Digital Marketing: A Simplified Version
Earlier this year I finished a blog series of 22 blog posts about digital marketing to help fellow artists and digital marketing enthusiasts to have a starting point on this vast topic:
Link: https://blog.sangitaekka.com/table-of-contents-for-digital-marketing-series/
Few days back some people showed interest in this function and wanted suggestions/advice. I am no expert, but I will share what I know, and hopefully make it easier for the enthusiasts to take the first step.
On that note, this post is to identify, categorize, and simplify digital marketing activities for enthusiasts and acts as a simple guideline for early stage business owners and may help them decide where to invest their time and money.
Digital marketing jargons and categories
Digital marketing, as the name suggests, is all kinds of communications you can do to reach your customers over the internet, be it a social media post, a search engine ad, or a blog post.
There are multiple sub-functions in digital marketing which can be largely categorized into the following categories:
1. Content marketing
2. Email marketing
3. Social media marketing (SMM)
4. Search engine marketing (SEM)
5. Influencer/Affiliate marketing
A closer look at the jargons mentioned above:
1. Content marketing
Any output produced by an individual/company in text, audio, video, image, or other formats which inclines with business goals is content. A webpage is an example of publicly accessible content of a business in text format often paired with other formats like graphics, infographics, photographs, embedded forms, or videos.
Content marketing at the core is a writer’s job. Content writers work closely with graphic designers or video creators to design how the information ought to flow for the end customer to consume.
Content writing spans website content, blog posts, social media posts, content for ads or notifications, reports, whitepapers, press releases, PPTs/slides for events, email communication, etc. Content in other formats include podcasts, infographics, tutorial videos.
Business communication and associated content generation depends upon industry. E.g. IT, finance, science, and technology need frequent content communications. Industries like FMCG may create content once and update frequently. The former is more text heavy in its communication, while the latter needs a mix of text and image.
Business owners, particularly those who are just starting up need to first decide on how they want to communicate to their audiences, via what channels, and then proceed with content generation. E.g. both IT and FMCG start-ups would need their own websites. While an IT start-up would need to focus more on text formats as blogs, resources, and social media, an FMCG start-up needs good photo stock and individual product data as content for both website and social media.
One key area to focus for content marketeers is CTA — call to action, which as the term suggests invites users to make some action, drawing them closer to the business. It may be signing up for a newsletter, downloading a PDF in exchange for email address, making them drop their contact details etc. A seasoned content marketeer would know how to plug-in CTAs across the online channels.
The takeaway here is to do the homework of how you want your customers to find you. Once the channels like a website or social media are finalized, put efforts in building content around it.
For more details and self-study visit websites like HubSpot, Neil Patel etc.
2. Email marketing
Email marketing is one of primary ways to keep your customers engaged. This is often termed as audience retention, as having an email address means the person found enough value in a product or service to subscribe to it.
This is one of the primary reasons why many business websites ask for emails to deliver newsletters — an email communication typically carrying updates on products or company news in general. Content marketing team churns out text periodically along with some needed graphics to make the email body easy on the eyes.
These generated contents are then sent to list of people in bulk via email marketing tools like Mailchimp, Elastic Email, etc. These tools help automate email marketing activities, so it is not necessary to keep a person stationed to do the messaging manually. A good list is compiled by wpbeginner on email marketing tools and alternatives.
So far so good. However, the larger purpose of attaining an email address is to generate leads, which is a jargon for a potential customer. This person may not yet have paid for a product or services but is interested enough to look into it. This is where email marketing gets a lot more serious and enters into lead nurturing.
Simply put lead nurturing is the process where a potential customer is (hopefully) converted to a paying customer via constant correspondence over mails, and other channels of communication, which is followed via CRM — customer relationship management tools.
CRM tools like Zoho, Salesforce provide a much larger functionality when it comes to building and maintaining relationships with customers. SelectHub’s page on Top CRM Features and Functionality List explains it well.
Company websites with lead magnets (entry points which prompt people to provide email addresses) are primary and reliable sources of leads.
3. Social media marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing, in my opinion, is the easiest part of digital marketing to learn and master. Social media platforms though varying in their communication designs, are an integral part of digital life. Marketer or not, people are used to communication nuances of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat and so on.
There are multiple online resources on how to market on a given platform. Social media marketing enthusiasts however need to familiarize themselves with two approaches —organic and paid.
Simply put, organic is free. A social media post which can be an image, or a link along with some comments and hashtags reaches its followers or people who may share similar interest but do not follow yet. Organic reach increases via shares or retweets.
On the other hand, paid campaigns, which are not limited to social media, are set-up by page owners to target an audience suitable for their product or services. Each social media platform has its own settings and demography based on the people they have on the platform.
SMM team works closely with content marketing team when the volume of content produced is high and needs scheduling. Images and meme templates often work well to get people interact with social media posts. This is termed as engagement. Online tools like Canva are popular platforms with stocks on images, videos, and templates many of which are accessible for free.
Companies, irrespective of their size, cannot miss out on social media marketing.
4. Search engine marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing refers to efforts made to make a product or service visible as results on SERPs — search engine result pages when users make search queries. A website with high DA — domain authority (ranking score of a website on a scale of 1–00 based on search query relevance), and PA — page authority (ranking score of a single page on a scale of 1–100 of a particular page) appear as top results of the query.
The search results can be both organic and paid. A website with SEO (search engine optimization) optimized content is likely to rank higher with time and efforts. SEM campaigns are often paid campaigns, and since Google dominates this category, Google AdWords is a sought skill. Both DA and PA were developed at Moz, which is a go-to platform for SEO toolset. SEMrush and Ahrefs are also notable sites.
PPC (pay per click) is yet another important term to familiarize and learn. PPC is the amount an online advertiser would pay when a user clicks on their ads. This is linked to the ad bidding systems and displaying search results as ads when a user enters a query. Pick someone with experience on running PPC campaigns if search ads are a priority for your business.
SEM demands experience and good content writers who know how to create SEO optimised content. Any business before investing in SEM needs to ensure that the website, lead magnets, resources, and information are in place.
Please note that, though I am aware and sort of familiar with needed SEM tools, this is one of the sections of digital marketing in which I have not worked properly. Refer to other sources for more details if this interests you.
5. Influencer/affiliate marketing
Social media has empowered general people to share the content they create online and create their own follower base. Promoting products or services via influencers is the easiest way to reach a target audience.
Influencers would often create content from a certain category — fashion, travel, technical etc which makes it easier for brands to find the right fit.
Good to know — ASCI i.e. Advertising Standard Council of India, which is a regulation body for advertisements has drafted rules for influencers to call out a promotion, promotion, and not content.
Advice you did not ask for but may prove useful
Now this section is a general advice based on personal experiences and observations.
1. Creations vs Tools
Before you decide to make a shift to digital marketing, decide if you want to create content or manage tools. On a personal note, I believe that digital marketing becomes much more easier if you have a knack for writing since most of the brand communications are strongly dependent on text format.
However just writing is not enough. It is good to experiment with tools like Canva, manage some of the social media handles, get better at SEO optimized content writing, and also to familiarize oneself with nuances of email marketing. These are basics and sets one well on the path of being a content marketeer.
SEO on a broader level with paid SEM campaigns functions separately and requires working with a team that is producing content. For people with a background in web development, beginning with SEO may look fairly easy for the familiarity with HTML, page structures, and tags. Google’s blog on SEO vs PPC is a good place to learn the basics.
If you are not a creator, find a friend who is. Ask them to add you as an editor on their social media handles to get used to. Later on, you can also experiment with paid campaigns on Facebook as admin. It is much easier to experiment with Facebook with small budgets and seeing how targeting works. This exercise makes it much easier to promote content on other social media handles and then eventually explore other tools for CRM, SEM, and so on. Pick one aspect of the digital marketing which seems easiest to you and explore it.
2. SEO, SEM, SMM trio
Before any paid marketing activity, small businesses looking to grow need to focus on getting their websites up and ready. The first version of the website is not going to be on point, but it should communicate clearly what the business is all about, should have SEO optimised content, must have a clearly spelled out “About Us” section, should link to social media handles, have CTAs in place, and should avoid any broken links.
Post this exercise, people can choose to invest in SMM and SEM organic and paid campaigns. A social media calendar in place and SEO optimised content across handles pave way to invest further in digital marketing of businesses and individuals.
3. Tracking and analytics tools
The benefit of online marketing is the accessibility to data over a period of time as well as in real time. This makes it easier for digital marketeers to track which posts perform well in terms of reach/impressions, engagement rate, link clicks, website clicks and more!
Google Analytics is a free tool which can be accessed by businesses and individuals alike. An individual can link multiple websites to GA under a single email id and track numbers, respectively.
Another useful jargon in the space of digital marketing is where two variants of a page are shown to two sets of target audience and their response is measured. This is a way to determine what kind of content/messaging/branding is preferred by a certain target audience.
4. AIDA model
The where the letters mean — Awareness, Interest, Demand, Action is a marketing practice which segregates customer journey from point where they are just looking/researching for products and services to actually making the purchase.
This model is useful for marketing or public relations, and has seen some more evolution to itself, which you can read here.
5. Marketing ethics
Put simply, do not lie. Though marketing often dwells in the grey area between communicating what exactly things are and where they can go, gimmicks do not fare well in the long run.
Conclusion
In conclusion, digital marketing is a continued effort and there are going to be lots of learning in the process. Though courses do not make someone an expert, specific courses on content, social media, email, or ad campaigns provide good benefits. The idea is to pick something which seems like an easy entry and then build on further.
Hope this helped. Kindly let me know. :)
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
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