Technology advances every single day. With these advancements come new opportunities in the digital world. Among these opportunities is digital marketing, an industry that has been the driving force for every successful business for years.
Understanding what is digital marketing and knowing how it works are two completely different subjects. There are quite a few digital mediums that you can use to get your brand out there and on the minds of consumers. Today, we’re going to be focusing on how to do digital marketing, and some of the strategies that have lead businesses to success.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO might seem really complicated, but it’s pretty straightforward. As the name suggests, it involves using different search engines to your advantage. Let’s take the most popular search engine, Google, for example. Google has specific standards that it looks for when ranking your website. It changes quite often, but if you know the algorithm, you can adjust your website to meet those needs. Once all the right requirements are met, your website will rank organically.
Because the algorithm changes so often, many people believe that investing in SEO is useless, but it’s quite the contrary. Google takes algorithm manipulation very seriously and filters through sites that don’t meet the natural requirements. If you haven’t made an active effort to organically rank your website, you most likely won’t make the top results in any search engine… and also SEO is the most important part of the how to do digital marketing process.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM is a vast subject. As with any marketing strategy, its focus is to drive traffic to your website. What makes SEM different is that the traffic is usually acquired through paid efforts.
Under the umbrella of SEM, you have three terms that relate to paid advertising, PPC (pay-per-click), CPC (cost-per-click), and CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions). All three of these terms are really important, so let’s break them down a little further:
Pay-per-click (PPC)
PPC is probably the most comprehensive term, so we’ll start with it. PPC, as the name implies, refers to paying an advertiser each time an ad is clicked. As you might have guessed, PPC is the exact opposite of organic or “natural” growth.
Even though traffic isn’t flowing to your site organically, PPC is still a very viable way to bring traffic in. Pay-per-click means that you only have to pay according to how many clicks your ad gets.
The most popular form of PPC is Google Ads. We’ve all seen those yellow, highlighted links at the top of the Google search page. They’re meant to stand out and draw you in once you’ve searched a specific keyword. They’re there because someone paid for them.
With the rise of social media, another form of PPC has surfaced through Facebook ads. These work essentially the same way. Of course, this is not to be confused with social media marketing, but we’ll get into that in a moment.
Cost-per-click (CPC)
CPC is directly related to PPC in the fact that it stands for the amount of money you owe the advertiser once your ad is clicked. There are a few factors in how much you can owe an advertiser, including Quality Score, and the rank of the other advertisers that are currently ranking for the same keyword.
CPC is extremely important for a business at any stage because costs can add up quick. If your CPC is high, then it’s possible that you won’t make any return from the original advertising investment.
Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM)
CPM is a little bit safer than PPC because it involves the completion of an agreed upon action. For example, a clicked ad, and a completed sale through the link.
Brands will pay the advertiser for every 1,000 impressions. If you agree to $100 per thousand, and the advertiser’s link attracts 100,000 new people, then the payout will be $10,000. It’s a very simple and effective method.
Social Media Marketing
We mentioned social media marketing earlier, so now let’s go a little more in depth. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the strategy of driving traffic through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
These days, just about everyone is on some sort of social media platform. It only makes sense for brands to use it to their advantage. The key is to create original and entertaining content. If it sits well with other users, it can spread like wildfire, and drive tons of traffic to your website.
Digital display advertising
Digital display advertising is a strategy that we’re all probably familiar with, we just never knew the name of it. Digital display advertising involves the use of digital display formats such as banners, text, images, media, and videos.
Digital display advertising can either work really well or really badly. It all depends on the message that your brand puts out there. The beauty in it, however, is the fact that any brand can customize the message to how they see fit.
Content Creation
Content creation involves the use of blogs, case studies, e-books, guides, articles, forums, videos, banners, and more to drive traffic organically to your website. This might sound a lot like digital display advertising, and some of it is related to it, but content creation deserves it’s own spotlight.
The reason this works so well is because you’re hitting those popular keywords that people are searching for, and then indirectly linking it to your brand. It’s important to keep your audience drawn in. If a visitor clicks on your link and immediately sees your advertisement, then he or she immediately click away, because that’s not what the visitor was looking for. On the other hand, if you don’t make the advertisement obvious enough, you defeat the purpose of creating the content in the first place. It has to be perfectly balanced.
Retargeting – Remarketing
Retargeting – remarketing is a strategy used to re-attract previous customers. The strategy is completely based on cookie technology.
It’s simple, when someone visits your site, they leave a tiny trial of data behind. That data is then collected and used to target the people who have already shown interest in your brand. It’s quite a valuable strategy.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the use of, you guessed it, emails. When you send an advertisement through an email, you’ve successfully engaged in email marketing.
There are lots of effective email marketing softwares out there. With these softwares, you can maintain email lists that are categorized by several factors including customers’ likes and dislikes, and even spending habits. When you have an advertisement that fits the characteristics of a certain group, then you know exactly who to email.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is where you pay publishers to bring you customers. It’s a performance-based program that a lot of high traffic websites use.
Advertisers will pay these big publishers for space on their website to advertise. It’s a one time deal, meaning that you’re not paying for every click, but rather an agreed upon length of time.
Big sites like Amazon, eBay, and LinkedIn run affiliate marketing programs. Essentially, most big businesses with high traffic websites run these sort of programs.
Mobile Marketing
Wherever you are, take a moment to look around you and notice how many people are using their phones. The use of mobile devices has shot up dramatically in the past few years. This is relevant because websites and apps have to be customized for mobile use.
Worldwide, people continue to use their smartphones and tablets to do every day tasks. As time goes on, more and more people will begin to use mobile devices, which gives mobile marketing massive untapped potential.
The conclusion
The current trend is pushing more towards online businesses than having the usual normal and boring offices, having this in mind no matter if you’re providing a service or you’re selling different type of goods, you need(I said need and not want) to expand your business to the word wide web … in the end all that it matters is building a brand for your name and improving your SERP(Search Engine Results Pages). Learning how to do digital marketing it will help you improve the way your company looks on the internet and also your SERP rank.
There are tons of digital marketing strategies out there to choose from. These are just a few of the more popular ones that have proven to be effective over the years. What really makes any strategy in the digital marketing world stand out is its ability to draw customers in. In order to do that, you have to give the people what they want. People don’t want some boring, lifeless advertisement that they’ve seen a million times from a dozen different companies. They want something that appeals to them and that will make their lives easier.
1 Comment. Leave new
This is one awesome article post. Really looking forward to read more. Cool!