Digital marketing refers to all the advertisement which is been delivered through digital medium like, search engines, social sites, blogs, mobile apps, emails. Let’s discuss them one by one.
- Search Engine Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing is one of the greatest and widely used marketing strategy, first, to understand it you must know what is a search engine, a search engine is basically a designed program which gives you results based on its database after the proper filtration match (Based on its algorithm).
We have seen many search engine, i.e google, yahoo bing, Baidu, Ask.com, etc. Now what’s the point of placing ads on search engine itself, let’s take an example of Google search engine, you might have noticed that whenever you search for any entity for example best English speaking classes in your area, you have seen that first three results are actually the ads, at most there could be four ads on the top and three at the bottom of the page.
Now, these English speaking classes have placed their ads on Google and they are paying to google based on PPC (pay per click), which means that whenever someone clicks on their ads they have to pay accordingly based on their bid price. PPC bring instant traffic to your website. It is mainly based on bidding value and landing page. Higher the bidding higher will be your rankings. Your ad will run until your budget gets over.
Now, what’s the benefits of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Whenever you search for any specific query then only the ads appear in the results which means that you are only targeting to the customer who actually needs you, they are the potential customers for your business? Which also means that you are just paying for the right customer, thus it is an effective and affordable way to reach out your customers.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is one the oldest form of marketing under digital marketing. This method is not a shortcut for approaching your customer, it requires persistent action to attract your customers to your blog, (any of your website).
Let me explain this whole content marketing to you with an example, let’s say you started your blog based on your business type let say it’s about smartphones, now you are giving reviews on each and every smartphone which is launching in the market, so you are developing a habit for the customers to read your blog before purchasing.
Now what will be the benefits of Content marketing, slowly slowly they will directly approach to your website, once they like your content, that means that now you have a brand value, people will know your business with that name, now what are the other strategy you can use to mark your impression on their mind for a long time.
The very first one is to give them a newsletter in the form of pdf or ppt, so that if they don’t have an internet access they could directly open your content through pdf files, the another great form of delivering your content is through videos, this will create an impact of your brand on their mind, you can use your logo or any other tagline in the videos and content pdf files.
The best thing about content marketing is, it is almost free, you won’t have to pay anyone anything except the charges for your hosting and domain.
Content marketing could also be used to sell your products as well, I will explain to you how let say you are having a restaurant and you want people to know about it, you could write an article regarding top 5 restaurants in city “X” and you could place yours in between, and you could increase your sales, or if you have any product let say, you sell travel packages and you don’t have a huge budget to promote your business, just start a blog about places to travel in India, and you can post your ads on your own website, which will do your branding and might be a sale for you.
Social Media Marketing
Well we very well know that around half of the internet users spend their time on social networking sites, thus why not to advertise your brand directly in front of them with really affordable prices as compared to PPC campaigns.
Social media nowadays is a great platform for a massive and rapid growth of your business, it all starts with creating and posting things about your business and the user interaction regarding your brand increases within an hour.
Let’s take an example of Facebook, let’s say you had created a page in FB for your business, the best part is creating a page and posting hundreds of things on it is absolutely free, thus you can increase your customer interaction through facebook very easily.
Plus there are large numbers of options to increase your brand awareness, i.e you can send an invite to people who are your friends, and even not only you but a page could be handled by many other partners of yours.
If you want to increase your brand awareness even more rapidly you could always choose a paid option as well with hundred of more option for example, their age their hobbies, interest, education qualification etc. and you can target them wisely.
Even there are an option to sell your product directly using social media, you just have to follow few guidelines and you are set to go for your first sale, that’s why social media marketing nowadays is on great boom.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is simply sending a commercial or promotional email to your customers, through their email id, it is simply considered as email marketing.
This form of marketing is quite old but even it is still quite effective, you might have noticed that day you received an email from any of e-commerce website, which might be like, today on sale, or the heading might be like, few product you might like.
Well, it indicates that they are really working on what you like or not, based on your previous purchases or based on your interest they will suggest you the different product so that you might buy them as well.
Email marketing is very sensitive of marketing because your one mistake could make your whole activity a spam, thus be conscious while you send email to those customers who have subscribed to you. Not to a huge database of emails which you have.
Now how to perform Email marketing and what are the benefits of email marketing, the very first benefit is that it is absolutely free, the only internet is required to send email to any of your customers, second, it’s a direct way to reach out your customer.
Now the question is how to perform email marketing effectively, or how to get the email address of people who are really interested in your services or product, well there are lots of technique people use these days but the simple and effective one is to “take permission with an offer” for example, just before asking them directly for their email address offer them something on behalf of their details, i.e free catalog with email sign-up.
This method is widely used by the digital marketer to build a long-term relationship, once you get their email address it is the insurance that they will see you at least once in weak, and what so ever they have subscribed for.
Let’s say they want your promotional offers news once in weak, then don’t cheat them by sending mail every then and now. It’s your responsibility to make proper relation with each and every customer of yours.
Mobile Marketing
Well, all the advertisement which is being delivered through mobile devices, or tablets, smartphones comes under mobile marketing.
One of the main reason of targeting people through mobile devices is the increasing users on mobile devices as compared to desktop, everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, thus the ads or the content of the website must be responsive, so that your ads or any other content on the website must open on small screen, they must be flexible to adopt any shape and size according to the size of mobile screen.
So every work which is done on the advertisement just to make it mobile friendly comes under mobile marketing, Google Adword is the only tool that handles both the campaign no matter it is running on the desktop, or smartphones, there are enhanced campaign by AdWords which is able to do so. There are different types of mobile marketing strategies i.e,
- App-based mobile marketing
- In-game mobile marketing
- Mobile ad extension, Mobile image ads
App-based mobile marketing is one of the famous mobile marketing technique, the reason being 80 % of the user time spent on the phone is utilized in-app only, thus it’s a great way to serve your ads on the app based platforms.
Well with using google adsense, you can monetize mobile apps but yes, there is another Google tool, which is Google Admob, which helps the app owner to place different types of ads on their mobile apps.
In the game, mobile marketing technique, is also amazing you might have noticed when you play a game there are few full image ads or video ads appear in between, and sometimes if you are low on your health on the game, you could watch an ad and regain your health after it.
This is a wonderful technique, just by asking to watch an ad to refill your life, helps the app developer a lot, they could earn money like that only.
Mobile ad extension and mobile image ads marketing technique is a way to create mobile-friendly ads, those are responsive with the theme of your website, there are several mobile extension used in mobile ads only i.e, click to call, click to download, navigate, etc.
These extension increases the overall value of your ad, as you can directly call or navigate to the one you are searching for.