Digital Marketing 101 for Beginners

The term Digital Marketing has been tossed around for years now, and if this is the first time you hear it then you must have been living under a rock. That’s the only plausible explanation one can come up with for such blatant ignorance. The might of the internet is the driving force behind the world as we know it today, and it is in everyone’s best interest to be well versed in the NETizen lexicon. People the world over spend most of their waking hours online, which has prompted companies to invest their energy and resources to pursue their clients in the virtual space.

This is where digital marketing comes into play. Simply put, digital marketing is the promotion of products and services to consumers via the use digital media and technologies. This type of marketing approach entails that the marketers keep a close tab on active campaigns to deduce what content is catching the eye of the customer, what is being viewed often or for how long, generating sales etc. typically in real time. When operating in the digital space, consumers are not just subject to a unilateral advertising campaign but have access to what other web users have to say about the brand as well.

Tools for Digital Online Marketing

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): It is the process of following a set of rules to send signals to the search engines that your webpage is worth showing in the engine’s index thereby increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your site by securing first-page ranking.
2. Content Marketing: It is the process of generating and dispensing valuable, relevant and consistent content to a target audience with the objective of favorable consumer action.
3. Social Media Marketing: SMM employs the various social media channels to create and dispense promotional content that the users will further share with their social network leading to brand exposure and customer reach.
4. Pay-Per-Click: PPC is a method of diverting traffic to the website wherein the advertiser pays a fee to the publisher every time the ad is clicked.
5. Affiliate Marketing: This is a strategy wherein the company enrolls individuals or companies as affiliates to market the company’s products for a commission.
6. Email Marketing: It is the use electronic mail to promote products and services to current and prospective customers.
7. Native Advertising: Digital Offline Marketing. These marketing campaigns are conducted offline but are enhanced by the use of electronic devices like phone, radio, television, electronic billboards.

Why is Digital Marketing here to stay?

1. Digital marketing is way cheaper than traditional marketing, as it takes only a fraction of the cost and time to broadcast an ad across the internet than traditional marketing.
2. Since the internet is all pervasive, the digital marketing domain has a wider and more readily available base. The probability of a customer stumbling across an ad while online is far greater than say noticing it in the paper, or splashed across the regular billboard.
3. The sweeping omnipresence of the internet in people’s daily lives also allows marketers to target audiences across continents and categories as well as record and analyze their response patterns to strategize further campaigning efforts accordingly.
4. Customers have the added comfort of making more informed decisions about which product to go for, as they can compare the attributes, prices, brand credibility and user reviews of the various product choices available online.