Digital Marketing - A Step-By-Step Guide

Digital Marketing has become an essential marketing strategy for any business to connect with potential customers, drive sales, and promote their products and services.

The digital world has changed rapidly over the last decade, and as a result, the traditional form of marketing has evolved and has been replaced with digital marketing. Earlier, businesses relied on newspapers, magazines, and television to promote their products and services. Now, business marketing has been revolutionised to a great extent.

Today, social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are the most prominent online mediums to market the business and connect with the prospects. Social media marketing strategy saves time, money, and cost as compared to traditional marketing.

“In 2019, the number of Smartphone users in the United Kingdom rose to 55.5 million, making it 82.9% of the population” as per Cybercrew.

With this, it is clear that digital marketing is no longer an option; it is a necessity for any business looking to succeed in today’s marketplace.

With digital marketing becoming a buzzword these days, everyone wants to become a successful digital marketer. Not only because digital marketing is an in-demand profession, but also it is a growing industry.

This comprehensive guide will help you understand all the fundamentals of digital marketing and help you become a pro digital marketer.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the use of digital channels to reach existing and potential customers. It uses internet-based devices, social networking sites and other digital platforms to promote the brand. Its primary objective is to target specific audiences, gather customer information, run marketing campaigns and track business insights.

SEO, social media marketing, PPC, content marketing, email marketing and mobile marketing are some of the popular digital marketing strategies that improve the overall promotion campaign of the brand. It also helps to enhance the website’s visibility and aids in ranking higher in Google SERP engine ranking. Better Google search engine ranking means more eyeballs visiting your web pages and making a potential purchase.

Types of Digital Marketing:

Here is the list of the digital marketing strategies that you can incorporate into your business to execute successful marketing campaigns, drive high-quality website traffic to the website, maximise leads, and optimise the user experience:

(SEO): SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It optimises the website to drive traffic, enhance its visibility, and rank higher on the search engine result page. It analyses the words and phrases people are searching for and helps you to include them in your blogs, articles, and other content formats. Targeting keywords, good link structure and content indexing, are the fundamental features of SEO.

68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, as per InterGrowth. Therefore, it makes SEO the most useful digital marketing strategy in increasing customer loyalty with frequent communications, engages the customer at every buying stage, and helps to target the right audience.

If you are interested in enhancing your SEO skills and expertise, register yourself with Lead Academy and get certified in SEO Online Course.

Social Media Marketing: Social Media marketing is a popular digital marketing strategy that uses social media channels to promote a company's products and services. This digital marketing strategy involves posting, tweeting, pinning, and blogging engaging and compelling content. The goal is to create unique and creative content to connect with the target audience, improve brand reputation and drive sales.

To reach the broader target segment in a specific niche, the social media marketers promote the products or services on popular social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter and more.

To become a master in Social Media Marketing and build a successful career in this profession, join the Social media marketing online course offered by Lead Academy.

Content Marketing: Content marketing is a digital marketing technique that involves the creation and sharing of content online. Podcasting, blogging, video, lead magnets, email and infographics are some types of Content Marketing formats. The content is written in various forms such as blogs, articles, podcasts, videos, ebooks, case studies, infographics, and more to increase customer engagement.

Good quality content helps to drive traffic to the website and boosts the website’s Google ranking. Enhanced Google ranking can be achieved with content marketing tools like Slack, WordPress, Google Analytics, etc.

As per HubSpot, nearly 40% of global marketers believe that content marketing is a significant part of their marketing strategy. It makes content marketing one of the popular marketing strategies. 

PPC: Like SEO, Pay-per-Click (PPC) is also a process of boosting traffic on the website through advertisements. PPC uses advertisements to promote the brand's products and services on online platforms like Google search pages, YouTube and various social networking websites. However, using a PPC marketing strategy to rank on Google's SERP is a tough job. Search Engine Results Page, referred to as SERP, decides which ad to prioritise based on an algorithm.

The PPC ads are the same you see on the top of Google's search page, before YouTube videos, on Instagram, Pinterest and other social networking sites. PPC  is used for a particular website depending upon the client’s budget. As long as you will pay for the advertisement, the ads of the brand will highlight. Once you stop the payment, the ad will disappear. Thus, PPC is the fastest way of driving traffic to the targeted website.

In 2019, the search advertising made 6.72 billion British pounds, as per Statista.  This makes PPC one of the vital digital marketing strategies.

Email Marketing: Email Marketing is one of the most effective and popular revenue-generating marketing tactics to connect with prospects. The strategy involves writing compelling Email headlines and drafting engaging emails. This marketing strategy includes sending the newsletters, latest offers on the products and remarketing messages. It strengthens the growth of the brand by connecting with the prospects and ultimately drives sales.

As per HubSpot, nearly 80% of marketers confirmed an increase in annual email engagement globally. This makes email marketing one of the digital marketing strategies.

If you want to become an expert in Email Marketing, pursue the Email Marketing Skills course of Lead Academy today!

Mobile Marketing: Mobile Marketing is a digital marketing strategy that helps reach the targeted audience via tablets, smartphones and other internet-based mobile devices. The process includes promoting engaging videos, audio and text content on smart devices. In addition, marketers can implement SEO and PPC marketing strategies to maximise customer reach, and visibility as most target audiences (especially the young population) use mobile phones and other smart devices to stay updated about products and services.

As reported by DataReportal, 92.8% of mobile devices access the internet globally. The data makes Mobile Marketing one of the famous advertising strategies. The domain also encompasses countless career opportunities. If you want to pursue your career in mobile marketing, enrol with Lead Academy and pursue your favourite mobile marketing course.

Benefits of Digital Marketing?

Let's see how digital marketing helps businesses to maximise customer reach and drive traffic to the website:

Lead Generation: Digital marketing helps businesses to generate potential quality leads through various digital marketing tactics. You can generate high-quality leads by branding your products and services via different content formats or digital marketing strategies. Some popular content formats are blogs, articles, ebooks, videos, whitepapers, infographics, and much more.

Measuring the Results: With the availability of data analytics software such as Google Adwords, SEM Rush, Google Analytics and more, measuring the impact of the Digital Marketing strategybecomes effortless. The generated result is called key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPIs help the business in building strategy and hence generate effective business outcomes.

Targeting the Potential Customers: SEO, social media marketing, PPC, and other digital marketing strategies help companies to reach their potential customers. The marketers use creative content, display advertisements and emails to target the right audience.

Increased Loyalty: If you are writing content regularly in the form of articles and blog posts, your readers are likely to remember you. It keeps the readers hooked to your compelling content and informs them about new products and services in the market. This is how marketing strategies such as content marketing helps to increase brand loyalty.

Better Conversion Ratio: Unlike traditional marketing, where keeping track of the marketing progress is challenging, analytical tools of digital marketing such as SEM Rush, Google Analytics and Google Adwords provides essential marketing insights such as trending topics people are searching on google, high-volume keywords, long-tail keywords, difficulty, keyword density, to name a few. With the strategic implementation of digital marketing, it becomes easy for the marketer to decide which types of content resonates with the potential customers. The unique and creative content helps businesses engage customers with the brand and helps to convert leads into sales.

How does Digital Marketing help in overall business growth?

Before digital marketing, businesses used radio, television, magazines, mails, flyers and events to reach potential customers. The traditional strategy was expensive and less effective in promoting products and services. However, with the increase in the individual's internet-time, promoting the brand online became the need of the hour. This is how digital marketing came into practice.

Digital marketing made advertising and marketing affordable for everyone, irrespective of the size of the business. Hence, companies are investing in it to acquire overall business growth.

Here is how digital marketing can help the business grow:

Cost-effective:Traditional marketing uses television ads and print media for promotion, which are very costly for small scale and medium scale businesses. On the other hand, digital marketing promotes brands online, which is cost-effective and more efficient than traditional marketing.

Geographical expansion and wider reach: With traditional marketing strategies, the global development of the business becomes a time consuming and tedious task. Implementation of effective digital marketing strategies helps in expanding the business geographically. Digital marketing strategies are flexible, easy to set up and can target a desired group of audience.

Better Revenue:Effective digital marketing strategies result in the global expansion of the business and a higher conversion rate, which ultimately helps the company enhance sales and earn higher revenue.

As per Google, businesses using digital marketing have 3.3 times the probability of increasing their workforce and have a minimum of 2.8 times higher revenue growth expectancy than companies using traditional marketing plans.

Increased Brand Awareness: Digital marketing strategies such as email marketing and content marketing increases brand awareness among the customers by sharing informative emails and text, video and audio content.

Increase Google Ranking: Digital Marketing helps to optimise the content, thanks to SEO and boost the website ranking in Google’s search results. Better SEO friendly content means more potential customers visiting the website and making the desired purchase 

Conclusion

Digital marketing has changed the way marketing is done. It is inexpensive, faster, measurable and interactive as compared to traditional marketing. By implementing this marketing technique, you can bring more traffic, conversions and revenue to the business.

Digital Marketing offers numerous job opportunities to aspiring students specialists with countless possibilities of business growth and expansion. If you want to build a strong career in Digital Marketing, you need to get registered with the Digital Marketing Course of Lead Academy. The extensive Digital Marketing For Coaches & Trainers course is endorsed by the Quality Licence Scheme and approved by CPD.

The Digital Marketing online course is crafted by industry experts and helps you gain comprehensive knowledge of the subject. The self-paced course will help you head start in your career and earn an accredited qualification in Digital Marketing.

Along with Digital Marketing, Lead Academy also provides many professional courses for Email Marketing, Social media Marketing Online Course, Digital Marketing and Advertising Course and SEO Online Course.

Visit the official website of Lead Academy today to master the Fundamentals of Digital Marketing!