A Beginner's Guide to Digital Marketing

Over 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new product while using their phones which shows the huge reach of the digital medium in today's world. Each company desires that their product is found by potential customers but they are not aware of the biggest advantage Digital marketing presents. Here in this article, I will present a brief overview of Digital Marketing and its different types:

In General: Digital Marketing refers to the promotion of your product by placing advertisements on mediums like search engines, websites, social media platforms, emails, and mobile apps. 40% people claimed a significant reduction in marketing budgets when they chose Digital Marketing over conventional advertising methods. On top of that, companies with effective Digital Marketing strategies have 2.8 times better revenue growth expectancy. This scenario pretty much sums up the reason why every business in 2018 and onwards needs to create a Digital Marketing campaign.

Let's explore the subcategories of Digital Marketing in brief:

1. Social Media Marketing: Placement of advertisements on social media platforms comes under this category. Primarily, these channels are known to increase brand awareness for your business. There is an enormous reach on these channels, Facebook alone caters to an audience of 1.5 billion active users, hence for a startup founder or business owner, this is an incredible audience size which he or she has to capture. Marketers do not just post about their product but they also post other content to engage the audience or potential customers in order to convert them their customers also. 

2. Content Marketing: Millennials believe that ‘Content is King’ which is the reason why this is our gateway to generating a lot of organic traffic and is also a key pillar of modern Search Engine Optimization techniques. Whether you want to promote your product through written articles or create videos to capture all its feature in essence, Content Marketing covers all this. A content campaign costs 62% less than all outbound marketing campaigns and has greater benefits than most other campaigns. We will explore these benefits in depth in future articles.

3. Affiliate Marketing: This is a type of performance-based advertising where one party receives a commission for promoting some other party's products or services through its own channels, be it website, account or blog. This is how bloggers, vloggers, social media influencers do ‘paid-partnerships’ and post reviews of the products on their social media accounts. At times they are heavily biased too, so beware!

4. Email Marketing: For every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made in return, should I say more? Email is a source for a company to communicate with their audience and let them know about the latest products, upcoming discounts and new policies of the company. Companies usually contact back the customer through emails by newsletters, follow-up emails, and holiday emails etc.

5. Mobile Marketing: Mobile devices are an integral part of our lives so it’s considered one of the most effective ways of communication. From SMS to MMS it gives a lot of ways to market a product and communicate the consumer so it’s up to the marketer which one they find most suitable for their product. 98% of text messages sent to a user are always opened, only 20% of emails are opened in comparison. So you can see the essence and importance of SMS marketing for the brand awareness of your company.

                                                                       

Being new to the market and bringing innovation to the table combined with profitable outcomes, this domain is too much to explore. To excel in this field, courses on Digital Marketing from websites like Coursera, Udacity, and SkillShare etc also prove fruitful. Moreover, do check this space as I will be writing on this topic quite often.