Digital marketing in today’s world is booming and the ongoing coronavirus situation has certainly boosted the trend of digitalisation. Statistics also say that in the coming years more businesses are likely to join the online world. Therefore digital marketing is rising in an exponential manner day by day. In This blog, We would talk about 9 Basic Digital marketing Strategies for Beginners.
The term “digital marketing” might be common to an internet user, but most of them are unaware of its meaning and significance. Is this also applicable to you? Then, this article is written just for you.
What is Digital Marketing?
To make it very simple, we can say that when you market your business or services or products using the internet, it is called digital marketing. There are long definitions of it on the internet. But does it make sense if you read only difficult definitions without understanding the concept? So let’s discuss it in a little elaborate way to present it more clearly to you.
These days so many small businesses and start-ups are coming up and growing very fast. Nowadays any business needs to connect and engage more and more with their potential customers to survive in the slugfest. And the best possible way to reach out to people is the internet, right? So, people use various digital tools such as social media, emails, websites and many other platforms to increase their connection and grow their business. This is the very basic concept of digital marketing.
9 Basic Strategies of Digital Marketing
As a beginner, you don’t want to be ignorant of the basic skills that you should acquire to kickstart your digital marketing career, right? Or, you might have been thinking of purchasing a digital marketing course and therefore want to educate yourself before any prior commitment. Whatever may the cause be, it’s always better to have at least the basic knowledge of something you want to pursue.
These days, many entrepreneurs, digital marketing companies are coming up with their courses on digital marketing. Some courses are genuinely good. But before investing your money in any such courses, you should have the ideas and concepts so that you can decide if it is a good fit for you or not.
So, here are the basic digital marketing types that you must know in order to place yourself as an industry expert in the near future!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of ameliorating your content so that it appears in the search result. SEO is one of the fundamental processes of digital marketing because it helps you to escalate your leads. By optimizing your content, you give some hints or signals to Google that your content is the most relevant ones on a certain topic.
But, how does it work?
Google has an inconceivably huge database where all information around the web is saved. When someone searches on Google regarding anything, google starts looking into its database. The algorithm scrutinizes all available pieces of information and ranks the most appropriate and helpful content on the top, considering hundreds of factors.
Therefore, the essence of SEO in marketing is inevitable. Your business will grow extraordinarily if your website ranks on the top or even anywhere on the first page of Google (preferably within the top 5).
Content Marketing:
Now that you know about SEO, think about one thing — if you don’t have proper content, what is even the point of acquiring SEO skills ! Content, in my opinion, should be the first and foremost priority of a digital marketer. You probably have heard the line, “content is king”. Have you?
A solid content marketing strategy will aid you to grow organically, disseminate your brand awareness, generate more leads and increase sales.
So, what exactly does the term ‘content marketing’ suggest ?
It is a process where you consistently create free, valuable, informative, appropriate content and distribute these contents to certain platforms in order to educate your audience about your product or services. This marketing approach, if performed successfully, is able to attract innumerable potential customers. And ultimately, it drives profitable customer actions.
This marketing strategy,
I. Increases sales
II. Saves money, as it brings customers organically.
III. Increases your brand awareness and brings better customers.
Email Marketing:
We all are pretty much familiar with this form of marketing. Have you ever signed up or shared your email ID with any website instead of anything valuable e.g. e-books, templates or cheat sheets, webinars, mini-courses etc.? If yes, let me tell you that it was a simple marketing trap to get your lead. Still confused ? Let me explain.
Marketers use their customer’s emails to add value to customer’s life, expand their brand awareness, promote their products, convince customers to buy their products or services and many more. But how do they build their customer email list ? Yes, you caught it right. They provide anything that adds value to people’s lives instead of their names and emails. To put it relatively straightforward, basically, this is what email marketing is.
These valuable free stuff that you provide instead of a customer’s contact details (mostly emails) are called lead magnets. And the emails and other details that you collect from the customer are known as leads. These are the most common terms in digital marketing.
There are tools called autoresponders, that allow sending pre-written emails automatically to prospects. These are very crucial tools for email marketing campaigns. Various autoresponders are available on the internet among which some are free, while some are paid. Some famous autoresponders are:
- HubSpot
- Get Response
- Moosend
- Aweber
- Klaviyo
- Mailchimp
- Convert Kit
- Autopilot
- Constant Contact
- Omni send
Social Media Marketing (SMM):
In SMM we use the power of various social media platforms to connect and engage with a large number of audiences and drive traffic to our websites. Any brand or start-up creates and posts content consistently to not only increase their brand awareness but also to connect with their potential customers. As a large number of the population these days use social media, it is the easiest way for any brand to engage with its audience.
Through social media, you can drive traffic to your website. A blend of SMM and a good content marketing strategy can be very beneficial to your business. Marketers use different tools for SMM to manage their content calendar, schedule their posts in advance and so on.
The basic strategy of SMM is simple. First comes the most important goal setting. Next, you decide your target audience and use certain platforms to perform your strategy. In the last step, you have to select the form of your content, whether it will be text form or video form or anything as per your requirement.
This skill is very simple and interesting to learn. It’s all about testing and experimenting with what is working and what not. You can easily learn this skill and offer digital marketing services to your clients.
Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC):
A Pay Per Click or PPC model is the process of running paid ads on search engines e.g. Google, Bing. Companies basically bid on certain keywords and when that particular keyword is searched on Google, their website is ranked on the top. Thus businesses drive traffic, increase leads and sales.
Whenever any user clicks on their website, Google or Bing charge a certain amount of money from the advertisers. In this process, a PPC model is run.
But, does that mean you will be able to rank your website without any effort ? No, not at all. Only advertisements are not enough for online marketing. Whenever you search for any keyword, you get to see only two or three advertised websites on the top. But there must be a lot of other brands who also made the same keywords. Why did their websites fail to rank ? Because all advertising websites compete among themselves, which is called an auction.
Platforms like Google and Bing judge the websites based on their quality and the amount of money they invested. Hence your investment and your content strategy must be very powerful in order to see your website on the top of the list.
Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliate marketing is another advertising strategy where any company runs ads or appends their website’s link to a third-party website in order to get more traffic or lead. The third-party websites are known as the affiliates and receive a commission for promoting the company’s products or services. The commission is granted only if the company gets a sale.
The affiliate can promote our products in many ways; not only on their websites but also on their social media or email list etc.
When one vendor gets multiple affiliates, it becomes problematic for them to handle all affiliates all together. And here comes affiliate networks. Affiliate networks are nothing but such companies that make it easier for a vendor to manage all its affiliates in an organised way. Some most popular affiliate networks in India are Amazon Associates, Flipkart Affiliate, vCommission, BIGROCK Affiliate etc.
You can Also Read – Which are best platform for Online Learning.
Conclusion
These were very brief and basic concepts of digital marketing. You can further expand your horizon free of cost. There are a lot of free digital marketing courses available on the web. Explore them, if you are determined to come into this industry.
You have three options in your hand. You can get a digital marketing job in any company or you have the option of freelancing. Later you can also build your own digital marketing agency (this is not at all recommended for beginners).
However, I hope in this article you’ve got all your doubts cleared about digital marketing. To conclude, I must say digital marketing is a vast topic that can not be explained completely within the threshold of one article. This was a very basic and brief introduction.
The Author is a Final Year English language Graduate Student. he does love writing columns, Blogs, Stories. Socio-Political, Lifestyle, International relations are the most loved writing area for him.
He is a Full-time Freelance Web Content Writer and Columnnist.
