The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Digital Marketing

Among various marketing strategies, digital marketing topped corporate India’s marketing graph in 2009. Back in the day, marketing was only limited to cold calling and offline marketing. Our previous generations were used to seeing marketing campaigns only on billboards. In a span of 10 years, digital marketing had become widely popular across India, helping various businesses in reaching their audience. In fact, with the introduction of digital mediums such as emails, SEO and social media, the entire marketing process has become more transparent.

Digital marketing has offered many job opportunities to people who were hesitant to talk over the phone but had a bag full of marketing ideas. If you are wondering what is digital marketing or want to build a career in digital marketing, read this article.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, is advertising brands to connect with audiences through the internet and other forms of digital communication. This involves email, social media, and web-based advertising, together with text and multimedia messages as marketing channels. In simple terms, if a marketing strategy has anything to do with digital communication, it’s digital marketing.

Why is Digital Marketing important?

Given the different kinds of digital marketing approaches, there are a variety of benefits that tech-savvy businesses can avail themselves of. Digital marketing makes it possible for companies to reach potential customers during day-to-day activities such as watching videos, browsing social media, reading articles etc. When these activities are handled regularly, businesses can explore a wide range of opportunities. Some of the benefits include:

Global Reach- Unlike traditional marketing strategy, digital marketing is not confined to areas. With the Internet being accessed worldwide, businesses can market and sell to customers across the country and even the world.
Low Price of Entry- It takes only a tiny investment of money and time for certain aspects of digital marketing to be achieved. For instance, small businesses don’t need to spend a fortune to manage social media, design a website and publish blogs.
Measurable ROI- Careful assessment of return of investment or ROI is important before committing to a marketing strategy. While ROI is difficult with traditional marketing, digital marketing allows businesses to make well-informed decisions by providing real-time insights into the effectiveness of every marketing strategy.
Enhanced Targeting- Businesses can increase their chances of reaching their target demographic by engaging users in a particular location, industry, or social media platform.
Dynamic Adaptability – As opposed to traditional marketing strategies that require long-term planning, digital marketing is so flexible that it facilitates businesses to change the course when required, thus taking advantage of commercial opportunities.
Immediate Connection – Customers do online research and go through reviews before making the purchase decision. With proper SEO, PPC and SEM strategies, businesses can make instant connections with their audience.
Relationship Formation – The rise of social media has made it one of the dominant platforms for communication for a variety of customer demographics. These days, consumers want to connect with brands or businesses on their preferred platforms.

How does Digital Marketing work?

Let’s look at the different steps that together make digital marketing work.

Identify the goals

Defining the goals is crucial before building any marketing strategy. For instance, if the goal is to create or increase brand awareness, the focus should be on reaching potential consumers through social media. In case the purpose is to increase sales, more attention should be given to SEO and content optimization that can attract customers to the website. Additionally, if sales is the goal, PPC campaigns can help increase traffic through paid advertisements.

Determine Target Audience

Digital marketing helps target specific audiences, but it can be only of use if you have identified your target audience in the first place. Of course, the target audience can vary depending on the goal of a given campaign. As you may have noticed, while Instagram has a younger demographic who prefers funny memes and quick videos, LinkedIn has the older generation as its audience looking for tactical advice. Thus, the content should be tailored in a way that it reaches its target audience.

Decide on a Budget for Each Digital Channel

The budget depends on which elements of digital marketing you want to incorporate as part of your marketing campaign. Let’s say, the focus is on inbound techniques such as social media, SEO, and content creation for existing websites. Then, there is no need for a large budget. This is because inbound marketing is all about creating content the audience would want to consume. So, unless a business decides to outsource these services, all it will require is time.

Forming a Balance between Paid and Free Strategies

A mix of paid and free digital components are required for a digital marketing strategy to be compelling. For example, if you spend time observing customer behaviours to understand the needs of buyers, then you can create better content to attract them. You will be able to achieve results within the first six months of using this strategy, even with minimal ad spend. But, if you incorporate paid advertisement into your plan, you will be able to see results sooner.

Make Engaging Content

You can start creating content for various channels once the audience is identified and the budget is determined. This content includes email marketing newsletters, social media posts, blogs, sponsored content, PPC ads and more.

Perform Keyword Research

Digital marketing is all about engaging the target audience through personalized content and that cannot be performed without effective keyword research. Keyword research plays a crucial role in optimising the content for SEO and ensuring that people can find your website business through search engines. Social media keyword research can benefit sales through social channels.

Iterate based on Metrics

Understanding how to change the course based on analytics is critical in building an effective long-term digital marketing strategy. Let’s say, after a few months, you find that the audience is not curious about the content on Instagram while they love the tweets. This is an opportunity for you to re-examine your Instagram strategy.

What is Digital Marketing Strategy?

The term “digital marketing strategy” refers to the technique used for making an internet presence through online channels like organic search, paid advertisements, social media channels and other web-based digital marketing channels. Its purpose is to create and increase brand awareness and attract potential customers. A successful digital marketing strategy is made up of these three components:

Identifying the issue
Building a plan to deal with the issue
Taking targeted actions to implement the policy

With the recent boom in digital technology, digital marketing is a career path that is worth considering. If you wish to explore more about digital marketing, types of digital marketing, its strategies and various tools required, there are various digital marketing certification online courses that can be of help to you.