Since the coming of the internet during the '90s, digital marketing has continued to soar higher. With 53.6% (4.1 billion) of the world's population having access to the internet, businesses around the globe are beginning to see its power. They are putting in proper effort to take their marketing campaigns online. Our society today is driven by digital technologies, and worldwide digital advertising spending is projected to reach $335 billion by 2020. Marketing has always been about connecting with your target audience in places where they spend most of their time, so there is no better way to communicate with customers online than digital marketing. Advertising has shifted from offline to online, while digital marketing has been at the forefront of it all. In this guide, we will introduce you to digital marketing and its various forms (offline and online), and also show you how it has impacted businesses today.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is advertising delivered through digital means or channels. It involves all marketing efforts that use the internet and electronic devices to connect with customers. Digital marketing takes place both online and offline. Examples of offline digital marketing are television marketing, phone marketing, and radio marketing. While offline digital marketing has done well in the '90s, online digital marketing is the real deal now. With online digital marketing, businesses have a variety of options to target customers, depending on their marketing strategy and budget.

Forms of Online Digital Marketing

  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Pay per click (PPC)
  • Email marketing
  • Content marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • Marketing automation

Here is a more in-depth explanation of how each function.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a keyword-based approach. It is used to optimize the website content to enable your website to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). According to recent research by experts, 71% of consumers start their buyer's journey on search engines. Ranking higher on search engines allows your website to get organic traffic and increased visibility. Channels that benefit most from SEO are blogs, infographics, and websites.SEO can be approached in several ways for it to generate qualified leads to a website:

  • On-Page SEO: concerned with the keyword-rich content found on your website page. By using keywords with high search volume and meaning, you stand a higher chance of ranking higher on SERPs.
  • Off-Page SEO: concerned with activities that take place off your page and can influence your ranking. A good example is your backlinks. Backlinks involve other websites that lead to yours and their relative authority. The higher the authority of a website that links to you, the higher you rank on SERPs.
  • Technical SEO: focuses on how the coding of your page is done, and the backend of your website. By performing optimized image compression and having a well-structured data, you can increase the loading speed of your website. The higher the loading speed of your website, the higher you rank on SERPs.
  • Pay per Click Advertising (PPC)PPC advertising is a form of advertising that allows advertisers to pay a certain fee anytime one of their ads gets a click. The most popular PPC platform is Google AdWords. Research has shown that Google has over 92% of search results on the internet today. PPC ads combined with SEO have produced tremendous decisive results over time. Pay per click can hasten your advertising results by placing your ads on the first page of the search engine result page, and this will, in turn, increase traffic to your website. Leads generated by PPC advertising are more likely to convert since those clicking on your ads are consumers who are already interested in your product or service. Proper optimization of your landing page and carrying out excellent competition research are among the many ways to boost your PPC campaign strategy.

2. Email Marketing

Businesses make use of emails to communicate with customers and prospects alike. Studies have shown that email marketing has a 4,400% ROI, with a return of $44 for every $1 spent. Nevertheless, the content of your emails will ultimately determine their open rate.Email marketing is mainly used to nurture leads after they have indicated an interest in your product or service.

3. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the rave of the moment for digital marketers. It involves the creation of content that is pleasing enough to your target audience to generate leads, increase brand awareness, attract more traffic, and ultimately increase sales. Content Marketing can take various forms, such as:

  • Blog posts
  • Videos
  • Images
  • Infographics
  • Case studies
  • E-books
  • Social media posts
  • Website pages
  • White papers
  • Testimonials

Employ best practices for SEO in order to get the most out of your content strategy.

4. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the use of social media to promote your brand content or business and engage with your target audience. It can be used to drive traffic to your website.With the number of social media users currently at 2.82 billion, and projected to reach 3.09 billion by 2021, businesses today are actively taking their marketing campaigns to social media platforms. Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn have a massive amount of followers, thereby making it easy for brands to connect with their target audiences on a broader platform.

5. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to the set of processes or software that helps to automate the basic operations of a business. It can help organizations perform more efficiently. Rather than having to repeat tasks manually, such tasks can be automated with the aid of software. Some of the digital marketing tasks that can be automated include:

  • Email newsletters
  • Social media post scheduling
  • Lead nurturing workflows
  • Campaign tracking and reporting

Bottom Line

Digital marketing provides marketers with cost-effective options to connect with their target audience and increase traffic to their businesses. It has become the most widely used marketing strategy for companies in modern-day advertising.The behavior of buyers has changed drastically over the past decade, so more consumers are starting their buyer's journey online and also ending it online. This shift in consumer purchase behavior has made digital marketing a must for businesses hoping to make a stance in the modern marketplace. With all being said, why not take a step towards building a digital marketing strategy for your business?

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