What is digital marketing and why do you need it?

The short version.

Digital marketing is a specialized area of ​​marketing that applies techniques designed to increase exposure or sales using digital technologies. Or simply, it is a way to increase sales or exposure using computers, tablets and phones.

The long version.

You have a store or a single product. Maybe a book or a mobile app. You want to increase your sales.

Or perhaps you are running a political or awareness campaign. Maybe you have a brand. Either you just have an idea or you are promoting an event. You want as many people as possible to know.

This is exactly what digital marketing does for you. It includes a host of techniques, some of which you may already be using without even knowing they fall within the realm of digital marketing. The goal, as stated above, is to increase exposure / reach and sales. These are some of the techniques that digital marketers use to achieve their goals:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Paid Advertising

• Content marketing

• Influence marketing

• Content automation

• Social media marketing

• Direct email marketing (newsletters)

• Show ad

• E-books, optical discs and games, mobile apps

• SMS and MMS Marketing

• Callback and on-hold mobile ringtones

Let’s talk in more detail about some of the most important aspects of Digital Marketing.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Let’s face it: everyone uses search engines to find things online. So this is a big and very important issue. Why? It just doesn’t matter if you have a great website or page if people can’t find it! And while there are other ways to drive traffic to your site, ranking high in search engines will be the most reliable source of traffic you’ll have in the long run. Search engine optimization is essential!

There are two types of SEO:

• On-page SEO refers to the things your site should implement in the code and content (without going into details, this includes the right things: title tags, meta tags, URL and navigation structure, image attributes, sitemap site, header tags, keyword density, page load times, etc.).

• Off-page SEO refers to all the things you can do outside of your site (link building, blogger reach, social media, etc.).

SEO is a sustained effort, it is not something you do once and you can forget about it: search engine ranking formulas are updated frequently and constant monitoring and adaptation is needed to stay ahead of the competition. It is also a long-term effort, some changes take weeks to show results.

But again, let’s face it: everyone is doing SEO (up to a point). SEO is no longer enough: to get ahead of the competition, to achieve set goals, SEO is simply not enough anymore.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Paid Advertising

SEM is all about increasing visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) – do something to make your link more visible than the rest (increasing the chances that people will actually click on it). To be clear, the broader field of SEM also includes SEO (after all, getting your site to the top of search engine results pages through SEO fulfills the requirement of “being more visible than the rest “), but for a better understanding, I wanted to talk about them separately.

So how do you increase your link’s visibility on search engine results pages? Mainly through paid advertising: All major search engines provide an advertising service (such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads). Unfortunately, buying search engine advertising (or at least getting it right) isn’t simple; it involves a lot of research, monitoring, and optimization.

The first big decision you need to make is which search engine will you advertise on? This is answered by the initial research that you will need to complete: Target audience: demographics, age, gender, geographic location; These are some of the things that pinpoint the most suitable search engine to advertise on (this also tells you which search engine you should do SEO for). Then there’s keyword research (deciding which keywords to advertise), which includes some research on the competition. If your more obvious keyword choices have very strong competitive advertising, it might be a smart choice to invest in other less obvious, long-tail keywords. After doing some more research (does your target audience respond better to text or images? What time of day are they online? Etc.), you can set up campaigns and start monitoring performance, search trend, etc. . Campaign parameters are constantly changing, so constant monitoring and tuning is an integral part of search engine advertising; otherwise, your costs will spiral out of control and your reach will plummet.

Social media marketing

Having your site / page high on the search results is great! You get a steady stream of people interested in what you have to offer. But you could always use more! More people find out about you, more visitors to your page, more conversions, more sales. And even though everyone uses search engines to find what they’re looking for, what about people who don’t even know they’re looking for something? Get on social media – the best way to be in front of even more people. But social media is not just about advertising your stuff, it is much more than that: building an audience, changing wishes, receiving comments, customer support, contests and much more. Social media is a great opportunity with many different options and possibilities. Unfortunately, this also makes it complex. Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr, are just a few of the popular portals that people use every day, each with its own specifications and requirements; some focus on text, some on images, and some on video. What portals will you approach, what will you publish, how often, when?

Building a social media presence requires a perfect understanding of what you are offering, a lot of research, and a lot of trial and error. It is a marathon, not a sprint: create followers and keep them, convert and expand them, change trends … And then there is paid advertising on social media portals, something that cannot be successfully executed without a good understanding of your audience. . . Therefore, it takes time, patience and a lot of research.

But once this is done (correctly), you can expect another steady stream of people interested in what you have to offer.

Junk mail

Email marketing is a profitable way to reach your users and keep them engaged, interested, and always coming back.

Unfortunately, not many business administrators are aware of the great value that “subscribers” bring to their sites. Newsletter marketing is often ignored because when a site is first launched, there are very few users accessing it (hence no need to run a daily / weekly newsletter). And as the user base grows, the newsletter aspect is too often forgotten.

Make sure you don’t make that mistake! Start collecting subscribers now and in a few months you will have a valuable marketing asset at your disposal.

But more specifically: what exactly is a “newsletter” and how can it be used? Well … It’s a cheap way to achieve your goals by sending some emails.

However, things are not that simple. There are certain laws that govern this practice that you must obey. Most notable: you should never send unsolicited emails. This means that each user must have previously agreed to receive that particular newsletter from you (usually through the “Subscribe” function on your site / page).

There are two ways to treat newsletters.

You can manage everything on your own. This means collecting your site data and informing your users, creating a mailing list, and manually sending each email from your own email provider. This is fine if you have a small subscriber base (<100) and don't send emails too often.

But as your subscriber base grows, you will find it increasingly difficult to manage things on your own. This is where the use of specialized online newsletter services comes into play. These service providers manage everything for you (except writing your newsletter content, of course) so you can focus on the important things (delivering high-quality content to your subscribers).

There are many such services, most of which give you a free version / trial that you can safely use until you decide to go for their paid subscriptions.

Best practices regarding newsletters:

• Content is king. As with the rest of your site, the most important thing is to provide your readers with good, quality content. Otherwise they will just ignore your emails and after a while they will unsubscribe from your newsletter.

• Don’t forget to include links to your site. It seems obvious, right? You would be surprised …

• Decide what the purpose of each mailing list is: keep subscribers informed, ask for opinions, conduct surveys, or more commonly, drive traffic back to your site. It is better to have more than one mailing list so that you do not mix the interests of your subscribers (unless planned).

• If the purpose of a newsletter is to drive traffic to your website, be sure to “annoy” the reader enough to click the link and read more about that particular topic on your site.

• Always include a working unsubscribe link in your emails!

• Don’t flood your readers with too many emails.

• Make a shipping schedule and stick to it (regardless of whether it’s daily, weekly, etc.). It is always good that your readers anticipate the arrival of the next newsletter.

• Make sure to send your emails when users are most likely to read it! It doesn’t matter if you create a great email with great content, but it’s geared toward seniors and you send it out at 4am …

• Keep the subscription form on your website short and “friendly” – don’t ask for more information than you really need (most of the time, just the email address will do).

• Make sure your emails display correctly on mobile devices. Many users (even half in some parts of the world) read emails from their phone or tablet.

Optimizing your site for end-user interaction and conversion

This is an important topic, often neglected. We will discuss it thoroughly in a future post.

For now, if you want to read more about what we have discussed so far, I am going to go into much more detail in this post: OPTIMIZING and MARKETING Your Website – The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide.

Enjoy!