To become a certified Digital Marketing Expert, you need to first start with the basics of Digital Marketing while keeping up with Digital Marketing Trends. It is not something you can learn by just reading. You would need to practice what you learn and keep developing relevant skills along the way.
You can choose to learn Digital Marketing at home or a Digital Marketing Training Institute. I recommend that you learn from an institute but make sure the course has a good syllabus delivered by a credible trainer.
It’s strongly suggested to not fall behind distractions that may come up with the unorganized way of learning or possibly from the sources you might think isn’t worthwhile. It is always advantageous to straight away enroll in Digital Marketing Certification Course to sharpen your skills as well as find numerous opportunities that come with a consistent step-by-step way of learning. It saves much of your time and helps you to learn Digital Marketing systematically.
Digital Marketing Definition
A company or any individual may use digital media or digital platforms to promote and showcase a brand, their product or services, and their marketing messages. It might use the same media to build relations through responses and influences using a multi-channel digital integration. It includes activities such as uploading, forwarding, or sharing videos, messaging, podcasting, selling products/services, communication/interaction, acquiring real-time tracking reports, running radio/tv channels using any electronic or digital devices, Websites, apps, social media channels, Email providers, television, etc. For businesses, it is a great tool to identify whether their business strategies in the Digital world are working or not – typically in real-time.
Digital marketing objectives for customer retention
Winning the Moment of truth: It is the moment when customers grab their laptops and start searching for the service or products they are looking for, have seen, or heard about.
Winning the Customer Experience: It is the segment when you create a system for one on one interaction based on every unique challenge.
A better approach to the Customer journey: It is this stage where you not just analyze, but measure the customer’s behavior and uncover opportunities towards better value.
Concepts of Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing in today’s era has brought immense opportunities for businesses to run strategic marketing and meet their business goals. Businesses with Digital Media Management can not only dramatically increase productivity using possible technologies at their hand but can leverage the power in many ways which is difficult with other forms of marketing.
Brands are communicating through high-quality engaging visuals via ads to grab customers’ attention and personalized marketing where one on one communication with customers is one of the touchpoints to better conversions. With digital marketing tools, it provides businesses with the opportunity to track consumer behavior in real-time and measure the effectiveness of each running campaign to strategize even stronger. Moreover, Digital Marketing tools help digital marketers to create, distribute and measure to drive success.
With the 5Ds of Digital Marketing, it defines various opportunities to reach and interact with customers that brands can use in numerous ways:
- Digital devices: Today, audiences interact with brands for experience on mobile apps and business websites. This happens through various handheld and non-handheld devices like smartphones, TVs, tablets, desktop computers, and gaming consoles.
- Digital platforms: browsers and apps have enabled audience interaction on digital devices through major platforms or services like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
- Digital media: to reach and engage audiences several paid, owned, and earned channels of advertising, email, and messaging, search engines, and social networks are used.
- Digital data: various insight features in digital platforms collect data about their audiences and their interactions with businesses. Due to various cases of misuse of such data, digital data must be protected in many countries and strict provisions have been made regarding data security.
- Digital technology: it refers to the marketing techniques used for segregating and targeting audiences to create an interactive experience through websites and apps to convert potential customers into real ones.
Principles of Digital Marketing
There are numerous principles associated with Digital Marketing today and due to its dynamic nature, they may keep changing with time. For ease of understanding, I will be talking about two major principles in this article i.e. Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing.
Outbound Marketing:
Outbound Marketing is the act of reaching out to customers by starting a conversation about the product/service and seeing if the customer is interested in them. Traditionally it was done through door-to-door technique, or cold calling where there was no guarantee if he/she was a qualified lead or not. Things have changed since then. You can systematically target a selected group of audiences by pushing out messages as part of digital advertising to manage brand awareness especially while running advertising campaigns in paid media marketing channels. The idea is to remind the audience of your product’s specifications frequently so that they remember the brand as part of ‘drive product recall’ in the form of various display or audio/visual ads in the digital platform. These ads are aimed to serve as a medium for greater visibility along with attractive ad visuals that create a long-lasting impact on the audience. Outbound marketing focuses on attracting as much customer attention as possible and holds even for traditional marketing.
Inbound Marketing:
Inbound as opposed to Outbound is the complete opposite i.e. almost like reverse marketing. Instead of pushing your content out to the public, the focus here is on trying to pull the audience towards your content, brand, or service. It focuses only on attracting people who have already shown some interest in your product or service and who are targeted based on their high likeliness to turn into real customers. Through inbound marketing, you pull audiences to your product through blogs, search engines, email subscriptions, other social media, the worth of mouth, and the overall digital content and review. A marketer following this style focuses on finding ways to come up with situations where people are attracted to the brand through quality content to turn them into a customer.
Inbound marketing is considered the most important aspect of digital marketing today as it specifically targets only the audience who have the potential to convert into actual customers for the business. It facilitates efficiency as efforts are made only on people who have the likeliness to subscribe to your product or service rather than haphazardly pushing out your ads to everyone on the platform. Thus, the major power that inbound marketing possesses is that of ‘user intent’. User intent signifies the audience that will go through the effort to take some action (a search or an inquiry) to find out more about your product. This action is based on their own choice motivated by their needs and how they want to move forward with a purchase. Thus, inbound marketing is done properly and is highly efficient as well as effective. It helps lure customers to your product rather than run behind them looking for conversions. However, with the attention span of audiences reducing by the day, it is an equally challenging task.
Types of Digital Media
To form any Digital Strategy you need to know the type of media channel that marketers use. Digital Marketing makes use of 3 Digital Media types i.e. owned, paid, and earned.
Owned Media
Owned media includes:
- Blog posts
- Websites
- Videos
- Images and infographics
- Podcasts
- E-books, whitepapers, and guides
To put it simply, if you have created the above-mentioned points in-house and own it, it can be labeled as owned media. Ownership leads to control.
“The great thing about owned media is that you own it. That means you have control over it. With every other type of media that we talk about, you have less control over it,” Guido says.
But it is not necessary to create all of the owned media on your own. E.g. you do not have the necessary skills of wordplay and cannot, therefore, write compelling content. You always have the option to hire a freelance content writer to build up a digital library for your ownership. As long as you have cleared it in the contract, once the work is done and payment is made to the freelancer, any content produced is legally yours and therefore is owned media.
You create and manage your Owned media which incorporates the company’s content, packaging, point-of-sale, and the people who come into contact with consumers. These are the elements a brand develops to promote itself in the market. Brands use owned media to exhibit the company’s values and highlight their activities in a very personal way. Businesses will, of course, have full control of this type of media but they do need to make sure that they keep their posts or shares interesting and engaging for the audience by being creative as well as honest.
Owned media comes with numerous advantages including cost efficiency, flexibility, longevity, and the power of developing a go-to platform for the company’s audience. It plays a pivotal role in developing trust and credibility in the market. It acts as the major platform from which the company communicates or gives out information about all its activities. With all this being said, owned media does have its challenges i.e. it can take time to build a good reputation online and also credibility to get a high level of traffic to your content.
Paid media:
Paid media includes:
- Search Ads
- Paid Social
- Paid affiliate marketing programs
- Advertorials
Sponsored content
As the name suggests, paid media is the kind of media or advertising that businesses pay to drive banner and video visibility. It is done to get more traffic to your product, website, or service. Any type of media on the internet created to promote a brand or content for a fee can be considered paid media. Paid influencers, social media advertising, content advertising, paid search, etc. are some examples. All these help brands to maximize their digital marketing campaign and as a result, reach a greater audience compared to the non-paid formats. Using it with an extension of various reporting tools such as Google Analytics, you will open multiple doors where you can analyze the audience in your media and ultimately segregate them to design campaigns that will have greater conversion rates. This enables adaptation and helps optimize your paid media performance. With paid media, you will have control over who sees what information about you where, and when. The more you pay for this service, the greater will be the reach of your content. Normally brands use outbound paid media to gain familiarity and awareness in the market. Various paid searches and types of remarketing that come under Inbound paid media too are a great way to drive sales and conversions. However, the rise in the use of ad blockers is posing challenges to the ability of paid media, particularly with today’s ad saturation and various features that allow audiences to skip or report ads.
Earned media
Earned media includes:
- Backlinks
- Being featured in listicles and roundups
- Press coverage
- Awards
- Reviews
Any free publicity that a brand gains through consumers, influencers, public relations, word of mouth, and various shares gained by the brand-related content can be termed as earned media. Earned media isn’t as simple as owned media or paid media where you either choose to pay or not pay for your publicity. It is generated in two ways: one is in response to the various kinds of content shared and another is through voluntary mentions. To understand earned media just think of people like your brand advocates who actively promote your brand free of cost just simply because they like you!
This is the best kind of media for any business and therefore the focus should be on creating high-quality content that adds great value to the audience in terms of both information and engagement. Ideally, it is when brands succeed to create high-value content and share it through multiple platforms (including paid promotion) such that people not only engage but also share it with their circle because they perceive it as important, relevant, interesting, or even humorous. Using this process, businesses get their content circulated without putting in much effort to drive traffic. Additionally, it establishes authority and boosts credibility much faster and more effectively than any form of paid media.
In terms of Social Media, earned media may include reviews, mentions, reposts, shares, or anything that enables your content on people’s social media news feeds. Paid media can make your content appear in the audience’s newsfeed but it is the credibility earned by the content that gets it shared; something that paid media cannot do.
Since paid ads have been paid for to increase views, people will always question their relevance. On the other hand, earned media too is at the mercy or discretion of the audience. So what is the best media to get your message across? Brands should keep in mind that each media type has its perks and exists independently. An effective Digital Marketing strategy should find a way to ensure that all these types collaborate and complement each other to produce an all-encompassing, successful digital media campaign.
Courtesy: Trilogy Digital Pathshala – Best Digital Advertising Certification Training Course in Nepal