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What is Digital Marketing and How Does It Work?
Digital Marketing is the process of using electronic media and the internet to reach out to customers. Today, It’s an affordable technology to promote your business and engage your customers through social media, web applications, email, search engines, and mobile applications. A better understanding of Digital Marketing is a boon for any business today.
Now, coming to how Digital Marketing works, it is driven by the objective that your marketing team wants to achieve. Marketers use various digital channels to market their products and services. To achieve this, a marketing strategy is designed after analyzing the cross-channel digital landscape. The target audience behavior is carefully examined to get insights as to how to execute the digital marketing strategy.
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Once the insight is received, various digital marketing techniques are utilized to reach them and promote the products and services. Some of the commonly used digital marketing techniques are Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, etc. We have discussed each of these in detail later in the below sections.
These techniques help digital marketers to get the right quality leads which are passed on to the sales team. Another integral part of the working of digital marketing involves measuring the performance of the marketing efforts. Digital marketers use tools such as Google Analytics to monitor and analyze how social media campaigns are performing. This is how the entire digital marketing process works.
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Components and Types of Digital Marketing
There are different types of Digital Marketing. Having a good grasp of these techniques will surely help you have an edge over your competitors and help you develop your Digital Marketing Skills if you are a seller. It will also give you an insight into how Digital Marketing works.
Let’s take a quick look at a few of the techniques that teach you how to do Digital Marketing.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
SEO is a process to rank your website higher in a search engine so that more people visit your website as it appears first in the search engine, popularising your website. Blogs, websites, and infographics, can be used for the same.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
SEM is the method of advertisements appearing on the result pages of the search engine i.e. on search engine results pages (SERP). A small margin is to be paid for this. This is a paid promotion, where our product is marketed to the right customers who enquire about similar products, using their keywords in the search engine. There are a lot of differences between SEO and SEM.
Content marketing:
It is the channel through which we release our products through blogs, ebooks, infographics, etc. The objective of Content Marketing is to increase customers through lead generation by creating awareness of our product and by increasing traffic growth. It’s important to have a proper content marketing strategy to have that upper hand in the market.
Using social media platforms to promote our brand. Influences with a lot of followers can also use this social media platform to have paid collaboration to promote particular products and services.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC):
PPC is a paid advertisement displayed on the search engine results, and the publisher is paid whenever the user clicks on their advertisement.
Affiliate marketing:
This is advertising someone else’s product or services in your channel or website for a margin.
Email marketing:
Different types of emails are sent to the target customer. It can be emailed to welcome different customers or can be informative emails that have the details of discounts and promotions or subscription use letters for blocks.
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Planning, Implementing, and Optimizing your Digital Marketing Program
The three important steps in designing a digital marketing program are Planning, Implementation, and Optimization. We have discussed below these steps in detail:
Planning
Planning basically means charting out or giving shape to the digital marketing program. It involves the following items to be considered:
- Digital marketers need to plan in advance about the broader level business goals. These goals are divided into three phases – Short, medium, and long-term.
- Creating a Digital strategy is of utmost importance while planning a digital marketing program.
- Next and one of the crucial points is planning the digital marketing channels to promote the product and effectively communicate with the customers. This helps digital marketers in getting a clear shot at achieving goals without wasting much time.
- How will the digital marketing program be structured and developed? Even this is decided in the planning phase.
- Planning also involves determining the actionable.
- The budget allocation and marketing investment are decided by digital marketers along with other stakeholders.
- The entire roadmap and timeline of the Digital marketing program are charted out and determined in the planning phase.
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Implementing
Once the planning is done and a proper structure has been given to the digital marketing program, the execution phase comes. Implementation of the right techniques in the right place is very crucial. The following points need to be considered here:
- In the implementation phase, digital marketers initiate marketing and promotion through various channels in alignment with the goals laid out in the planning phase.
- Various marketing campaigns, search engine optimization, social media marketing, etc. are carried out.
- Web Analytics, Content marketing, Email marketing, advertising, etc. are carefully initiated.
- Some of these techniques such as email marketing are automated in the implementation phase.
- Lead generation and lead nurturing form a very important part of the implementation phase. These two form the base of the entire marketing functionality.
Optimization
Simply designing a digital marketing strategy and executing the same is not sufficient to get sustainable growth. It is very important to track and monitor the performance of your digital marketing efforts. Also, a careful analysis of the results and performance of your digital marketing techniques is very important to get clarity on whether you have set the goals right. In case the results are not up to the mark, digital marketers can go back and revisit the strategy to rectify errors. This helps in the optimum utilization of resources such as labor and money.
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How does Digital Marketing Work? Apply What you have Learned
After learning it’s time to apply your knowledge to your business and get started. Let’s begin step by step and answer the question of how to start Digital Marketing.
Keep reading if you are a seller or imagine yourself in the shoes of an entrepreneur to have a better understanding of the following steps in Digital Marketing.
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Define your Goal
It is very important to define the goal that you wish to achieve through the Digital Marketing campaign. Whether you want more followers, likes, or responses to emails or to be number one on Google searches, or is it simply brand awareness or lead generation?
Give high priority to brand awareness. Your brand awareness strategy can be considered a win when people replace the generic term with your brand name.
One of the greatest examples of this is what Google has achieved. People don’t say “search it” anymore, it’s “Google it”. But it takes a long time to reach this level of awareness but it is achievable.
The process of coaxing happens through advertisements. And one important step in the conversion process is lead generation. It increases brand awareness, instills knowledge about your product in people, and finally convinces them to purchase your product.
So it is very necessary to have a clear goal before going to further steps of Digital Marketing.
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Outline your Target Audience
Who your target customers have to be kept in mind. It is very important to analyze the customers. This can be done by studying your competitor’s target audience and by analyzing your website traffic with the help of various tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, etc.
Finally, you have to decide whether you are targeting the other businesses or the audiences at this step of your Digital Marketing campaign. Make sure to define a precise and distinct audience for your business.
It is also very important to develop a buyer character from the study of the target audience and define their age, demographics, occupation likes and dislikes, job and income status, goals, digital behavior, etc. This is a lengthy step that requires patience and practice to give perfect results.
Decide your Budget
A proper budget has to be set for Digital Marketing campaigns. Possible expenditure will be the one if you are planning to hire a Digital Marketing company. Another one will cost you for running the Fb or Google advertisements.
So it is important to set a realistic amount for Digital Marketing campaigns. Also, consider factors like trends and previous data and statistics before allocating money for your Digital Marketing strategy.
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Specify your Channel of Marketing
Which particular channel that you want to use, for your Digital Marketing campaign, has to be decided properly by keeping your target audience in mind. It is better to use as many channels as possible.
It is very important to differentiate the channels that you use for business-to-business dealings and business-to-consumer dealings. The right strategy for choosing the most appropriate channel for your business would be a blend of all the available channels, with a slight emphasis on the most used media by your target customers.
A strong strategy, which gives you more ROI can be built by combining all the channels appropriately.
Also read: What are the top SEO tools used by SEO experts?
Work on keyword research SEO and PPC
This becomes significant for running Google advertisements or any other search engine commercials. Search Engine Optimization also gets better when you do some research on the keywords that your customer is searching for.
There are websites like, answer the public, which can give you an insight into what most frequently asked questions about a particular topic.
A proper understanding of the customers’ goals and the particular keywords that the customers are using to search it in the search engines can help you reach that number one position in the search engine.
The monthly search volume and keyword difficulty of the keywords has to be compared after keywords are compiled. Any keyword that has a high monthly search with low competition can give a better position.
But in the case of pay per click, the objective is to reduce the cost per click and to reach the maximum number of people.
After that, your website has to be optimized and issues like page loading speed, mobile usability, and other issues of the site have to be resolved. Various software tools can be used. This gives our product additional brand value support from google free of cost.
Relying on search engine optimization experts would give you the required results.
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Create content or advertisements for social media
Now it’s time to create commercials that can engage and influence your audience through your Digital Marketing campaign. It’s important to choose lookalike customers and to start from small numbers and then slowly scale up.
Here you can also rely on influencers, but proper research about the influencer has to be made before approaching paid promotions. One of the greatest mistakes which you should avoid is the sacrifice of the quality of the content. Quality is the simplicity and understandability of language or means of communication
Creating advertisements and promotions for the sake of increasing the number of commercials is a strict no-no. Images, infographics, videos, or blogs can be advertisements. Make sure to spice it up with little creativity, fun, and good-quality content.
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It’s important to keep up the reputation of your brand. consistency of your social media posts and interactions can help build it. It’s important to acknowledge the good as well as the bad reviews.
As Bill gates said “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning “
So it’s important to build a rapport, take feedback constantly from existing customers, and simultaneously attract other new potential customers. Consistency of posts and advertisements are other factors that have to be kept in mind. Continuous updates of the latest trends and products always gain new customers.
Don’t ignore email marketing
In Email Marketing Strategy, It’s significant to keep track of emails. For example, if a person visits your website for a particular product, further info regarding price drops or offers can be communicated to him through emails.
Further, if a customer adds your product to the cart and if He/She doesn’t buy it, you can coax them through Email. Automated emails can also save time and add to the purpose. Email marketing is important to stay in the minds of your customers.
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It’s a tactic to follow up with any customer who has interacted with our website through advertisements and emails. It can also be useful in the case of abandoned products in carts. Companies like Amazon have special branches and specialists for remarketing. See below how remarketing of google works.
Develop a blogging strategy
We might feel that blogs are unimportant, but blogs can be game-changer. Whenever a user reads your blogs it helps in SEO. If a reader spends some time reading a blog on our site then it tricks google to believe that the reader is looking for some of our products and in turn, increases the probability of our advertisements in their feed. This will gain a higher rank in the search results. So dedicating a little time to blogs is never a waste of time.
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ROI of a Successful Digital Marketing Program
As mentioned in the above sections, it is very important to measure the success of your digital marketing program. To correctly assess the ROI of your digital marketing program, there are certain metrics that you need to take into consideration. Let us look at some of these Digital marketing metrics:
- High ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – ROAS means the overall return on the Ad spent alone. A high ROAS means that your ads are running smoothly and achieving the required results.
- Low Cost of Acquisition – It denotes your marketing cost per new customer acquisition. A low cost of acquisition indicates that your digital marketing program is in line with the set goals.
- High Lead Closures – When the marketing team passes the leads to the sales team, the final deal closure is known as lead closure. A high lead rate means the majority of the leads passed by the marketing team are getting closed. This means the lead quality is good, which in turn indicates that your digital marketing effort is bearing fruits.
- Click-Through Rates – A higher CTR means that your content or post is performing well and attracting more readers and audience reach.
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Problems that Digital Marketing Can Solve
Digital Marketing has the capability to solve the majority of the problems that an organization might have. Its contribution to the matters crucial to the management of an organization is huge. Let us explore some of the main problems that Digital marketing can solve:
1. Failure to maximize ROI
A majority of the organizations have already spent a huge sum of money on marketing and are on their way to increasing the spending day by day without being able to maximize their returns. Such organizations need Digital Marketing. A good Return on Investment is very important for a healthy business and Digital Marketing has just the right techniques to get better results with lower investment.
As customers are more technically sound, they are highly active on social media. Hence, a good performing social media presence is very important for organizations. However, having a poorly performing Social Media account can hinder your chances of building a good brand image in the minds of your customers. Social Media Marketing has already paved the way for millions of start-ups globally to maximize their profits. Hence, Digital Marketing is your go-to weapon if you have a bad social media performance.
3. Dropping Conversion Rates
Low conversion rates are a result of poor quality leads being passed on to your sales team. In spite of your sales team’s efforts, the conversion rates will be low. Digital Marketing uses analytical tools that help in fetching good leads thus leading to better conversion rates.
4. Low Website Traffic
Driving the right quality and amount of traffic to your website is very important. Even if your website is attractive and highly engaging, there will be no traffic directed to it if Digital Marketing is not used. Lower traffic means low leads and in turn, low conversions.
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5. Undesirable results from Paid Ads
Digital Marketing has the potential to drive traffic and generate traffic even if paid ads are not working. Hence, you definitely need it if you are shelling out money and not getting any traffic or returns.
6. Difficulty in creating quality content
The audience is hungry for content. However, if you do not have a proper content marketing strategy in place and are randomly posting content, there will be less or no audience engagement with the content. Hence Digital Marketing is very important to create related and highly engaging content for the right audience.
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Conclusion
A little understanding of the above techniques can open the wings of marketing for your business. A few statistics to add here, according to Statista, there are currently 15 million mobile phone users in the world.
So spending a little effort on Digital Marketing is giving you access to the global market of 15 million customers. So never underestimate the dominance of Digital Marketing in the field of marketing and business.
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