Digital Marketing Fundamentals

Businesses are working around the clock to find new strategies to maximize their interaction with their customers by taking advantage of technology. To do so, they have strengthened their Digital Marketing efforts to make very specific content designed to attract their target audience and engage with them.

As most companies and businesses understand the importance of digitizing their operations, there is a growing need for advanced experts in the digital marketing field to promote their services. If you are interested in learning more about this field and why it might be fruitful to study free digital marketing, scroll down to find out!

Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all marketing and engagement activities done through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. Using these online media channels, digital marketing is the method by which companies reach target audience through the channels where they spend their time reading, searching, shopping, and socializing online.

You don’t need to be a digital expert to know that your customers are spending a lot of time (and money) online these days. They’re googling, scrolling through their newsfeeds, posting selfies on Instagram and chatting to friends on WhatsApp. That means your business and your marketing campaigns need to be present during these moments as well.

• Target Prospects
• Cost-Effective
• Outrank Bigger Players
• Measurable Results

Digital marketing has become a vital component in organizations’ overall marketing strategy. It allows companies to tailor messages to reach a specific audience, making it possible to market directly to people who are likely to be interested in their product. Digital marketing encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics and technologies used to reach consumers online. Digital marketing can be broadly broken into 8 main categories including:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• PPC (Pay-per-Click)
• SMM (Social Media Marketing)
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Online PR
• Affiliate Marketing
• Marketing Analytics

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of optimizing your website with the goal of improving your rankings in the search results and getting more organic (non-paid) traffic. Search engine optimization focuses only on organic search results and does not include PPC optimization. There are two main buckets that search engines look at when evaluating your site compared to other sites on the web.

• On-page SEO looks at what your site (or your page) is about
• Off-page SEO looks at how authoritative and popular your site is.

A PPC advertising model is where advertisers pay when someone clicks on their ad. Think of it as buying visitors to your website. It is also referred to as Paid Search, Pay Per Click Marketing, Paid Search Marketing.

PPC a great way to generate quick leads and sales when you need them and you can just as easily pause it or turn it off. Paid Search Marketing is suitable for a wide range of businesses, and in many industries Google Ads have become an essential part of the marketing budget. PPC is also done on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

Social networks are now a substantial part of every marketing strategy, and the benefits of using social media are so great that anyone not implementing this cost-effective resource is missing out on a phenomenal marketing opportunity.

• Increased Brand Awareness
• More Inbound Traffic
• Improved Search Engine Rankings
• Higher Conversion Rates
• Better Customer Satisfaction
• Improved Brand Loyalty
• More Brand Authority
• Cost-Effective
• Gain Marketplace Insights
• Thought Leadership

Content marketing is the process of delivering high-quality content to your target audience to engage, raise awareness, convert, and make sales.

• Gets more traffic, leads, and purchases
• Educates your target audience
• Improves the relationship between you and your audience
• Build a community and develops your brand voice
• Can show your customers how you can help them solve their problems
• It can be done with little cost
• Helps you to test new products, and understand your customers

Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing that uses email to promote your business’s products or services. It can help make your customers aware of your latest items or offers by integrating it into your marketing automation efforts. It can also play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, building relationships or keeping customers engaged between purchases through different types of marketing emails.

Online PR, also known as digital PR, is a link-building tactic that involves creating a story or piece of creative content, and distributing it to target media to secure coverage that includes backlinks to a client’s website, thereby improving SEO and overall search rankings on Google.

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning money (commissions) every time you sell a company’s products or services. You only get paid every time you drive a sale, just like a commission for a sales representative. Merchants who sell goods and services online use one of the following commission payment models:

• Cost Per Sale
• Cost Per Lead
• Cost Per Click

There are three common commission structures for affiliate programs:

• Purchase-Based Commission Structures
• Traffic-Based Commission Structures
• Customer Acquisition-Based Commission Structures

One of the major advantages of digital marketing is that it is highly trackable and measurable. Today, analytics allow marketers to track user behavior at a highly detailed level: how many times they click on a link, how much time they spend on a web page, how often they open emails, and much more. Not only does this allow marketers to learn what is successful with consumers and adapt their marketing messages moving forward, it also means they can demonstrate their value to the company.