About Digital Marketing and How It Works

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, refers to all marketing efforts that occur on the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers. This also includes communication through text or multimedia messages.

Overall, digital marketing is defined by using numerous digital tactics and channels to connect with customers where they spend much of their time: online. The best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overarching goals. And depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through the free and paid channels at their disposal.

Why is Digital Marketing Important?

• It reaches a broad spectrum of internet users who spend their time and money online.
• It pins small businesses in top-ranking positions over brick-and-mortar firms with a meagre advertising budget.
• It provides businesses with laser-focused control to ensure target audiences read their messages.
• It allows personal-level marketing to provide comfort and security for customers to subscribe to the messages and purchase. 
• It enables tracking ads and communicating with the target audience. 
• It provides scaling and adaptability for growing businesses to get instant results and optimize accordingly, reducing lost revenues and wasted ad spend.
• It influences the purchase decisions of internet users who look for services, products, or anything they desire online. 
• It allows businesses to market to people by various means that show individual respect. 

Types of Digital Marketing

If you have a computer or a smartphone, as many of us do, you’ve experienced digital marketing. It could be an email in your inbox, a search result when using Google, an ad on Facebook, a text message sent to your phone, or a post by an influencer on Instagram. As you can see, internet marketing is an expansive field with many areas of specialization. The core forms of digital marketing, however, are:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO consists of carefully structuring and optimizing your website’s pages to achieve the best position possible on search engine result pages (SERPs) when internet users perform a search on an engine like Google that’s related to your business.

2. Paid Social and Paid Search Advertising

Ads that appear on social media are paid social ads, and all that seems on SERPs when you enter a query are paid search ads. Advertisers create these paid ads and compete with others for positions on their chosen social platform or the SERP for their selected search engine.

3. Email Marketing

Any marketing that occurs through email is known as email marketing, and it’s not just for newsletters and coupons. All marketing-related interaction over email fits into this category.

4. Content Marketing

Every effort to market through online content is considered content marketing (and often employs SEO, paid search, and paid social advertising). For example, all these content types (and more) are grouped under the content marketing category:

• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Videos
• eBooks
• White papers 

5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing in which companies reach out to third party websites to advertise their products and services. These are also known as referrals. The target audience of the affiliate website becomes important in this aspect of digital marketing. Some of the ways that affiliates are incentivized are based on:

• Registrations
• Email sign-ups
• Sales and
• Subscriptions

6. Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing is a type of digital marketing focused on reaching the target audience via mobile devices. We all are excessive users of mobile devices and there is a good chance of tapping on to their attention by following simple marketing strategies. Push notifications, emailers, social media posts, MMS, SMS, newsletters are a part of Mobile Marketing. 

7. Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a practice that increases brand awareness, and helps brands achieve their marketing objectives. A wide range of content buckets are available for social media marketing like videos, memes, static posts, trending posts, testimonials, stories, reels, etc.. If you perform SMM properly, there is a high chance that your conversion rates will increase, you will be able to build a good top-funnel traffic, and your paid marketing cost will go down.