market.

 It is also a great opportunity for students to learn a new skill and earn some side income while studying.

 

 

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