DIGITAL MARKETING 101
Digital Marketing, in simple terms, is Marketing on Digital channels.In order, to be a good Digital Marketer, you need to be a good Marketer first.
On top of all the basic marketing principles, a Digital Marketer needs to understand when and what Digital Marketing tools to use.
In this section, we will talk about what these digital channels and tools are and how measurement and optimization is the centerpiece of the Digital Marketing Ecosystem.
DIGITAL CHANNELS
The basic principle of Marketing communication is to find where your prospects are and then communicate with them on that platform.
for instance, Adidas will advertise on a Sports TV channel because that’s where its prospects are. Well, this TV channel is a traditional communication channel.
But we don’t just watch TV, we browse the internet as well which becomes a digital channel
The major digital channels and by extension digital marketing avenues are,
1. Email\SMS\Push Notification Marketing
2. Search Engine Marketing
3. Search Engine Optimization
4. Display Advertisement
5. Social Media Marketing
6. Content Marketing
7. Affiliate Marketing
Don’t worry!
Let’s untangle each
channel nice & slow.
Email\SMS\Push Notification Marketing
Email\SMS\Push Notification Marketing as the name suggests is sending Email, SMS, or Push notifications to your prospects and customers.
These channels are used not only to sell products and services or announce new products but also to build a one on one relationship with the customer. These are the channels where you can directly communicate with the customer.
Types of Campaigns:
A. Batch Email campaigns (Sending one email to a large audience at a time eg. new product announcement or a Newsletter)
B. Personalized Email campaigns (eg. Birthday Mails)
C. Trigger-based campaigns(Automated campaigns that trigger when a user performs a particular set of actions eg. an automated email can be sent to users who visit your products page twice in one day)
Important Metrics: Open Rate, Click Rate, Hard Bounce, Soft Bounce, Deliveryrate, Unsubscribe
Popular Tools: HubSpot, Marketo, MailerLite, MailChimp
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
3.5 billion searches are made on Google every day. Chances are, a lot of these people are searching for things related to your products and services.
Search Engine Marketing is Marketing on that Search Engine result page.
As you can see above, the first result on the result page is labeled an Ad.
Also, on the right side, those cards are labeled as ‘Sponsored’.
These are in fact advertisements run by Adidas for the keyword “Adidas Shoes”.
Types of Campaigns:
1. Text Ads
The first ad that you see above is a text ad. These ads contain a Headline field, description field, and ad extensions (Men’s collection, Adidas New Arrivals in the example above)
2. Shopping Ads
These ads as you can see in the example above appear as cards with an image and price of the product giving better visibility to users on what the product is.
Important Metrics: Ad Impressions, Ad Impressions share, Reach, Click through rate, Cost per click
Popular Tools: Google Ads, Bing Ads
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
93% of all online experiences begin with a Search engine and 75% of the users never reach the second page of search engines. This makes it essential for brands to feature on the first search engine result(SERP) page for their keywords.
SEO is the science and art of getting your website to this first page. SEO is also one of the most dynamic areas of Digital Marketing as SERP is governed by Search engine algorithms that keep changing.
The general idea to follow is that search engines want users to find exactly what they are looking for when they search for something.
That means, as an SEO expert, you need to make sure you are ranking for the right keywords and your website and landing page experience is flawless.
SEO is largely divided into two parts;
1. On-site SEO
2. Off-site SEO
On-Site SEO is optimizing elements on your website. These elements are User Interface and User experience on your site, page loading of your website, mobile-friendliness, Sitemap, Keyword planting on your Headings, content, etc,
Off-Site SEO is governing how the rest of the internet is talking about you (if at all). If links to your website (also called backlinks) are found on numerous other websites (i.e. other people are referring to your content), Search engines see this as a sign of authority. If many related websites are linking to you, you become the centerpiece of that particular field
But SEO is not limited to getting on the first page. Once you get there, you need to maintain the space as hundreds of other websites are continuously trying to take your place.
If your website appears first in the SERP and yet most users ignore you and click on the second or the third result (i.e. your Click-Through rate(CTR)is bad), Search engines will realize that when users enter this particular “search query”, they are not looking to get to you. This will result in the degradation of your position on the SERP.
Important Metrics: Organic Traffic, Page Rank, Bounce Rate, Page load speed, Exit Pages, Keywords ranked for, Indexed pages, crawl errors
Popular Tools: Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, Google search console
Display Advertisement
Display advertisements are text, image, or video ads you see on various websites. This is similar to an ad in newspapers. Newspapers publish content you want to read and they earn from the Ad revenue.
Similarly, Websites also publish content and earn from the Ad revenue by allocating certain spaces of their websites for Ads.
Important Metrics: Impressions, Reach, Cost per Impressions/click (CPM or CPC), Engagement rate, ClickThrough Rate, Ad visibility
Popular Tools: Google Ads, AdRoll
Social Media Marketing
50%of the world's population is on Social media and Millennials on average spend about 158 minutes on Social media.
Social media marketing is creating content and advertisements on Social Media Platforms. Social Media platforms go beyond your basic Targetingoptions like Demography and Geography. They leverage the data, knowingly or unknowingly provided by you to create distinct behavior and event-based targeting options like “People who are likely to click on an ad for a Book” to “People who just got married or had a baby”. These advanced targeting options in the hands of good Marketers result in massive optimization of Marketing budgets. Types of Ads: Link click, Video, Post boost, Multiproduct (carousel) ads, Dynamic product ads, etc Important Metrics: Engagement Rate, Impressions, Cost per lead, Reach, etc Popular Tools: Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, Buffer, Hootsuite
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is an indirect form of marketing your products and services. Marketers create and publish blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media posts.
Content marketing serves two major purposes. First, it leverages owned media to inform prospects about your products and services. Second, it improves the overall SEO health of your web properties thereby increasing traffic and helps you achieve your Website goals.
50:30:20 is a general rule followed in the industry for Content Marketing. This rule states that 50% of your content should be only for the users (i.e. not at all promotion).
These could be helpful information and guides. 30% content should be a soft sell (this could be explaining your product features)and 20% content should be a hard sell with a clear call to action(CTA).
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is when a brand leverages content creators’ audiences to sell their products.
TheseContent creators (eg. a YouTuber or a Blogger) get a commission when someone buys a product or a service using their referral.
Affiliate Marketing works on a fixed margin basis and in many ways is a no-loss strategy for Marketers (as you only incur a cost when a customer is acquired).
The challenge, however, is to maintain brand safety.
Content creators who work as your affiliates are independent creators. What they say on these public platforms is not in your control. If these Content creators make an inappropriate statement (or a video/blog), it may have ripple effects on your brand
Key Principles of Digital Marketing
Now that you are versed in Digital channels, let's talk about some key principles of Digital Marketing. 1. Setting up SMART Marketing Goals
It is important to set up Goals for your Digital Marketing efforts as a whole and also at the individual platform and campaign level. S: Specific M: Measurable A: Attainable R: Relevant T: Time-bound An example of SMART goal for a Content creator would
2. Nail down the Targeting
Digital Marketing provides a varied range of Targetingoptions like Devicetargeting, Geofencing, Interest, Digital Behaviour, Language, Life events, etc.
Targeting impacts both your marketing budget and your conversion rates. Too broad and your Conversion rate decreases and spending increases.Too narrow and you miss out on potential customers
3. A/B Testing
Digital marketing takes a lot of guesswork out of Marketing.
if there isn’t enough data on what type of Communication strategy will work on what
type of customer, you can run an A/B test on 10% of the audience and make data-driven decisions.
4. Measure and Optimize
As soon as you push a Digital campaign live, you start seeing its performance data. This is helpful in two different ways. First, it helps you optimize all your future campaigns.
Second, it guides you on how to tweak the live campaign to get better results.
For instance, if you’re running a campaign ahead of valentine’s day for Women’s bags and you’ve targeted both men and women and you see that the Conversion rate amongst men is way lower than women, you can choose to target only women. That way your budget is optimized and the overall conversion rate increases.
5. Personalization
Many people prefer going to their local grocery store as they get personal treatment in that shop. The shopkeeper knows them and knows what they want. Personalization principles extend to the digital world as well. This could be Demography, Geography, behavior-based personalization, or can also be even granular, User-based personalization. A snapshot of an Amazon Home page. It shows products based on our browsing behavior.
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