What is Digital Marketing and how it works:

What is Digital Marketing and how it works

Sales and marketing always being an eye bowls for any entrepreneur or business organization. Lots of innovations and updations had taken place in this domain. Initially, in sales and marketing one need to focus on classic approaches i.e. cold calling, field mapping, customer meetings and so on. As time changed, so the approaches updated accordingly.  But in last few years there is a dynamic shift of population on internet and hence it has given the birth of Digital Marketing.

To define Digital Marketing in very simple language is “Marketing of product and services through online mediums and channels” like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and other local portals.

Let me give you some facts, Google is the biggest search engine in the world full of information. People are more active on social media because of easy internet access today. 60% population of the world is using traditional ways to buy any product or services and 40%population uses online modes. These figures will be reverse in next 5 years.

As of May 2019, total population worldwide is 7.7 billion. The internet has 4.4 billion users. This figures show us the potential Digital Marketing did have in the upcoming years.

Keywords plays very important role in SEO. There are various tools through which you can do keyword research for your business. If keyword research done properly you win half the battle. Google itself offer free tool for keyword research named as Google Keyword Planner Tool.  Once keyword research is complete then it comes to the look and feel of your website which attracts more traffic depending on various factors mentioned by Google. Digital Marketing is segregated in four sub branches as below:

1.       Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2.       Social Media Optimization (SMO)

3.       Social Media Marketing (SMM)

4.       Search Engine Marketing (SEM) / Pay Per Click (PPC)

All the above four domains are independent yet dependent on each other to get best results. To explain everything in detail takes huge time so to save time, let’s have some little glimpse on each of them one by one.

1.       Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

The basic definition of SEO is it is a process to increase traffic to your website through organic search results.

It is a process through which one can bring traffic on the website for free, organic, generic. SEO done in two ways one is “On Page” and other is “Off Page”. All parameters and guidelines are given by Google.

There are lots of activities involve in both type of SEO. The basic difference in the two is “On Page” activities done on live website and “Off Page” activities done on the third-party websites to generate back links.  Below is the list of activities:

             On Page Activities:

1.       Website Analysis

2.       Study of Plug-in

3.       Pre Analysis Report

4.       Keyword Analysis Report

5.       Keyword Ranking Report

6.       Competitor Analysis

7.       Blog topics for Social media keywords based

8.       Title

9.       URL Structure

10.   Description

11.   Alt Tag/Image Optimization

12.   Body Tags (H1, H2, H3…)

13.   Keyword Density

14.   Internal Linking

15.   Canonical

16.   Text/HTML ratio

17.   Schema.org

18.   Frames

19.   Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)

20.   Favicon

21.   Robot.txt

22.   Website Structure & Construction

23.   XML Sitemap

24.   Google Analytics Integration

25.   Google Search Console Integration

Off Page Activities:

1.       Search Engine Submission

2.       Link Submission

3.       Article Submission

4.       Infographics Submission

5.       Blog Submission

6.       Forum Submission

7.       Directory Submission

8.       Social Bookmarking

9.       Business Review

10.   Local Listings

11.   Question Answers, Comment Submission

12.   Social Media Engagement

13.   Photo Sharing

14.   Press Release Promotion

15.   Classified Submission

16.   Document Sharing 

17.   Video Submission

Make a note here “Never use your personal Gmail account to do SEO always create new account and then proceed with SEO”.

You need to make sure that all the above guidelines of “On Page” and “Off Page” activities are following properly; it will help your website to come on top of first page of Google SERP for particular keywords.

SEO is time-consuming process yet it gives you desired results probably in 6-8 months of time period. The benefit here is you will get organic traffic with more clicks which lead to more conversions with genuine leads and hence boost your business online.

* (To learn more on how to do these activities, I will write separate articles in detail).

2.       Social Media Optimization (SMO):

Social Media Optimization is the process of increasing the awareness of products, services, events, brands etc by using social media channel handles like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Whats App etc.

Worldwide the numbers of users of social networking sites is around 2.46 billion. This figure gets increased in coming times. Therefore, social media play an important role and yes you will get huge number of potential customers and clients worldwide almost free of cost.

Usually, it done by creating your business page on major social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest; create business account on Twitter and business promotional channel on YouTube.

To receive benefits from your social media handles you need to focus on following points:

a.      Create high quality unique images.

b.      Unique Content as content is king.

c.       Post daily.

d.      Check best time for posting on different media handles.

e.       Attach landing page with your high quality image and content.

f.        Check Grammar and spelling mistakes in posts.

g.      Provide active response on queries.

3.       Social Media Marketing (SMM):

It is the shortcut to increase traffic to your website. When we use paid services from these social media networks we will call it as social media marketing.  You can increase traffic by running Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, Pinterest ads, Instagram ads and YouTube ads etc to increase awareness or to generate leads through conversions.

Every social media channel has their system for advertisements and everyone charges accordingly based on the type of ads you want to run. To is very effective way because you will get more genuine leads in short span of time as compared to traditional models of sales and marketing. SMM services is a paid one which offers by all social media handles, it is in demand because it gives instant results in terms of conversions.

4.       Search Engine Marketing (SEM)/ Pay Per Click (PPC) :

SEM also known as PPC is very important pillar in Digital Marketing. Google runs this in name as Google AdWords. It is very much target oriented where you can run ads to the specific type of audience with specific geographical areas etc. In this keyword plays an important role, where CPC (Cost per Click) and CPM (Cost per Mile/ Cost per Impressions/ Cost per thousand Impressions) come into existence.

In Google AdWords you need to do bidding for your keywords and based on various factors like your ad quality, CTR, page loading time, ad content etc will matter to get your ads in Google ads ranking in Search Engine Result Page(SERP). 

To become a successful digital marketing expert one has to have ability to work in all the four sub branches i.e. SEO, SMO, SMM and SEM. Person also become expert in any single domain and excel in that too. The reason here is Digital Marketing is flourishing itself like anything from last few years and the coming future has a very big potential for digital marketers.

Career avenues which digital marketing open up are like you can get a job as every company now a day’s focusing on this and hire professionals who are good in any of these or in all segments of digital marketing. Apart from this you lot of new agencies are into market running successfully so starting your own business in pretty easy in digital marketing. Freelancer is a domain in huge demand in digital marketing.

To start a Digital Marketing Agency you required below four experts:

a.      Digital Marketer

b.      Web Developer

c.       Content Writer

d.      Graphics Designer

Hope you will able to get the glimpse of what is digital marketing is all about, how it works and what are the career prospects one have if they opt Digital Marketing as career. To explain everything in detail will launch a series of articles soon.