Digital Marketing Fundamentals

When you hear of digital marketing, what comes to mind?

I have personally observed that a lot of people think online digital marketing is all about marketing on social media. That’s not true. Yes, it involves social media but it’s far more than that. There are a lot of digital tools, platforms, and strategies that people use to market their services and products online outside of social media.

In simple terms, digital marketing is the use of digital tools, platforms, and strategies to connect and market products or services to customers online. Egs. of such tools are content, images, videos, email, social media, search engines, etc.

Now that we have an overview of what digital marketing is, let’s talk briefly about the main types of digital marketing we have:

• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing (Organic)
• Social Media Advertisement (Paid)
• Search Engine Optimization (popularly known as SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (popularly known as SEM)
• Display Advertising
• Email Marketing
• Mobile Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Google Analytics

Content Marketing

If you’ve ever written a blog post or made a video about your services or product intending to share it, then you were marketing with content. Content is the core of all marketing activity because, for all the other types of marketing, you use content.

With content marketing, we look at how to plan, create, distribute, and promote content about services or products. We also look at how to measure the impact of the content.

Social Media Marketing

This is what we are familiar with because we interact on social media platforms on a daily basis. Well, if your business is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest, you’ve likely marketed on such platforms before.

Social Media Marketing looks at the various social media channels and considers the one that best suits your services or products. It also looks at how to manage one’s social media presence and how to create effective content for each channel.

Social Media Advertisement

Have you ever paid money to Facebook or Instagram to show your content or page to as many people as possible? If you have, then you were advertising on social media. That’s the difference between social media marketing and social media advertisement.

This type of marketing looks at how to execute advertising campaigns that resonate with your targeted audience.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

We usually call it SEO for short.

If you don’t have a website, this type of marketing will not mean much to you. If you also have a website and you don’t see how it is benefiting your business, it’s likely because you’ve not taken a look at SEO.

Optimizing a website is what digital marketers do for a particular website to rank high in search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. If you type, let’s say, wedding photographers in Ghana, Google has to find a way to display and rank websites related to wedding photography in Ghana. When Google finds, for eg. 100 websites, it has to find a way to place one website first, another website second, and then, the others, third, fourth, fifth, and on, and on, and on. If Google places a website first, it means the website is highly optimized for search engines.

That’s what SEO is. It’s about working on a website to increase its ranking and visibility in search engines.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is similar to SEO. The only difference is that with SEM, you pay Google to rank your website high in its search engine. Your website may not be well optimized for search engines but once you pay Google, Google can shoot your website to the first or second position if someone is to type keywords related to your website.

Google refers to its SEM strategy as Google Adwords. That’s a special name Google has given to it. If you’ve noticed, anytime you search for something online, the first few sites or pages that will be displayed usually have an ad sign to them. The Ad sign signifies that those sites or pages are being advertised on Google.

Display Advertisement

Display marketing was the first form of advertising on the web. If you’ve ever visited a website and seen a banner ad pop up, that was a display ad.

If you’ve visited YouTube and tried clicking on a particular video to watch, only for a different video ad to stream, that was a display ad.

Formerly, display ads were limited to only images until Google acquired YouTube and incorporated video ads to the platform.

These display ads can even be seen in Gmail accounts and some mobile apps.

The idea behind display ads is to redirect people on a particular platform to another platform to take a specific action..like registering for an event or making a purchase. The display ads give viewers the option to know more about the products or services of the advertiser.

Again, the most popular display ad platform is Google Adwords.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is exploding right now. If you are looking for data that shows just how big video is and how fast it’s growing, look at this:

33% of the people’s time spent on the internet is allocated to watching videos (Depositphotos)

55% of people watch videos online daily (HighQ)

28% of people with a smartphone watch a video on their phone every day (HighQ)

The average time a person spends each day watching video content online is 1.5 hours (Wyzowl)

Desktop accounts for 89% of business-related video views (Vidyard)

87% of marketers are using YouTube, making it the most widely-used platform for video (HubSpot)

YouTube users watch over 1 billion hours of video each day on the platform (YouTube)

Mobile accounts for over 70% of YouTube’s total watch time (YouTube)

Only 46% of viewers watch a video until the end (Vidyard)

People watch more business videos on Thursday than any other day of the week (22%) (Vidyard)

The top 3 channels where video content is distributed: website (85%), social media (84%), and YouTube (67%) (Vidyard)

The world’s largest video platform, YouTube, is the 2nd most popular website on the planet (Alexa).

82% of internet traffic will be video by 2022 (Cisco).

 

From these stats, there’s no doubt that more people are spending time watching videos online.

Last year, it was even said in the world of online marketing that 2020 will be a “year of video” so as business owners, we must consider this kind of marketing going forward.

If you’ve never created a video to promote your wedding business, products, or services, think of creating one soon.

So now, the main question…what is video marketing?

Video marketing is the practice of planning, creating, editing, publishing, and promoting video content to promote your brand, business, or product.

Common platforms used for video marketing include YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Vimeo and Instagram.

To learn more about video marketing, check out Backlinko’s guide on video marketing.

Email Marketing

There is always a perception when it comes to marketing with emails. People think it is old-fashioned and therefore, dead.

Well, let the stats speak…

Why is that? With all the hype over new channels, why is decades-old technology still one of the most effective marketing strategies?

I think the answer has something to do with the fact that people use email more than other platforms. Almost every online platform, nowadays, requires an email before you can sign up. So before you get to another social media platform, you first need an email.

That’s why building a successful email marketing campaign is more important than ever for businesses.

But this is the thing about email marketing…There is no point in marketing to people who don’t know you (your business, services, or products) via email. If you do, that is considered as a spam.

Because of this, email marketing is more effective when you’ve already generated leads or acquired customers that you want to re-market or communicate with them. So the main goal is to help you retain customers or convert leads into customers.

That’s the reason before you do any email marketing, you need to find a proper way to collect and build email lists.

Mailchimp is the most popular email marketing platform.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is broad. It cuts across any advertising activity that promotes products and services via mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

I would like to think of this kind of marketing more as a marketing strategy than a type of marketing. Mobile Marketing looks at how more people are using mobile phones these days to access the internet as against those using desktops and laptops and creates optimized ads to reach these people on a mobile phone.

Social media, search engines, display ads, videos, etc consider this kind of marketing. The reason it’s more of a strategy than a marketing type.

You can learn more about mobile marketing.

Affiliate Marketing

“Make money while you sleep”. That’s a popular saying when it comes to affiliate marketing.

The idea behind this type of marketing is that you promote other people’s products, often through an affiliate network, earning a commission if people end up buying.

It’s based on revenue sharing. If you have a product and want to sell more, you can offer promoters an incentive (usually, money) through an affiliate program.

If you have no product and want to make money, then you can promote a product that you feel has value and earn an income from it as an affiliate marketer.

So another way to look at this type of marketing is to turn your customers into marketers

Once they earn you a customer, you pay them an incentive or commission.

Web Analytics

Web analytics helps you to collect, analyze, and report website data.

The most popular website analytics software in the world is Google Analytics. It allows site owners to see information about how users find, interact, and navigate between the pages of their website.

Common reports that people use in Google Analytics include traffic sources, popular landing pages, bounce rate, conversion rate, and page views.

Conclusion

I believe you are now getting the overall picture of how diverse online digital marketing is. It is more than just marketing on social media. Share your thoughts in the comment section below and let me know which type of marketing you would want me to expatiate on.