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What is Digital Marketing? [Complete Guide 2024]

Updated Date: October 21, 2024

In today’s era, digital marketing is one of the most significant initiatives for business enterprises. As we can see, the customs nowadays are very smart. They like to be educated about their purchases. That’s the reason they go on the internet and spend significant time gathering information about businesses and their various products.

If your business has a strong digital presence, you can use that presence to form a concrete digital marketing strategy to reach out to your consumers to sell your products and services. This will sky rocket your sales in a shorter time as compared to the traditional forms of marketing. To market your product and services, you can hire top digital marketing agencies in USA.

Let us see some of the interesting stats and facts and then we’ll deep dive into the topic:

The gross digital marketing amount spent in 2022 is 16.2% more as compared to $491.70 billion in 2021.
More than 70% of users using the internet prefer to get information about products via content instead of traditional modes of marketing.
You might have heard that blogging is outdated and blah blah, but the fact remains that it is still a key component as 53% of digital marketers agree that it helps in generating leads by maximizing their product’s reach.
68% of users believe that a blog adds creditworthiness to a website and blogging alone drives 97% more links to business websites.
Video marketing drives a good return on investment. The average conversion rate for websites that don’t use videos is 2.9% whereas it is 4.8% for those that use it.
By the end of 2025, it is predicted that the global SEO services market will grow to $83.7 billion.

Table of Contents

What is Online Marketing?

Digital marketing simply means using digital channels for marketing products and services to targeted consumers. This marketing mode takes into account the use of websites, social media handles, search engines, mobile devices, and other similar channels. This phenomenon gathered hype with the advent of the internet in the early 90s and now it is inevitable for any business who wants to put its best foot forward to ultimately gain success in the long run.

Digital marketing acknowledges some of the same principles as we see in the case of traditional marketing where enterprises approach consumers to understand their behavior. The best strategy is to combine traditional and digital marketing techniques in such a way that it creates a perfect recipe for marketing.

In a nutshell, digital marketing is extremely crucial especially when you want to stay competitive and relevant within your industry. No web or digital presence will ultimately ruin your business as it is going to miss out on countless opportunities to reach out to its target audience.

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10 Types of Digital Marketing

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a tool for site optimization so that it stands higher in search engine results pages. On top of that, the amount of organic traffic to your website also increases concurrently. The task of SEO is to ensure that your web page or the article features at the top of the search results of search engines like Google and Bing. You might be interested to know about online marketing cost.

If you want to drive quality traffic to your website or blog then it can be done by adopting a variety of methods to assess your SEO which are described below in detail:

Off-page SEO: This takes into account all the activities that happen off the page while your site optimization is being carried out. Adding Backlinks is a powerful way to improve your website’s ranking on search engines. Backlinking increases traffic on your website as it generates link juice from other publishers that collaborate with you. So it is a win-win situation for both the parties.
On-page SEO: This takes into account all of the stuff that appears on the website. This step involves conducting research on keywords for finding their search volume and meaning. This way a website owner can offer its site visitors answers and take a higher step on the search engine results page.
Technical SEO: This is more of a backend-centric SEO technique that involves the patterns of coding being done at your site’s backend. Some forms of technical SEO include minifying CSS, image compression, data restructuring, etc. All these techniques can drastically enhance your website’s loading speed.

2. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Under the Pay per Click method, you drive traffic to your website by paying the publisher, every time your advertisement is clicked. Some people also call it a paid version of SEO. Google ads is one of the most popular types of PPC. If you want to grab the top slot on Google’s SERPs then you have to pay for that. As far as other mediums are concerned, they include Twitter ad campaigns, Facebook paid ads, and LinkedIn-sponsored messages. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and PPC are quite similar but can also include affiliate advertising and display advertising.

3. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media forms the backbone of an effective and robust digital marketing strategy for any organization. A business can promote its brand on multiple social media handles. This is a great way to generate leads and increase brand awareness as it helps in boosting traffic to your website. Social media marketing overlaps with various other types of online marketing like SEM, SEO, Content Marketing, and PPC.

Here are the most popular social media channels used for social media marketing.

Instagram
Twitter
Facebook
Pinterest
Snapchat
YouTube
LinkedIn

4. Email Marketing

Email marketing involves sending emails to your existing and potential clients for business promotions. A newsletter is one of the popular forms of an effective email marketing campaign. People can be asked to sign up for your newsletter if they visit your website. Later on, this tool can be used to send those people regular updates and reminders regarding your brand.

Here are some examples demonstrating how you can make your emails more appealing to your shoppers:

Build up a sense of urgency: Drafting an email in such a way that it induces your customers to buy your product as quickly as possible comes under this category. It can be done by giving discounts and early bird offers.
Ease to set preferences: This involves allowing mail recipients to set their preferences so that they get to decide how often they would like to receive your emails.
Personalize your Email: Personalized emails can induce more people to click on them. Say, for instance, the recipient’s name can be written under the subject of the email.

5. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves promoting and creating various types of content for ultimately generating leads and sales. There could be various forms of content such as blogs, videos, infographics, social media posts, and so on. As we all know “content is the king” and it is the main factor that drives organic traffic to your website/blog.

Your target audience should be clear in your mind if you want the best results. On one hand quality content promotes sales and on the other hand it builds brand reputation, loyalty, and conviction. All digital marketing channels primarily rely on content. In the absence of business-centric content, there is no significance of SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing, PPC, Email Marketing, etc.

6. Influencer Marketing

This is quite the latest form of marketing that is turning out to be extremely beneficial to new brands who want to establish themselves in the market quickly. If a well-known face or a celebrity promotes your brand then his or her audience (which is sometimes in billions) will naturally fall for your product.

It helps create a pathway between their audience and yours. For example, if some famous Tennis player posts a picture of a product on his Instagram handle, then his audience will get to know about the product and the brand. Under this form of marketing, an influencer’s reputation is used to leverage the brand’s popularity.

Even small startups can leverage influencer’s reputation to popularize their brand. They don’t necessarily need to approach some big name as there are small influencers too in the market who charge less and in return, you get the attention of their fans who are in good numbers.

7. Affiliate Marketing

The next form of marketing we have on the list is Affiliate Marketing wherein a business partners up with a different business and promotes it on their social media channel. Under an affiliate marketing program, by the time a lead is generated, the affiliate marketer who has sold other people’s products receives a commission.

If you want to expand your reach, affiliate marketing can be a great tool. Many famous brands around the world are using affiliate marketing techniques as part of their digital marketing strategy to boost their sales. As it’s a performance-driven marketing tool, it offers businesses a 100% ROI. It is a cost-effective method and that’s the reason store owners can cut down costs and expand the customer base.

8. Video Marketing

One of the most promising techniques of digital marketing in the current scenario is Video Marketing. Combining words and images in the form of an intuitive video can help grab the attention of online users to a great extent. This marketing technique can be implemented simply by uploading video content on either your website or any third-party video-sharing site like YouTube.

According to a report published by HubSpot Research, more than 50% of customers would like to view videos from brands instead of other forms of content. If you use videos to promote your brand, it will definitely help in maximizing your brand visibility among your target audience.

9. Mobile Marketing

Nowadays we use smartphones more than any other gadget. So if used effectively, it can be a great tool to target a potential client base. According to a survey, world’s 27% of the world’s population uses voice search on mobile devices. Another study conducted in America showed that mobile usage makes up 69%, while desktop-based usage stands for less than 50%.

Therefore, it is a must that you optimize your website in a way that is fully responsive and mobile-friendly. A responsive web design can make the browsing experience on mobiles as smooth as in the case of desktops. Also, having an app is a great idea as more people might engage with your mobile application than they do with the website. Hence put utmost care and diligence in building a simple, intuitive, and user-friendly app.

10. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation involves making use of some software that is dedicated to automating your basic marketing operations. Following are some examples:

Email Newsletters: With email automation, you can not only send your subscribers automatic emails but also increase or decrease your contact list as per their needs. In this way, only those who are keen to see your newsletters will see them.
Campaign Tracking and Reporting: Marketing campaigns are all about different people, websites, emails, phone calls, etc. Marketing campaigns can help you arrange everything in order so that you can evaluate its performance according to the set benchmarks.
Regular posting on social media: For brand awareness, it is essential to post content on a regular basis. Social media scheduling methodologies can help push your content on different social media channels as per the set plan. This way you get more time to frame content strategies.
Lead-generating Workflows: Everything good takes time. Right from generating leads and turning them into sales takes a desirable time and effort. With automation, this process can be automated to cater to predefined results.

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How to Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Business?

1. Defining Objectives and Target Audience

You must set realistic, measurable, and timely goals before starting your campaigns. Secondly, it’s always a best practice to identify your target audience before starting any marketing campaign. Your target audience signifies the group of people you want your ad campaign to reach based on multiple parameters such as demographics, age, gender, or purchasing behavior. If you have defined your objectives clearly and possess a decent understanding of your target audience, you can easily determine which channels of digital marketing can be used in your ad campaigns.

2. Researching and Analyzing the Market

You must put great emphasis on conducting an in-depth analysis of the market in terms of demand and supply. This will give you a clear understanding of your competitors as well as of your potential customers. You can analyze your past performance and draw analytics for determining what worked and what didn’t. Also, spend some time evaluating the digital presence of your competitor(s). The best thing about digital marketing is that you can see what your competitors are doing as everything is in the public domain. Analytical tools like SpyFu can be used to conduct an analysis.

3. Creating Engaging and Relevant Content

Mapping out a concrete content strategy is the next step that you need to take. It is based on your marketing objectives and target audience. Here are some tips that you can follow to formulate a robust content strategy:

Go back to the earlier steps and look for ideas from your competitors and potential customers
Check out this website – answerthepublic.com to see what type of questions people are asking in search engines
Find out what is trending by searching hashtags on Instagram and other similar portals.
Go through Google Search Suggestions to see what people are searching under your category
Explore Pinterest which is filled with highly viral and shared content.

4. Choosing the Right Digital Marketing Channels

From influencer marketing to social media campaigns and more, there are tons of digital marketing channels you can use to your advantage. The choice of your digital marketing channel will directly relate to your goals, project budget, and target audience. After choosing the channels as per the content, you need to prioritize them based on the strategy you created in earlier steps. Think about how each channel will contribute to meeting your overall goals and objectives.

5. Implementing and Monitoring the Strategy

Then comes the step where you implement and keep track of the strategy you formulated. Companies usually struggle when it comes to answering whether they are getting the desired results or not. Each activity should have a clear KPI that you invest in which is a measure of your success. After that, you need to set some benchmarks to see the desired outcome. Say for example in the case of email marketing, my email open rate could be my KPI and my benchmark could be reaching 30% or higher.

6. Optimizing and Adjusting the Strategy

One of the most remarkable things about digital marketing is that you get complete power and freedom to adjust and pivot. You don’t need to create a set plan and stick to it, rather you can make changes and modifications in your plan according to the results. For example, if an ad isn’t working, pause it and create a new one and post it on a different channel or post the same ad to a different channel.

Try various combinations and see which one works best for you. Focusing on tactics via digital marketing can be quite easy as you might get to use new tools every week and new ideas to adapt. The deciding factor is to build a set plan and stay focused. Meanwhile, as you track the progress you can make necessary adjustments and modifications in your marketing strategy based on what is tending.

Top 5 Digital Marketing Tools

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that is extremely helpful when it comes to tracking website traffic, conversion rates, and user behavior. It provides you with valuable insights pertaining to the patterns with which your visitors interact with your website. This is extremely useful as this might help you in exploring the areas for improvement.