The short version.
Digital Marketing is a specialized area of Marketing that applies techniques designed to increase exposure or sales using digital technologies. Or simply: it is a way to increase sales or exposure using computers, tablets and phones.
The long version.
You have a store, or a single product. Maybe a book or a mobile app. You want to increase your sales.
Or maybe you are running a political or awareness campaign. Maybe you have a brand. Either you just have an idea or you are promoting an event. He wants as many people as possible to know about it.
This is exactly what Digital Marketing does for you. It includes many techniques, some of which you may already be using without even knowing that they fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. The goal, as stated above, is to increase exposure/reach and sales. Here are some of the techniques that digital marketers use to achieve their goals:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Search engine marketing (SEM) and paid advertising
- content marketing
- influencer marketing
- Content automation
- social media marketing
- Direct email marketing (newsletters)
- show ad
- Electronic books, optical discs and games, mobile applications
- SMS and MMS marketing
- Callback and call waiting tones for mobile
Let’s talk in more detail about some of the most important aspects of digital marketing.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Let’s face it: everyone uses search engines to find things online. So this is a big and very important topic. Why? It just doesn’t matter if you have a great website or page if people can’t find it! And while there are other ways to drive traffic to your site, ranking high in search engines is going to be the most reliable source of traffic you’ll have in the long run. Search engine optimization is essential!
There are two types of SEO:
- On-page SEO refers to the things your site needs to implement in the code and content (without going into details, this includes the right stuff: title tags, meta tags, URL and navigation structure, image attributes, sitemap). site, header tags, keywords). density, page load times, etc.).
- Off-page SEO refers to all the things you can do outside of your site (link building, blogger outreach, social media, etc.).
SEO is a sustained effort, it’s not something you do once and you can forget about it: search engine ranking formulas are frequently updated and require constant monitoring and adaptation to stay ahead of the competition. It’s also a long-term effort, with some changes taking weeks to see results.
But again, let’s face it: everyone is doing SEO (to some degree). SEO is no longer enough: Staying ahead of the competition, achieving set goals, SEO is simply not enough anymore.
Search engine marketing (SEM) and paid advertising
SEM is all about increasing visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs): do something to make your link more visible than the rest (increasing the chance that people will actually click on it). Just to be clear, the broader SEM field also includes SEO (after all, getting your site to the top of search engine results pages through SEO meets the requirement of “being more visible than the rest”), but for a better understanding I wanted to talk about them separately.
So how do you increase your link visibility on search engine results pages? Mainly through paid advertising: All major search engines provide an advertising service (such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads). Unfortunately, buying search engine advertising (or at least doing it right) isn’t easy; it involves a lot of research, monitoring and optimization.
The first big decision you need to make is which search engine to advertise on. This is answered with the initial research you will need to complete: Target Audience: Demographics, Age, Gender, Geographic Location; These are some of the things that point to the most suitable search engine to advertise on (this also tells you which search engine to do SEO for). Then there is keyword research (deciding which keywords to advertise), which includes competitor research. If your most obvious keyword choices have very strong advertising competition, it might be a smart choice to invest in other, less obvious “long tail” keywords. After doing some more research (does your target audience respond better to text or images? What time of day are they online? etc.) you can set up campaigns and start monitoring performance, search trend, etc. Campaign parameters are constantly changing, so constant monitoring and adjustment is an integral part of search engine advertising; Otherwise, your costs will spiral out of control and your reach will plummet.
social media marketing
Having your site/page show up high in search results is great! You get a constant stream of people interested in what you have to offer. But you can always use more! More people find out about you, more visitors to your page, more conversions, more sales. And while everyone uses search engines to find what they’re looking for, what about people who don’t yet know they’re looking for something? Enter social networks: the best way to be in front of more people. But social media isn’t just about advertising your stuff, it’s much more than that: building an audience, changing desires, getting feedback, customer support, contests, and much more. Social networks are a great opportunity with many different options and possibilities. Unfortunately, this also makes it complex. Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, are just some of the popular portals that people use every day, each with its own requirements and details; some focused on text, some on images, and some on videos. What portals will you approach, what will you publish, how often, when?
Building a social media presence requires a perfect understanding of what you’re offering, a lot of research, and a lot of trial and error. It’s a marathon, not a sprint: building and keeping followers, converting and expanding them, changing trends… And then there’s paid advertising on social media portals, something you can’t successfully execute without a good understanding of your audience. . So it takes time, patience and a lot of research.
But once this is done (correctly), you can expect another steady stream of people interested in what you have to offer.
Junk mail
Email marketing is a cost-effective way to reach your users and keep them engaged, interested, and always coming back.
Unfortunately, not many business administrators are aware of the great value that “subscribers” bring to their sites. Newsletter marketing is often overlooked because when a site is first launched, there are very few users accessing it (so there is no need to run a daily or weekly newsletter). And as the user base grows, the newsletter aspect is all too often simply…forgotten.
Make sure you don’t make that mistake! Start collecting subscribers now and in a few months you will have a valuable marketing asset at your disposal.
But more specifically: what exactly is a “newsletter” and how can it be used? Well… It’s a cheap way to achieve your goals by sending some emails.
However, things are not that simple. There are certain laws that govern this practice that you must obey. Most notable: You should never send unsolicited email. This means that each user must have previously agreed to receive that particular newsletter from you (usually through a “Subscribe” function on your site/page).
There are two ways to deal with newsletters.
You can manage everything on your own. This means collecting data from your site and informing your users, building a mailing list, and manually sending each email from your own email provider. This is fine if you have a small subscriber base (<100) and don't email too often.
But as your subscriber base grows, you’ll find it more and more difficult to manage things on your own. This is where the use of online services specialized in newsletters comes in. These service providers manage everything for you (except writing newsletter content, of course) so you can focus on the important stuff (delivering high-quality content to your subscribers).
There are many of these services, most of which provide you with a free trial/version that you can safely use until you decide to go with their paid subscriptions.
Best practices regarding newsletters:
- Content is king. As with the rest of your site, the most important thing is to provide your readers with good, quality content. Otherwise, they will just ignore your emails and after some time unsubscribe from your newsletter.
- Don’t forget to include links to your site. It seems obvious, right? You would be surprised…
- Decide what the purpose of each mailing list is: to keep subscribers informed, to ask for feedback, to conduct surveys, or, most commonly, to drive traffic to your site. It’s best to have more than one mailing list so you don’t mix the interests of your subscribers (unless that’s the intention).
- If the purpose of a newsletter is to drive traffic to your website, make sure you “trick” the reader enough to click the link and read more about that particular topic on your site.
- Always include a working unsubscribe link in your emails!
- Don’t flood your readers with too many emails.
- Make a shipping schedule and stick to it (whether it’s daily, weekly, etc.). It’s always good for your readers to anticipate the arrival of the next newsletter.
- Make sure you send your emails when users are most likely to read them! It doesn’t matter if you make a great email with great content, but it’s aimed at older people and you send it at 4 in the morning…
- Keep the signup form on your website short and “friendly”: don’t ask for more information than you really need (most of the time, just the email address will suffice).
- Make sure your emails display correctly on mobile devices. Many users (even half in some parts of the world) read emails from their phone or tablet.
Optimizing your site for end user interaction and conversion
This is a big topic, often overlooked. We will talk about it in depth in a future post.
For now, if you’d like to read more about what we’ve discussed so far, I’ll go into much more detail in this post: OPTIMIZE and MARKET your website: the ultimate beginner’s guide.
Enjoy!