Digital Marketing
Marketing has always been about linking with your target audience in the right place and at the right time. This, therefore, means you need to meet them where they are already spending most of their time, which in our current world is mostly on the internet. Uniquely, this sort of already explains digital marketing.
In general, the word ”digital marketing” is not just a fancy or aesthetical word used to sound intelligent or smart by professionals in a board meeting while closing a deal, in a presentation or for such purposes.
Moreover, whilst that is great, there is more to it. You may ask out of curiosity, what ideally is digital marketing?
Well, I like to think of it as a compound word, ”digital” and ”marketing”. In this context, digital means, internet while marketing means, to buy.
So, summing it up in simple terms, it means the buying of products and services via internet mechanizations or online mediums. .
[Image Source – wallpaperplay]
A Little History on Digital Marketing
In general, the term digital marketing was first popularised during the early 2000s. Although, digital marketing had been in existence for over a hundred years prior.
Actually, a man named Guglielmo Marconi was the first digital marketer in history.
Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1874, He was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor, credited with the groundbreaking work necessary for all future radio technology.
Surprisingly, through his experiments in wireless telegraphy, Guglielmo Marconi developed the first effective system of radio communication. That is to say in 1899, he founded the Marconi Telegraph Company.
Also, in 1901, he successfully sent wireless signals across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving the belief of the Earth’s curvature affecting transmission.
Marconi shared with Karl Braun the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics. Sadly, he died in Rome on 1937.
Guglielmo Marconi
[Image Source – Mental Floss]
It’s quite astonishing how digital marketing came into play. On December 12, 1901,
Guglielmo Marconi did quite a miniature demonstration in England where he transmitted morse signals across open water. However, in the process of waiting for the radio to reach the general public, the creators realized they could sell products with it.
Forbye, the first live broadcast was from an opera performance at the Met and it closed ticket deals without phones, apps, Facebook ads or blogs aiding.
There are several kinds of digital marketing but I’m only going to focus on five key ones here. They are:
- Content Marketing.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Affiliate Marketing.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a type of digital marketing that focuses on creating and distributing content for a target audience.
The crucial part here is “value” and “relevance”. This is one of the disparities between content marketing and traditional spammy advertising. This should compel the target audience to seek out the content and consume it.
Examples of content marketing go thus: Blog posts, ebooks, podcasts, infographics, videos, white papers, case studies.
Search Engine Optimization [SEO]
SEO is an acronym for the word, Search Engine Optimization, it is a type of digital marketing that is focused on the process of increasing the quality and quantity as to the traffic or visitors of a website or a web page by increasing it’s visibility to its target audience or users of a web search engine.
Furthermore, SEO refers to the improvement of unpaid results the exclusion of direct traffic/visitors and the purchase of paid placement.
So, there are quite several ways to approach SEO as to generating qualified traffic to your website. These include:
On-Page SEO: This is a type of SEO that focuses entirely on all contents existing “on the page” when viewing a website.
researching keywords for their search volume and intent/ meaning, you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs)
Off-Page SEO: Basically, this is a type of SEO that focuses on all activities which take place outside the page when you are intent on optimizing your website. “What activity not on my website could affect my ranking?” You might ask. The answer is inbound links, which are also known as backlinks.
The number of publishers that link to you, and the relative authority of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for the keywords you care about.
By networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites, linking back to your website, and generating external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to move your website up on all the right SERPs.
Technical SEO: Basically, technical SEO is a type of SEO that is focused on the backend of your website and the methods as to how your pages are coded.
Image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all forms of technical SEO that can speed up your website. This is an important ranking factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.
Search Engine Marketing [SEM]
SEM is an acronym which means Search Engine Marketing.
It is one of the types of digital marketing. Search engine marketing is a sort of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages majorly through paid advertising.
In like fashion, search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the various internet-based marketing associated with the researching, submission, and positioning of a website, within search engines as to achieving optimal visibility and increasing your share of paid and[or] organic traffic/visitors referrals from search engines.
There are three major types of SEM. They are:
- Pay-Per-Click [PPC], also known as Cost-Per-Click [CPC] and Sponsored Search Results [SSRs]
- Local SEO
- Organic SEO
Social Media Marketing [SEM]
So, social media marketing {SEM] is a type of digital marketing that is bent on promoting your brand and your content on social media platforms. This is actually to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate great leads for your business.
There are a few platforms you can use for social media marketing. They are:
- LinkedIn.
- Facebook.
- Instagram.
- Twitter.
- Pinterest and the likes.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing that is focused on a certain marketing arrangement. In this sort, an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals. In general, there are various affiliate marketing platforms. They are:
- Amazon Associates.
- CJ Affiliates.[Formerly Commission Junction]
- ShareAsale.
- Awin. [Formerly Affiliate Window]
- Avangate Affiliate Network.
In closing, digital marketing is primarily necessary in our current world because of it’s convenience, effectiveness, and sophistication. In addition, In addition, if you want to learn more about digital marketing such as the need to inculcating it to being a part of your marketing strategies, click here.
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