Digital Marketing For Dummies: All you require to know before you begin

Do you feel like you have a strong handle on digital marketing for your business? If no, then you’re not the only one. With the growth of the internet, marketing opportunities for companies having been always extending in the course of recent years. And, if your marketing plan doesn’t possess these digital marketing strategies, it will ruin your business. Marketing is all about associating with your customers. With the help of our article on “Digital Marketing For Dummies” we’ll explain everything you require to know about digital marketing and how to apply it to your business and grow.

Let’s get started!!

WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING?

Digital Marketing is the constituent of marketing that uses the internet and digital technologies such as social media, search engines, email, desktop computers, and mobile apps to advertise the products and provide delivery services. Using these online-based channels, digital marketing is the way by which organizations endorse goods, brands, and services.

How this all started?

The term Digital Marketing was first used in the 1990s. Even though, Digital Marketing made its mark in the 2000s. But it has a whole lot of earlier roots. Here’s the timeline of digital marketing technology:

• 1981: First ever Personal computer was released by IBM.
• 1989: Computers storage abilities reached up to 100MB.
• 1993: The first-ever clickable banner went live
• 1994: New technologies enter the digital marketplace and Yahoo was also launched the same year.
• 1995: There are 16 million internet users.
• 1996: We saw the launch of couple more search engines like Alexa, Look Smart and American spends 20 minutes online on average.
• 1998: We saw the birth of google
• 2002: The numbers of worldwide internet users reached 588 million.
• 2004: Facebook is launched and users begin searching for products online.
• 2005: YouTube is launched and digital marketing sees a hype.
• 2007: First iPhone is released (smartphones allow customers to buy things anywhere, anytime – a complete game-changer for digital marketing.
• 2010: By 2010, different advertising software had been created. And, after 2010, people transition to being dependent on it totally.

The above list of events gave birth to digital marketing. In a world, where an average person spends more than 8 hours using the technology per day, it signifies that advertising has capitalized.

Online Marketing For Dummies: The Essential Marketing Channels

Decent digital marketing for dummies articles wouldn’t be complete without the legitimate rundown of the principle techniques. Here are the key points:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
4. Pay-per-click Advertising
5. Affiliate Marketing

Now, let me explain these essential marketing principles;

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Also, known as Organic Search. The Focus of SEO is to raise the ranking in search engine results.  SEO is the skill to improve your website visibility on Google. As we spent a lot of time, money, and energy in becoming a well-trusted leader in the real world market. SEO does the same but on Google.

The prime motive of SEO is to bring new customers to your business who need a specific solution that your business can solve. These people would look for a solution you provide without knowing you yet.

For example: Let’s say you provide marketing services in New Delhi, India and you want to acquire more customers. An SEO campaign will help your business to show up in front of customers who need the marketing services. An SEO is divided into 2 main categories:

1. On-Page SEO: Used in optimizing your website with internal links and proper HTML markup on your content.
2. Off-Page SEO: Primarily used for creating backlinks

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Our digital marketing for dummies article won’t leave social media out of your main campaigns. Because everything is on Social Media and it is the place where a company needs to be. SMM is used to grow your business online. By being active on the different social media sites including Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, Quora, etc.

A key takeaway for a healthy SMM campaign is to provide the exact type of content for the platform and respond regularly to your audience.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

It is considered as the cousin of SEO, as this marketing channel gives you the result on the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages). SEM is a marketing strategy to optimize the website’s reach in the search result pages. Yes, it is quite different from the term SEO but anyhow the focus of both the terms are almost similar. As SEO increases the number of site visitors meanwhile SEM focuses on the improvement of website visibility through attractive advertisements. The primary way SEM works is by PPC (Pay per Click) which we will discuss later on. Google Ads is one of the most used tools for AdWords in Google.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

These are the advertisements that we see whenever we search on-web page search engine or on any website, usually spotted with a tiny sponsored tag at the bottom. Professionally, it is an easy way of buying visits to your website instead of organic reach. In PPC, you pay a fee for each click on your advertisement or on the keyword.  Google Ads and Facebook are the most famous PPC advertising system and this type of PPC is also called Search engine marketing. Your marketing just cannot depend on the “physical world”.

Affiliate Marketing

The Affiliate Marketing Model depends on Revenue Sharing. It is basically getting paid for reaching out to different people and sell the products. The thought behind being to advance others’ items through an offshoot organization. On the off chance that individuals purchase the item, you wind up earning a commission. Getting offshoots to make leads and deals for your organization implies that you pay them on commission, which is chosen by you. This implies no forthcoming expense! The connection or standard has a novel UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) code that tracks if this purchaser came from your site or elsewhere.

Some common platforms that publishers and manage affiliate relations are Avant Link, Click Bank, etc.

Digital Marketing Mistakes

Knowing about digital marketing for dummies is not just the things you have to do but also must know about the don’ts of this field. We correct and learn from the mistakes made by others. Here are the most common digital marketing mistakes.

1. Going Too Fast, and Too Hard

Despite taking the time to completely study the analytics of digital marketing, most people just rush on the things they just discovered without thinking about the loss of this extra speed. Without proper planning and marketing strategies, their work will not be much effective. It might work in the early stages but as time passes they will lack behind.

2. Bogus (false) Confidence

If you think like, in a perfect world your work will get noticed and in return, you are getting paid for creating the sales for your company or your business based on its quality. Regrettably, this image doesn’t work In the real world. If you just live in the imaginative world and think you will succeed, sadly it won’t happen. If you don’t learn and apply the above-mentioned strategies and techniques, your content will never get the exposure which it deserves.

Bottom Line

As you have a basic understanding of digital marketing. Of course, there are many more things to say about the various marketing channels that we have discussed above. But we are quite sure that our article on “Digital Marketing for Dummies” has made a strong base.

So which of the discussed channels you liked the most and wish to implement from Digital marketing for Dummies. Comment Down