Digital Marketing Basics: What is it, what are the various types and how they work
What is Digital Marketing?
Using internet to make your brand, products and services visible to your audience on their laptops and mobile devices is Digital Marketing. The process does not only include displaying banners or running video ads but also includes SEO, a process of tweaking your website content and coding technically to make it more visible on search engine results.
Different Types of Digital Marketing
The term digital marketing is actually a combination of multiple activities including search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, email marketing, content marketing and social media marketing – each of which is a specialised activity in itself and requires specific skillsets to handle it effectively.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO, the most popular branch of digital marketing, is the process of optimizing a website or webpage or content in a way that it appears to a user when he searches for a relevant information on search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo. While most people will confuse SEO with inserting keywords in articles, the overall process is much bigger than that.
SEO is broadly categorized into On Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO is the process of optimizing content and technical aspects of the website in accordance with the guidelines laid out by most search engines. The objective in this case is to make it easy for search engine crawlers to access, understand and match your content to the right searched keyword. While how well your content is written, your keyword density etc. are important parts to this process, it also includes parameters like how well the site is designed, how fast your site loads, how efficiently your HTML is coded. For an on page SEO process to be successful, editorial team, and technical team and SEO team needs to collaborate closely.
Off Page SEO is the process of through which you help search engines to rank the importance of your webpage. This includes external link building exercises, submitting your content and website to multiple listing directories, regularly sending your content to relevant other site owners and asking them to link back to you.
Pay Per Click Marketing
Building an Ad campaign to acquire users from search engines or social media by paying money is often termed as a PPC marketing. As the name suggests, in this case your ad is visible to the users when they search for a relevant keyword or their interests match your product/service offerings, but you pay only when they click the Ad and visit your website.
Major platforms of PPC advertising like Google and Facebook allows advertisers the flexibility to design their own set of target audience and display their advertisements only to them. These companies give a panel to the advertisers where they can set budget and define their target audience.
Social Media Marketing
Building your company presence in terms of ‘pages’ on social media, communicating with your users through those pages and thereby building a community around them, is called Social media marketing. Popular social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc. A social media marketing can also include paid processes to advertise your pages or products to other users to improve your follower base.
Email Marketing
One of the oldest and most effective form of digital marketing is Email Marketing. The process includes sending specific Creative Emails to customers’ email ID to make them aware of your product or service offerings. However, it needs to be understood that the process of email marketing has evolved over years and in recent days sending emails to people who have not shared their consent to receive such mails is viewed strictly by most servers. This will result into your mails landing in their SPAM folder.