what is digital marketing
Digital Marketing Essentially, if a marketing activity involves digital communication, it is digital marketing. It is the act of using the Internet and other forms of digital communication such as websites, social media, search engines, and emails to help brands connect with potential customers and coordinate with their online marketing strategies to advertise and sell products and services. Use digital marketing channels to convey your message to potential customers and deliver the right offer at the right time and place.
Want to understand and learn Digital Marketing? This article will provide the latest and most comprehensive industry guide for students, digital marketing practitioners or business owners who are interested in digital marketing majors, want to take digital marketing courses, want to master digital marketing tools, and plan to acquire digital marketing strategies.
Today, consumers rely heavily on digital means such as websites or online media to research products. Digital marketing can allow brands and products to appear when consumers use social media to read news, browse blogs or search for product information, allowing consumers to communicate with companies online in real time, learn more about products and services, and cultivate brand familiarity Spend.
To realize the true potential of digital marketing, marketers must dig deep into today’s vast and complex sales funnel to discover strategies that can make an impact on sales. Digital marketing is a method of collecting lead data in real-time and creating effective interactions with repeat customers. By engaging customers in a digital environment, companies build brand awareness, position themselves as industry opinion leaders, and keep their business at the forefront of the Internet when customers are ready to buy.
A digital marketing specialist is a multi-skilled professional responsible for promoting a business or product online using all available digital marketing channels. They need to have a good understanding of all digital marketing disciplines and tools. Digital marketing job responsibilities include:
Design, implement and monitor SEO campaigns Analyze and optimize PPC campaigns Oversee content marketing campaigns Leverage social media networks (traffic, awareness and sales) Collaborate or manage other members of the digital marketing team Coordinate all online campaigns Set goals and analyze all digital marketing channels Performance
The difference between a digital marketing expert, an SEO expert, or a PPC expert is that a digital marketing expert needs to be an expert in multiple fields and have a broad understanding of how digital marketing works in general, not just a single discipline.
Components of Digital Marketing
The world of digital marketing encompasses many different strategies. Here are some of the most common types of digital marketing.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Paid search or pay-per-click advertising (PPC) usually refers to sponsored advertising results at the top or side of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). These ads charge businesses a fee per click, customizing the ad settings so that the ads appear when users search for specific keywords. These ads are very effective because they rely on data collected from an individual’s online behavior and increase website traffic by serving relevant ads to the right people at the right time. These ads can also be remarketed, meaning that based on customer behavior, marketing automation tools can create unique, personalized ads across platforms. PPC channels include:
Google Search Engine Ads: It allows paying for ad placements at the top of Google keyword rankings on a “per click” link basis. Facebook Paid Ads: Businesses can pay to customize video, image posts or slideshows, and Facebook will post the content to the feeds of people who match your business audience. Twitter Paid Ads: Businesses can pay to place a series of posts or ads into a specific audience’s feed, all dedicated to achieving specific goals for the business. This goal could be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads. LinkedIn Sponsored Messages: Here, companies pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users based on different industry and background profiles.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization SEO is the process of optimizing website content, technical settings, and coverage so that on-page keywords appear at the top of search engine results. Use SEO to attract visitors to your website when they show they are searching for related products. While PPC and remarketing have their place, organic online traffic through SEO has a huge impact on search rankings as well as organic site traffic.
Use SEO to dramatically increase visibility and build lasting customer relationships through the use of keywords and phrases. SEO is defined as improving a website’s ranking in online search results by generating organic website traffic using keywords and phrases that users search for. A strong SEO strategy has a huge impact in digital marketing campaigns because visibility is the first step to building lasting customer relationships. There are many ways to use SEO to generate qualified traffic to your website. These include:
On-page optimization: This type of SEO focuses on the information and links within your website, allowing search engines to retrieve all content present on your website. By researching the search volume and intent (or meaning) of your keywords, you can create relevant and informative pages that convey content or answer reader questions, ultimately ranking higher on the search engine results page (SERP) for your keywords. External website optimization: This type of search engine optimization focuses on optimizing activities such as external website content or links on the Internet related to the corporate website, or external links, also known as backlinks. The number of these links and the relative “authority” of these publishers will affect the ranking of the keyword. These sites can increase outside attention by connecting with other publishers who write posts for the business (and link back to the company website). Back-end optimization techniques: This type of SEO focuses on the back-end of the website, and how the pages are coded. Image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all techniques that can improve website loading speed, which is an important ranking factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.
Social Media Marketing Social Media Marketing
The key to effective social media marketing is not only to have active social media accounts, but also to incorporate social elements into every aspect of your marketing efforts to create as many peer-to-peer sharing opportunities as possible. The more inspired your audience is to engage with your website content, the more likely they are to share it, potentially inspiring their peers to become customers as well. Channels used in social media marketing include:
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Snapchat Pinterest
Influencer marketing Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing that involves endorsements and product placement from influencers, individuals and organizations who are experts or socially influential in their field.
Sponsored Content Sponsored Content
With sponsored content, a business as a brand pays another company or entity to create and promote content that showcases the brand or services in some way. One popular type of sponsored content is influencer marketing. With this type of sponsored content, influencers in the sponsored brand industry publish company-related posts or videos on social media. Another type of sponsored content can be a blog post or article written to highlight a topic, service or brand, also known as advertorial.
Content Marketing Content Marketing
Effective content marketing is used to guide or inspire consumers looking for information. When a business website provides content that is relevant to its audience, it ensures that the business becomes an industry opinion leader and a trusted source of information, thereby reducing the possibility of other marketing efforts losing customers in static pages. In the age of the self-directed buyer, content marketing generates three times more leads than paid search advertising, so it’s worth the extra effort. Channels that come into play in a content marketing strategy include:
Blog posts: Writing and publishing articles on your company blog can help demonstrate industry expertise and generate organic search traffic for your business. This ultimately gives businesses more opportunities to convert website visitors into leads for their sales team. E-books and white papers: E-books, white papers, and similar long-form content can help further educate your website visitors. It also allows businesses to obtain reader contact information, generate leads for the company and move people into the purchase process. Infographics: Use pictures or charts to display visual content such as content or advertisements, which can help website visitors visualize the concept of the brand.
Inbound Marketing Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to the marketing method that strengthens every aspect of customer experience in the digital marketing platform owned by the enterprise. Businesses can use each of the digital marketing tactics listed above throughout their inbound marketing strategy to enhance the customer experience and stimulate customer desire to buy. Here are some classic examples of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing:
Blogs and pop-ups Video marketing and commercials Email subscription systems and automated emails
Email Marketing Email Marketing
For more than two decades, email remains the fastest and most direct way to reach customers with critical information. Today, a successful email marketing campaign must be engaging, relevant, informative, and interesting to avoid getting buried in your customers’ inboxes. To be successful, marketing emails should meet five core attributes. They must be trustworthy, highly relevant, interactive, coordinated across channels and strategic. Types of emails sent include:
Blog Subscribe to Newsletter. Send follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded certain content. Welcome page email. Email promotions for customers with purchase records. Prompt or campaign emails for customer nurturing.
Mobile Marketing Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing focuses on mobile apps to reach specific audiences on smartphones, feature phones, tablets or any other relevant wearable device. Mobile devices are in our pockets, kept by our beds, and constantly checked throughout the day. This makes mobile marketing very important, as two-thirds of consumers surveyed can recall a specific brand they saw on a mobile device in the last week. But it’s also very subtle, given how private mobile devices are. SMS, MMS, and in-app marketing are all options for reaching customers across devices, but beyond that, businesses must also consider using other digital marketing channels to coordinate marketing efforts.
Marketing Automation Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is an integral platform that ties all digital marketing tools and strategies together. Without it, a campaign will look like an unfinished puzzle, missing a crucial piece. Marketing automation software streamlines and automates marketing tasks and workflows, measures results, and calculates return on investment (ROI) for digital marketing campaigns to grow revenue faster. Marketing automation can help businesses gain insights into which programs are working and which ones aren’t, and it will provide metrics that allow companies to adjust their digital marketing strategies.
Automated Email Newsletters: Email automation doesn’t just allow for automated emails to be sent to subscribers. It can also narrow and expand your contact list as needed, controlling newsletters to be sent only to those who want to see them in their inbox. Automate social media posts: Businesses need to post frequently if they want to increase their organization’s presence on social networks. Social media scheduling tools plan content and posting times in advance and link to corporate social media channels for automatic posting. Marketing teams can spend more time focusing on content strategy. Lead nurturing workflow: Generating leads and converting those leads into customers can be a lengthy process. Automate the process through a bot chat system, or by sending leads specific emails and content (such as when they download and open an e-book) if they meet certain conditions. Campaign tracking and reporting: Marketing campaigns can include a large number of different contacts, emails, content, web pages, phone calls, and more. Marketing automation can help businesses prioritize everything they do by the campaign they serve, and then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress of all those components over time.
Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of advertising based on the effectiveness of site groups. Companies can earn commissions by letting others promote products or services on affiliate websites or platforms. Affiliate marketing channels include:
Google Ads works with the Google Adsense advertising channel to host video ads through the YouTube Partner Program. Post affiliate links from social media accounts.
Online PR Online PR
Online PR is the practice of securing online coverage through digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s a lot like traditional PR, but in an online space. Channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:
Connect with journalists via social media: For example, talking to journalists on Twitter is a great way to build relationships with the media, creating earned media opportunities for your company. Online reviews of a company: When someone reviews a company online, good company reviews help brands send a strong message to protect reputation. When there are negative reviews, a sincere and effective official reply can also improve customer favorability and trust.
CCC Digital Marketing Course
CCC College Canada’s innovative vocational college cultivates digital marketing talents for the Canadian market and provides Canadian-recognized digital marketing diplomas. It aims to help students develop their majors in the new era of digital marketing and lay a solid foundation for their future careers. This major combines practical, hands-on courses with theoretical knowledge. Students learn marketing and business concepts while learning the latest practical skills for the digital marketing industry.
Online marketing is a complex and ever-changing field that is rapidly expanding as new trends, opportunities, and technologies emerge. As the field continues to grow and evolve, students will not only be prepared to adapt to the field, but will be able to advance their skills as they advance professionally.
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to demonstrate proven knowledge and skills such as:
Describe the online and digital marketing environment and opportunities for a variety of organizations Develop solid digital marketing strategic plans for organizations ranging from start-ups to complex enterprises Conduct thorough market research on products and services Use appropriate onlineAdvertising platform Develop a suitable social media marketing plan based on market research Identify and develop online advertising based on business goals and target market Utilize online marketing techniques such as SEO, ad campaigns, Google and Bing analytics on popular platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. Build a marketing platform