What is Digital Marketing ? In simple terms !

It's a spectrum of all marketing tactics done online with use of an electronic device or with internet to  connect with customers where they spend their time online.

It encompasses all the marketing efforts that businesses leverage on digital channel such as search, social media, website, email, and websites to content with current and prospective customers.

For example, a content marketer can research and create blogs and write down blog ideas, social media marketer might help them support promote that blog and through organic or paid posts through the business account and an email marketer can create email marketing campaigns to nurture those leads and help them mature to become a informed and confident purchaser of that product.



Its often that many of us come across different terms of digital marketing, but its unclear what it actually means and its prominence. This blog will help you develop a proper working understanding of digital marketing and usage of terms with technical aspects.

SEO
Search Engine Optimization - SEO, is the creating, publishing and optimizing content to rank at top of the search results page, to increase the traffic. The ways that SEO receives much of its traction is through, blogs, info graphics, video content and website.

There are numerous ways to drive qualified traffic to your website.

On-page SEO focuses on all the content that's included and exists on your website.  By researching keywords for their volume, history, intent and its impression share, you can answer the questions of readers, and rank higher on the search engine results page and reach out to new set of visitors and rank rank higher on the SERP - Search Engine Results Page.

Off-Page SEO focuses on all the tasks that would answer the question of  "How do I increase my traffic and ranking without optimizing the content on my website?' Thee might be a question that you could develop, how this is possible? But its possible through inbound links, or technically known as backlinks where you publish your website, or share content or network with other publishers and even invite other writers too and publish on your website. The no.s ways or publishers connect to you that much of authority you could develop over the search engine and rank on top.

Technical SEO is a backend of your website where the pages are loaded. Image compressions, data structuring, optimizing CSS codes which better the speed factor for loading a website. when clicked on the link.

The best websites load anywhere between 3-5 seconds of speeds as quoted by Google, that's why its important to keep the codes lean and optimize content on a recurring basis, because all this is contributes to top on the SERP and Google has given utmost importance in each of its updates in the search algorithm.

Content marketing is another most important part of digital portfolio, in  simple sense it can be defined as backbone of digital marketing. This denotes that the content marketer creates and optimizes content in various forms and its availability to the customer. This acts as assets which help create brand awareness, create traffic, generate leads, and customers.

Content can be published in the form of Blogposts, Whitepapers or Ebooks, or infographics.

Blog are the content which is written to often provide a solution for the search queries on Google.
It will help you showcase your industry expertise and and reach organically to convert people on website

Ebooks and Whitepapers are the same as blogs and provide similar information on the likes of  solution but in exchange for the reader's contact information, and educate throughout the buyer's journey. It can even be a new product brochure or an announcement or even a case study to give a sneak peak about the product or service.

Infographics are generally photos with information because its better to show the information  rather than telling it. Through visual content reader's can get a overview of the concept and learn better.

Social Media Marketing

The practice of promoting your content and your company on social media channels to increase awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business. The top channels to be used in social media marketing include:

• Facebook.
• Twitter.
• LinkedIn.
• Instagram.
• Snapchat.
• Pinterest.
• 
  
• There are a few metrics which help you understand your performance on social media which are common across platforms. 
• 
  

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Just like organic search results appear through SEO on sear engine results page, PPC is a method to drive traffic to your website by paying every time your ad is s clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Ads, Bing which allows you to pay for appearing on top slots of Google's search engine results pages at a price "per click" of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC include:

• Paid ads on Facebook: Here, users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook will publish to the newsfeeds of people who match your business's audience and across its apps.
• Twitter Ads campaigns: Here, users can pay to sponsor a series of posts or profile, pages, to the news feeds of a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplishing a specific goal for your business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter followers, downloading an ebook, creating polls, initiating Twitter chats,  tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
• Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific LinkedIn users which are carved out based on their industry and background etc. 

Affiliate Marketing

Amazon happens to be the best example of Affiliate marketing as it was a ost important tool to reach out to millions. This works as performance-based advertising where you receive a commission for promoting someone else's products or services on your website and if that person purchases it. Affiliate marketing channels include:

• Hosting video ads through the Youtube Partner Program
• Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.

Native Advertising

Content-led marketing is often known as Native advertising refers to advertisements and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed-sponsored posts, Taboola are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be "native" -- Facebook and Instagram advertising can also be considered as an example too. The speciality of these posts is that there cannot be any difference spotted between the sponsored and non paid content published on the website. 

Marketing Automation

It refers to the softwares that serves to automate your basic marketing operations. Many marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks they would otherwise do manually, such as:

• Email newsletters: Here you can initiate, schedule, edit, optimize campaigns with ease. Email automation doesn't just allow you to automatically send emails to your subscribers. It can also help you shrink and expand your contact list as needed so your newsletters are only going to the people who want to see them in their inboxes.
• Social media post scheduling: Rather than you coming online and posting the content on your social media handle if you want to grow your organization's presence on a social network, you need to post frequently. This makes manual posting a bit of an untidy process. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your social media channels for you so you can spend more time focusing on content strategy.
• Lead-nurturing workflows: It doesn't require that leads generated should be converted into sales or customers so easily, the ads and content posted interact with different people with different mentalities or in fact reach to irrelevant audiences too. It's perhaps important to understand the purpose of each lead is different when they give leads and are on the different points of the buyer journey. Generating leads, and converting those leads into customers, can be a long process. You can automate that process by sending leads specific emails and content once they fit certain criteria, such as when they download and open an ebook.
• Campaign tracking and reporting:  The USP of online marketing is you get to see how you have performed, marketing campaigns can include a ton of information on different people, emails, contents, webpages, phone calls, and more. It can help you sort campaign you work on by the campaign it's serving, and then track the performance of that campaign based on the progress all of these components make over time.

Email Marketing

Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences repeatedly and increase trust consistently. It can be used as a medium to mitigate communication gaps, publish exclusive offers, announce deals and promotion too which directs towards the website. The types of emails you might send in an email marketing campaign include:

• Blog subscription via newsletters
• Follow-up emails to website visitors who downloaded something
• Customer welcome emails
• Holiday promotions to loyalty program members.
• Tips or similar series of emails for customer nurturing.

Online PR

Earned media's another spectrum is Online PR, the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It's much like traditional PR, but in the online space to provide optimum information. The channels you can use to maximize your PR efforts include:

• Reporter outreach via social media (includes every platform)
• Engaging online reviews of your company (answer it and acknowledge it )
• Engaging comments on your personal website or blog ( do it upto maximum extent possible)

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing refers to a marketing methodology wherein you attract, create attention, engage, and delight, inform customers at every stage of the buyer's journey. You can use every digital marketing task written above, throughout an inbound marketing strategy, to create a customer experience that works with the visitors to convert them into customers, not against them. Here are some classic examples of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing: 

• Blogging vs. pop-up ads (A bit of spam and irritating kind when done on website)
• Video marketing vs. commercial advertising
• Email contact lists vs. email spam