Digital Marketing Tutorial: A Step-by-Step Guide To Become an Expert

Introduction – What is Digital Marketing

The Digital Age is here. Today, it is nearly impossible to imagine a world without the Internet. Thanks to the increasing penetration of digital devices like smartphones and the Internet of Things and the growing accessibility of the Internet, our world is now a Global Village. According to Statista, as of January 2020, almost 4.54 billion people were recorded as active Internet users, meaning that 59% of the global population is actively engaging with the Internet and digital platforms. Naturally, the ever-expanding digital domain opened up new possibilities for marketing and enter – Digital Marketing.

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The essence of marketing is to connect with the right audience in the right place and at the right time. Now, this “place” is the Internet where people are already spending a significant amount of their time. 

To put it simply, Digital Marketing refers to the marketing approach that uses the Internet and electronic devices like smartphones, laptops, and computers to connect with the right audience (prospective customers) through digital channels like social media, email, text messages, GIFs, e-books, search engines, and so on.

Digital Marketing is a broad umbrella that encompasses numerous marketing techniques, including  search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing (SMM), content marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and PPC advertising. Let’s deep dive into this digital marketing tutorial to understand every components of digital marketing.

Why Digital Marketing?

Unlike traditional marketing methods that primarily depend on physical techniques of marketing (for instance, print ads, flyers, billboards, etc.), Digital Marketing can occur anytime, anywhere via online platforms. Since a large portion of the global population already has access to the Internet and possesses smartphones, through Digital Marketing you can connect with your target audience in any part of the world and at any time. 

The presence of social media has further made it impossible for entrepreneurs and organizations to ignore Digital Marketing. If you are not building your presence “online” you are missing out on an ocean of opportunities. The two most important benefits of Digital Marketing are brand awareness and customer retention.

No wonder why an increasing number of brands are adopting Digital Marketing strategies. While established companies are building official websites to represent their brand, small businesses and startups often start off small through social media channels. 

Here are some reasons why you cannot ignore Digital Marketing anymore:

• It allows you to interact with your potential customers and understand their exact needs and preferences.
• It allows you to build personal relationships with your target audience, thereby enhancing brand loyalty.
• It lets you customize your marketing efforts to suit the specific needs of individual customer segments (buyer personas).
• It allows you to track and monitor the vital KPIs to measure your overall success.
• It is more cost-effective than traditional marketing techniques.
• It is the perfect tool for small businesses since it helps level the playing field.
• It equips you with the power to expand to the global marketplace.

Since Digital Marketing offers numerous strategies and approaches to marketing, there’s plenty of room for creativity and customization to cater to the unique needs of your business and customers.Learn more about the advantages of digital marketing.

How Digital Marketing Helps Businesses?

Today, the role of Digital Marketing for businesses has gained a newfound prominence in the industry. No matter what industry you are in, you need Digital Marketing to grow and expand your business. The best thing about Digital Marketing is that apart from expanding your customer base, it lets you hit the bull’s eye – connect with the right people. You will get to know about this more in detail when you will go through our Digital marketing tutorial. Hence, your marketing efforts always remain more targeted, guaranteeing higher rates of success. 

Furthermore, Digital Marketing is all for personalization which not only improves customer satisfaction but also increases their loyalty towards your brand. With the right Digital Marketing techniques and efforts, you can create reliable branding, irrespective of the size of your business.

B2B companies

B2B (business to business) companies demand a unique and well-designed marketing plan. As the name suggests, B2B marketing is all about marketing a brand’s products/services to other businesses or organizations. Since B2B companies are no longer exempt from Digital Marketing, it is about time that B2B marketers invest in the right Digital Marketing tools and techniques.  

While thinking about Digital Marketing strategies for B2B marketing, it is natural to go straight to direct and outbound marketing techniques. However, there’s much more to B2B Digital Marketing. 

Here are 8 Digital Marketing strategies for B2B companies that you can use to boost your brand awareness and exposure:

• Adopt the research and demographic targeting approach.
• Create an engaging and informative website.
• Invest your time in SEO (both on-site and off-site SEO).
• Invest your time in client research and review.
• Harness the power of referral marketing.
• Segment PPC campaigns
• Create engaging video ads along with quality digital content.
• Leverage social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)

B2C companies 

When it comes to B2C (business to customer) marketing, companies seek to interact directly with their potential customers and promote their products/services to them. The goal of B2C marketing is to design and build throughtful and evocative strategies that can effectively convey a brand’s value to its target customers. 

More B2C companies are resorting to Digital Marketing since it promises to offer unlimited exposure in both national and international markets. To add to that, Digital Marketing helps B2C companies to create successful marketing campaigns at much less cost than conventional marketing techniques. Unlike conventional marketing that relies heavily on physical elements (hence, the increased cost), Digital Marketing hardly involves any physical element. Reduced costs inevitably lead to increased profit margin. 

Here are seven Digital Marketing strategies for B2C companies that have a high success rate:

• Dig deep into your customer profiles.
• Drive customer-brand engagement through contests or quizzes.
• Drive traffic to your website through SEO techniques.
• Offer gift cards/loyalty points to customers from time to time.
• Create a strong brand following on social media platforms.
• Use email marketing to its fullest to reach your existing and potential customers.
• Connect with influencers to build trust and take advantage of their network.

List of Digital Marketing Channels

Now that we have discussed at length about what Digital Marketing is, it’s time to dive into the discussion on the types of Digital Marketing channels or Digital Marketing techniques. We’ve highlighted seven types of Digital Marketing Channels:

1. Paid Marketing (SEM)

SEM (search engine marketing) in Digital Marketing is a form of paid marketing. Search engine marketing process is one of the best ways to grow your business and promote your products/services in a competitive market. 

How does PPC advertising work?

SEM refers to the marketing technique that utilizes the power of paid advertising along with other tools to increase the visibility of websites in search engine results pages (SERPs). These paid ads are known as pay-per-click ads that usually come in different forms. While some PPC ads may be simple text-based ads, others might opt for a more visual approach, like product listing ads (PLAs).

So, this is basically how PPC works – advertisers bid on keywords that users are highly likely to search on platforms like Google and Bing while looking for specific products or services, thereby allowing advertisers to display their ads alongside the search results.

Different Types of Campaigns

The term “SEM campaign” refers to an advertising method designed to generate ads in search engines to help websites gain top ranks in SERPs. A solid SEM campaign strategy is fundamental to your online brand building journey.

The most effective SEM campaign strategies include:

• Search advertising – It is a technique wherein display ads appear in SERPs when you enter specific keywords and search queries to search for a product/service.
• Display advertising – Display advertising is a form of advertising usually placed on relevant third-party sites using text, logos, animations, videos, photographs, or other graphics to portray a commercial message.
• Social media advertising – It is a form of advertising that uses paid ads to attract the target audience using social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
• Remarketing – Remarketing is the practice of displaying targeted ads to users who have already visited your website or interacted with it in some way. 
• Sequential remarketing – It is a form of story-based remarketing where you not only target the users who have been on your site but you do so by creating long-term campaigns with dynamic content (like stories, messages, etc). 

Ad Writing Techniques

Creating engaging PPC ads helps you attract the attention of the right kind of people. While PPC ad writing is a tricky business, these ad writing techniques should help – 

1. Always include relevant keywords in your headlines.

2. Depict clearly how you aim to solve the pain points of your customers.

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3. Try to incorporate emotional triggers in your ads to evoke the emotions of your target audience.

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4. Include numbers or relevant statistics in your ads to attract users who respond better to empirical proof.

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5. Highlight the benefits in your ads instead of features to show how your product/service will add value to their lives

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Bid Management Plan

Bid management in Digital Marketing refers to the process of automated management of bidding for Digital Marketing campaigns. Usually, marketing managers define and set the bid management algorithms based on the available resources to facilitate automated management. 

With help of bid management tools, you can automate your CPC (cost-per-click) bids for different Digital Marketing campaigns. Also, when combined with a  digital analytics solution, bid management tools help you create brand awareness while simultaneously generating profits.

The three main bid management strategies are:

• Rule-based bidding 
• Portfolio-based bidding 
• Positional bidding

Landing Page Optimization

Landing page optimization (LPO) is a branch of conversion rate optimization (CRO). It is a process that involves enhancing each element of your landing page to boost the conversion rate of a website. 

Take a look at some of the best landing page optimization strategies:

• Eliminate unnecessary functionalities, navigation elements, and extra form fields.
• Evaluate headline variations and call-to-action texts that resonate with the language used by your visitors in their search queries.
• Add contact information like phone numbers, or email address, or contact forms to help users find you readily.
• Try contrasting colors for icons and elements in your landing page.
• Try various offers to obtain customer contact information.
• Maintain visual consistency in your landing page.
• Reduce the page loading time.

Read more about landing page optimization methods to get better results.

2. SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a holistic process of optimizing a website to get organic (unpaid or free) traffic from SERPs. SEO is not a single tool but a suite of tools and best practices that allow your website to rank higher in SERPs, thereby creating an influx of traffic to your site. To put it simply, SEO refers to the technique of obtaining more traffic from free and organic searches on search engines. Furthermore you will get to know more about what is seo in digital marketing and how seo works. 

How do Search Engines work?

All search engines use crawlers to identify the relevant web pages for their algorithmic search results. These crawlers, also known as spiders or search engine bots, crawl millions and billions of pages using advanced search engine algorithms to produce a set of high-quality results in SERPs. Are you curious to learn how search engine algorithms works? Let’s discuss about it.

Essentially, this is how search engines work:

1. Crawl – They browse and scour the Internet for relevant content by closely monitoring the code/content for each URL they come across.
2. Index – They store and organize the content obtained via crawling and then index the same. After a page is indexed, it is approved for being displayed in the SERPs. 
3. Rank – They rank the results according to the content quality, which means that the pages are ranked in order of most relevant to least relevant.

Role of Keywords

If you are a Digital Marketer, you are well aware of the importance of Keywords for Digital Marketing. In layman’s terms, keywords refer to specific ideas or topics that can capture the essence of your content. However, in SEO terms, keywords refer to the words and phrases that users use in their search queries. Thus, keywords are specific words or phrases that drive traffic to a website. 

Keywords are an integral part of SEO – they are the link between what you search for in search engines and the content they provide in SERPs. The keywords you use in your content, meta title, and meta description determine how well you will rank in SERPs and what will be the volume of visitors coming to your site. Keywords may either be short-tail keywords or long-tail keywords.

If you are wondering how to do keyword research, it is not a challenge anymore. There are numerous tools like SEMrush, Keyword Explorer, and Google Keyword Planner that help you track down the right keywords based on the language and search queries used by your customers.

On-page Best Practices

Here are some of the best strategies for on-page SEO and on-page optimization:

1. Title tags

• Keep the length of title tags limited to 55 to 60 characters. 
• The format for the title tag should be – Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name.

2. Meta descriptions

• Avoid using non-alpha characters or quotes in meta descriptions.
• The ideal meta description length should be anywhere between 150 to 160 characters.

3. Content (with relevant keyword)

• The content should be relevant to your target keyword.
• Use the target keyword at least four times in your content.
• Keep your content lucid and visually appealing.
• Include links from other pages on your site.

4. Header tags and keyword phrases

• Use the target keyword phrase once in the H1 tag.
• Use H2 tags only if there are multiple sections.
• Use H1 tags on pages you wish to leverage for driving unique traffic to your site.

5. Image ATL tags and filenames 

• Keep the image description relevant to what they are.
• Use dashes between the words instead of underscores.
• Do not use non-alpha characters in image or file names.

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Technical SEO

So far, we’ve talked about SEO, but what is technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the method of optimizing a website for efficient crawling and indexing to improve its search visibility. It is called technical SEO since it has little or nothing to do with the content of a site but instead focuses on optimizing the site’s infrastructure. Technical SEO is a broad umbrella that includes all crucial technical aspects like sitemaps, meta tags, keyword research, linking, and JavaScript indexing, to name a few.

The best practices of technical SEO are:

• Specify a preferred domain for your site or blog.
• Optimize the Robots.txt along with your URL structure.
• Optimize the navigation and site structure.
• Add breadcrumb menus for seamless navigation.
• Implement structured data markup
• Check all the canonical URLs of every page of your website.
• Optimize the 404 pages on your site.
• Optimize your XML sitemap.
• Add SSL on your server to build an HTTPS website.
• Boost your website speed along with page loading time.
• Optimize your website for mobile devices.
• Opt for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to boost the speed of the mobile websites. Click to learn more about Technical SEO.

SEO Strategies

When it comes to the SEO game, Google is the top player. Every year Google makes around 3,200 algorithm changes! Just thinking about the number is enough to make you dizzy. But then, Google is doing everything right. How so?

By creating a well-designed and structured SEO strategy and implementing it. If you, too, wish to ace the SEO game, make sure to implement these SEO strategies in 2020:

1. A/B split testing – By adopting A/B split testing, you no longer need to manually make changes to your website for SEO. all you need to do is to install a JavaScript code (like the one Google analytics hands you), and you are good to go!
2. Host HTML files using a CDN – Since speed has a direct impact on rankings, using a Content Delivery Network is the best option to boost your site speed. By caching your images and static content, CDN amps up the page loading speed significantly.
3. Test multilingual title tags – There are special SEO tools like Clickflow that automatically test your title tags and meta description to improve the click-through rate.
4. Opt for FAQ page markup – FAQ page schema markup allows you to drive more traffic from organic searches. All you need to do is add commonly asked FAQs to your search listing.
5. Create content clusters – Content clustering aims to create distinct sections in your website surrounding various topics that may be similar but are not the same. By creating content clusters and linking relevant content (based on related topics), you let search engines identify the main content.

Link Building

Link building is a pivotal SEL technique that focuses on obtaining hyperlinks from other sites to your own. It is the process of encouraging other websites to link back to your website. Links act as a signal for search engines about the quality of a website – the more relevant backlinks you have on your site, the higher will be your search ranking. Links show search engines that your website is trustworthy and reliable. Hence, marketers are now heavily investing in link building strategies to increase the authority of their websites and also drive referral traffic.

Some of the proven link building techniques include:

• Strategic guest blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your site. HubSpot maintains that brands that actively engaged in blogging create 97% more inbound links and 55% more visitors. 
• Make your presence known on social media platforms by posting relevant blogs, posts, images, short videos, etc., as they are fantastic tools for customer-brand engagement.
• Infographics are excellent to convey vital messages in a visually appealing form. They can produce 37.5% more backlinks than a standard blog post!
• Include resource links from trusted sites like Forbes, Huffington Post, and Jeff Bullas, on your website.
• Keep a close track of your competitors’ backlinks to stay on top of your SEO strategy and make sure to replicate the best links among them on your site.

Web Analytics

Wondering what is web analytics? Web analytics refers to the process of collecting, analyzing, measuring, and reporting web data to understand critical aspects like web usage and user behavior across different web pages to evaluate and improve the efficiency of a website. You can use web analytics tools to assess and measure things like:

• The outcomes of advertising and marketing campaigns.
• The campaigns that drove the maximum traffic to the website.
• The number of users visiting a website, their duration of stay, and the pages they visit.
• The changes in website traffic immediately after the launch of a new advertising/marketing campaign.
• The key performance indicators that drive business success, including net sales, purchase conversion rate, the average time for conversion, the number of qualified leads in the sales funnel, and so on.

3. Content Marketing

In Digital Marketing, content is everything – Content is King. As a Digital Marketer, you will naturally invest a lot of time and effort in getting your SEM and SEO strategies straight. However, if you don’t pay attention to the content you post on your site, your search engine ranking is bound to suffer. In order to avoid that, one must always first focus on creating content marketing strategy.

What is Content Marketing?

As the name suggests, content marketing revolves explicitly around content creation, publication, and distribution to a target audience to push them to visit a website. Content marketing lies at the heart of Digital Marketing – it helps generate new leads, increase customer loyalty, and increase customer-brand interaction. 

For instance, Glossier, the cult beauty brand, relies on the power of user-generated content to boost its Instagram following and position. Likewise, AARP Magazine, one of America’s largest consumer magazines, comes up with quality content every time. How do they do it? By listening to their readers, they strive to understand their pain points and create content that they would love to read. These content marketing examples are what set the standard high in the Digital Marketing industry. Read more about increasing sales with content marketing.

Why is content marketing important for business?

Here are six reasons highlighting the importance of content marketing:

• Build a trusted brand image – By consistently creating relevant content and sharing it with your network on the right channels, you establish your brand as a reliable authority in the field.
• Improve organic searches – When you create unique, relevant, and informative content for your target audience, search engines recognize your content as valuable, thereby positioning your content at the top ranks of SERPs.
• Generate new leads – Higher ranking in SERPs and a trusted brand image go a long way in helping netizens find you on the Web. Content marketing helps increase marketing leads both quantitatively and qualitatively.
• Attract the right people – By identifying your target buyer personas, you can create highly personalized content for these target groups. In fact, So, when you publish content, you will attract the attention of ideal prospective buyers.
• Build backlinks – Needless to say, if you create and publish meaningful content, others in your field will want to link to your content. This will further expand your network since users from those sites will come to your website for content.
• Encourages visitors to share your content on social media – Once you establish yourself as an industry expert with your content, your loyal customers will happily share your content further in their respective social circles on different social media channels.

Types of content

Content marketing encompasses a wide range of content types. Here are the eight most popular types of content:

• Blogging
• eBooks 
• Video 
• Infographics 
• Case studies
• White papers
• Longform content
• Template and checklist downloads

You can create the ideal content marketing strategy for your brand by combining the different content types and focusing on the ones that bring in the most leads and sales.

Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing strategy is a part of content strategy. In essence, content marketing strategy is like a smaller strategy that fits right into the bigger strategy (content strategy). 

While content strategy primarily focuses on the planning, creation, and maintenance of content, content marketing strategy is more concerned with marketing the created content. Content marketing strategy aims to build an audience base by consistently creating, publishing, and distributing content that is educative, entertaining, inspiring, and meaningful.

To build a robust content marketing strategy, ask yourself the following questions:

• Who comprises your target audience?
• Who are your major competitors?
• What is your core content strategy?
• What is the purpose behind your content?
• What content formats should you focus on?
• What can you offer to your users that others in your field cannot?
• How frequently should you post or publish content?
• How do you plan to manage your content?
• Which channels should you use for distributing your content?

If you can successfully find the answers to these questions, creating a content marketing strategy will become much easier for you!

Content mapping based on the customer journey

Did you know that you can boost your leads tremendously by mapping your customers’ journey?

Essentially, the customer journey comprises three main stages – awareness, consideration, and decision. Thus, a customer journey map is a visual representation depicting each experience an individual customer has with your brand. 

An effective content mapping strategy based on the customer journey outlines how every content is strategically related to the customer journey and how it impacts the same. By doing so, you can better visualize the opportunities that can help you cater to the specific needs of your target audience.

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By creating a content map based on your customer journeys, you can reap the following benefits:

• Identify whether or not the customer journey is in a logical order.
• It helps you see where in the purchase funnel your customers interact with your content.
• It depicts how your content plans to help alleviate the pain points of customers in each stage of their journey. 
• It enables you to concentrate your efforts and resources on the most crucial aspects of your business for maximum effectiveness.
• It depicts the gaps between the desired customer experience and the one they experience in the real-world scenario. 

 4. Social Media Marketing

Well, everyone knows about social media now. But how businesses can utilize social media? What is Social Media Marketing? Social media marketing refers to the marketing approach that solely focuses on using social media platforms/channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., for connecting with the target audience for increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, driving web traffic, and so on.

Social media marketing strategies include designing engaging content, listening to what people are saying on social media platforms, monitoring and evaluating analytics reports, and running social media campaigns, to name a few.

Facebook Marketing

According to Statista, Facebook has over 2.4 billion active users, which makes it the most popular social network in the world. Naturally, Facebook presents a wonderful opportunity for digital marketers to capitalize on content and user engagement. 

Facebook marketing pertains to actively using Facebook as a communication tool and channel for customer-brand interaction and engagement. Marketers can create both individual and business profiles to spread awareness or develop a fan base for a product/service. By creating a Facebook page and crafting actionable Facebook marketing strategies, marketers can encourage customers to connect with their brand and reach out to them. 

Twitter Marketing

Just like Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing is another way of promoting your brand and connecting with your target audience. It is a known fact that Twitter is a powerful social media tool where you can find information on any topic whatsoever, be it entertainment news or national/international political affairs.

To reap the benefits of Twitter for brand building and awareness, you must first create a solid Twitter marketing strategy. Essentially, a Twitter marketing strategy refers to a well-designed plan that focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your customer personas and followers via Twitter. The end goal is to improve brand recognition, attract new followers and prospective buyers, boost conversions, and increase sales. Some of the most effective Twitter marketing strategies include Twitter lists, Twitter chats, and Twitter moments.

LinkedIn Marketing

As we mentioned earlier, LinkedIn is one of the most extensively used social media tools worldwide. With over 675 million professionals on LinkedIn, the platform is used by both aspiring entrepreneurs and established businesses. 

LinkedIn marketing is all about using LinkedIn’s professional network to promote your brand and business. The platform allows you to connect and interact with an active community of professionals and users to drive actions specific to your business.

While you can promote your business with LinkedIn Ads, you can also seamlessly manage your ad campaigns with Campaign Manager. but before doing this one must prepare a LinkedIn marketing strategy which will give precise steps to work on goals and get the results. Furthermore, you can also publish engaging content on your company page on LinkedIn.

Video Promotion via YouTube

YouTube has over 2 billion logged-in monthly users with people uploading around 500 hours of video every min on the social media channel. So, you can imagine how big YouTube is! Thanks to the millions of informative, entertaining, and engaging videos on YouTube, it has joined the ranks of Google for searches – be your search related to any topic, YouTube surely has something for you.

This is the reason why brands are now using YouTube to spread the word about their products and services. The idea behind YouTube videos is to educate people about your brand and your core values. However, since YouTube has no shortage of content, you must use YouTube optimization best practices to make your videos stand out in the crowd. For instance, you can optimize your video description, categorize your videos, upload custom thumbnail images for your videos, and add cards and end screens to increase viewership. Click to learn more about YouTube SEO.

5. Affiliate Marketing 

Thanks to the rise of social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, affiliate marketing is the latest trend in the Digital Marketing domain.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a marketing technique that involves promoting the products or services of other brands or companies in exchange for a specific commission amount. If you are the promoter here, you are the “affiliate.” The idea behind affiliate marketing is that you can promote the products/services of other brands and vice versa, and if the target audience ends up buying the products/services you promote, you can earn a piece of the profit gained from each sale that happens through you.

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Affiliate marketing is all about referring products or services of other brands via blog posts, videos, etc., on social media channels or your website. Each time someone purchases the brand you promote through the unique link provided by you, you earn a commission. Thus, affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing that can generate substantial profits, provided you do it right!

How does affiliate marketing work?

Affiliate marketing is based on revenue sharing between two parties, namely, the product/service owner and the affiliate marketer. In essence, affiliate marketing aims to boost the product creation and product marketing processes among different parties, wherein each party gets a portion of the earned revenue based on their contribution. 

So, if you are the owner of a unique product and wish to expand your network of users and followers, you can connect to like-minded affiliates via an affiliate program. These affiliates can promote your product in their respective circles and increase your sales. Likewise, if you are not the creator of a product but you want to earn money, you can reach out to different brands and promote their products and receive a commission for each sale you make. 

Here’s how affiliate marketing works:

1. You must first find and join an affiliate program. 
2. Then you choose which offers you can/wish to promote.
3. You obtain a unique affiliate link for the offers you will promote.
4. Now you share those links on your website and social media handles in the form of blogs or videos.
5. Earn commission each time a user clicks on your link and makes a purchase.

Reasons to become an affiliate marketer

As affiliate marketing is rapidly gaining traction in the industry, there’s all the more reason to become an affiliate marketer. Here are reasons why become an affiliate marketer:

• You do not have to create or develop a product/service – You need not even bear the costs associated with business development!
• Affiliate marketing has relatively low business costs – You only need a stable Internet connection, a computer/laptop, and an entrepreneurial mindset.
• Affiliate programs have no signup fee – Most affiliate programs are free to join.
• In affiliate marketing, you always have the option to choose from a multitude of products/services (also, you can choose to promote the offers that interest you).
• Affiliate marketing requires no standard business procedures like inventory management, customer service, shipping costs, and so on.
• As an affiliate marketer, you will enjoy the perk of earning unlimited revenue – The more sales you make, the higher will be your commission.

How to become a successful affiliate marketer?

The road to becoming a successful affiliate marketer requires hard work, patience, persistence, and a thirst for knowledge. Although you cannot become successful affiliate marketer overnight, so here are steps on how to become an affiliate marketer:

• Take baby steps to figure out what you need to do as an affiliate marketer. You cannot expect to earn a truckload of money in your initial days itself. You need to learn the tricks of the trade with patience.
• Learn from your predecessors. Take inspiration from the success stories of those who are experts in the trade and learn from their experiences.
• Before you promote a product, make sure to learn about its nitty-gritty and USP. Then create an engaging promotion campaign or story to pitch the idea to your followers.
• When you take up the responsibility of product promotion, you must first make a plan that provides a clear picture of the strategies you will use to promote the product. 
• Once you’ve tried your hand at different marketing areas, you can identify which niche market is your strongest suit. Focus on that particular niche and sharpen your marketing skills to build a reputable name for yourself in that niche.

Types of affiliate marketing channels

There are basically six types of affiliate marketing channels or programs. They are:

• PPC (pay-per-click) – In this marketing model, an affiliate is paid when they refer visitors to the company website (whose product they are promoting). Although affiliates are paid even if their referrals don’t lead to any specific actions (like, purchase a product), the pay is relatively low. 
• PPL (pay-per-lead) – In this program, the affiliates are paid only for the converted leads. So, the visitors who come to the site via their referrals must fill sign up forms to become a lead.
• PPS (pay-per-sale) – In this channel, the affiliates are paid only when their referrals purchase from the company’s official site. The commission is paid on a certain percentage of the product price.
• Sitewide commissions – In this model, the company offers sitewide commissions to the affiliates. This means affiliates will get a commission for any purchase (not a specific product) on the site through affiliate referrals.
• One-time commissions – In this affiliate marketing program, affiliates are paid only once after their referrals are successful in performing the predetermined action (lead conversion or purchase).
• Recurring commissions – This affiliate marketing channel offers commissions to the affiliates according to subscription-based programs. So, the affiliates will be paid as long as the referrals of the affiliates remain signed up with the company.

Affiliate marketing strategies of 2020

Now that you are well-versed in affiliate marketing, here are the top five affiliate marketing strategies that you must implement in 2020!

• Stick to promoting products that you are familiar with – Affiliate marketing is mainly about building trustworthy relationships with your audience. Thus, before you promote a product, make sure you have enough knowledge about it.

• Experiment with your promotion campaigns – While you must identify your niche market and focus on building a strong foothold in the same, don’t forget to collaborate with multiple merchants. Keep your promotions diversified. 
• Focus on mobile-friendly affiliate programs – Needless to say, this is the era of smartphones and mobile devices. Just as websites are now optimized for mobile devices, you must also aim to take up affiliate programs that are optimized for mobile platforms. This will help you to expand your audience base.

• Optimize your conversion rates – As an affiliate marketer, you must continually monitor and optimize your conversion rates. This includes testing your landing page, call to action buttons, and conversion rate optimization strategies. 

• Know your affiliate traffic sources – Apart from focusing on the volume of traffic and conversions, you must also know the sources from where your traffic is coming and their demographics (age, location, etc.). By doing so, you can create personalized messages for individual customer segments for optimal customer satisfaction. 

6. Email Marketing

Email is one of the most powerful Digital Marketing tools. As of now, there are 3.8 billion email users globally, thereby making email the perfect marketing tool to reach your target audience. And since email is going nowhere, any business that wants to stay relevant in 2020 must practice top email marketing tools which can help them get desired results.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a direct marketing technique that involves the use of electronic mail (email) as a tool for communicating commercial messages to an audience. It may include sending advertisements, new offers, loyalty coupons, fundraiser information, business requests, and much more. Email marketing is used to build brand loyalty, trust, and awareness.

While many think that email is outdated, they couldn’t be farther from the truth. Even today, email is one of the most widely used means of communication worldwide. 

Benefits of email marketing

Why Email Marketing?

When done right, you can reap the following benefits of email marketing:

• It allows you to craft personalized emails for attracting your different customer segments.
• Emails make for an excellent tool to build your brand identity and credibility since you get direct access to the email inboxes of your customers and potential customers.
• It is a fantastic approach to boost sales. Through targeted emails, you can feature items that resonate with the preferences of your customers, products they have purchased before, and even inform them about discounts, offers, and coupons. 
• It lets you track the essential metrics conveniently. For instance, you can monitor your email open rate, click-through-rate (CTR), and even conversion rate. 
• Well-crafted emails can drive a substantial volume of traffic to your website. You could even include social sharing buttons in your emails to encourage your customers to share the message across their social circles.
• Email boasts of generating high ROI. Since email marketing can get your conversion rate to touch the sky, it can also provide a significant boost to your ROI.

How to do email marketing?

While it’s true that email is far from being dead, it is a challenging task to craft a successful email marketing strategy. So, then how to do email marketing? Just follow these simple steps:

• Identify and define your audience – To ensure that you design relevant and personalized emails for your customers, you must first identify and define the different buyer personas, understand their pain points and their preferences.

• Set your goals – To set realistic and actionable goals, you must start by researching the email stats for your industry. Once you find the numbers and metrics, you can use them as benchmarks for your marketing goals.

• Allow people to sign up – Email marketing is about getting people on board with you, that is getting them to subscribe. If you want to expand your subscriber base, you must create a permission-based email list including a checkbox so that users can opt-in to your mailing list, know what kind of emails can they look forward to, and how often they want to receive emails from you (daily, weekly, etc.).

• Experiment with email campaigns – There are many different types of email campaigns that you must experiment with. Seeing the outcomes of these campaigns, you can decide which type of campaign works best for you and focus on that.

• Create a schedule – To create a schedule for your email marketing strategy, you must decide how frequently you plan to contact your email list. Once you design the plan, make sure to let your audience know about when they will hear from you, and be consistent with it. 
• Measure the results – Just as it is with all marketing techniques, even email marketing metrics must be tracked and measured. The metrics help you identify the areas of improvement and tweak your email marketing strategies accordingly.

How to increase your user base?

You can effectively increase email subscribers by following these simple steps:

• If you want your audience to look forward to your emails, you must create unique and relevant email content every time.
• Always include social sharing buttons in your emails to push your subscribers to share your message with their family and friends, thereby increasing your reach.
• Classify your email lists according to the different buyer personas. This will help you send targeted messages to cater to the specific interests of your buyer personas.
• Revitalize a dead email list with opt-in campaigns. You can create an engaging opt-in message and mail it to your old list that you think would take a newfound interest in your brand.
• You can add hyperlinks to the signatures of your employees. These email signatures can bring people to your landing page and encourage them to sign up for your mailing list.
• You can write a whitepaper or an ebook and host them on your landing page. People who wish to download and read them can drop their email addresses. While they get the whitepaper/ebook, you get their email addresses. So, it’s a win-win.
• You can host free giveaway contests using your social media handles in exchange for contact information (name and email address, primarily).
• Pinterest is an excellent platform to host engaging visual content for encouraging visitors to sign up to your website to view the content.

Ways To Improve Open Rate & CTR

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Open rate and click-through-rate are two of the prime determinants of the success of your email marketing strategy.

Follow these rules to increase your email subscribers

To increase the open rate of your emails, make sure to abide by these rules:

• Always keep your email list fresh and relevant. Try to keep your email lists filled with active subscribers who engage with your mails.
• As we said many times before, segmenting your email list is an absolute must. It allows you to send out customized emails to your subscribers.
• At all costs, avoid spam filters. To do so, you can ensure that your recipients actually opt-in for the emails and also by sending out your email campaigns from a valid IP address.
• Your timing for sending your emails should be perfect. A/B testing can help you figure out the timeframes that deliver the best results.
• Attract your subscribers with witty and smart subject lines. Keep a conversational tone.

To increase your email open rate, you can do the following:

• Always give people a choice to opt-in for your emails. You can use either single opt-in or double opt-in to obtain the email addresses of your subscribers.
• Know how to use Preview Text to your advantage. This text offers your subscribers with a snapshot of what’s inside your email.
• Pay attention to email formatting. Keep your emails mobile-friendly and also focus on the readability factor.
• Provide a clear call to action (CTA) in your emails to encourage your subscribers to take some form of action and interact with your brand.
• Always test everything, including preview text, subject line, layout, CTA, and of course, the content. 

Learn more about the advanced techniques of email marketing.

7. Mobile App Marketing

As mobile devices have become part and parcel of our daily lives, it is only natural that the canvas of Digital Marketing is expanded to include mobile apps for marketing. 

What is mobile app marketing?

Mobile app marketing refers to the marketing technique that aims to interact with mobile app users throughout their user journey, right from when they download and install the app on their mobile device to when they become a loyal user of that app.

Mobile app marketing demands that you keep your users engaged at every stage of the marketing funnel – from discovering your app and installing it to getting them onboard and interacting with the app. 

Importance of mobile app marketing

Some of the most remarkable benefits of mobile app marketing are:

• Mobile apps ensure that you enjoy all-time visibility. While users may not always have the time to log in to their desktops to see important messages and emails, a mobile device allows them to view them on-the-go.
• Mobile apps are a quick and useful tool for driving customer engagement and interaction. They can inform users about new product launches, promotional offers, etc., thereby fostering direct communication.
• Mobile apps are excellent for building customer-brand relationships through timely notifications, alerts, and reminders that push users to take action. 
• Mobile apps help improve customer experience and satisfaction as they can interact with your brand and even make purchases from you on-the-go. 
• Since a large percentage of the global population use smartphones, mobile apps can help expand your customer base to a great extent. As your customer base grows, the credibility of your brand also increases.

Mobile app marketing vs. Mobile marketing

Although mobile marketing and mobile app marketing are synonymous, they are quite different. Essentially, mobile marketing is a broad umbrella that covers everything related to the mobile platform – mobile ads, apps, and mobile websites. On the other hand, mobile app marketing is primarily focused on app promotion while ensuring the engagement and retention of app users.

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy that aims to reach the target audience on their mobile devices via emails, text messages, push notifications, social media ads, and so on.

However, mobile app marketing is all about creating marketing campaigns exclusively for targeting mobile app users at every stage of their lifecycle. Apart from attracting new users, the latter focuses on improving customer retention and lowering the churn rate. 

List of mobile app metrics

Here are the mobile app analytics metrics you should look out for:

• Users – It pertains to the average number of daily/monthly users who actively engage with your mobile app and create value for your business.
• Session length – It refers to the duration of time a user actively uses your app in a particular session (from opening it to closing it). 
• In-app time- This means the amount of time a user spends in your app over a period of time (daily, weekly, or monthly).
• Acquisitions – This refers to the number of users who download your mobile app through a specific source such as organic search, paid campaigns, referrals, etc.
• Screen flow – It refers to a user’s path through your mobile app, as is when they enter, the steps they take to get converted to loyal users, and when they exit the app.
• Retention – It refers to the percentage of users who always return to your app after their initial visit. Retention rate can be classified according to device, campaign, purchase frequency, etc.
• Lifetime value (LTV) – This denotes the revenue amount you expect to generate from a particular user throughout their customer journey. LTV can be pivotal to calculating how much you need to spend on new customer acquisition efforts. 

Mobile app marketing strategies

If you wish to make your mobile app stand out in the crowd, you must follow these mobile app marketing strategies:

• Research on your target market – If you don’t conduct proper market research to identify your target audience, your marketing efforts will go to waste. Instead of reaching out to everyone, you must focus on resonating with your target customers. Also, conducting market research helps you to get a good idea of your competitors, thereby allowing you to amp up your marketing game.

• Ensure visibility in app stores – To ensure that your mobile app ranks higher in the app store search results, you must optimize your mobile app. The core factors affecting your app store rank are title, description, app icon, and in-app screenshots. The higher you rank, the better will be your app visibility.

• Create an attractive landing page – While it is mandatory to build a visually appealing landing page, you must also focus on your content. Make sure your landing page keeps the users informed and engaged.

• Viral videos are the way to go – If you have a unique content idea, don’t let it go to waste. Make a viral video out of it and share it on your social media handles like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Keep the video fun and informative in a way that can highlight the core features/goals of your mobile app.
• Monitor and measure your KPIs – By regularly analyzing and evaluating the key performance indicators of your app, you can get valuable insights on its overall performance and success. 

What is a Digital Marketing Campaign?

A digital marketing campaign is an online marketing strategy explicitly designed to drive engagement, conversions, traffic, and ROI. The campaign is crafted, keeping in mind both the short-term and long-term goals of a brand/organization and relies on more than one digital channel. The purpose of a digital marketing campaign is to let you identify your priorities and articulate your digital marketing strategies accordingly. Follow these digital marketing step by step strategy guide to explore.

How to build a step-by-step comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy? 

By now, you must already know that a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is a broad canvas that includes a host of elements and carefully crafted actions designed to help an organization achieve its short-term and long-term goals. The components of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy include different buyer personas, social media, SEO, SEM, digital marketing tools, and digital marketing channels (paid, earned, and owned media), and so much more. If you wish to reap the optimal benefits of digital marketing, your digital marketing strategy must clearly outline how to use these components.

Since we’ve discussed at length about SEO and SEM, now we’ll focus on the other six crucial elements that make a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

1. Design Customer Personas

We know we’ve said it before, and we cannot help but stress this point enough! 

Your marketing strategy can only be successful if you know who you should market to. In other words, you must identify your target audience who “need and want” your product/service. Thus, building a detailed guide on the different buyer personas that you will be catering to should be the first priority of your digital marketing strategy.

In layman’s terms, buyer personas are nothing but a representation of your ideal customer/s. To create digital marketing customer personas, you have to conduct extensive research, survey, and even interview your target audience. The idea here is to gather as much real data about your customers as possible. 

To obtain a 360-degree view of your digital marketing customer persona, your research pool must comprise a mix of existing customers and prospective customers along with people who aren’t in your contact list but who are a close match of your target audience. You have to focus on collecting both quantitative and qualitative data to create buyer personas.

Quantitative data

• Age – Knowing the age of your customers helps you understand the needs and preferences of a particular age group. This helps you to design the products to suit the needs of the different age groups.
• Location – This is a necessary data that lets you know where your customers are based from. Tools like Google Analytics can help you obtain the location of your customers, thereby pointing to the locations that generated the maximum traffic.
• Income – Although most customers are unwilling to share sensitive information like personal income in online survey forms, they might offer it if you conduct a personal research interview.
• Job profile – This data is pivotal, particularly for B2B companies, as it helps you get a good idea of your existing customer base. 

Qualitative data

• Buyer goals – Every customer who interacts with your brand has a specific goal in mind while browsing for products/services or buying them. If you can obtain this data, you can improve your product to enhance customer satisfaction quotient further. 
• Pain points – You can reach out to your customers via online survey forms or relevant questionnaires to understand the pain points of your target audience and the everyday challenges they face. It will help you to build products that can effectively address those pain points.
• Priorities – When you collect customer data, make sure to obtain detailed information on the priorities of your customers in relation to your brand and products. For instance, try to know why they come to you and what they expect from you.

2. Outline your marketing goals and the tools you will need to accomplish them

When you set the digital marketing goals for your brand, always make sure that they are perfectly aligned with your business goals (look at the bigger picture). Your marketing goals could be brand building, generating leads, acquiring new customers, capturing new markets, and so on. Once you’ve outlined your digital marketing goals, you must set them in motion and also measure the metrics to determine their success. 

This is where digital marketing tools come to the picture. When you have the right tools for digital marketing, you can measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy and see what improvements it is bringing to the table. Tools like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Buffer, MailChimp, Ahrefs, HubSpot are excellent for monitoring and measuring the success of your digital marketing strategy.

3. Analyze the existing digital marketing channels and assets

While devising your digital marketing strategy, you must evaluate all the existing digital channels and assets that you use and identify the ones that you can incorporate into your new digital strategy. You can categorize your existing digital channels and assets by leveraging the owned, earned, and paid media framework.

• Owned media – As the name suggests, this includes all the digital assets that your brand owns. Owned media includes your official website, social media handles, blogs (even off-site content that you host on other sites like Medium), and other platforms/tools that are completely under your control.
• Earned media – This refers to the media exposure that you have “earned” through word-of-mouth promotion. It can include guest posts, PR work, and social media reviews (comments, shares, and mentions), and press mentions. 
• Paid media – This includes all the media channels that you spend money on to attract your target audience and prospective customers. Paid social media posts and ads, native advertising (for example, sponsored posts on other sites), tools like  Google AdWords, and other channels that you use to promote your brand in exchange for money. 

If you wish to accomplish your digital marketing goals, you must ensure that these three digital marketing channels are utilized wisely and optimally. 

4. Analyze and plan your earned media strategy

With a carefully crafted earned media strategy, you can significantly improve sales and boost conversion rates. However, the one aspect where most digital marketers go wrong with earned media is the lack of analysis of their earned media strategy. 

It is crucial to evaluate and analyze your earned media strategies by placing them against your present marketing goals. This helps you identify the core areas of focus that you can implement in your present earned media strategy.

Try to evaluate things like where the maximum traffic and leads are coming from, which type of guest posts are driving most relevant traffic to your site, what social media platforms are getting the most shares, mentions, and comments, what kind of response did you get from a press review, and so on. 

The aim behind analyzing your earned media strategy is to develop an all-round picture of the goals earned media will help you achieve and how. To plan a well-structured earned media strategy, do the following:

• Prioritize your goals
• Set a budget for earned media
• Focus on your target audience
• Identify the topics of interest of your target audience.
• Determine how you will use your resources and tools
• Connect with reputed industry experts for collaboration
• Always make sure to track and measure the metrics

5. Analyze and plan your owned media strategy

Owned media forms the core of your digital marketing strategy since it is the one channel that’s completely under your control. And when it comes to owned media, content is the prime focus. Whatever you promote under the owned media banner will inevitably be portrayed as content, be it your homepage, your “About Us” page, your product descriptions, the blogs/infographics/ebooks you post on your site, or the posts you put up on your social media handles. 

With good content, you can win the attention of your target audience while also boosting your brand’s image and credibility. Thus, you must pay close attention to the content that you put forth. Evaluate the content that you have already posted and see which ones brought the maximum traffic via organic searches and led to the most conversions. Once you figure out the content form/s that drive the most website traffic, try to focus more of your efforts and resources on those types of content. 

Here’s how you can evaluate and plan your owned media strategy:

• Audit the existing content – To audit your existing content, first, make a list of all the content that you’ve created and posted so far. Then rank each item according to its performance, but the order should be in relation to your present marketing goals. For instance, if your priority goal is to boost web traffic, rank the content items that produced the maximum traffic moving on to the ones that didn’t. This way, you’ll know which type of content works best for you. 
• Figure out the gaps in the existing content – The next step is to identify the gaps in your existing content based on the unique demands, preferences, and pain points of your buyer personas. For instance, if you are a leading cosmeceutical brand and a particular buyer persona’s main challenge is to find what products can slow down the process of aging, your primary focus should be on creating informative content on this and related topics. 
• Make a content creation map – Once you’ve completed the previous two steps, it is time to devise a content creation map that clearly outlines the aspects of useful and engaging content. Your map will contain –  title , aim (what the content seeks to address), format, promotional channels that you will use to distribute it, and budget estimate.

6. Analyze and plan your paid media strategy

Just as you need to assess and devise your earned and owned media strategies, you must also analyze the performance of your paid media efforts and the outcomes they bring. The idea is to evaluate your existing paid media efforts across individual platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., and determine which forms of paid media are ideal for meeting your current marketing goals. 

Often it may happen that you’ve invested a substantial amount of money and time on a particular paid channel/tool (like Google AdWords), but it failed to bear the expected results. This is your wake up call – either you must get to the root of the problem with the channel/tool, or you must discard it from your present paid media campaign and focus on the ones that deliver the best results. Learn more about PPC marketing tools to help you with your planning.

After you’ve completed all the six steps in the order we’ve mentioned, you will have a well-structured, comprehensive digital marketing strategy ready to go!

Role of a Digital Marketer

Since we’re talking about digital marketing, our discussion will be incomplete if we don’t talk about the function of a digital marketer. A digital marketer is a professional who specializes in the digital marketing niche. The role of a digital marketer largely depend on the organization. You may be responsible for singular aspects of the company’s digital marketing strategy, or you may lead the marketing team and flesh out the company’s overall digital marketing strategy.

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Digital marketers often wear multiple hats within an organization – they act as leaders, supervisors, and managers whose prime responsibility is to leverage various digital channels (company website, social media, corporate blogs, etc.) for business expansion and promotion. To achieve this end, they create an actionable content strategy, focus on SEO and SEM, make social networking decisions, reach out to influencers and affiliates, and offer advice to the upper management regarding all things associated with digital marketing. Another vital job responsibility of digital marketers is to monitor and measure marketing analytics to identify the gaps in the marketing strategies and fix them accordingly. 

Below are a few classifications of the role of a digital marketer:

1. SEO Manager

What does an SEO Manager do?

SEO is a specialized branch of digital marketing, and hence, SEO Managers planning, implementing and managing a company’s SEO strategy. They focus on all aspects of SEO, including keyword research, content, web analytics, and reporting, link building, user intent, mobile SEO, and technical SEO, to name a few. SEO Managers take charge of a company’s SEO strategy and design effective SEO campaigns to ensure higher search engine rankings and web visibility.

2. PPC Manager

What does a PPC Manager do?

A PPC Manager is responsible for the overall pay-per-click media strategy of a company or its clients. They are mainly concerned with effective PPC management and their focus areas include launching and optimizing PPC campaigns, keyword analysis, competitive analysis, monitoring and reporting KPIs, managing budgets, A/B testing, and ad spend filtering.

3. Content Marketing Manager

What does a content marketing manager do?

Content Marketing Managers are responsible for planning, implementing, and managing a company’s content marketing operations. It is their duty to ensure the success of content marketing strategies. They design the content marketing strategy, implement the proper tools for content planning, manage day-to-day content creation, editing, distribution, and promotion, and create detailed reports on the outcomes of different content marketing initiatives.

4. Social Media Manager

What does a social media manager do?

Social media managers represent a company’s voice across all social media channels. They are digital marketing experts who are responsible for carefully curating the social channels leveraged by a company. This includes monitoring and responding to audience comments and mentions, collaborating with other brands and managing social media partnerships, creating and posting shareable videos and images. Their sole aim is to enhance the online presence of their organization.

5. Affiliate Marketing Manager

What does affiliate marketing manager do?

An Affiliate Marketing Manager is responsible for supervising and managing an organization’s affiliate programs (both external and internal) through each stage. Their duties include brainstorming, launch, maintaining, trafficking, marketing, reporting, optimization, and analysis of affiliate programs. Affiliate Marketing Managers also recruit new affiliates to expand the distribution of affiliate programs.

What people want to know more about Digital Marketing

As we said earlier, digital marketing is a vast canvas that encompasses many little elements, techniques, tools, and strategies. So far, we’ve discussed the core aspects of digital marketing, including its definition, its benefits, the various marketing channels, how to devise a robust digital marketing strategy, and the multiple roles of a digital marketer. But the discussion doesn’t stop here – there’s a lot more to talk about!

Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing

The debate between traditional marketing vs. digital marketing is an ever-circulating one. While traditional marketing has been around us forever, digital marketing, too, isn’t particularly new. Until the breakthrough of the Internet in the 90s, traditional marketing was pretty much the only marketing technique around. However, things began to change gradually with the advent of the Internet. 

The primary difference between traditional marketing vs. digital marketing is in their use of marketing medium through which they strive to reach their target audience. 

Traditional marketing is the type of marketing and brand promotion that aims to reach a semi-targeted audience via offline methods of advertising like print ads (newspapers, magazines, flyers, and billboards); direct mail (postcards, catalogs, etc.); telephone (SMS and phone calls), and broadcast (radio and television). Digital marketing, on the other hand, is the marketing technique that relies on the use of the Internet, digital media and platforms, and electronic devices. 

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Let’s look at the three other main points that make up the traditional marketing vs. digital marketing debate:

• End goal – While the primary aim of traditional marketers is to boost sales and revenue with their offline advertisements, digital marketers not only aim to increase sales and revenue but also provide value to their customers. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing seeks to maximize customer satisfaction. 
• Communication – Traditional marketing is a one-way street. In it, only marketers get to put forth their ideas and strategies before their target audience without encouraging any form of interaction from the users’ end. Contrary to this, digital marketing is focused mainly on customer-brand interaction. Customers can always connect with brands and interact with them through testimonials, social media comments, shares, and mentions. 
• Data-driven – Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is extremely data-driven. All the strategies and campaigns that come under the banner of digital marketing are based on real-world data and metrics. Also, being data-driven, digital marketing allows more scope for customization to attract different buyer personas.

Does Digital Marketing work for all businesses?

Yes, digital marketing works for any business in any sector of the industry. The idea behind digital marketing is to promote a brand through online and digital mediums to reach the target audience and encourage them to become loyal customers of the brand.

Irrespective of your business field and industry, you will always have a target audience and buyer personas. Hence, you can connect with them through engaging, interactive, and meaningful online content, campaigns, and advertisements. While that’s true, digital marketing process cannot be alike for all businesses – meaning no two companies can implement the same digital marketing strategy. 

For instance, for companies/organizations in the B2B industry, the digital marketing strategy has to be more focused on delivering industry-relevant information wrapped up in a concise shell as the B2B audience is mostly tech-savvy. The focus here is not on brand promotion, but on addressing the core pain points of the B2B clients.

On the other hand, for B2C companies and firms, digital marketing strategy has to be engaging, informative, entertaining, and eye-catching. Why? Since B2C companies are targeting customers (the common man) who need all the elaborate information delivered to them in a flashy way (unlike tech and business-savvy experts of the B2B domain). 

Thus, while the core elements, tools, and techniques of digital marketing remain the same, the method of implementing them differs from business to business. In essence, it depends on the unique needs of your business and the goals you wish to achieve via digital marketing. 

What is the role of Digital Marketing in a company?

The role of digital marketing for any business or company is to ensure that it not only survives but also thrives. By thriving, we mean that a business should continue to grow and develop with changing times. In the age of the Internet and IoT, if you are not investing in digital marketing, you will be stuck in a rut. Since digital marketing is evolving, it allows businesses to be dynamic and break away from the monotony of traditional marketing. 

Here are three key points that highlight the role of digital marketing in a company:

Boost web traffic 

Every SEO’s concern is to know how to increase website traffic. If you can identify the specific needs of your business along with the unique demands of your buyer personas, and align them with the right digital marketing strategies and tools, your web traffic will skyrocket. 

• Advertise well – By using paid search, social media advertising, display advertising, influencer marketing, email marketing, etc., are excellent means to attract your target audience.
• Get handsy with social media – Make the most of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest to spark communication with your customers.
• Focus on content – In digital marketing, content takes the crown. Hence, your content should be both relevant and meaningful. It should be something that the audience can relate to. Also, write punchy titles and taglines.
• SEO is your best friend – To sell your content well, you must optimize your content for SEO (both on-page and off-page). Perform keyword research, target long-tail keywords, and make sure to include them in your content for higher rank and visibility.
• Guest blogging is the way to go – Writing guest posts for reputable sites, and getting published is a great way to drive the traffic of other websites to your site. You should also connect with industry experts and invite them to contribute to your blog.

Lead generation

Often digital marketers struggle with lead generation. But it is no rocket science. How to increase lead generation? Lead generation can be broken down into three stages of marketing operations corresponding to the three stages of the customer journey – traffic generation, converting visitors into leads, and finally converting leads into loyal customers. 

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Here’s how you can boost lead generation for your website:

• Run A/B tests
• Optimize web pages
• Perform routine website checks
• Optimize your site for mobile platforms
• Create lead magnets through SEO techniques.
• Customize your content to suit buyer personas.
• Write quality blog posts consistently.
• Create and upload videos on your social media handles.
• Leverage the power of live chats sessions. 

Learn more about lead nurturing strategies.

Attribution modeling 

Attribution modeling is a framework designed for analyzing which touchpoints (marketing channels) are responsible for lead conversions. In other words, attribution modeling refers to the different techniques that marketers use to break up and assign the credit for lead conversion to the appropriate marketing channels.

Attribution models help identify what particular action of a user that leads to the desired outcome (like purchasing a product) and assigns a value to each of such actions.

There are mainly six types of attribution models, namely, First Interaction, Last Interaction, Last Non-Direct Click, Linear, Time-Decay, and Position-Based. Each of these models distributes the conversion values across each touchpoint differently.

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The primary goal of attribution modeling is to understand the chain of events that influences customers to act in the desired way (that is, to become your loyal customer). 

What type of Digital Content should I create?

There are many high-performing digital marketing content types. You can focus on one or two types of content to represent your brand, or you can create a mix of content types to avoid monotony.

Blogs – Blogs are one of the most extensively used digital marketing content types, especially for startups and small businesses. Forbes maintains that sites having blogs have 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t! This means that blogs can be your ticket to higher search engine rankings.

Infographics – Since it is a known fact that the human brain is designed to better understand pictorial and visual representations rather than numbers and text, infographics make an excellent content marketing tool. You can create informative infographics to engage your target audience and help them visualize the statistics in a much simpler way.

eBooks – eBooks are a type of long-form content typically aimed to offer value to business leads and customers. Since eBooks are usually a gated content type, which means that users must provide some standard information to access the eBook. Hence, it is a great way to collect data on leads.

Case studies – Case studies can be defined as customer stories that illustrate how a business has paved the way for the success story of a client. This content type is usually used to highlight special applications for a brand’s products/services. Case studies help customers to better understand how you can add value to their lives.

Checklists – Checklists are worksheets containing a list of things-to-do in a stepwise manner to accomplish a desired result or outcome. They are simple and easy to follow, and the best part, you can incorporate checklists into your blog posts or social media posts.

Social media posts – Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, are great tools to foster customer-brand relationships. Well-crafted social media posts can go viral, thereby spreading your brand name far and wide. 

Videos – Videos are a fantastic visual medium to grab your target audience’s attention. Videos are one of the most extensively consumed content forms today, thereby making it a honey pot for netizens. 

How long will it take to see the results?

Once you invest in digital marketing, there will come a point where you’ll be thinking how long does it takes to see digital marketing results. That’s the story of all digital marketers – everyone expects to see tangible results after a period of time. However, there’s no clear outline or timetable for your digital marketing strategies to reap results – different marketing strategies have different maturity timetables. Also, it takes time and expertise for your digital marketing efforts to materialize as you desire.

For instance, paid search strategies usually deliver results immediately after you set the bid prices. In contrast, SEO strategies may take anywhere between four to six months to deliver over 100 organic search results per day. Then again, brands that consistently post a minimum of 12 relevant blogs every month can witness results within six to nine months. 

So, the timeline for your digital marketing strategy to reap results largely depends on the type of strategy you are using.

What kind of budget do you need for Digital Marketing?

As is true with all business operations, digital marketing also demands a specific portion of your budget. Since the modern customer spends a substantial amount of time online, no marketer can ignore digital marketing. An increasing number of businesses are increasing their digital marketing budget to fit the dynamic demands of their customers. 

The key to developing a practical digital marketing budget is to take a look at your digital marketing goals and figure out how you need to allocate your resources. Read more about how to start digital marketing on zero budget. 

Steps to create a digital marketing budget:

• Set concrete goals.
• Analyze your previous digital marketing strategies.
• Create a list of the top ten channels that brought in maximum leads in the past.
• Allocate resources based on the performance of your previous digital marketing efforts.
• Fragment your marketing and branding requirements and choose the marketing platforms accordingly.
• Always track and measure your marketing analytics results.

How does mobile marketing come under digital marketing strategy?

According to Statista, by the end of 2020, the number of mobile users in the world will reach 6.95 billion. 

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What does this mean for digital marketing?

It means that the maximum digital interactions of the modern world occur through mobile platforms. This is the reason why mobile marketing has become an integral part of digital marketing.

Mobile marketing aims to optimize your official website, and social media handles for mobile devices, thereby enabling mobile users around the world to interact with and conduct business with brands. Mobile marketing mandates you to optimize all your digital assets like ads, web pages, websites, images, and content (layout and format) for mobile devices. You can also create mobile apps to allow your users to interact with your brand on-the-go. 

By using mobile marketing, businesses can reach a larger audience as compared to what they would gain by solely focusing on desktop digital marketing strategies. Due to these reasons, digital marketers must always consider how to optimize their digital marketing assets for mobile users while creating a mobile marketing strategy. 

How to do Conversion Rate Optimization? (Strategies to boost Conversion Rate Optimization)

Conversion rate optimization in Digital Marketing is the process of optimizing a website’s design, sponsored search ads, blogs, and landing pages to boost the conversion rate. By modifying specific components of a site, you can increase the chances of your visitors converting into leads or customers before they leave the site.

It is the technique of encouraging visitors to take some form of action when they visit your site. Thus, the goal of conversion rate optimization in Digital Marketing is to drive the highest possible percentage of visitors to your website for lead conversion or for completing a desired action. 

Steps you can take for conversion rate optimization:

• Incorporate lead flows (high-converting pop-up ads) in your blog posts.
• Include text-based CTAs in your blog posts to encourage users to act.
• Design automated workflows to free up the valuable time of your sales team.
• Include messages to high-converting web pages to increase conversions.
• Allow leads to transform into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).
• Perform A/B tests on your landing pages.

Digital Marketing Misconceptions 

Although digital marketing is a pivotal part of the industry now, it is not without misconceptions and myths. Some of the most common misconceptions in digital marketing are:

• Digital marketing is irrelevant for small businesses – Digital marketing is nothing but a way to interact and communicate with your target customers via online and digital platforms. It has little to do with the size of your business.

• Digital marketing is all things technical – While technology is a crucial part of digital marketing, it is not everything. Digital marketing focuses on integrating technology with traditional marketing practices to increase brand awareness, boost customer loyalty and sales, and increase revenue.

• Digital marketing is just another name for social media – Digital marketing is made of numerous components of which social media is only one part. There’s email marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing, and also mobile marketing. 

• Digital marketing should be kept separate from the overall business strategy – Digital marketing strategy must be perfectly synchronized with your overall business strategy to ensure a well-designed brand marketing and promotion plan.
• It is challenging to track digital marketing outcomes – Thanks to the multitude of advanced digital marketing tools and frameworks, monitoring and measuring the results of your digital marketing efforts has never been easier!

Where should I start? – upGrad Course 

Considering that digital marketing careers are one of the most promising careers in the market right now, the field is continually attracting students and professionals alike. But the question is, how to learn digital marketing, how to start online marketing?

Where to start?

upGrad is a great place to start your digital marketing journey. At upGrad, we believe in learning through experience, and hence, we’ve crafted our digital marketing course in a way that balances theoretical learning with hands-on experience. upGrad offers exclusively designed course for students and professionals. You will not only be trained by our qualified and trained faculty members, but you will also get to have one-on-one feedback on submissions and personalised feedback on improvement.

Furthermore, upGrad aims for overall grooming – candidates receive one-on-one communication sessions with mentors, attend resume building sessions, and participate in mock interviews. Get an opportunity to interview for 250+ hiring companies partnered with upGrad.

upGrad’s digital marketing course duration is 6.5 months. The course is fragmented into various modules consisting of theory, case studies, and live industry projects on topics like SEO, SEM, social media/content/email marketing, marketing analytics, campaign management, and marketing strategy, among other things.

The upGrad and MICA PG Certification in Digital Marketing & Communication course take on a holistic approach to digital marketing. By the time you finish with us, one thing is for sure – your horizon of knowledge will expand significantly and you’ll learn to think and act like a true digital marketer. With so many perks and benefits, why should you go someplace else?

Conclusion

As technology continues to advance, the domain of digital marketing, too, will improve and expand. This will create new opportunities for businesses to leverage digital marketing in radical ways to enhance their brand image and reach the global audience. The scope of digital marketing is further increasing with the increasing adoption of digital marketing across various parallels of the industry.

As a result, companies are taking a proactive stance to recruit skilled digital marketing professionals. High payscale and diverse career choices are the two core perks of a digital marketing career. We hope this digital marketing tutorial fed your curious mind and increased your thirst of getting into digital marketing. 

So, are you ready to start your digital marketing career with upGrad?

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Dilip Guru

He is a Digital Marketer, SEO & Content Expert. He works as head of SEO and content at upGrad.

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