Digital Marketing A complete Step by Step Guide

Digital marketing is a broad term and it is known by a number of other expressions also like internet marketing, data driven marketing or web marketing. Although the names internet and web marketing indicate that this type of marketing is restricted to the internet and the World Wide Web marketing only but that is not true. In fact it is not right to use the term digital marketing inter changeably with internet or web marketing because digital marketing can be offline also.

Although the internet plays a pivotal role in digital marketing, this term is used to describe telephone marketing too. According to the definition

Digital marketing refers to all kinds of marketing techniques and processes that are done via the digital media. It is different from the traditional marketing because in digital marketing the organization know which marketing tactics are working and what return they are giving to the organization.

Let us first take a look at offline digital marketing and then the online digital marketing.
Offline Digital Marketing
There are four main categories of offline digital marketing. People might be surprised because there is a common misconception that for digital marketing you must have an internet access and now we are talking about not one or two but four broad categories that do not use internet but are termed as digital marketing.

Radio Marketing
Television Marketing
Enhanced Marketing
Phone/Mobile Marketing

1. Radio Marketing
   Although the days when radio was the sole form of entertainment for many are long gone but still the radio persists to exist and that too aplomb. People listen to radio even still. Many forms of entertainment faded away with time but the popularity of radios is that much even today that it is included in a major category of digital marketing. It is understandable that the listener base has decreased to a significant amount but still there is enough to advertise over the radio.

Here are some radio stats taken from a Statista

Radio still reaches 85% of the US population every week
Listeners listen 2 hrs per day, on average
40% of all radio advertising expenses worldwide comes from the US
About half the population of the US listens to internet radio at least once a month
So when you are advertising to everyone do spend some time and money on radio commercials too. Pick out key timings like when the people are on their way to home from work. Or late nights on the weekends. Radio marketing might not be a huge but definitely a big help to you ad campaign.

1. Television Marketing
   Television Marketing is also a great way to advertise. In fact it is the best and most powerful type of offline marketing available. Every year, millions of dollars are invested in television ads. New and novel ideas for ads are becoming a rage.

However a major drop in the popularity of television commercials has occurred thanks to YouTube and other online streaming websites. You might ask that what is the difference, you can put your television ad in YouTube just the same however there is a big difference in the ad that runs on TV and that one that run on a reputed Video streaming site and that difference is targeted audience. In case of television it is difficult to project our ad to the audience that we would like to cater too. Of course you can make broad customizations like targeting toys ads during the kids shows or make up and upcoming sale promotions during the programs that focus on females, however it does not generate a customized experience like Google does for us.

Anyhow, right now this is a big industry and if you want a breakthrough publicity come up with a great online ad campaign.

Also if a commercial becomes viral it can have lasting impact and generate millions of views on YouTube. Super bowl commercials have attained a special status on the field of television advertisement. In fact advertisers plan the whole year to develop ads with great concepts to be released during super bowl.

1. Phone/Mobile Marketing
   While telephone marketing might be near to death (although you might get an occasional call from some brands trying to sell you vacuum cleaners or something) mobile phone marketing is a hottest new trend in offline marketing and it might surpass television marketing soon in terms of popularity. Calling people on their mobiles to lure them into a specific offer is a commonly used way. Usually mobile phone companies do that to inform the customers about their latest deals and packages and offers.

Combing the offline marketing of phones with online marketing in mobiles we have more data for customized marketing. We can make you of GPS to locate the person and advertise to them according to their location. If for example there is a sale near you, you will get notified thus prompting you to go there.

1. Enhanced Offline Marketing
   Here we enhance the experience of user marketing by using electronic and digital media. For example the electronics billboards are a great way to send you message to the audience. Normal billborads are almost dead because people nowadays have a lot of technology gadgets, smartphone and iPads and they do not have time for looking out of the window to see the billboards propped around all the way.

Another great example of Enhanced digital marketing is seen on Apple stores where you can try out the Apple phones and iPAds. This helps you a lot in making the final decision.

Online Digital Marketing
These are some of examples of offline digital marketing. Now let us take a look at online digital marketing. The online digital marketing can be righty called online marketing or web marketing. Simply put

“Online Digital marketing is any form of marketing that you do by using the internet.”

With the explosive growth of the internet, the online audience is huge. Organizations want to cash on this great opportunity to advertise their product through internet in order to achieve a greater audience.

There are many things to be considered while doing online marketing. Two main challenges are

The size of the web is huge. Making your voice heard in this huge and humungous world is a challenge that you must fulfil.
Finding the right audience is also a big challenge although now there are various tactics and algorithms devised by companies like Google and Facebook that send your Ad campaign to the right audience.
There are many components of online marketing. For a successful online ad campaign a lot of things need to be kept in view. Here are some of the main online marketing components.

Now let us briefly look in to all of these components for a great online digital marketing experience.

1. Search Engine Optimization
   Search Engine Optimization is all about bringing your webpage in the top search results of the search engine. there are a lot of criteria that makes a page eligible to get among the top spots in the search engine listings. To know more about SEO, here is our guide to great SEO.

2. Search Engine Marketing
   Search engine marketing is a paid form of Search Engine Optimization. Here you can pay to get your links in the top of the Google search. Most of the click go into the top 3 results of the page. To get your link in the top of the Google search page, you pay par number of clicks. The more cick you get the more you have to pay. And keywords that are popular can cost you even 500 – 700 per click. That is a big amount. Consider if the link gets a thousand clicks in a day, 500,000 $ in a day is a huge amount to pay.

Search Engine marketing can be too expensive if you are not careful enough of it. Use it after considerable deliberation otherwise you will end up losing much more money than you can ever earn. Competitive and important Keywords will cost much more as compared to non-competitive keywords.

1. Social Media Marketing
   We all are well aware about the basics of social media marketing. Social media has penetrated in our lives’ all the aspects, marketing through Social media is very important because it has too many users. Having a reach for such a huge amount of audience, it is the best option for advertisement. We can use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and reach a large amount of audience. These social media platforms have built in tools that help you create catchy adds as well as get analytics about their add campaign. Read our social media marketing guide to learn more about Social Media Marketing.

2. Affiliate Marketing
   Affiliate marketing works like referrals. When you refer someone at your workplace, if that person is good and is hired permanently, you get a commission for referring that person. The affiliate marketing work in the same way. When you become an affiliate of a webpage, you help in its promotions. For example if you are an affiliate of Amazon, you take their links and publish them on your blog or email them to your friends. If some clicks on the link that you created and buys the product you get a small amount of commission for this product dale.

3. Email Digital Marketing
   Email marketing is also a great way to market your project. Although the advent of social media, the value of email marketing has decreased a little but it still pays a lot. Another main reason is that it is completely free. You can send the email to bulk of mails to a number of recipients for free. Read more about Email Marketing.

4. Pay per click Marketing
   Pay per click marketing is another form of digital marketing that is in a way similar to SEM. However in SEM your link can come in the Google search, while in pay per click, you can have link placed anywhere. Whenever your link is clicked you have to pay an amount of money to the host website. Of course the rate of Pay per click or ppc is much less as compared to SEM. However this type of marketing is also preferred when you have a product that will give you an ample amount of profit.

5. Content Marketing
   It is a great way to market your product. Write about it, give it a background, a story, something people can relate to. Content marketing is a great way to promote products. Studies show that toys that have background stories are sold much than those which do not. You can do content marketing via blogs, YouTube videos, Apps, Podcasts or a lot other media. The key to great content marketing is creating great content. If the content is good people will want to buy your product and learn about it. There are four main properties of a great content.

6. Originality
   Plagiarism gets caught easily. You might be tempted to copy as there is a lot of stuff on the internet. But the sophisticated software available, can detect plagiarism. Once you get caught and Google takes you out of the indexing, you are gone forever.

13 Consistency
Once you start a blog or video log, be consistent in generating the content. If you decide you will make a new blog entry every Monday morning then there must be a new blog entry every Monday. There is no shortage of content on the internet, if the user find no new content, they will stop visiting the site altogether.

1. Uniqueness
   If you write something, write on a new and unique topic. If there is already a an abundance of material on a topic, it will be very difficult to make the readers come to your site instead of already established pages.

2. Quality
   Write content with great quality. Never compromise on the quality of the content.