Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

Want to know about the fundamentals of digital marketing? First, let a fact sink in.

At the end of December 2020, about 5 billion people were active internet users, which accounted for more than 60% of the total population, according to the recent data available. The number of people who use the internet in everyday life is expected to rise in the next years as technology develops even further in the future.

With devices such as smartphones, desktops, and tablets, technology is almost at the heart of everything we do today in a connected world.

Because of this development, it is not a shock that advertisers and communication experts are heading into the modern world and are trying to optimize all sorts of emerging media and social platforms as a source to increase brand awareness and expand the companies.

Not only has digital marketing emerged, but it has also gathered momentum in this age of social dominance. Hence, learning about the fundamentals of digital marketing is essential.

Marketing Feasibility: Offline or Online?

The number of people who go online every day is always increasing. This is primarily because more and more people are getting access to the internet.

According to Pew Report, the use of the internet in the last three years has increased by 5 percent. And even though we hear about it a lot, the way people shop and spend has changed. The marketing on offline platforms doesn’t perform as well as before.

There are numerous advantages of digital marketing. It is economically cheaper than traditional marketing (TV ads, billboards, print media ads, etc). It helps in focusing on the exact audience that you want to target, which you cannot do with traditional marketing. Digital marketing also gives us real-time results very quickly and efficiently. It also helps us test different marketing strategies to find out which one works the best.

Marketing is, indeed, very much about the right place and at the right time to communicate with the public. Now you have to find them where they spend time already: on the internet.

And that, my friend, is where the web or digital marketing comes into play.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing covers all marketing campaigns using the internet or an electronic system. Companies use digital platforms for communications with existing and potential clients.

Such platforms include search engines, social media, emails, and other sites. There are a few fundamentals of digital marketing that are followed by marketing experts. Those fundamentals provide a much wider range of options than conventional electronic or print media marketing.

Hence, companies can engage consumers even more through emails, social media, and search engines.

Types of Digital Marketing (True fundamentals of digital marketing)

The use of various digital media strategies and platforms to link to consumers through the internet is what digital marketing is about. Several marketing strategies fall under the umbrella of “digital marketing”. Email marketing, social media marketing, or search engine optimization. In fact, it includes pretty much every online marketing strategy.

Successful digital marketers can see how a good digital marketing strategy promotes their objectives. Digital marketing is so successful that most marketers are almost always ready to fund bigger and better digital marketing campaigns through free and paid platforms based on their marketing plan objectives.

You must learn about the fundamentals of digital marketing of the different channels before you properly invest your time and money in strategy-making on how to achieve your objectives. A successful campaign should include several digital marketing channels such as:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Content Marketing
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Pay Per Click (PPC)
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. Marketing Automation
7. Email Marketing
8. Online or Digital PR
9. Inbound Marketing
10. Sponsored Content

Let’s briefly discuss each of them to enhance your basic understanding of each digital channel.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a way to customize the content of your website to correspond to the search result. It helps in ranking higher and thus maximizes the number of free (organic) traffic received by your website. Websites, blogs, and infographics use SEO to draw more traffic.

There are many ways to handle and use SEO to generate click-through rates.

On-Page SEO

This type of SEO concentrates on all the content on the website “on the page”. You will answer the commonly-asked questions as per the keywords of your search query, its frequency, and purpose in the search engine results page (SERPs). Then you will optimize the website content to draw traffic according to the keyword analysis.

Off-Page SEO

This style of SEO focuses on all activities “off the page” to improve and enhance website traffic.

The number of other websites linked to your content and the related “authority” of those websites influence how well you are ranked by the keywords.

Content Marketing

This term refers to the development and promotion of brand and market awareness, growth in traffic, lead generation, and consumers. The following platforms will play a role in content marketing:

Blog Posts: Writing and editing articles reveal your experience and create organic market search traffic. This specifically helps in turning the website visitors into consumers.

Infographics: Readers and website visitors often want you to show or demonstrate the answer to a question. Infographics are a visual content medium that allows visitors to view a topic that they want to understand.

The website “WikiHow” uses excellent infographics to answer the commonly-asked questions.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves promoting and marketing your products/services through social media channels. In the fundamentals of digital marketing, social media marketing is a brilliant and key concept.

One of the key benefits of social platforms is that you can pick a specific audience to target.  Different platforms can be used such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

In fact, according to Hubspot, 92% of business owners and advertisers say that their businesses are dependent on social media.

Facebook: A Facebook profile of your brand makes your links to future consumers easier and more discoverable. Facebook ads have proved incredibly effective in highlighting and increasing the brand awareness of a business.

Instagram: Instagram is the perfect way to demonstrate your brand visually in the form of images and pictures. The platform provides a wide range of resources for your audience to engage. Instagram is expanding incredibly rapidly with over 450 million monthly active users.

Twitter: Twitter targets customers who are searching for new items and exclusive opportunities. According to a Twitter study, an estimated 93 percent of Twitter followers expect to buy from small and medium-sized businesses they follow, while 69 percent have already purchased something from the product pages and brands they follow.

Pinterest: Pinterest is the most common forum for people to find new ideas. It has 110 million monthly active users. The visual content that you build and post through your account will indeed draw your audience’s interest and encourage them to check out your products.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a crucial network to develop the brand and create powerful online business partnerships.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC is a way of paying a publisher each time the ad is clicked to push traffic to your website. In fact, one of the most popular types of PPCs is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots at a price per click of the links you put on the Google search engine results pages. Additional channels that use the PPC include:

Paid Facebook & Instagram ads: Marketing experts and businesses pay to post a video, images, or a slideshow on Facebook that will be shown as advertisements to people who fit the audience typeset by them.

Campaigns on Twitter: Similarly, users can pay for tweets to target the audience’s news feeds. The objectives can include growing the page traffic, targeting new Twitter users, increasing tweet interaction, or even increasing the number of app downloads (ads where users are prompted to download an app).

LinkedIn Message: Users will pay for sending messages, based on their business objectives, to unique LinkedIn users.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a type of performance-based marketing. You earn commissions to advertise the goods or services of someone else on your website. Marketing networks for affiliates include:

• YouTube Affiliate Network hosting video advertisements.
• ‘Post on your social media accounts’ type affiliate marketing.
• Mentioning the products on your blogs/website & directing the audience to the seller’s website or page through a hyperlink

Marketing Automation

It means the program that automates the fundamental marketing practices. Many marketing teams can manually automate routine activities, such as:

Email Newsletters: Email automation not only gives you the option to send any updates to your subscribers automatically but it will also allow you to reduce your email contact list or extend it if required. It means that only those people, who want to see your updates, are going to get your emails.

Moosend can be a tool for you to start your email newsletters because Moosend has 7 Incredible Reasons to Boost Your Sales

Social Media Scheduling: Truly want to extend the reach of your company on a social network?  You have to post frequently on your social platform. This manual posting is a little distracting and time-consuming but will increase your reach subsequently. Tools for social media marketing post your posts on your social media accounts for you and allow you to spend more time on other important tasks

Lead-Nourishment Workflows: Creating and transforming leads into consumers can be a lengthy process. You can simplify this process by sending clear, to-the-point, and simplified email content when any required conditions are met, such as downloading and opening an app.

Campaign monitoring and reporting: Marketing campaigns may involve lots of emails, content creation, webpages creation, phone calls, etc. Marketing automation will help you monitor anything you operate on, consequently followed by the improvements achieved by all the information over time.

CRM is maybe able to help you here. How CRM can find you the right strategy?

Email Marketing

E-mail marketing has key importance in the fundamentals of digital marketing. Companies use e-mail marketing as a medium of correspondence. Furthermore, e-mail is also used for promoting content, discounts, and activities and for prompting users to visit the company website.

You can send e-mails in an e-mail marketing campaign for:

• Blog or newsletters subscription.
• Website users who downloaded something.
• Welcome emails for the client.
• Holiday discounts for participants of your loyalty program.
• Any other related set of emails for something else.

Online Public Relations

Online or digital PR is a strategy to improve your online reputation and increase your brand awareness. A business can obtain the desired results through online PR by using different PR methods. Digital PR introduces a brand to new audiences, and that’s what makes it important.

Companies work with social media influencers, bloggers, or journalists as a digital PR strategy to get quality back-links, and media mentions. This, in turn, helps them to improve their SEO and gain more brand awareness.

As a result, digital PR can also help generate leads and increase sales. Some examples of digital PR are unlinked (without providing a backlink) mentions on famous websites, guest posts, press release mentions, etc.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing means a marketing strategy where buyers are drawn, engaged, and encouraged at each point of the visit to the product website.

During an inbound marketing campaign, you can use any digital marketing tool mentioned above to develop a consumer experience.

Some classic examples of inbound marketing vs conventional marketing are as follows:

• Blogging vs pop-up publicity
• Video promotion vs commercial advertisement.
• Specific contact lists (sending email only to the relevant people) vs e-mail spam (sending it to everyone)

Sponsored Content

You pay other companies, organizations, or influencers for the promotion of your products. They, in some way, discuss your brand or service which then gets the publicity or the intended brand awareness.

Influencer marketing is a popular form of sponsored content. Any specific brand can sponsor some content to publish articles or videos with the help of an influencer on social media through ‘sponsored content’ marketing.

Additionally, a blog or article that is written to highlight a topic, service, or brand may also be a form of sponsored material.

Why don’t you try this: Top 10 marketing strategies that work

Conclusion

To conclude the fundamentals of digital marketing, it is crucial in this century to make use of effective digital technologies to meet your marketing goals. This is an age of an ever-growing number of internet users.

You can do everything online with a single click or a tap. Making use of digital marketing is indeed necessary to gain an upper hand over your competitors and grow your business further. It is viewed as a step in the right direction in this dynamic age.