What is Digital Marketing?
The internet has changed how companies and brands promote their products and services. The days of advertising in newspapers, television commercials, and radio announcements are over. If you want to promote your brand in the modern age, you need to look for digital marketing agency services.
Did you know that digital marketing generates 50% more customer interactions than traditional marketing? A growing number of consumers use smartphones, tablets, and laptops to shop online and interact with business owners. If your company does not have an online presence, you are missing out on thousands of potential leads and sales for your business.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is another term for online marketing. Whenever you promote anything on the internet or through some form of digital communication technology, you are partaking in digital marketing activities.
A digital marketing platform is 62% less expensive than traditional marketing platforms. None of your ads have to get printed or sent to commercial media outlets for television and radio distribution. The internet is a gateway to several free and inexpensive marketing tools that anyone can use.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual or small business owner. You have the power at your fingertips to grow your brand into a success with the power of digital marketing.
What are the Types of Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing doesn’t just mean posting ads on Craigslist. That is one minuscule element of digital marketing. Are you curious to know, “What are the types of digital marketing that are out there?”
Digital marketing can be broken down into seven categories. They include:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
Each type of digital marketing serves a unique purpose for promoting your brand. You may benefit from some of them or all of them. It depends on which digital platforms your target audience uses the most to browse for products or services in your niche.
Let’s examine each type of digital marketing in more detail.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is when you enhance your website’s content in a way that makes it rank higher in search engines like Google. The three core elements of SEO are:
- Keywords and phrases
- Backlinks
- Original rich content
When consumers visit Google to search for items related to a particular niche, they will type in specific words and phrases. If you can figure out which keywords are getting searched for the most in your company’s niche, you can naturally integrate those keywords into your website’s content.
Google has a free keyword planner tool to make it easy for webmasters to research popular keywords for SEO purposes. If you can choose the right keywords for your content, then more people will discover your website in the Google search results. That will bring more organic traffic to your website.
Backlinks are links to your website that are published on other websites. Quality is better than quantity when it comes to backlinks. Your goal should be to get backlinks posted on reputable websites within your niche. These could be blogs, forums, message boards, or classified ads.
Focus on the quality of your content too. Creating media-rich content with relevance to your niche is essential. Google loves to rank websites with original videos, audio, text and images.
Pay-Per-Click
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a fancy internet term for “paid advertisements.” Since SEO can take months or even years to generate steady traffic to your website, PPC allows you to bypass this extensive waiting period by paying for traffic.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads are two examples of PPC platforms. When you set up a PPC ad campaign, it asks you to bid on specific keyword phrases. If someone searches for one of these keywords, they will see a textual or graphical link to your website. If the person clicks on the link, you pay whatever amount of money you bid on for that keyword. But if they don’t click on the link, you don’t pay anything.
Think of PPC as a way to boost the ranking of your website without SEO. New businesses can benefit from PPC because they don’t have to wait for consumers to discover their websites naturally. Instead, the PPC ads will ensure that consumers find your website faster.
The PPC platforms give you several tools to target specific demographics with your ads. Use the keyword planner tool to help you find the best keywords to use for your PPC campaigns.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a broad term that refers to the various types of content that you can create for people to read, watch, and hear online. The most popular forms of digital content are:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- eBooks
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Pictures / Images / Infographics
- Articles / Text
Sometimes you can merge different types of content, such as when you put videos or images in your social media posts. It is good to spice up the content and make it as unique as possible. Not only will your audience respond well to original content, but so will search engines as well.
Originality isn’t the only thing that matters, though. Great content is entertaining, captivating and captures people’s attention. For example, video content is popular because it is easier to make entertaining videos than entertaining articles. As a result, you’re less likely to lose people’s attention with a video.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the utilization of social media platforms for promotional purposes. Since over one billion people use social media websites worldwide, they create the perfect opportunity for businesses to reach a wide range of consumer demographics.
Here are the biggest social media networks for marketing purposes:
- YouTube
There are multiple ways to promote content on these platforms. The paid methods include PPC marketing, as we discussed previously. But you can also use free marketing methods on social media too.
Simply posting content to your social media channels is a free and easy way to attract attention. If you can build a large following to your social media channels, then your posts have the potential to reach thousands of people without having to spend any additional money.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is one of the newer types of digital marketing. If you’ve ever used a free app on your smartphone or tablet, then you’re probably familiar with mobile marketing already. It is a way to promote your products or services to people who use mobile technology.
The great thing about mobile marketing is that you can tailor your ads to specific geographic locations during whatever time of the day you want. You don’t need to rely on running pop-up ad campaigns on mobile apps solely. SMS text ad messages are another way to reach people too.
For instance, you could set up mobile ads to pop up as text messages onto people’s phones whenever they walk past your store or step inside your store. These ads are in response to the specific actions taken by the person at that time.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest types of digital marketing but still one of the most effective. Your objective is to encourage website visitors to subscribe to an email newsletter, where you keep them up to date on the latest products, services and other news related to your company.
When a visitor signs up for your newsletter, they give their consent to receive email marketing content from your company. So, let’s say you have 1,000 people subscribed to your newsletter. You could send out one email message, and it would reach the inboxes of those 1,000 people. It is not considered SPAM because those people gave their consent to receive those emails.
Email marketing allows you to send personalized messages to people who already love your company and want to read news about it. Most businesses can generate a high number of sales from their email marketing campaigns. They are truly effective.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another old but effective type of digital marketing. Rather than promote your own products or services, you can have other digital marketers handle the promotions for you.
The affiliate marketers implement their own marketing strategies to promote custom affiliate links which connect to the sales pages of your products or services. Each affiliate marketer is assigned a custom link.
If someone purchases something after clicking on an affiliate link, the corresponding affiliate will receive a percentage of the sales price as a commission. You receive the rest of the sales price after the commission is deducted.
So basically, you don’t have to do any of the digital marketing. You’re paying professional digital marketers a commission if they generate sales for you. If they don’t generate sales, you don’t pay them anything.
Therefore, you cannot lose money with affiliate marketing.
Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Don’t just post up random ads on Facebook or Google and assume you’re done. A successful digital marketer always develops a digital marketing strategy before executing their online ad campaigns. Otherwise, those ad campaigns might not target the right audience. That would be time and money down the drain.
Here are five reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy.
1) Achieve a Specific Goal
Every digital ad campaign and marketing strategy must work toward accomplishing a specific goal for your company. Perhaps you’ll want to have 100,000 views per day on your website or at least ten leads per day. Once you have a goal in mind, you can create a strategy that helps to achieve it.
2) Save Money
A well-planned digital marketing strategy can save you money on your advertising budget. You can calculate exactly how much you want to spend on SEO management, PPC campaigns, content creation, etc. You will have complete control over
3) Grow a List of Followers and Connect with Them
Digital marketing simplifies how companies and consumers can communicate with each other. You don’t have to send out postcards or flyers and hope people will visit your store. Now you can have people subscribe to a social media channel or email newsletter and connect with them with a single digital message instantly.
4) Become an Authority in Your Niche
Every company wants to be the authority of its niche. Your digital marketing strategy should revolve around this very concept. If you can build a positive reputation amongst your customers, they will post positive ratings and comments about you online. When other prospective customers read those comments, they will trust your company over the other companies in your niche.
5) Learn About Your Audience
Digital marketing strategizing is not all about promoting ads. Part of your strategy should be to examine your audience. Take advantage of the digital analytical tools that let you study the demographics of your website’s visitors and social media channels.
Once you understand the types of people interested in your company, you can create new products or services that cater to their specific needs.
What is a Digital Marketing Agency?
Business people don’t have the time to develop digital marketing strategies and to execute them effectively. Most of their time is spent developing new products and services and delivering them to their customers. Becoming an expert digital marketer is not in everyone’s wheelhouse.
Fortunately, you don’t have to learn digital marketing to make it work for your company. Many entrepreneurs hire digital marketing agencies to take care of this responsibility for them.
A digital marketing agency is a service-based business that creates and manages the online promotions of other companies and brands. The standard digital marketing agency services include the following:
- SEO Management
- Content creation
- PPC Campaign Management
- Lead Generation
- Consulting & Performance Solutions
- Traffic and Sales Analytics
An agency is there to represent your company and help it succeed. It has a team of digital marketing specialists who will implement the best strategies to boost your company website’s search engine ranking and ad performance on the internet. Their number one goal is to increase your traffic, leads and sales. Local Expert 4 Business is a very reputable digital marketing agency, and we are here to work with you to make your digital marketing strategy become a reality. Simply check our services and contact us and be on your digital journey TODAY.
Conclusion
Aspiring entrepreneurs and new business owners must learn digital marketing if they want their companies to grow and succeed. Even if you own a local mom-and-pop shop or brick-and-mortar storefront, digital marketing can still bring in more customers to your establishment.
You don’t have to learn anything new. Hire a digital marketing agency to run your online ad campaigns. Then you can focus 100% of your efforts on operating a productive and successful business.
