Search Engine Optimization, Pay-per-Click, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Marketing Analytics, and Affiliate Marketing are the eight key categories of digital marketing.
Digital marketing has become an important part of an organization's overall marketing strategy over the last decade. It enables businesses to target their communications to a specific audience, allowing them to market directly to people who are likely to be interested in their product.
Two members of the Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) academic staff discussed how digital marketing fits together with traditional marketing strategies and provided information on some of the different types of digital marketing now in use.
What does digital marketing entail?
Digital marketing refers to a wide range of marketing strategies and technology that are used to contact customers over the internet. It has transformed the marketing business as a method of online marketing that allows organizations to develop a brand identity.
Dr. Mark Hobson, a senior associate dean of business programs, noted that while digital marketing appears to be a new world, it is founded on many of the same concepts as traditional marketing and involves both fundamental marketing understanding and technical know-how.
Dr. Jessica Rogers, associate dean of marketing programs, explained that the two disciplines help consumers connect with different groups. “Traditional media is a terrific method to reach a broad consumer base,” she noted, “whereas digital media may reach highly specialized groups.” “A important aspect is that some channels are more effective than others depending on the target demographic.”
Digital Marketing Types
Rogers discussed some of the most common methods of digital marketing and gave a brief description of each:
Optimization for Search Engines (SEO)
The purpose of SEO is to encourage a company's website to rank higher in Google search results, resulting in more traffic from search engines. To do so, SEO marketers look for words and phrases that people use to seek for information online and include them into their own material. According to Moz's “Beginners Guide to SEO,” SEO includes a variety of factors, including the text on your web pages, how other sites link to you on the web, and how your website is built. According to Salary.com, an SEO specialist can earn roughly $70,058.
So, what are some ways to boost a website's SEO? It's critical to recognize that one of the factors that makes SEO difficult is that the answer to this query is always contingent on Google and its most recent algorithm. With that in mind, from Moz's Beginners Guide to SEO, here are a few of the most crucial factors for SEO strategists and marketers in general to understand about how SEO works today:
Content indexing – It's critical to make it easy for search engines to understand what your site's content is by including alt text for images and text transcripts for video and audio.
Good link structure — Search engines must be able to “crawl” your site structure in order to find all of your content. An SEO specialist can style links, URLs, and sitemaps in a variety of ways to make them more accessible to site crawlers.
Keywords and targeted keywords – One of the essential building blocks of SEO is properly deploying your keywords – i.e. the search terms you want your site to be found for – in your content and headers. Stuffing your content with as many keywords and keyword variations as possible is no longer a good idea. Writing high-quality content with keywords in the headers and a few times in the crawlable page content is now regarded best practice and will improve page rankings.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
Paid adverts and sponsored search engine results are referred to as pay-per-click. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning the ad will disappear once you stop paying. PPC, like SEO, is a strategy to boost a company's internet search traffic.
Pay-per-click advertising includes ads that appear at the top and sides of search results pages, ads that appear when browsing the web, ads that appear before YouTube videos, and ads that appear in mobile apps.
Another feature that sets pay-per-click apart from SEO is that you just pay for the outcomes. In a traditional PPC strategy, such as a Google AdWords campaign, you will only pay for clicks.
when someone visits your website after clicking on your ad Pay-per-click advertising allows you to spend virtually any amount of money. Some businesses may get a return on their investment of a few hundred dollars, but many huge businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on pay-per-click advertising.
The cost of running an ad or promoting your search results is mostly determined by the level of competition for your keywords. Keywords with high competition (i.e., those with a lot of people searching for them and a lot of sites wanting to be found for them) will cost more, while keywords with lesser competitiveness will likely cost less.
You can specify whether your ad or promoted results are shown to users all over the world or exclusively inside a certain geographic area when you set up a pay-per-click campaign. According to Google, if you're marketing a brick-and-mortar business, this option to personalize by geography helps you avoid wasting ad revenue by delivering advertisements to individuals who don't live near your shop.
Marketing on Social Media
This encompasses everything a company does through social media. Although almost everyone is familiar with social media, marketers must use it in a planned and integrated manner. Creating social media postings and responding to comments are only the beginning of social media marketing.
Instead of being an afterthought, activities must be planned and consistent to be effective. There are several online tools available to automate and schedule social media postings to help keep messages consistent, but marketers should only use automation as a tool, not as a “set it and forget it” solution. If there is no real person behind the posts, users will immediately figure it out.
Marketers that use social media should not be isolated from other marketing functions. Social marketers must collaborate with the rest of the marketing team to ensure that the brand's message is consistent across all channels, both online and offline.
Analytics is an important component of social media marketing: social media marketers must be adept at analyzing the performance of their postings and developing plans based on that information. According to marketing writer Jayson DeMers, another incentive for marketers to continuously measure and analyze their initiatives is that this data allows them to demonstrate a campaign's return on investment and whether it added value to the organization.
Beyond Instagram and Twitter, there are other free avenues for spreading your message. Google My Business, eBay, and Facebook Messenger and Marketplace are some of the other alternatives.
To put it another way, social media marketing is far more difficult than maintaining a personal Facebook or Twitter account. It necessitates a combination of creative thinking and objective, data-driven strategy, and it could be a good fit for individuals who appreciate combining these two disciplines. According to Salary.com, a social media analyst with a bachelor's degree can earn around $68,230.
Marketing with Content
To raise brand awareness, content marketing employs narrative and information sharing. The ultimate goal is for the reader to take a step toward becoming a customer, such as seeking additional information, joining an email list, or purchasing something. Blog entries, resources like as white papers and e-books, digital video, podcasts, and much more are all examples of “content.” In general, it should deliver value to the consumer first and foremost, rather than simply market the brand or try to sell something. Content marketing is about developing a long-term, trustworthy relationship with your customers that can lead to multiple sales over time rather than just one.
Material marketing works in tandem with other forms of digital marketing: it's a means to combine SEO search terms into new website content, and the results may be disseminated via social media and email marketing. Analyzing your content marketing statistics can reveal a lot about your customers: what are they looking for when they come to your site? What types of content entices people to stay on the site longer and explore? What types of things make them lose interest and leave?
Content marketing, unlike PPC advertising, is a long-term strategy. According to Marketo, a marketing automation business, marketers build up a library of material (text, video, podcasts, etc.) over time that will continue to draw users to the site via search engines. This content library also helps to spread brand awareness and raises your profile as an information provider. When users come to your site for knowledge, you want them to remember you as an authority when it's time to buy anything.
People who enjoy writing, video, and audio production should consider content marketing. However, like with all aspects of digital marketing, it necessitates excellent strategic and analytic abilities.
Email Promotion
Despite the rise of social media, smartphone apps, and other platforms, email remains one of the most effective marketing tools, according to Rogers. It can be used as part of a content marketing plan to provide value to customers and convert them over time. According to the American Marketing Association, email marketing professionals are competent at not just creating attractive campaigns, but also understanding appropriate audience outreach and monitoring customer interactions and data and making strategic decisions based on that data.
The open rate – the proportion of recipients who opened the email – and the click through rate – the number of recipients who opened the email and clicked on a link in the email – are two analytical measurements that email marketers are constantly aiming to better. There are several things marketers can do to make their emails more appealing to consumers and more likely to be opened, according to Constant Contact, a renowned email marketing software business. Among them are:
Make a Sense of Immediacy – Writing email language that informs recipients that a special offer is running out of time or that just a limited number of the offer are available might increase the amount of people who visit your website.
Make Your Email More Personal – Including the recipient's name in your emails and subject lines has been shown to enhance open and click through rates. (For instance, “Katie, a special offer only for you.”)
Allow recipients to choose their own preferences – Allowing consumers to choose how frequently they want to hear from you can help you keep some of your email subscribers on your list and clicking on your emails.
Mobile Advertising
This sort of digital marketing focuses on reaching out to your target audience via smartphone or tablet. Text messages, social media, websites, email, and mobile applications are all examples of mobile marketing. Marketers can customize offers or special content based on a customer's location or time, such as when they enter a store or attend an event.
Consumers in the United States now spend five hours a day on their phones, according to a recent TechCrunch story. This is a 20% rise compared to the fourth quarter of 2015. In addition, users are spending far more time in apps than on mobile browsers. Users in 2017 spend far more time with apps than they do with television. According to the TechCrunch report, 15 percent of that app time is spent on entertainment applications like Netflix and Hulu, 19 percent on Facebook's mobile app, 12 percent on other social and messaging apps, and 11 percent on gaming apps.
According to Retail Dive, 45 percent of all purchasing uses a mobile device in some form, whether it's for research, pricing comparison, or making a purchase. That percentage is 57 percent for the majority of Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1997), according to the Pew Research Center.
Marketers understand that you must carry your message to your customers where they are, and one thing is certain: your potential customers are on their phones.
Marketing research
Digital marketing is very trackable and measurable, which is one of its main advantages. Coupons and other direct mail offerings were once the sole trackable marketing materials. You knew the message had hit home when a customer used the coupon. Today, analytics allow marketers to watch user behavior down to the smallest detail: how many times they click on a link, how long they stay on a website, how often they open emails, and so on. However, the massive amount of data accessible on digital marketing effectiveness can feel like sipping from a fire hose, and marketers must be able to properly comprehend what the numbers represent and how they should be used to inform strategy.
This not only allows marketers to learn what works with customers and alter their marketing messages in the future, but it also allows them to demonstrate their worth to the organization. Understanding all of this data and applying it to make strategic decisions is a key element of a digital marketer's job, and it distinguishes them from their traditional counterparts.
Many methods are available for measuring the performance of digital marketing efforts, and many marketers may use a combination of them based on their goals and audience (Fortune magazine reported that many marketers are using over 100 applications in their total marketing process.) Google Analytics is a popular marketing analytics tool that can be modified in a variety of ways to track how your website is performing, which keywords are driving traffic to your site, how users are travelling across your site, and much more.
Having good, precise analytics and the ability to interpret them can help marketers “fail fast,” quickly eliminating initiatives that aren't performing and establishing better campaigns around proven themes. Over time, analytics will not only be used to measure your efforts, but they will also be used to inform and improve them.
In a digital marketing degree program, you'll learn about marketing plans and strategies, branding, mobile marketing, and digital advertising, among other topics relevant to your marketing job.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing, also known as influencer marketing, has been popular among many organizations as a means of bridging the gap between customers and businesses as online marketing has grown in significance. However, what exactly is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing takes use of industry experts' and social media influencers' growing popularity. Your company will partner with these third-party influencers in exchange for money to market your products or services. Influencers will engage their audiences through posts, blogs, or videos as part of a collaboration to bring in more business and generate new leads for your company.
With new media like TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, and blogs becoming a mainstream method of entertainment, news, and shipping in recent years, affiliate, or influencer marketing, has risen tremendously. One of the most prominent forms of internet marketing is affiliate marketing. The affiliate marketing sector is anticipated to expand to $6.8 billion in 2020, according to Inc.com.
The demand for marketers is increasing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the number of advertising, promotions, and marketing managers will rise by 10%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median compensation for these jobs will be $141,490 in 2020.
Marketing abilities
By implementing marketing techniques in the internet environment, digital marketers assist the larger marketing team and the company's strategic goals, according to Hobson. According to Rogers, digital marketers try to be a voice for customers and how they want to interact with brands online. “(Marketers) approach the brand's channels strategically to maximize investments, increase traffic and conversions, and manage integrated digital content,” she explained.
Because digital marketers must always be where their customers are, they must be aware of advances in technology, social media, and software.
Technology evolves swiftly; today's popular social networking app may be all but forgotten by next year, yet many marketing fundamentals remain constant.
According to Rogers, many employers now require knowledge with Google Analytics, Google and Facebook Ads, HubSpot, and Hootsuite. You'll learn the fundamentals of technologies like these in a master's in digital marketing degree, then explore and apply them through coursework. They're also searching for those who are familiar with Adobe Creative Suites and have some experience with SEO and keyword research.
However, since the days when corporations largely promoted through print, radio, and television, several key components of the marketing puzzle have not altered. All marketers require excellent communication skills as well as a solid understanding of marketing ideas.
According to Rogers, employers combine these soft skills with technology-related proficiencies in job posting requirements.
“Communicating a marketing message to a target audience is a core tenant of marketing,” she explained. “We must be able to communicate not only with our teammates, but also with consumers, executives, and others. These people are our target audience, and without great communication skills, our words would not be received correctly.”
Because digital marketing is a continuously changing field, it is critical for businesses to stay current on new and developing methods, according to Hobson. Companies achieve this in a variety of ways, some of which are the duty of digital marketers and others of which are the responsibility of other departments.
“It's never been more critical to stay ahead of the competition,” Rogers added. “Because the business landscape is evolving so quickly, it's become a vital tactic to look at your competitors to assist inform your own digital strategy.”
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