Major Components of Digital Marketing | 6 Essential Pillars
You might already know or would want to know more about what is digital marketing. We all have at some point in time, could be lately come across the term Digital Marketing. This article is about Digital Marketing Types.
What is digital marketing, the benefits it brings to us all in terms of wider reach, growth in business and various other possible ways?
Digital marketing is the updated version of traditional marketing. Marketing is in practice since ages. It is now being implemented in a modern way. So in order to understand the concept of digital marketing we need to know what marketing is.
What Is marketing
Marketing is explained as the set of practices a business uses to expand its reach and grow regarding awareness among potential customers.
A business may use various marketing strategies based on the goals needed to be achieved.
It could be either to increase the sales numbers or to create brand value in the market. It could be to promote a specific ongoing offer or could be to announce an upcoming one.
Marketing is the backbone of any successful business. In earlier times, a company would use traditional techniques of marketing to grow. The mediums used back then were different.
Word of mouth is one of the earliest forms of marketing and is still trending. That is because people trust if a person whom they know appreciates any product or service they have used. It builds the credibility of the brand.
Then came various other platforms where businesses could promote themselves. A few of the examples are newspaper ads, Radio ads, pamphlets, TV ads, etc. The technology keeps up with new innovations.
So everything in the present era is going online. The Internet is occupying everything around us. It is changing the means of marketing and Advertising a business too.
What Is digital marketing definition
Changing the means of marketing and business too where digital marketing takes a stand!
Let’s take a look at the definition of digital marketing to understand what is digital marketing:
Digital Marketing can be defined as the process of marketing done using digital platforms, mainly the internet.
In simple words, we can say its marketing in a digital form. We use the internet for the promotion of the business or an individual. The aim is to reach potential customers at the right time when they are searching online.
Now let’s try to understand what is digital marketing. Since we know now that marketing is something that helps businesses to grow and if a company wants to attain that growth via the internet, we will call digital marketing.
There has been a drastic increase in the number of internet users since the past decade. According to an article posted in The Economic Times by Surabhi Agarwal, the number of internet users is estimated to grow by up to 500 million by the end of June 2018.
So India is the second-largest online market after China. The majority of urban users are already using the internet. In the rural areas as well it is spreading like a Wildfire. Digital marketing has a much broader and deeper reach because of this large customer base. The majority of the urban users are already using the internet So are the rural areas where the fashion spreads.
For the urge of the broadest reach of the same, digital marketing serves for several platforms to grow.
Digital Marketing Types
There are many categories in Digital Marketing. There are so many ways we can promote a business by the means of digital marketing.
Various forms of Digital Marketing are as below:
Search engine optimization
When we talk of Digital Marketing types, Search Engine Optimization will be on the tip of the tongue. It is a process of increasing traffic to a website. The traffic comes from organic sources without spending on ads.
We tweak a site to generate organic traffic. You can check our post on Why SEO is important.
SEO is great if you are looking for fruitful long-term traffic. It is broadly classified into two categories, On-page SEO & Off-Page SEO.
So On-Page SEO is the set of specific activities that we perform on our website to make it suitable for search engines. Off-Page, SEO is what we do on the internet to promote that website.
Search engine marketing
We pay the search engines to provide visibility for our ads. It may bring in some good traffic but only for the time the Ad is active. Search engine marketing is good for businesses who make money out of the traffic that comes on their site. SEM is not recommended for bloggers who intend to make money out of blogging.
One of the fantastic platforms that helps a business to advertise is Google Adwords. Some other platforms available are Bing Ads and Yahoo Search Ads. Since Google is the most widely used platform, you can start your ads with Google Adwords.
Regarding securing a job, Search Engine Marketing has a better scope for being paid higher but having the knowledge of SEO is equally important.
Social media marketing
Usage of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to promote a specific post or a page belonging to an individual or a business is Social Media Marketing. You can run various Ad campaigns on Social Media or organically promote the content.
The most popular Social Media platforms being is Facebook followed by Youtube, Instagram, and Twitter. Social Media a great platform to get your post spread across. Since there is a vast community of people who are actively using Social Media, it can prove a valuable resource for any business if utilized correctly.
So a business can not only promote their stuff but also can have a check-up on what their competitors are coming up with. You can have a constant touch with your customers. Social Media can help you analyze your customer reviews when they talk about your business online.
Content marketing
Promoters create quality content for a particular target audience. Quality content attracts a visitor which can turn him into a customer or will increase the chances of him revisiting your site or promoting it. Check out how to make great content.
Content marketing plays a significant part when it comes to creating brand awareness and trust among customers. Quality content brings in more traffic to your website. More traffic can result in an increase in sales.
We can expect to generate quality leads from the traffic that comes in through content marketing as they are relevant people looking up for that particular content.
Content Marketing can even save you some amount spend on advertisement. It is one of the most important Digital Marketing Types. The people who visit your site, if they find your content that great, will eventually share it with others which gives you free promotion.
Perhaps there are many bloggers out there who keep writing content into different niches. If they find your content worth appreciation, they may link back to your content which gives you backlink increasing your SEO rankings.
Affiliate marketing
Earning some extra cash is easy with affiliate marketing. We refer traffic from one site to another. Every successful referral brings in some money. You don’t need to have your own products. If you can master the art of affiliate marketing, you can earn more money than what an average full-time job can fetch you.
So there are various affiliate programs run by different companies you can sign up for. Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and Clickbank are some of the examples of the companies which provide affiliate programs with the right amount of commissions.
Therefore, In the affiliate programs, you can get paid per sale, per lead, or per click depending on the affiliate provider. You get commission purely based on your performance. The best part about affiliate marketing is that you don’t need any investment. You can make money selling products or services others provide using your marketing reach.
E-mail marketing
Business uses the mailing system as the communication platform to promote offers. It can also help in building and maintaining healthy relationships with the customers by keeping them posted with what is new. The emails are sent to the customers mostly with commercial intent.
So you can promote new blog posts, products or services which are newly launched, or any specific offer to attract more traffic or sales. E-mail Marketing campaigns can be run sometimes to increase brand awareness or maintain the position of a brand among customers.
You need to have an email database that you should be collecting with time to launch a campaign. You can segregate your mail subscribers on various factors like location, behavior, interest, etc. to target them. A more specified target will result in more open rates for the emails being sent. Sending specific emails to the relevant audience is always better as they are the ones who value those emails. So blindly sending emails may result in losing subscribers and credibility.
Hope this post by our Digital Marketing Agency in Bangalore is helpful in understanding what is a digital marketing and Digital marketing Types. You may consider having a career in Digital Marketing too. check Career in Digital Marketing as well