Digital marketing is a very broad term, and it basically covers all promotional activities that are done online. Some of these activities doesn’t need to look too promotional at the first sight, like search engine optimization, or various content strategies, but are mainly done for increasing visibility of company’s website, and therefore various brands it promotes.
Digital marketing is currently one of the most effective types of promotion. Main reason for this are advanced techniques digital marketers use for audience targeting and campaign result analysis. This article tells a short story about several different digital marketing practices.
Table of Contents
Search Engine Optimization
It is the process that influences higher visibility of web pages, and uses various on- and off-page activities. It involves creating good-quality content, adding keywords to it, structuring web pages in a way they make search engine crawling easier, building links on other website’s and blogs etc. SEO is very dynamic digital marketing branch, since Google and other search engines often change their algorithms in order to present more relevant results to their users. During the last decade keywords were the most important (for some time even the only) criteria for determining page rank, but MoZ’s research from 2015, that included interviews with more than 150 SEO professionals, determined that page and domain link authority, mobile friendliness and uniqueness of website content will become equally important in the future.
Search Engine Marketing (AdWords)
SEM also has increasing visibility on search engine results’ pages as its main goal, but uses different methods to get there. Search engine marketing term in most cases includes paid advertising and the smart use of advertising services provided by search engines themselves. Google AdWords is the number one internet advertising service, and marketers discovered that the ways this platform is used drastically influence campaign results. The fact that 97% of Google’s revenue comes from this service, tells us a lot about AdWords’ popularity. AdWords algorithm mainly relies on advanced behavioral targeting, and it uses current and previous searches done from user’s account. These are some of the most innovative features this platform comes with:
- AdWords Express – feature that allows small businesses without websites to market their products and services by using Google placement pages;
- Remarketing – it enables companies to direct their ads towards Google users who already visited their website in the past;
- Ad Extensions– enables businesses to include more information in their ads, like: phone numbers, addresses, slogans etc.;
- Google Click-to-Call – feature intended for phone users that allows them to call company’s number with one click on the ad.
Social Media Marketing
Marketer’s recognized social media’s promotional potential in the early days. We could see more or less obvious promotional posts and pages on Friendster and MySpace and Facebook was the first social media that introduced paid social media advertising concept.
Social media marketing is not much different from other digital marketing strategies. It requires good quality content and constant interaction with the audience. It also allows marketers to increase their audience with paid ads and advanced targeting features this platform provides. This helps users to increase their ad’s relevance, which according to Stephen Esketzis, the most important criteria for campaign’s success.
Content Marketing
All the above written strategies and content in most cases can’t make any effect, without providing top-quality content. Although most people consider content marketing to be a completely new concept companies started with this practice, in the beginning of 20th century, when they were issuing magazines and other publications. Today content production driven by product promotion is much more sophisticated. It includes various different types of content including: articles, photos, podcasts, videos, infographics, white papers, e-books etc.
Benchmark survey done in 2016, proves that good-quality content is not the only parameter that makes content strategy successful. Communication with customers, teams and other marketers play a very important role in the process. This survey also discovered these great findings:
- Use of infographics increased for more than 20% in only one year.
- More content marketers use Facebook (66% rated it effective in 2016, which is 8% more than last year).
- Part of companies’ marketing budget that’s being allocated for content marketing purposes is 7% bigger this year.
Other Types of Digital Marketing
There are many other ways companies can promote their products and services online, these are some of them:
- E mail marketing– It is one of the oldest types of digital marketing and it requires companies to send promotional e mails to potential customers, which are also called Newsletter. Although advanced e mail filters make this strategy much less effective, it is still widely accepted and loved by both marketers and customers;
- Influencer marketing– It means hiring influential people from company’s niche to promote its products or services, on social networks, their blog or website. This can be done by paying certain sum and signing a contract with ‘digital celebrities’, or simply by sending them a batch of free products.
- PR stunts– Digital media allows marketers to film PR stunts and make strong campaigns around them.
Digital marketing took over customer’s attention in recent years, and today we see less billboards and TV commercials. Companies finally realized that for effective promotion they need to go far beyond presenting their offer in a loud and bold way. One of the reasons why digital marketing is so effective, other than obvious tech improvements, is the fact that provides much more valuable insights in niche-specific topics. Consumers respect that and continue clicking on links they find interesting.