Digital Marketing Concepts

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This is a snapshot of what is digital marketing and its components.

Digital Marketing 
In simplistic terms, digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media. Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it involves the use of channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t – typically in real time.
While the Internet is perhaps the channel most closely associated with digital marketing, others include wireless text messaging, mobile instant messaging, mobile apps, podcasts, electronic billboards, digital television and radio channels, etc.
Below are the high-level activities and sub activities required for digital marketing.

1. Get site online
The first major step is to get your site designed and developed either by your in-house team or out-sourcing to some third party. A good website attracts target audience and builds traffic. 

The steps of building website are:
  • Get domain and space from site like GoDaddy.com
  • Design/Build static Templates in HTML
  • Get templates for Home page and Inner pages like Services, About us,Contact us etc.
Also, it is important to keep the website updated regularly to keep it relevant and useful to the user group.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Once site is developed and functional, then it is time to optimize it from search engine perspective. SEO can make the content of your websites more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software.

Why would this be of great importance to you? What would happen if even after building a good, attractive website and having great products, customers are unable to find your telephone number or find the address of your business? Worse, they are not even able to find your name when they search for particular products or services you are providing. Traffic to your web site could be extremely low. Potential customers might not even know that your site exists. I do not think that many businesses could survive for very long in this situation.


This situation could apply to any great web site if not optimized. Therefore Search Engine Optimization is necessary and a critical part of digital marketing strategy.

In SEO, search engine like Google, Bing etc index the site and display the site on Search Engine Result Page (SERP). For example, if you search for a keyword like "Washing Machine" search engine shows result through organic search (natural) and inorganic search (paid). Screenshots of both the searches are shown in this blog.



To improve the search results and positioning the website among the top search results, following things have to be done:

  • Content Management
    • Site should be enriched in content that correctly reflect the purpose of the website. Contents should be designed as relevant to target audience.  Remember "Content is King". So your content should speak highly for what you are and why you.
  • Keyword Research
Keywords should be chosen carefully and ideally should not be repeated more than 3 times.  Also, select specific target groups of keywords instead of using generic keywords. It helps in improving site ranking in Google when a particular keyword is searched in it.
Below are the activities that needs to be performed for keyword selection
    • Large scale keyword discovery, search volume and competition analysis
    • Client validation & confirmation
    • Final keyword selection  
  • On Page Optimization (done on the site)
In search engine optimization, on-page optimization refers to factors that have an effect on your Web site or Web page listing in natural search results. These factors are controlled by you or by coding on your page. Examples of on-page optimization include actual HTML code, meta tags, keyword placement and keyword density.

Some of the important aspects of on page optimization are -
    • Good quality and well optimized content are desirable, but you also want to provide both positive user experience in the navigation, and friendliness for search engine bots.
    • Make sure that the keywords you're targeting are included in your title and other tags, and also within the first 50 to 100 words of the article. Don't forget to include links to other site pages appropriate to that particular post
Avoid common on-page SEO mistakes such as Duplicate content, URL variants of the same pages, Off-site images and content on-site, and Duplicate title tags.

Off Page Optimization
Off Page Optimization is required to increase the site ranking through other sites. Examples of off-page optimization include things such as link popularity and page rank.

One way to do off page optimization is by Directory Submission. There are some directories (sites) where you can submit your site. These directories will list your site but it might take from a week to couple of months since there are lots of other sites being submitted to these directories. You need to become a premium member of these sites by paying some amount in case you want to get your site listed early.

Other way is through Link Building (Backlink/inbound links). Backlinks are incoming links to your website or web page and helps increase traffic.

Below are the steps for link building.
  • Identify links where your site link can be mentioned
  • Post link of your site on other sites 
Other ways are writing Blogs & posting articles related with your site (business) on other popular sites and leave your site URL. Forum & Social Network Posting are also useful where information related with your site and business on forum and other social networking sites can be posted.

Note: - Writing blogs, articles on most popular sites and leaving your site URL there will definitely help in increasing site ranking. The number of back links is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page.

3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing is promotion of your web site in the search result page through advertisement. This advertisement will appear based on keywords supplied while publishing the advertisement and it might appear on search result page as well as affiliate (network) sites. These network sites will be partner sites of search engine.

To do SEM, you need to:
  • Create your ads/banners (creative).
  • Select keywords that match your ads to potential customers. Keyword identification is not an easy task. It should not be generic. Rather, it should target to particular group.
  • Buy media from search engine like Google or Bing. You can choose CPC (Cost per click) or CPM (Cost per mile)
  • Bid for keywords
4.Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is to get traffic and attention of the users through social networking sites like Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook. You can create business page on either or all of them and use them to market your business in social media platform.

Facebook page opens dialogue mode with customer. Customer or user knows that there is an entity that is listening and taking actions accordingly. To make a more effective business page at Facebook or other social media, regular posts on the page are must. You have to engage user by putting useful information on the page and using polls. Medium such as LinkedIn can be used to make a profile and subscribe to related groups and add regular post. You Tube advertising is also a social media phenomenon which is be very compelling. You can engage users through Twitter too.

5. Email Marketing
It involves sending promotional email (text or HTML, preferably HTML email) to potential customers.

This can be classified in two categories–
  • Transactional Emails- These are the email sent upon placing an order, after shipping the order or once order is delivered.
  • Direct Emails – These are promotional emails which can be sent to potential customers or existing customers. It can be done through various ways like subscription feature put on the website or discount emails can be sent to existing customers. Different promotional email templates can be prepared and tested through A/B testing.
6. Online Reputation Management

This is about monitoring the brand mention in SERPs (search engine result pages) or online media and Web content like Facebook, Blogs or any consumer complaint sites. People are talking (positive and negative things) about brands everywhere. So it is important to monitor those sentiments and take appropriate action. There are some free tools like www.socialmention.com through which you can monitor people sentiments. You can also check company websites, social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter, consumer review sites like consumercomplaints, social news sites, collaborative research sites such as Yahoo Answers, Rediff Q&A, and blogs etc

Some of the free tools that can be used for ORM are

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