Digital marketing gets talked about a lot, by a lot of different people. You hear people say that’s what they do for their job, but what does it really mean? Digital Marketing is essentially any form of marketing that exists online. It encompasses all digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with your current and your prospective customers. From your own website to any of your online branding materials such as email marketing and online brochures, this is all digital marketing.
Other Digital Marketing examples include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC), Affiliate Marketing, Native Advertising, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing, Online PR and Inbound Marketing. If you’re not familiar with some of these terms then here’s a quick explanation:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You know when you search in Google, and the results come up? You want to be at the top of that list, don’t you? Well, SEO is the process of optimizing your website to “rank” higher in search engine results pages, which means you’ll get more visitors to your website.
Content Marketing
This term refers to creating and promoting online content assets to generate more awareness of your company, get more traffic, generate more leads, and ultimately get more customers. Examples of online content include blog posts, ebooks and whitepapers, and Infographics.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is when you promote your business on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business. You can use channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest to do social media marketing for your business.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
This is a way of driving traffic or driving potential customers to your website. You do this by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked, so, for example, you can pay for a Google ad which means you’ll get one of the top slots on Google’s search engine results pages at a price “per click” of the links you place. You can also use PPC on Facebook, Twitter, and with sponsored messages on LinkedIn. This gets slightly more technical than the first options but do not fear; there is plenty of pay per click management services out there who can help you with this.
Affiliate Marketing
This is where you will get paid commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website. You can do this by hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program or posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.
Native Advertising
These are advertisements which are primarily content-led but featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content, for example, a BuzzFeed-sponsored post would be considered as native advertising.
Marketing Automation
This is very handy and refers to the software that you can use to automate your basic marketing operations such as email newsletters, social media post scheduling, lead generating and nurturing and campaign tracking and reporting.
Digital Marketing is the way forward so start small, but think big and you’ll smash it!
