In the past decade, digital marketing has become an integral part of a business’s total marketing strategy. It enables businesses to personalize their communications to a specific target, allowing them to promote directly to those who are likely to be interested in their product.
Two academic team members from Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) discussed how digital marketing connects with traditional strategies and described some of the sorts of digital marketing that are currently in use.
What is Digital marketing?
Digital marketing entails a vast array of marketing strategies and technology used to reach consumers online. It has transformed the marketing sector as a method of online marketing that enables businesses to develop a brand identity.
Dr. Mark Hobson, a senior associate dean of business programs, stated that while digital marketing may appear to be a new world, it is founded on many of the same concepts as traditional marketing and involves both marketing fundamentals and technical expertise.
According to SNHU’s senior associate dean of business, Dr. Jessica Rogers, the two disciplines assist to interact with various consumer groups. “… Traditional media is a terrific approach to reach a wide consumer base, whereas digital media has the ability to target extremely particular consumers,” she said. A important issue is that, depending on the intended audience, some channels are more effective than others.
Types of Digital Marketing
Rogers discussed several of the most prevalent forms of digital marketing and provided a brief summary of each.
Search Engine Marketing (SEO)
The objective of search engine optimization (SEO) is to improve a company’s ranking in Google search results, hence increasing search engine traffic to the company’s website. To do this, SEO marketers conduct research on the keywords and phrases people use while searching for information online, and then include these terms into their own material. According to Moz’s “Beginners Guide to SEO,” SEO involves numerous components, including the text on your web pages, the way other websites connect to you on the web, and the structure of your website. According to Salary.com, an SEO specialist can make roughly $70,999 per year.
So, what are some ways to enhance a website’s SEO? It is essential to realize that one of the challenges of SEO is that the answer to this question is always dependent on search engines and their most recent algorithm. From Moz’s “Beginners Guide to SEO,” here are a few of the most critical aspects for SEO strategists and marketers in general to know about how SEO works today:
Content indexing – It is essential to enable search engines to “read” your website’s content by adding alt text to images and transcripts to audio and video content.
Good link structure – It is essential that search engines can “crawl” your site structure in order to readily locate all of its information. An SEO specialist can style links, URLs, and sitemaps in a variety of ways to make them more accessible to site crawlers.
Keywords and keyword targeting – Properly deploying your keywords — that is, the search terms for which you want your website to rank — in your content and headers is one of the essential building blocks of search engine optimization. No longer is it recommended to “pack” content with as many keywords and keyword variants as possible. Writing high-quality material that includes keywords in the headers and a few times in the text that can be crawled is currently regarded as best practice and will improve a page’s ranking in search engine results.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) (PPC)
Pay-per-click refers to sponsored search engine results and paid adverts. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning that if you stop paying for the advertisement, it ceases to exist. Similar to SEO, PPC is a method for increasing online search traffic to a firm.
Pay-per-click can refer to the adverts that appear at the top and sides of a page of search results, the advertisements that appear while browsing the web, the advertisements that appear before YouTube videos, and the advertisements that appear in mobile apps.
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Pay-per-click advertising is further distinguished from SEO by the fact that you only pay for results. In a conventional PPC arrangement, such as a Google AdWords campaign, you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement and visits your website. Pay-per-click advertising is essentially limitless in terms of budget. Some businesses may see returns with an investment of a few hundred dollars, but many huge businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on pay-per-click.
How much it will cost to run an ad or promote your search results will mostly depend on how competitive your keywords are. High competition keywords (keywords that many people are searching for and many websites are attempting to rank for) will cost more, whereas low competition phrases will generally cost less.
When you create a pay-per-click campaign, you will also be able to specify whether you want your ad or promoted results to be displayed to users worldwide or only inside a certain geographic region. According to Google, if you are marketing a brick-and-mortar business, the option to customise advertising by geography prevents you from wasting ad dollars on visitors who reside nowhere near your shop.
Social Media Promotion
This comprises all of a company’s social media efforts. Almost everyone is familiar with social media, but marketers must take an integrated and strategic approach to social marketing. Social media marketing is much more than only posting to social channels and responding to comments.
To be successful, efforts must be organized and consistent, not haphazard. Numerous online solutions are available to automate and schedule social media postings in order to maintain consistency, but marketers should only use automation as a tool and not as a “set it and forget it” solution. Users will easily discover if there is no actual person behind the posts.
Marketers that utilize social media should not be isolated from other marketing functions. Social marketers must collaborate with the company’s broader marketing team to ensure that their message is consistent across all channels, both online and offline.
Analytics are a critical component of social media marketing. Marketers using social media must also be adept at analyzing the performance of their posts and developing plans based on this information. Before continuing with the implementation of your new plan, it is essential to evaluate the performance of your current social media posts.
Textual infographic illustration. According to Salary.com, a social media analyst with a bachelor’s degree can make approximately $69,834. In 2021, according to Statista, 88% of industry professionals cited an increase in their company’s exposure as the primary benefit of social media marketing. 79% of organizations cited an increase in website traffic as the most significant advantage.
There are also various free alternatives to Instagram and Twitter for spreading your message. Google My Business, eBay, and Facebook Messenger and Marketplace are other alternatives.
In other words, social media marketing is significantly more complex than maintaining a personal Facebook or Twitter account. It needs a combination of creative thought and data-driven, objective planning, and may 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 approximately $69,834 per year.
Content Marketing
To promote brand awareness, content marketing employs narratives and information dissemination. The ultimate objective is to convince the reader to become a customer by requesting additional information, subscribing to an email list, or making a transaction. The term “content” can refer to blog entries, resources like as white papers and e-books, digital video, and podcasts, among other things. In general, it should deliver value to the consumer before promoting the brand or attempting to generate a sale. Content marketing is about establishing a long-term, trustworthy relationship with your clients that can lead to multiple sales over time, as opposed to a single transaction.
Material marketing functions in tandem with other forms of digital marketing: It is a method for incorporating SEO keywords into new website content, and the content created can be shared as social media posts and email marketing publications. The analytics for your content marketing can teach you a great deal about your customers: what are they seeking when they visit your website? What kind of content encourage longer visits and further exploration? What types cause them to lose interest and leave the site?
Contrary to pay-per-click advertising, content marketing is a long-term approach. According to Marketo, a marketing automation company, marketers construct a library of material (text, video, podcasts, etc.) that will continue to draw consumers to the site via search engines over time. This content collection also promotes brand awareness and raises your profile as an informational resource. Moreover, if visitors visit your website for knowledge, they should remember you as an expert when it comes time to make a purchase.
Content marketing is an excellent career path for those who enjoy writing, film, or audio production. However, as with digital marketing in general, it requires excellent strategic and analytic abilities.
Email Marketing
Rogers stated that despite the rise of social media, mobile applications, and other channels, email remains one of the most effective marketing methods. It can be included into a content marketing plan, giving value to consumers and converting an audience into customers over time. According to the American Marketing Association, email marketing professionals are not only able to build attractive campaigns, but also understand optimal audience outreach and are adept at monitoring consumer interactions and data and making strategic decisions based on this data.
Email marketing software can provide a variety of analytical metrics, but the open rate (the percentage of recipients who opened the email) and click through rate (the number of recipients who read the email and clicked a link in the email) are the two that marketers want to increase the most. According to Constant Contact, a renowned email marketing software business, there are a number of things that marketers can do to make their emails more appealing to users and more likely to be opened. These consist of:
Develop a Sensation of Urgency – Writing email language that informs recipients that time is running out to take advantage of a special offer or that there are only a limited number of offers available might increase the amount of clicks to your website.
Customize Your Email – Including the recipient’s name in email subject lines and email body content has been shown to enhance open and click-through rates. (A sample subject line would be, “Katie, an exclusive offer especially for you.”)
Permit Recipients to Establish Preferences – Allowing people to decide how frequently they wish to hear from you will help retain some of your email subscribers and clicks on your emails.
Mobile Marketing
This sort of digital marketing focuses on connecting with your target audience on their smartphone or tablet. Mobile marketing targets consumers via text messaging, social media, websites, mobile applications, and email. When a customer comes into a store or visits an event, for example, marketers might personalize special offers or content to the area or time.
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In a poll done by Statista in February 2022, 46% of respondents reported spending between five and six hours per day using their phones for personal usage. In addition, 22% reported spending more than 3 hours every day on their mobile device. From the end of 2020 to the start of 2021, mobile users in the United States will spend approximately 40 minutes per day on social media apps, with Facebook and Instagram attracting the largest audience.
In recent years, e-commerce has expanded significantly, becoming an integral part of the worldwide retail industry. According to Statista, 70% of all retail website visits in 2021 will be from smartphone users, and e-retail sales will increase by over $4.2 trillion in 2020.
Marketers understand that you must get your message to where your customers are, and it is abundantly evident that your potential customers are on their mobile devices.
Also read: Top 10 Winning Amazon Advertising Strategies for 2023
Marketing Research
One of the primary benefits of digital marketing is that it is extremely measurable and trackable. coupons and similar direct mail offers were once the sole trackable marketing materials. If a customer redeemed a coupon, you knew the message had been received. Today, analytics enable marketers to watch user activity at a granular level, including the number of times they click on a link, the amount of time they spend on a website, and the frequency with which they open emails. Marketers must be able to comprehend what the statistics represent and how they should inform strategy, as the tremendous volume of information accessible regarding digital marketing effectiveness can feel like sipping from a fire hose.
This not only enables marketers to understand what is effective with consumers and change their marketing messaging moving ahead, but it also enables them to demonstrate their value to the organization. Digital marketers are distinguished from their traditional counterparts by their ability to comprehend all of this data and make strategic decisions based on it.
There are numerous methods available for monitoring the performance of digital marketing efforts, and depending on their goals and target audience, many marketers will employ a combination of these techniques. Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for marketing analytics, and it can be configured in virtually infinite ways to monitor how your site is performing, which keywords are sending traffic to your site, how users navigate your website, and much more.
With solid, reliable analytics and the ability to analyze them, marketers can “fail fast,” removing initiatives that aren’t performing and constructing better ads based on concepts with a track record of success. Over time, you will not only use analytics to measure the success of your efforts, but also to guide and enhance them.
In a digital marketing degree program, you will study a variety of marketing-related topics, such as marketing plans and strategies, branding, mobile marketing, and digital advertising.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing, also known as influencer marketing, has gained popularity among many organizations as a means of bridging the gap between customers and businesses as a result of the rise of internet marketing. What is affiliate marketing, though?
Affiliate marketing capitalizes on the popularity of industry experts and social media influencers, which is on the rise. Your company will cooperate with these third-party influencers to promote your products or services for pay. Influencers will engage their audiences through posts, blogs, and videos in order to generate more business for your organization and new prospects. The BLS expects a 10% growth in the number of advertising, promotions, and marketing managers from 2010 to 2030, as depicted in an infographic.
Affiliate or influencer marketing has risen tremendously over the past few years, as new platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and blogs have become widespread sources of entertainment, news, and shipping. Affiliate marketing is becoming one of the most prevalent types of internet marketing. Influencermarketinghub.com projects that by 2022, the affiliate marketing sector will be worth $12 billion.
The work market for marketers is expanding. The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) anticipates a 10% growth in advertising, promotion, and marketing managers. According to the BLS, the median compensation for these positions in 2021 was $133,380.
Marketing Skills
Hobson stated that digital marketers help the larger marketing team and the company’s strategic objectives by implementing marketing tactics in the internet environment. Rogers stated that digital marketers seek to be the voice of the customer and how they wish to communicate with a brand digitally. She stated, “(Marketers) approach the brand’s channels strategically to maximize investments, increase traffic and conversions, and manage integrated digital content.”
Digital marketers have a tremendous duty to stay abreast of developments in technology, social media, and software due to the necessity to always be where their customers are.
Dr. Jessica Rogers accompanied by the text Dr. Jessica Rogers
The most popular social networking app of today may be obsolete by this time next year, yet many of the fundamental marketing ideas remain the same.
According to Rogers, many employers now require knowledge with Google Analytics, Google and Facebook Ads, HubSpot, and Hootsuite. In a master’s program in digital marketing, you will learn the fundamentals of such tools and apply them through coursework. In addition, they need applicants with proficiency in Adobe Creative Suites and a working knowledge of SEO and keyword research.
However, some essential marketing jigsaw pieces have remained the same since the days when corporations largely marketed through print, radio, and television. Every marketer must possess excellent communication skills and a solid foundation in marketing principles.
According to Rogers, employers incorporate these soft qualities with technological proficiency in job advertising requirements.