7 Essential Digital Marketing Components you must know

Did you know that marketing strategy is incomplete if it does not include digital marketing components?

This year statista reported 13% increase in digital marketing budgets compared to the previous year.

You and we all are in the digital age.

In times of 24/7 connectivity, it is not option to use digital marketing strategies, its a must to follow the journey of your digital consumers and nurture them throughout their online sales cycle and provide them a positive impact about your brand.

 To assist development of effective marketing methods, you need to dip your toes into the advertising component to score better career opportunities in the digital marketing landscape and grow your digital marketing skills. One can take a look at the growth and effectiveness of digital marketing channels and their component.

In this blog post you will get to know about digital marketing basics, my goal is to make sure you have clear options about digital marketing and the actionable way forward.

The Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing

Marketing is changing. It was about 50 years ago that you could publish advertisements in the newspaper everyday. In the 1950’s the media had enough money for one crappy TV advertisement. Traditional marketing are things of the past.

Ten years ago businesses could buy cheap internet sites and use some keywords and they could call it good. In the last 10 years marketing has evolved much quicker than in the past 100 years.

Traditional media is a great way to reach a broad consumer base, whereas digital media has the ability to reach very specific audiences.

I know it’s time for Digitalization! We have 80% of Americans in the USA using smartphones and spend an average 8.1 hours a day on social networks. A generation had reached adulthood knowing only a world shaped by digital technology. 

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the future. You need to understand what exactly digital marketing is and what are processes and terminologies that makes up a successful digital marketing campaigns.

Here comes another question why do you need digital marketing? what does a digital marketer do?

You use digital marketing if you have below some or many of these goals you want to achieve

1. You want to drive traffic to your website or blog to generate leads
2. Create interest in your brand/service/product and get leads
3. To nurture your targeted audience by regularly educating and engaging with them
4. Create awareness about your brand by mass b2c campaigns
5. Personalized marketing based on customer requirements
6. Position yourself as an authority on any subject online.
7. Conversion in terms of revenue from your efforts on digital marketing

To achieve a goal you need to set up objectives first and give it a timeline.

How do you define digital marketers? Digital Marketing is also sometimes called Online marketing.

This umbrella includes everything marketing and engagement activities can be conducted via the Internet.

Digital marketing helps you find your target audience, be noticed, acquire a lead and then convert that lead into a loyal client.

If you are looking for a laptop for digital marketing check out our post best laptops for digital marketing.

What are the skills required to become a digital marketer?

Listed below are the skills required to become a digital marketer

1. Passion

In digital marketing you have to be resourceful, ie you need to learn new skills regularly, and need to upgrade your skills. Hence if you are passionate about it then no matter what you will keep learning and growing in this field.

2. Developing content

You need not be the best writer out there but you need to be good at English. To start with your copywriting needs to be simple, easy to understand and grammatically correct. Content needs to be valuable, solves problems and can be humorous.

3. WordPress

WordPress is easy to use platform to design web pages and develop your own blog. WordPress is a search engine friendly platform, here you can create amazing content. You do not need to be a developer to start a wordpress blog, you just need to understand how it works, once you figure it all things fall into place.

4. Basic Design Skills

You do not need to be a skilled graphic designer. But you definitely need to know what kind of visuals work, images which needs be used. There is one very good tool Canva which you can get started with right away, it helps you to quickly design any type of design for your banner, social post or any other required design.

5. Data Analytics

This topic useful as whatever effort you do in digital marketing, ie social media, SEO or content, you need to analyze the results you are getting out of that effort. First step here is to get google analytics integrated to your site or blog, also understand concepts of A/B split testing.

6. Learn and Take Action

Learning something and getting certificate is useful, but implementing it and getting results is much more important. Hence you need to put into practice what you learn. Unless you take action you will not get results, so keep taking byte sized actions every day to reach your goal.

7. Upgrading Skills

Digital marketing is ever evolving field, hence regular learning and upgrading skills is a must. Like what used to work in digital marketing  few years back may not be that relevant now.

What is life cycle marketing?

A sales funnel influences how marketing works. The model was as follows: awareness, interest, decision. Stages involve different messages depending on what stage of the buyer journey the user was in.

There was a linear, fixed path that had little room to elicit a highly human characteristic: indecisivity. Emotion is key in purchasing decisions, and the conventional sales funnel has not been designed to allow emotional twists in buyers journey.

Lets get into marketing’s lifecycle. Top Life Cycle Marketing focuses on engagement with consumers throughout the lifecycle of the relationship.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Here is converting rate optimization. The conversion percentage is the percentage that leads to a website. For example, if a user visits their website and a customer calls you as a result, you can get 2% of the total conversion.

CRO is designed to help increase conversion rates, which will be 2% converted to 4%, 5% and the like. This enables the user to offer a range of discounts and promotions.

Test a series of calls to action in your business to determine how much converts. It is important that you have high leads in mind.

What is a digital marketing plan?

A marketing plan is based on a set of objectives to achieve and then to fulfil those objectives. The key to achieving optimum results with your marketing plan is to communicate how you can improve the customer experience by communicating the advantages to your audience.

The following questions can help marketing teams understand the right digital activities to pursue: What are your business and marketing goals? What is your digital marketing budget? Who are your target customers? Can you describe your audience with discrete buyer personas? Which online channels does your audience use?

It’s essential to align your marketing efforts with the buyer’s journey to capture your prospects’ attention and stay relevant at every stage they might face your brand.

Your digital marketing strategy should therefore focus on the marketing methods which are best for generating positive results for your audience. Digital Marketing offers the potential to evaluate different strategies quickly and adjust based on the results.

New Age Digital Marketing Tactics

In the following sections we will learn about the new and evolving digital marketing tactics

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation automates your processes to focus on your business. Marketing automation examples include automatic follow up emails, an embedded calendar that lets you book an e-mail from a representative, paid ads which run while you sleep.

It’s great to see digital marketing combining sales with marketing. It now requires only one or three person teams to do this.

Marketing automation has drastically reduced marketing costs and has made online companies more profitable, while also doing very little work.

There are numerous online tools which help your marketing teams achieve marketing goals.

Programmatic advertising

The billions on the internet have made it hard for businesses to find the right place to put their ad. Advertising programs can solve that issue.

Programmatic advertising enables you to test your ads on a variety of different websites and platforms in very fast terms. Eventually it can identify which ads work better and where to allocate advertising budgets.

Remarketing

It is usually 10 times less effective to market to an already engaged client than to a consumer who does not have any. In this area, remarketing has a digital component in place.

Customers searching through search engine optimization, and PPC sites have already expressed curiosity about your company’s services.

It makes converting your brand to potential customers more successful and scalable.

Online lead generation

It is important a company website can be useful when converting visitors into sales leads. Traffic visiting the web is useless unless it does not convert.

If you want your site to get more traffic, you need to contact your potential customers and get emails. This way you can expand sales opportunities. This is what is important for an effective online marketing strategy.

Blogging

Bloggers are an additional method of content marketing. Many people think blogging has died, but that isn’t the truth.

Blogs allow for the creation of useful material for your users. This tool helps your site to be found more easily by keywords and relevance.

Blogs are an important tool in lead generation if you can give feedback about your thoughts.

Influencer Advertising

Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that brings key industry leaders in the process of brand promotion.

Hundreds of millions of Instagram followers are now generating revenue from these online influencers. Influencers are digital marketers with a goal of generating a loyal user base.

The influencers trust their recommendation. It might be advisable for an influencer to contact them to ask for a quote on how to create your own blog for the business.

Marketing Analytics

Another component is marketing analytics. To be successful in launching an online business, you need knowledge of different metrics and measurement tools.

You can use google analytics to analyze your website traffic, it will provide you detailed website analytics about your visitors, where and how they reached your site.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate sales are hardly new ideas. Digital Marketing simply means to sell or make money off the products and the service.

Online affiliate marketing can, however, simplify your sales process quite effectively. You simply add links to your sites to promote affiliate products and if you sell an affiliate product by your hyperlink you earn commissions.

Some professional online affiliate marketers are earning mainly by affiliate commissions on their websites.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is paid media designed to match the content and look and feel of a media source. This media is designed to match the visual design and function of natural content, appearing in your feed of recommended videos.

Reputation Marketing

Reputation marketing focuses on gathering and promoting positive online reviews. Reading online reviews can influence customer buying decisions and is an important component of your overall brand and product reputation.

An online reputation marketing strategy encourages customers to leave positive reviews on sites where potential customers search for reviews. 

What are the Digital Marketing Components?

Here are the seven major components of Online Marketing that will help you provide valuable insights. Digital marketing methods provide a wide variety of ways for marketing managers to engage potential customers.

1. Your Website or Landing Page

Having a website or even a simple landing page is no longer an option . Apart from social media, the first page people will reach out to find about your business is your website.

On your website you can show your potential customers how your business or product solves their problem. Show them your portfolio, case studies, testimonials and more. You canhave your unique brand with colors, images, fonts and videos.

Your website must be a central hub for your business online. This is the opportunity to build brand awareness as much as possible and to connect with the right people to make it more effective. Here you’ll eventually get your visitors to that point.

During your online promotions, you are able to pull people down your funnel and turn them into sales. You can use your online presence as a branding tool.

Similarly, it’s worth taking into account your style and your message when creating it. Its importance can be found in both the international and local market.

2. Email Marketing

What is email marketing?

Email marketing involves collecting a visitor’s email address for further followup.

It may involve many different things including the offer of value for existing customers or a special discount on a particular product and sending out an e-mail wishing them an enjoyable holiday.

It aims at increasing lead generation. Eventually the aim will be to get them back on your web site to begin a sale by sending emails to you.

It is permission based marketing, wherein you send regular, valuable content to your subscribers to help them.  It is one to one marketing so you can introduce your products and services when you send your subscribers email.

Make sure you are only sending mail when any user has opted-in to your mailing list. Sending mails to bought databases or bulk sending mails without permission is known as spamming and it is not a good practice which can also lead to blacklisting your domain.

Why should you use email marketing?

As per campaignmonitor every dollar spent on email marketing can generate $44 which is 4400% return on investment. But it needs to be done in right way, in terms of way you interact with your subscribers.

Email marketing can be done in following ways

1. Newsletter
2. Free offer (Free e-book or course)
3. Cold Mailing (one-to-one)
4. Support (customer service)
5. Drip Marketing Sequence (E-Course)

You can set up forms, pop ups on your website or blog and ask visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, opt-in to get a free e-book or e-course.

Drip email Marketing is best to help nurture your audience. Drip marketing offers complete automation. Here you can send free educational series of emails, free consulting, free ebook, or you can send automated series of 3 or 5 emails to any person who is a potential lead for your product or service.

3. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the form of marketing that is focussed on creating, publishing and distributing content for a focussed audience online. It is a key digital marketing element. Your content can be in the form of blog posts, articles, videos or podcasts.

There are several different ways to use these categories, such as YouTube videos and blog entries. Content marketing is one of the most important components of a digital marketing strategy.

Content marketing aims to provide as much useful information as possible and make your target audience trust your brand. Content advertising helps your business be top-of-mind all the time while reminding your audience of the business you are selling.

It helps to build trust and build your brand online. You need to build content with a strong objective, which can provide value to your target audience.

You must have heard many times content is king, you can drive traffic with valuable content, in return you can generate enquiries which ultimately leads to revenue generation.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is the organic way which your website can use to show up on google search engine listings when a certain keyword is searched on Google. This is termed as search engine optimization.

Majority of traffic comes from google listings. Hence you need to keep your website optimized for google search.

If you are interested to know about SEO tools, checkout our post Is SimilarWeb a SEMRush Alternative?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an advertising technique for the search engines. This software uses Google to drive traffic to your website.

SEO encompasses many elements, from the words on your web pages to the way other sites link to you on the web to how your website is structured. 

SEO has one major difference, that is the fact that it generates organic sales. This is achieved through high visibility in search engines that match your product or service. Learn how SEO works.

SEO is done in two phase process, on page SEO and Off page SEO

On page SEO is the factors which you can control on your own website, while off page SEO means ranking factors which occur off your website. Like backlinks from other websites, you gain this when other websites or people on social media share your content.

When you optimize your site with simple and useful user interface which is valuable for your visitor and also the content is of top quality, then you can build traffic organically with the help of SEO.

Search engines reward you by giving your site you more website traffic when you create relevant content which is useful for visitors.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the use of social media channels to connect with your audience to attract, nurture, engage, build your brand, increase sales, generate leads and drive traffic to your website.

Social media marketing is just a simple act of adding organic links to websites through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other digital platforms.

Social media marketing is an effective tool that helps your company get a large audience online for free.

You can drive traffic from social media to your website, social media selling, drive enquiries for your business. Use social media analytics tools to discover who interacts with your social media accounts. 

Its big thing now, it is about online reputation management, word of mouth marketing, personal branding, social crm, cloud sourcing, customer sourcing, PR, recruitment and employer branding.

If you complain on social media, it’s the reputation of that brand on stake, so the brand for example Airtel or Jio will reply you as quickly as possible.

However, social media platforms have reduced effectiveness and the reach of organic posts requiring businesses to pay for impressions.

What that means is you can’t get by with only posting organically. You need to supplement your social media campaign with paid social media ads, or else your message will die on the wind.

With the right approach, your social media strategy can help you foster important customer relationships and establish your brand as a reputable one.

6. Pay Per Click or Search Engine Marketing

Since advertisements revenue make up almost all social platforms, the company aims to increase revenue through paid ads to make the platform more attractive to business. The greater the effectiveness of it, the greater your conversions.

There are two main types of paid search advertising — pay per click (PPC) and cost per mille (CPM). With PPC, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. With CPM, you pay based on the number of impressions.

Google Adwords is the most widely used paid search advertising platform; however, other search engines like Bing also have paid programs. Programmatic advertising Programmatic advertising is an automated way of bidding for digital advertising. Each time someone visits a web page, profile data is used to auction the ad impression to competing advertisers. 

The digital marketing component in Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube marketing allows your website to target specific audiences in the right way.

The biggest downfall of this system are the large social media platforms which have drastically reduced SMM reach.

Search engine marketing which is also known as PPC or Online advertising or Pay per click or paid marketing, this is when you bid for keywords to show your links on top of the SERP (search engine results page). Search marketing can be implemented in google, bing, yahoo etc

Pay per click is an alternative search marketing technique. There are several factors that affect search engines. PPC vs Search Engine marketing is different since all the Pay per click traffic is collected.

Google Adwords will rank you at Google’s top search rankings but every click generated in your online advertising campaign costs you no matter how much the click becomes leads. You will see immediate results while SEO, though free, requires a few hours to start.

This works with bidding on keywords, hence if a keyword “Digital Marketing in Mumbai” is worth Rs 20 then if you want 1000 clicks you will have to pay Rs 20,000.

Once user clicks on the ad he reaches your landing page, your landing page should have relevant contents as per the offer you made in the ad. If your offer is not relavant and useful for the user then he will close your page and your ad money is wasted. Hence you need a well optimized landing page.

Google ads also supports video ads via youtube and display ads on relevant google ad network sites.

7. Video Marketing

Video marketing is marketing in the form of a video. It’s incredibly effective in today’s times—take a look at these video marketing statistics:

• A video is 50 times more likely to get organic page ranks in Google than plain text
• 50% of the consumers who watch online product videos say it helps them make more confident buying decisions.
• People who see videos stay on a website two minutes longer on average and are 64% more likely to make a purchase transaction.
• U.S. consumers now watch up to six hours of digital video daily.
• After Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine out there.
• Videos allow you to boost branding efforts and build trust. They’re like a Netflix—for a fraction of the price.

The best marketing videos are under 60 seconds—in fact, they should be under 10 seconds for maximum impact. Because consumers prefer short videos, they are more likely to watch yours if they know you provide quick, succinct details. To get started, we recommend making the following videos into your marketing plan:

• How-to videos about your products and services
• Customer testimonials
• Company culture videos
• Videos that highlight the benefits of using your products or services

FAQs – Digital Marketing Components

 Final Thoughts

Now that we’ve defined the basics of digital strategy, you can discover what action points you should consider when developing your own one according to your business objectives.

Keeping an eye on key performance indicators (KPIs), like conversion rates and cost per lead, will help you improve your campaigns to reach even more customers.

I hope this post helps you in improving your digital marketing performance.