What is Digital Marketing? A Step by Step Guide for Online Marketing

Top Digital Marketing Agency is using traditional marketing approaches in this era of digitization. Print ads, banners, hoardings, video advertising, radio advertising are some of the traditional advertising approaches that have the potential to reach your target audience. However, the behavioral patterns of your target audience are changing and you need to cope with these changes to stay ahead in the competition. Digital marketing is the new marketing approach that has carved a niche for itself by offering some invaluable benefits to marketers. People, nowadays, check out the profile of any digital marketing company or SEO services provider online before dealing with them. It is a crucial norm that you need to understand and amend your marketing campaign accordingly. Digital marketing is one of the result-driven approaches to attract millennials to your offerings and to create brand awareness and brand visibility.

Before promoting your business online you should know the basics of digital marketing. In this digital marketing step by step guide, we will discuss the below digital marketing process and approach in detail.

1. What is Digital Marketing?
2. What are the types of Digital Marketing?
3. Reasons why your business needs a Digital Marketing Strategy?
4. What does a Digital Marketer do?
5. How to do Digital Marketing?
6. What are the benefits of Digital Marketing?
7. What are the Digital Marketing KPIs and Metrics?

Let’s get started.

What is Digital Marketing?

If you have to define digital marketing. It can be summed up like this: Digital marketing is all about efforts a company puts on the internet to attract their target audience. Here, print ads, banners, hoardings and video and audio ads are made exclusively for digital channels such as social media platforms, websites and other electronic media channels. You need to hire a digital marketing agency that can offer you unmatched digital marketing services to develop an authoritative online presence. Your target audience will take you seriously and will turn up to you when they want information relevant to the industry. Some of the digital marketing approaches are search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing and others. We will discuss all these digital marketing approaches in detail in this post. 

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One of the striking differences between traditional marketing approaches and digital marketing is that traditional market approaches are geographically limited. For example, a print ad can be seen by your target audience living in the same city or area. It is not the case with the digital marketing approach. You have the whole world to show your digital advertising through the internet. It is not limited to a city or an area or a country. It is important to know How to create a digital marketing strategy? For businesses, adding digital marketing into their existing marketing tunnel is not an option anymore. It has become a necessity for them. If your business does not have a website, you at least need to have a social media presence to reach out to your target audience. Furthermore, there are many options and strategies you can explore once you embrace digital marketing. There is enough scope for you to be creative and innovative to put your message to your customers. Also, it is far more cost-effective than other traditional marketing approaches. Measuring the performance and ROI of your digital marketing strategy is also easy and accurate. With the availability of different performance metrics and dashboards, you can easily get a detailed report of any digital marketing campaign. All you need is a team of digital marketing experts who have a proven track record in the domain and who are well-versed with new digital marketing and top SEO trends and updates. They will first understand your business model, needs and nature and design a digital marketing strategy that serves the core purpose. Moreover, they will keep a sharp eye on the campaign while measuring the performance of the campaign and make necessary amendments as and when needed. 

What are the Types of Digital Marketing?

Below are the types of digital marketing that you can employ to reach out to your target audience and to develop a powerful authoritative online presence. 

Search Engine Marketing:

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the amalgamation of two digital marketing techniques- search engine optimization and pay per click. For new businesses, getting genuine traffic on their websites is not an easy task. So, they combine SEO and PPC campaigns to get traffic on their websites through paid and unpaid means. SEM is one of the most important digital marketing techniques.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most meaningful and effective digital marketing techniques that does not just bring online traffic to your website but also improves your brand visibility and awareness.Here, In SEO services a few efforts are made such as website optimization including on-page and off-page optimization, keyword research, content creation and marketing, guest post services and outreach, local business page setup and other marketing efforts to bring genuine, relevant traffic to your website. The efforts are made in a manner that your website ranks at the top of the search engine results when relevant keyword queries are typed by users. 

Pay Per Click:

Pay-per-Click (PPC) is also another digital marketing technique where website traffic increases through paid means. Here, your ads are placed on the search engines such as Google and Bing and your account will be charged every time someone clicks on your adverts. The amount they charge depends on your website quality score and the keyword competition of your selected keywords. When you want good traffic for a short period, you can always go for PPC campaign management. 

Social Media Marketing:

One of the most promising digital marketing techniques, social media marketing (SMM) is all about marketing your offerings through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. Here, digital marketers put efforts to increase the number of followers and the total number of shares to improve your social media outreach. Also, social media marketing facilitates digital marketers to communicate and interact with their target audience directly. 

Content Marketing:

As they say, “Content is the king”, it is very vital for any business to create highly engaging, valuable, original and enriching content that improves customer experience. People visit your website or any platforms to educate themselves or to get some information. It is your responsibility as the digital marketer to come up with content that satisfies the thirst of your target audience. Images, infographics, articles, blogs, press releases, videos, GIFs are some of the content types. Valuable and engaging content will improve your brand awareness and visibility. 

Email Marketing:

Though you might feel that email marketing is traditional and outdated, researches point otherwise. Even today, more than 90% of people check their emails once in a day. The first thing that the digital marketer needs to do is to develop a strong database of emails by different schemes and offers. Then, they can start their email marketing campaign by designing an eye-catching email that conveys the message brilliantly and innovatively.

“Content is really important when it comes to email marketing. Using the right SaaS Email Templates will help your campaign be successful and effective. ”

For your loyal customers, email marketing approach plays a huge role. You can notify them with newsletters, offers, discounts and other important information.

There are many email marketing tools available, and one popular choice is the GetResponse email marketing tool, that can help you to design an effective and superior email marketing campaign. You need deliver the right message, check SPF records, and ensure high email deliverability.

Influencer / Affiliate Marketing:

Many industry influencers are well respected and powerful within the community. Influencer or affiliate marketing is all about approaching these influencers and asking them to post about your offerings in their blogs, articles or social media posts. Influencer marketing has become popular in recent times, especially on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram where well-known influencers promote products and services of different brands. Here, the influencer might ask for payments or discount codes or other favors in return of a promotion post. 

Mobile Marketing 

It is a great initiative that helps to provide excellent

digital marketing benefits if you know the proper methods. We might leverage a combination of social media, text messages, push notifications, mobile apps, and email. You know, by 2024, there will be approximately 187.5 million users in the US alone. This means you need to get your hands on the best digital marketing proposal to target such a huge crowd. It is vital to have a straightforward move and optimize the current marketing efforts to deliver a seamless experience to the users. 

Audio Marketing

In the mobile addictive era, Audio is a medium to gain digital marketing benefits effortlessly. This might be in the format of podcasts which you can share on various platforms. You might have heard of Spotify or Clubhouse, which are indulging with the audience at high-rate. They are bringing the authentic phenomenon of radio in the form of podcasts. You get the opportunity to target the right audience and share your insights in the audio format.

Video Marketing 

As a top

digital marketing agency, you need to step into all the niches to grow your business. YouTube is engaging around 2 billion people every month. It helps people know new brands, get engaged, and look for better guidance through video content. Video marketing brings excellent digital marketing benefits if you have better customer engagement. 

Instant Message Marketing 

You might have seen random text messages pop up on your phone. Every social media platforms have access to direct messages, and it brings great opportunity for the top

digital marketing agency to use this. It helps to connect with the customers and get instant answers.

Some other digital marketing types involve radio and television advertising which are similar to traditional marketing approaches. The increasing use of smartphones and tablets also have made digital marketing services providers come up with mobile ads that are solely made for mobiles. 

Reasons Why your Business needs a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Now, let’s explore the reasons why your business needs a digital marketing strategy:Most of the time, businesses are clueless when it comes to their digital marketing goals. They simply don’t know what they want from their digital marketing efforts. When you have not determined your goals, you are likely to put less effort into achieving them. Hire a digital marketing agency to design a carefully planned digital marketing strategy that has goals, objectives and techniques to achieve those goals. Another common trait among businesses is no information about their target audience or market share. Here, you need well-planned research by digital marketing experts who will tell you about your target audience and their behavioral patterns. Also, you need to know what your competitors are doing and how they are approaching their customers. A powerful digital marketing strategy will tell you about what your competitors are doing. If you don’t adopt the digital marketing strategy for your business, your potential customers will simply go to your competitors for similar offerings. Do you want to lose that large chunk of customers who might come to you if you had a robust digital marketing strategy?The one-size-fits-all concept does not work when it comes to digital marketing. You must differentiate your marketing efforts for your existing customers, potential customers and other stakeholders. When you have a powerful online value proposition, you will be able to design a tailored digital marketing strategy that targets every customer personas efficiently and effectively. What happens when you don’t know your customers too well? It is very important to know your customers to offer them personalized, tailor-made offers that lure them. Online tools such as Google Analytics will not tell you about the sentiments of your visitors. A digital marketing strategy will help you to identify your customer persona and behavioral patterns to offer them exactly what they want. Practicing just digital marketing approaches and forgetting about traditional marketing is not a solution. When you integrate your digital marketing efforts with traditional marketing, you will see shining results. An integrated digital marketing strategy will ensure that you are in a good place to enjoy all the benefits. Even if you have enough resources, you will not reap any benefits if there is a lack of coordination amongst them. You need to coordinate your resources and improve communication among them to get quality returns. Also, sometimes, digital marketing experts don’t monitor analytics and key performance metrics. It is not a good practice to follow. You need to ensure that you have a digital marketing strategy that includes monitoring and optimizing analytics from time to time for continuous improvement of the key aspects. Check our: Digital Marketing Booster Packages

What does a Digital Marketer do?

A digital marketer is a broad term that includes many roles. Let’s discuss all of them in detail:

Digital Marketing Manager: 

The Digital Marketing Manager will be responsible for the company’s search engine optimization packages, strategy and will ensure that everything goes smooth and effortless. The manager will also be responsible for driving and improvising content based on research and data. The manager will design a strategy and ensure that frequent amendments are made based on metrics and key trends. 

Content Marketing Specialist:

A content marketing specialist will be responsible for designing and implementing a powerful content marketing strategy. They will perform keyword research, competitor analysis and content creation. He will come up with different types of content such as images, graphics, infographics, videos, audios and text-based content. 

Social Media Manager:

A social media manager is responsible for account setup, designing a social media strategy for each social media platform and scheduling posts on platforms. He might work in coordination with the content marketing specialist for social media posts and with SEO Experts for taking steps to improve visits and leads. 

Marketing Automation Coordinator:

A digital marketing automation coordinator will be responsible for the effects and results of a campaign. He/She will deal with monitoring key performance metrics to determine the success of the campaign and will suggest amendments in the existing digital marketing strategy. Additionally, the digital marketing automation coordinator will also oversee YouTube automation strategies, optimizing video content, and refining approaches to enhance the campaign’s impact on the platform.

How to do Digital Marketing?

What should be the best approach to digital marketing? It is not enough to hire digital marketing services and thinking that they will take care of everything. Your active participation is required to ensure that you monitor everything and achieve your goals. Let’s discuss the digital marketing approach step by step. Below pointers will help you to understand how to do digital marketing for your online presence.

Define your Goals:

The first and foremost thing is to determine your goals. What do you want from your digital marketing strategy? Do you want to increase conversions, followers, likes, email responses or you want to rank at the top of search engine results? Do you want quick hits on your website? Do you want your target audience to click on your ads? Defining your goal is the first crucial thing, as it will shape your digital marketing campaign. Only by having a clear goal can you create effective transactional emails or compelling social media campaigns.Also, digital marketing experts will find it easy to design and run the campaign if they know the goals. 

Define Your Target Market:

Another thing that you need to do is to define your target market. Who is your actual target audience? Where do they live? Which social media platforms they use? What are the factors they consider before buying offerings? Digital marketing experts will research about the behavioral patterns, likes, interests and other key aspects of your target audience through different strategies such as forms, newsletters, emails and others. 

Develop Personas:

Creating a buyer persona is also a crucial thing for your digital marketing campaign. It will help you to make personalized offers to your followers. Some of the aspects of the buyer persona are what they do, their annual income, family situation, age, likes, dislikes interests, buying patterns, etc. 

Define Your Budget:

What is your budget for the digital marketing campaign? If you want to hire digital marketing services, you need to pay them for their services. Though digital marketing is the cheapest form of advertising compared to all traditional marketing approaches, you need to define a budget for that. Developing an in-house team might prove costly compared to hiring a digital marketing agency. 

Channels you Want to Use:

Which are the digital marketing channels you want to use for your digital marketing campaign? Most of the time, companies want to include as many channels as possible, but it is not an ideal scenario. For example, if your target audience is not active on Twitter, there is no point including Twitter in your campaign. Discuss with the digital marketing experts you have hired and decide the number of channels you want to use. 

Keyword Research for SEO and PPC:

For SEO and PPC, you need to decide the keywords you want to target to get the best results. Many keyword research tools available in the market for the same. You can choose short-tail and long-tail keywords as per their performances and the number of search queries. Keywords play a huge role in the success of your digital marketing campaign. Take some time and do proper keyword research. 

Create and Manage your Social Media Profiles:

Creating social media accounts and randomly posting there will not serve any purpose. You need to put efforts to increase the number of followers by offering value-added information. Scheduling posts and coming up with creative and informative posts are important. At the same time, you also need to ensure that you positively respond to your followers. 

Website Optimization:

Digital marketing experts need to optimize the website, including on-page and off-page optimization, to ensure that search engine crawlers can easily crawl the website and understand the business. 

What are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?

Now, we will discuss some of the benefits of the digital marketing campaign. Stay tuned! 

Increases Customer Loyalty:

One of the most promising benefits of a digital marketing strategy is you will earn customer loyalty with time. When you regularly come up with new, valuable and engaging information for your customers, they will appreciate such efforts. Search engine optimization plays a huge role in improving customer loyalty as it is a long-term approach where you have the time to make relationships with your target audience. By offering personalized offers, relevant information, valuable content sharing and the best after-sales services, you can win the trust and respect of your customers. 

Engage Customers at Every Buying Stage:

Understanding the customer’s journey was difficult earlier before digital marketing came into the picture. Statistics and performance metrics have made it possible to analyze the customer’s journey including their likes, dislikes, buying patterns, the average time spent on the website, the number of clicks on product recommendations, etc. These metrics make it possible to engage with your customers at every stage of their journey to offer them an unparalleled user experience. 

Target the Right Audience:

If you don’t know your target audience, all your digital marketing efforts will go in vain. Digital marketing allows marketers to identify the target audience and to come up with offers that specifically target the target audience. With the availability of online activities and demographic and geographic information on hand, digital marketing experts find it easy to come up with tailor-made offers for the target audience. 

Develop a Sales Funnel:

Developing a sales funnel for your business is the ultimate goal of any marketing efforts. It separates window shoppers from actual buyers. Also, it helps companies to improve the customer journey of real buyers. With superior digital marketing approaches, you can develop your sales funnel to get constant leads from the market systematically. 

Optimize and Obtain Better Conversion Rates:

Tracking traditional marketing approaches is difficult, but it is not the case with digital marketing. Here, you can monitor and track every single activity performed by your users. It does not only help you to amend your campaign, it also helps you to increase your conversion rates by taking necessary steps to improve the user experience of the customers. 

Gain Brand Credibility:

It is a proven fact that brands that have a powerful and authoritative online presence have good brand visibility. A digital marketing campaign helps your brand to be visible by sharing valuable content, providing relevant information and communicating with the users directly without any barriers. All these things help your brand to be visible on the internet. 

The Best ROI:

As we have mentioned earlier, digital marketing is a cost-effective approach compared to other traditional marketing efforts such as TV and radio advertising, hoardings, billboards and others. They offer superior ROIs and the best value for the money you have spent. Check our: Digital Marketing Packages

What are the Digital Marketing KPIs and Metrics?

They are the Key Performance Indicator that is a quantifiable element for your business’ performance. The most vital

Digital Marketing KPIs that the best digital marketing agency focuses on are:

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization will help you know how well you are performing on the search engines. 
• CLV: Customer Lifetime Value is a revenue that a customer generates over a specific interval. Depending on your customer retention rate, this can be limited to days, months, weeks, or years. 
• Customer Acquisition Cost: The cost you invest in getting a new customer. This might be your advertising, sales, or marketing campaigns. 
• ROI: The Return on Investment indicates the profit rate you generate. 
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors that turns into potential customers or leads. 
• Search Traffic: These metrics include unique visitors, website visits, organic traffic, page view per session, traffic sources, and others related to the traffic. 
• Backlinks: This is a vital factor in SEO that deals with the number of other websites that link to yours.
• Bounce Rate: This is the deal where a visitor lands on your web page and exits immediately. Tracking this helps to know the scope of improvement and gain more customer engagement.

Conclusion:

Any brand in today’s world, cannot imagine a world without digital marketing. It has shown some superior results to companies and digital marketing is here to stay for a long time. It has set a benchmark for itself by offering some invaluable benefits for organizations across the globe. All you need to do is hire a reputed digital marketing services provider company that can offer high-quality and result-driven services. Apart from getting leads and increasing sales and revenues, digital marketing efforts can put your brand at the top of the industry where people will turn up to you for information and knowledge.