What is Digital Marketing?

Well, you would be already aware and interested to know more about Digital Marketing by the time you landed here.
Digital Marketing is different from traditional marketing in many ways. As the world emerge and transform, the strategy and medium also change. In Digital Marketing, you promote your business or the services in Digital platforms to reach your targetted audience. Here you have got different mediums for your business to get to your existing and potential customers. The websites, social media platforms, messengers, emailers are few among this which helps you for this purpose.
Even though everything sounds a bit simplified now, the main problem you will be facing is “reaching the customers”, yeah heard that right, there are platforms, but it’s not an easy task to reach your customers. You know what, each day there are millions of posts or contents are uploaded on social media. Millions of pages are optimized daily to be visible in the search engine. The number of brands and the amount they spend on paid advertising is very high. So like your brand, there will be a lot of other brands who will be looking for those top spots where the customers can notice your brand. To get deep into Digital Marketing, you need to know different activities, segments and other key focuses for making it successful.
Following are the key activities, and digital marketing segments to follow, so that your brand can lead and won’t miss a particular traffic stream.

SEO

SEO is Search Engine Optimization, which means, optimizing your website to rank in search engines like Google, Bing etc… if you have a website, obviously you want your website to show to the people who search your services in Google. As most of the beginners will only aim to rank their website for their brand keywords, you also need to figure out other potential keywords that are relevant for your brand and your offered services.
Example: If you have an e-commerce website selling garments in India, unless you are a prominent brand like Amazon or Flipkart, the chances for the customers searching you by your brand name will be 1/10. But 8/10 people will be searching for the keywords like “branded shirts deals” “fashion website India”.
Don’t be surprised if you find your competitor ranking for those keywords, and can’t find you listed. You are not late. You can even outrank them with SEO and some patience.
As the algorithm changes with time, there are other factors you have to make sure you are on top of it.
There will be many factors which get outdated and not considered as a ranking signal eventually. In the past, the SEOs did bulk directory submissions, link purchasing and automated traffic to rank higher. As time goes, the algorithm becomes smarter. They started to penalize the sites who trade links, spam submissions and who use other Black-hat SEO strategies. Google less prioritized the low-quality backlinks and started giving more importance to the website content quality and best user experience. The old practices, at least some are not even valid now. Now if you are focusing on bulk submission, the chances will be high to get penalized. However, the link building is still a ranking signal. Instead of the old directory submission, business listing etc. you should be more focusing on the articles, blogs and press releases which publish in unique websites.
Moreover, you should make sure that there are no on-page optimizations for you to do. Technical SEO is much important. Your website content should be of high quality and should deliver the customers what they searched. It should have apt keyword relevancy. It needs to have LSI keywords and should be non-plagiarized.
The website should load quickly, as this is very important. Google now officially made the loading speed as a ranking signal. You can find the core web vitals in your Search Console as well. A slow-loading website is not user friendly to the visitors. Hence, the loading speed has to be below 3 seconds. As now the number of mobile users is higher than desktop, you should be more focusing on the mobile version. Your website pages have to be easily navigable by visitors with fewer actions. If you are using pagination on your website, we would suggest you implementing infinite scrolling instead. Keep monitoring the metrics like Bounce Rate, Drop Offs, User scroll etc. and tweak the website content and design as per these metrics.
You should find apt keywords for your business. Compare the density of other top pages ranking for that keyword in SERP and use your selected keywords with required density in your content, headings and meta title.
Make your content and website UI/UX as perfect as possible. Get high-quality backlinks from unique referral domains. You will see the improvements.

SEM

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is promoting your website using paid advertising strategies in Search Engine, Search Partners and other 3rd party websites. Being the most used search engine in the world, Advertising in Google will benefit your business to be visible to your customers without the need for SEO and time.

Search Ads:

Most common Ad type used by businesses all over. One can create a search campaign to show their Ads in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). They can show their Ads in the top 3 and below 3 AD positions. The positions of your Ad will depend on your Keywords, competition, bid and quality score.

Display Ads:

While you visit some websites, you can see Ads in the form of an image or motion on the top, bottom or side part of their web page. One can show their services or other valuable brand information by running a display campaign on other third party websites.

Remarketing Ads:

Ever wondered, how the Ads of the products you searched for or left without purchasing is showing to you? This Ad type is known as Remarketing Ads. You can show the ads to the people who visited your website to read a blog or to make a purchase but dropped off without making the conversion. If you have enabled tracking your audience, you will be able to set up the Remarketing campaigns. You can even re-target them through Re-targeting Ads on social media.

Shopping Ads:

This is the Ad types you will see in google search results when you search for buying something like tech gadgets, shoes etc. You will be able to see a few details such as image, price, of the product there, and will take you to the product website for further information and purchase. If you are a business who sells physical items, you can go for this campaign. These Ad types are less preferred by most of the advertisers. Still, you can give a try if it works for you and your locale.

Video Ads:

Everyone YouTube users will be aware of video ads which show on YouTube. There are different video Ad types and placements you can try on YouTube. The bumper video ads, skippable ads and non-skippable video ads are some of the video ads you can run on Youtube.

Moreover, the users can also create various other campaigns such as Lead campaign, Discovery Ads etc. from their Ads manager.

SMM

Social Media is the most necessary tool for businesses, influencers and individuals to promote their services or work. Social Media being a place where an extensive community is available, Social Media Marketing (SMM) remains inevitable segment in Digital Marketing. Most of us are aware and using various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc. You can promote your business and services in all these platforms to reach your target audience.
The organic reach in most of the social media platforms is slow. Apart from the organic reach we aim for, we can achieve the results swiftly with the help of paid advertising in social media. There are different Ad types we can do in social media, depending on the business and goals.
You want your customers to subscribe to something or to request for quotes from your business? You can run a lead campaign. If you want your customers to try your restaurant, and if you want them to know that you are running a 50% off sale at your shop, you can run a brand awareness campaign. Do you want your customers to visit your website or download your app to read your blog or to make a purchase from your e-commerce store? You can run a traffic campaign in social media. If you can target your audience as perfect as possible, you will be earning from each penny spent by you.

Digital Marketing is not limited to the above segments. There are also other segments such as Email Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Messenger Marketing Strategies etc. you can try on.