Digital marketing strategy is a approach to web design, development and online marketing that generates leads and produces measurable results. Digital marketing is the art and science of leveraging digital assets to drive engagement and sales to your brand.
What Are The 10 Components of Digital Marketing?
These ten components provide the basis for any modern digital marketing strategy.
1. Web Development
Website development is the single most important key to digital marketing. Making sure your website is updates, fat and using tools like meta tags, descriptions, alt tags and H1, H2, H3, H4 headers will ensure your site will be able to be indexed, found and ranked on googles coveted first page. Web development also includes adding relevant information, storytelling and the mission statement of your brand.
2. Content
Search engines look for content that is compelling, relevant to the searcher, frequently updated and full of enrichment. Content marketing involves researching keywords, writing articles, improving the description of products and services on your site, and creating educational content that will compel your audience to engage more deeply with your brand. Making sure your articles have headers, bold print, italics and backlinks are also key to improving content.
3. SEO
On-site SEO involves ensuring that your site is developed correctly with the proper framework that appeals to search engines. Off-site SEO refers to any actions that you are taking for your brand that happen off of your main digital properties. SEO is based on finding keywords that are most relevant to your brand. There are also negative keywords that you may not want associated with your business. For example, if you have a service business that is more expensive than competitors you would not want one of your search term to be “rates” as the people who search rates are usually looking for bargain companies. Learn more about SEO.
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a highly efficient method for your digital marketing campaigns. The key is to generate more high-quality leads through your other online efforts. Email marketing will give your business a chance to find and engage with your local audience.
Sending high-quality content in your emails that speaks to them personally, addressing interests, wants, or needs and enticing them to continue to your website. Email lists and connecting to a CRM are gold to your marketing campaigns.
5. Social Media Managment
There are two key forms of social media management: paid and organic. While paid social media marketing includes the advertisements we all know and love, it also involves paid options for driving new fans to your page or brand.
Organic social media is a bit more elusive, but that also tends to make it more fun to implement. You gain organic reach when your brand educates or informs your audience, providing value to the reader in a way that they use and share the content that you create.
This could be in the form of buying something from your website after seeing a post or could involve the reader posting information about your brand either privately or publicly to their social profiles.
6. SEM
Finally, search engine marketing is what many people think of as traditional digital marketing.Advertisements are placed on Google, display or search engines, so when a user is browsing for the answer to a particular question, your paid ad pops your brand to the top of the search engine results page. Small, local businesses rarely need expensive SEM campaigns if all other digital marketing components are optimized
7. Online Video Marketing
Online video marketing has consistently gained momentum and performs efficiently. Utilizing tags, keywords and descriptions are a great way to get noticed online. If you hire a digital marketing agency – making sure they are able to do the video marketing and editing for you without sub-contracting is preferred unless you are a national brand.
8. AI and Automation
Marketing automation uses software to automate monotonous marketing work. Marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns – not just for the sake of efficiency, but also to provide a more personalized experience for their customers.
9. Backlinks and Articles
A backlink is when one website links to another with an anchor text. An example of a backlink is any article you find that links to another source or website. You can find examples of website backlinks all over the internet, especially on popular blog sites that link back to relevant content. Utilizing blogs that you create and others in your niche by linking keywords to your site will help elevate your keywords.
10. Analytics
Digital analytics are quantitative measurements of the performance of online content, including advertising campaigns, social media, and websites. That means digital analytics provide information from digital sources on how customers respond to or interact with your content and marketing campaigns.
How To Start Marketing My Website
- Create a website
- Optimize your website
- Building an email marketing list and create engaging emails
- Add social media channels and post content
- Create or find blogs and backlinks and create anchors for important keywords
- Install google analytics 4 and monitor progresss
- Using location-based targeting to grab the attention of local audiences
This is far from a complete strategy but it gives an idea of how to start digital marketing
What Are The 5 Ps of Digital Marketing?
The 5 Ps of digital marketing are simple: Product, Price, Promotion, Place, and People. All of these factors must work together for your digital marketing strategies to be successful.
Product: Your products or services should be at the heart of all of your marketing efforts. You have to understand the needs of your audience, and that should be taken into consideration when you’re defining services or building products.
Price: Will you look at a cost-plus markup strategy, or are you more interested in determining the pricing that the market will bear? Your pricing strategy could and should change over time and may require a fair bit of tweaking before you find the perfect mix.
Promotion: Where and how will you promote your products and services? Promotions don’t have to be paid; you can also work with influencers to promote your brand and offer discounts and a variety of creative alternatives that will help keep your ad budget in line while still raising awareness of your brand.
Place: While marketing in the past often included a physical location, digital marketing transcends that to digital properties such as your website and mobile applications.
People: Who are your tribe? Your products and services could be either mainstream or niche — defined in such a way that there is a small section of the market that is truly passionate about what you produce or the stories that you tell.
Understanding how the 5 Ps fit together often requires additional learning beyond what you can gather from a quick internet search. You need a digital marketing course to jump-start your education.
Digital Marketing versus Traditional Marketing
While digital marketing and traditional marketing share a common goal, the methods each uses differ. Here are the essential differences.
Audience
Digital marketing allows you to customize your efforts for a larger audience across the globe, targeting specific demographics and customer segments to fit each campaign. In contrast, traditional marketing focuses on audiences who are more local and can usually be reached via broadcast or print media.
Content Delivery
In digital marketing, you have the ability to deliver content through multiple channels depending on your target audience’s preferences and needs. These channels may include blog posts, YouTube videos, emails, SMS (texts), and social media. Traditional marketing delivers content via older-style channels, including radio, television, newspapers, magazines, direct mail, and displays.
Interaction
Digital marketing allows you to directly interact with your target audience more often. This interaction can occur through forums, social media accounts, website comments, interactive files and quizzes. Such interaction capabilities are game changers when it comes to reaching an audience.
The opposite of this occurs in traditional marketing, where promotion is through physical materials, such as catalogs, flyers, and brochures.
Events
Digital marketing efforts have created an increase in online webinars, courses, and events. Anyone can join in from anywhere, even from their favorite chair in their living room. Still, many consumers continue to prefer a traditionally marketed in-person event.
Creating, sponsoring, or participating in live conventions, seminars, or conferences can increase the connection with customers and build brand awareness.
Digital Marketing Tips
As a digital marketing beginner, you don’t have to feel intimidated or lost. Here are some tips to make digital marketing for beginners easier to grasp and get going.
Branding
Building brand awareness is an essential element to your marketing strategy and your success. Start out by knowing everything you can about it and its benefits.
Essentially, brand awareness is the recognition and familiarization by others of your brand, product, or service. To boost such awareness, you will need to help consumers learn more about your business, the products or services you offer, and what makes you stand out from your competitors.
There are several ways to build brand awareness. Consistency in how you present your brand across channels and platforms will be key. Consumers will be able to look at a blog or social media post and instantly know it’s yours if you do it right.
SEO Help
Search engine optimization (SEO) is everywhere today! Once you acknowledge this, it’s time to get in the game by understanding how SEO works and ways to use it to your advantage.
Sure, it can be a little intimidating at first, so start slow and easy. Identify keywords and phrases that your target audience uses to conduct searches. Incorporate these into all your content so your audience can find you more easily. From here, you’ll want to consider a link-building strategy to boost your SEO even more.
If you start feeling anxious, remember to take action one step at a time and keep learning all you can about SEO techniques and available tools. Soon you’ll be using it to increase website traffic, gain higher-quality leads, and more.
Storytelling
One of the most empowering moments that can occur as a digital marketer is to discover the online potential of your brand. Digital marketing is the perfect avenue for generating high-quality leads that result in more interaction with your brand and, ultimately, higher sales. Tell the story of your brand through engaging content.
You may discover opportunities to offer webinars to customers, create courses, sponsor events, or become a thought leader in your field. The online potential of your brand is vast, and cashing in on that is possible with targeted marketing and planning.
Demographics
While you may already know everything about your product or service, it is essential to step away from that and get to really know your customers. By doing so, you can build a better marketing strategy that appeals to them and other potential customers.
Conduct your own market research by sending out surveys to existing customers and by asking for feedback. Closely study customer reviews and comments to gain a sense of what they want most. Learn all you can about who they are, what they want or need, and the type of interests they have.
Once you collect this information and start to understand your customers, develop your buyer personas. You will use these to plan your marketing strategy and the type of content to share.
Start with Social
Consumers today spend tons of time on social media platforms. Since that is where they are, it is where you should be also. The goal is to build a significant presence on one or more platforms.
Create your social profile to match your brand and how you present yourself on your website. Now it’s time to start publishing content. Consider mixing it up a bit at times, providing informative, educational, or entertaining content to show your brand’s confidence and personality. Don’t just focus only on your products or services, but add posts that speak to your target audience’s interests and desires.
Digital marketing can become exhaustive and take you away from your business if you are trying to do it yourself. Finding a trusted digital marketing agency – one in your local area – is well worth the cost.
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