Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is the process of promoting your company, brand, or product through online and offline channels. In general, digital marketing entails using online advertisements such as banners, pop-ups, and videos, as well as social media promotion. There are, however, many other types of digital marketing, such as search engine optimization (SEO), which ensures that people searching for your products or services will find you via a visit to, say, Google.
Because of its broad reach, digital marketing is a popular way to promote products and services. If you have a product or service, people from all over the world can potentially be reached with relatively little effort thanks to the Internet. Email and social media promotion are two of the most common ways that digital marketing reaches its target audience.
One advantage of digital marketing is that it allows businesses to see the results of advertising campaigns almost immediately. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook also enable marketers to interact directly with customers via tools such as hashtags and pages.
Companies can now communicate with their existing and potential customers about their products and services much more easily thanks to social media platforms.
Digital marketing has several advantages over traditional forms of promotion, including better targeting options, real-time data (tweets, for example), higher engagement rates (because people are frequently online), and the ability to measure results much more effectively than other offline methods. Furthermore, because digital marketing is available 24 hours a day, you can reach out to your target audience regardless of when they are online.
It is important to remember that digital marketing is only one aspect of promotion and should not be used in place of other methods such as email marketing, which can be used to build relationships with customers, educate them about new products or services, or sell more to existing ones. Digital marketing supplements these other forms of promotion, allowing you to reach a much larger audience than would otherwise be possible.
Digital marketing encompasses activities such as:
Formation:
The process of creating new content for any website, app, network, or social platform with the goal of engaging audiences and increasing brand awareness.
Promotion:
Advertising on platforms such as Google, Facebook, and others; Increasing organic visibility through search engine optimization and paid search.
Research:
Developing strategies to understand competitors' digital footprints.
However, the ultimate goal is conversion - whether that is a sale or a sign-up - and this is where analytics comes in. To measure performance and optimize campaigns, digital marketers use tools like Google Analytics and Omniture.
Search engine rankings are influenced by two major factors:
The number of high-quality inbound links pointing to the page; the time it takes for pages on your site to load on visitors' devices.
To achieve high rankings, you should aim to quickly build a large number of relevant inbound links using tools such as Broken Links Finder, which can be used to submit broken backlinks for removal, so they no longer devalue the link profile. You'll also need an SEO tool like Scribe or something similar to monitor competitors and spot opportunities to outrank them by creating high-quality content that other sites will be willing to link to.
The number of high-quality inbound links pointing to the page; the time it takes for pages on your site to load on visitors' devices.
You should select a domain name that is both relevant to your business and easy to remember, such as www.yourbusinessnamehere.co rather than www.yournamehere987654321.co.uk; this will make it easier for your customers to find you online and, ultimately, improve conversions even more!
Marketing on display networks such as Facebook or Google AdWords can benefit from remarketing, also known as retargeting, in which users are shown ads related to the products they have already viewed on your site before leaving, increasing the likelihood that they will return and complete their intended purchase, so it's definitely worth trying if you think it could work for you as well.
These are just a few of the most important aspects of digital marketing; there are many more that you can investigate to gain a better understanding of what is possible. The most important thing to remember is that, like your website, it must be an ongoing process requiring creativity and effort in order to produce the best results possible, so it's definitely something to think about if you want your business to thrive.
After graduating from Oxford Brookes University, Erin Callaghan has over five years of experience working as an SEO specialist in the UK online marketing industry. She primarily writes about Adwords, SEO strategies, and PPC services, but she also provides advice on how businesses can generate more leads.