Digital Marketing Simplified: Just to Give You a Hint

Digital marketing, everyone has heard the name, but not all of them know what it actually is. This blog post is for you to know what it is. No jargon, just a quick brief on what digital marketing is in layman language, so if you want to invest in it, you can be more confident.

I am Ashvini Vyas and it’s more than 12 years now working in the digital marketing industry as a digital marketing specialist. I often meet prospects who want to take advantage of digital marketing services and people in professional meet-ups, who have heard the word digital marketing, but they either have some misconceptions or they just do not know what it actually means. Please count yourself in an exception if you already know it.

Recently, I had a call with a prospect who took a keen interest in knowing what digital marketing is before giving me the project and he inspired me to write this blog. I realized many people want to know about it, but as they are working in a senior position, they might feel shy and thus, do not ask about it. There are many articles written online, but those are for either aspiring digital marketers or well-established digital marketing experts that want to sharpen their skills.

If you want to know about digital marketing precisely to adopt it for your business or self-branding without getting lost into too many technical jargons, read on.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the way to market your offerings in the digital landscape. Here, the digital landscape means different websites of articles, guest blogging, press release distribution, business listing, social media sites, etc.

What are the fundamental channels of digital marketing?

There are different types of channels of digital marketing, but the two most commonly targeted by digital marketing experts are listed below:

1. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
2. Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.

Marketing activities performed targeting search engines are known as SEO marketing and marketing activities focusing on social media sites are called social media marketing.

What are the fundamental types of digital marketing?

There are two major types of digital marketing:

1. Organic
2. Paid

Organic and paid digital marketing activities are performed in both, search engines and social media. Thus, you can see four types of primary forms of digital marketing:

1. Organic search engine marketing aka SEO marketing
2. Paid search engine marketing aka PPC marketing or paid advertising
3. Organic social media marketing
4. Paid social media advertising

What is paid marketing? What do you (marketers) do with it?

Paid marketing is when you pay to the platform when it achieves a predefined goal.

In PPC marketing or paid advertising in search engines, you need to pay for each click on your listing in search results. For example, if you are running a PPC advertising campaign in Google and your ad is shown when someone is searching. Now, if he clicks on your ad, you have to pay a specific amount for that whether he generates any lead or not. This payment is given to Google or any platform you are using to run ads.

In paid social media marketing also you pay for a specific goal to achieve. For example, if you are running a paid Facebook marketing campaign, you need to pay a reach to a specific number of people, i.e., 10000 views of your ads.

There are different types of paid ads in both, search engine and social media platforms and you need to pay accordingly such as:

• Pay per click. Whenever someone clicks, you pay for that click
• Cost per thousand impressions. You pay for impressions/views on your ad
• Cost per lead. You pay for warm leads passed to you by the platform

A major benefit of paid ads is you start getting results within a few minutes. Your ads will start showing, your credit card will start swiping, and you will start getting the results you want.

A major drawback of paid ads is that it is very expensive and does not give the required returns to some businesses.

We, digital marketing experts, create these ad campaigns to run ads. Moreover, we monitor and fine-tune different parameters, so you can receive better returns over your investments.

What is organic marketing? What do you (marketers) do in it?

Unlike paid ads, you do not need to pay per click or view. Only pay to your SEO expert or social media expert to run organic campaigns.

Organic means you do not just show ads, you build your authority by sharing informative posts, by being a positive brand, by appearing more often organically and entice people to be your prospects.

In SEO marketing, organic marketing involves various activities such as website optimization, content marketing, etc.

In social media marketing, your social media manager will perform various activities such as creating different posts and post them regularly on your social media pages/profiles. He will also make sure to respond to comments or direct messages (DM) you get on the page to create user engagement.

A major advantage is it gives long term results at inexpensive rates compared to paid ads to many businesses. You are not paying for all clicks.

A major disadvantage of organic marketing is you have to wait to see the expected results.

We, digital marketing experts, use our expertise to create marketing campaigns and execute them to get the best ROI. Hope this blog post gave you the required understanding of digital marketing. If you still have any questions, contact us.