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Digital Marketing Made Simple: The Ultimate Guide

Digital marketing. What does these couple of words mean? Are they just some new fancy buzzwords or do they really mean something that’s important? Digital marketing made simple – this is a term that can be used for any form of marketing products or services that make use of electronic…

By Manas Gulati
May 18, 2017

Digital marketing. What does these couple of words mean? Are they just some new fancy buzzwords or do they really mean something that’s important? Digital marketing made simple – this is a term that can be used for any form of marketing products or services that make use of electronic devices. And it’s been around for a lot of years (because electronics have been around too for as many decades). So to talk straight, digital marketing is anything you do online to get people’s attention. A decent digital marketing strategy will also aid in driving people to your website and maybe even convince some of them to join your email list and try your products and services. In the current scenario, lots of businesses opt for digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, online advertising and their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers. A lot of organizations have started focusing on online or digital channels over offline marketing campaigns because this is one way they can reach their ideal target audience where they're already present or aim to spend most of their waking hours: online. And unlike conventional usage of TV, radio, print ads for traditional marketing, digital marketing can be measured. This obviously lets you gauge what’s working and what’s not. So you could concentrate your efforts on what actually works for you and stop focusing on stuff that doesn’t. Also digital marketing is way more inexpensive when compared to the rest of the means and methods and easy to test and pivot. Let’s look at the ultimate guide and strategies that work for digital marketing:

SEO Marketing
SEM Marketing
Email Marketing
Content Marketing
Social Media
Pay Per Click Advertising
Relationship Marketing

You’ll have to look at tackling different things at various stages of your business. Obviously a beginner level will be different from a more evolved stage of your business. But it’s all about taking one step at a time. Because as we all know and agree, Rome was not built in a day! This guide is here to help you take those baby steps. A digital marketing strategy with a focus on things that matter like drawing up a plan, email marketing and amazingly fresh and unique content along with social media is what will take you ahead of your competition.

#1. SEO Marketing

An inherent part of any digital marketing strategy, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO is a focused element that helps in motivating customers to visit your business site via online platforms. It’s all about marketing the modern way! From knowing who your target market is to realizing truths that drive home this point, SEO today aims at attracting potential customers who are interested in what you have to offer. You also need to consider important factors such as mobile markets and optimize accordingly. If potential customers are not looking at desktops but mobile devices, then you need to ensure that you provide a quality user experience. Think about your keywords well. Move away from just one keyword and stop using just that to try to go up the ranks. Keywords are now much more about knowing and fathoming what your target audience is actually keying into the search engine. Use content that has quality. Apart from not stuffing in keywords endlessly, keep the content natural and focused.

#2. SEM

Search engine marketing’s provides advertisers or businesses the opportunity to place their ads right before customers who are motivated to buy their products then and there. No other medium has the ability to achieve this. Any wonder then search engine marketing is so effective and such an amazingly powerful way to grow your business. With SEM expertise, you can efficiently connect your brands with customers and prospects. It enhances visibility among current customers & qualified leads, and relentlessly measures performance.

#3. Email marketing

“You’ve got mail.” Once upon a time this is what you got to hear. Times have changed but that hasn’t lessened the importance or the addiction to emails. Looked at from another perspective, our inbox is still the place that grants us solitude amongst all the chaos that is communication on the web.

So building an email marketing campaign that’s successful and engaging is of utmost importance in today’s day and age. Get started with a sizable email list – use anything from offering freebies to a simple newsletter or a product update. But also remember that it needs to have a strong call to action and copy worth dying for. Also try not to forget that a follow-up is very vital and that you need to be consistent with it. So if someone wants a daily update and you forget to deliver, maybe you need to up the game. You also need to look at the value you’re providing. And you could do it with an offer or consider doing it with a newsletter or in linking to blog posts or other forms of media content.

#4. Content marketing

This is a strategic marketing approach that lays emphasis on creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. So instead of talking just about what you sell or want to sell, you are doling out appropriate and useful content to your prospects and customers that could actually help them in the long run to address certain issues. From large organizations like P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and innumerable more, to small and medium businesses, content marketing is used by one and all. And they all do it all because you guessed it right, IT WORKS. Content marketing helps with:

More sales
Cost savings
Better customer loyalty

#5. Social media marketing

Using the immense power of content along with social media marketing can help you take your customer base to an all-new high. Once you know what your target audience wants, you could go for social media optimization (SMO) that acts like a strategy to pull new visitors to a website. For this you need to add social media links to content, such as RSS feeds and share buttons or promote various activities through social media by updating statuses or tweets, or blog posts. Also keep in mind that a highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy high in quality has a better chance for success than an all encompassing strategy that wants to be all things to all people. Publish unique and exceptional quality content and you will see your followers share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

#.6 Pay Per Click Advertising

One of the quickest ways to get more visitors as well as potential customers to your website is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. With tools such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and others, business owners can display ads in the sponsored results section of search results pages. They are required to pay a fee each time someone clicks through from the ad to their site. But PPC needs to be executed correctly if you’re gunning for a large number of customers.

#7. Relationship marketing

This is an important factor of effective customer relationship management (CRM), which aims at fostering long-term customer engagement. Businesses encourage customer loyalty instead of plain customer procurement. This strategy also effectively builds a foundation of reciprocal trust so customers can feel a personal connection to the company brand. Unlike perishable media like print, radio and TV, relationship marketing has the ability to live on in the lives of consumers for decades. Moving on from the basics of digital marketing. let’s look at the main advantages of adopting digital marketing:

Cost-effective: It’s easy on the pocket. And much more cost-effective than traditional marketing approaches, such as print or TV ads. A large percentage of small business owners have admitted to saving money with digital marketing, compared to traditional marketing. If undertaken well and executed with honesty, digital marketing can improve ROI by a whopping percentage and can even amplify revenue growth as well.
Buyer-centric: This one’s aimed at particular audiences. Not broadly defined people like traditional marketing approaches work. with a targeted approach, digital marketing enables experiences that customers want to remember.

Before jumping with joy looking at the benefits digital marketing metes out, it’s really vital to know the common mistakes people make with digital marketing. As we all know by now, digital marketing is all about traffic. And when it comes to driving traffic to your website, there are two common mistakes: #1. We don’t try any traffic strategies: Imagine a world where materials sold themselves. But don’t we all know that such a world does not exist. We would love it if all our ideas and their implemented materials could sell by themselves. Alas, such is not the case. We expect our posts to go viral, also expect that they are inspiring enough that our audiences won’t think twice before sharing it. But we need to set our expectations right. Because the world does not work that way. We need to be active about promoting our material by getting it in front of our ideal audience. And for that, we need a sound strategy that drives traffic to your site. #2. We try every traffic strategy: It’s amazingly easy to believe every online guru and get pulled into the digital marketing whirlpool — SEO, PPC, Twitter, Snapchat, Affiliates — you think about it and you’ll be told that this is the only way to make money. The fear of missing out, results in us spending all our time randomly chasing the “next big thing” in digital marketing. Think before you take the leap. Take small steps and build on that big idea well. If you're a green horn and totally unaware of what constitutes of digital marketing, start with just one campaign and spend only a small portion of your overall marketing budget on digital first. It does take a while but when your team becomes familiar with digital marketing and results start to show, you can increase the proportion. That’s more or less the be all and end all on digital marketing. As is known universally, the Internet is, by far, not the only place for marketers to gather success, but it is still the one place where success can be measured and bettered. There is no chance marketers could afford to miss out on the opportunities of the web. And sooner than later, every businessman will have to master online marketing. And we are quite sure of the fact the digital marketing does matter. Digital marketing (especially during a slump) earns greater returns in a world where traditional advertising is not what it used to be. With multi-channel digital marketing increasing by leaps and bounds, we think it’s time marketers jumped on to the digital marketing bandwagon and give their business the boost it so deserves.