An Introduction to Digital Marketing

What is digital marketing?

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Digital marketing is a form of marketing in that people advertise products or services to other people digitally.

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Digital marketing uses different channels to reach out to potential clients or customers. Examples of the different types of channels include Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo), Websites, Social media, emails, and mobile applications.

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Why is digital marketing so important? 

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To understand why digital marketing is so important and powerful, let me share a bit of information about traditional marketing.

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Traditional marketing involves using traditional channels, like billboards and printed media. TV commercial for Coca-Cola. How it works is that, you spend a certain amount of money (for e.g. $5000 to have your brand shown to the public). Then you sit back and hope that someone will see the commercial and buy your product or services. 

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This method of marketing requires a huge upfront investment and very limited ways of tracking how much money you actually made from that particular investment. You also will not be able to target your ideal customer right away.

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Digital marketing on the other hand helps can help marketers advertise their products and services directly to their ideal consumers easily. The emphasis is on matching the right product/service with the right consumer. Due to the complex algorithms and behavior tracking digital marketing platforms provide, digital marketers are able to interpret key metrics and understand consumer behavior better. This allows marketers to craft more effective marketing campaigns to reach out to the right audience increasing the likelihood of their ideal consumer buying. 

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Digital marketing also allows marketers to build brand awareness easily as you are able to reach out to a large audience without having to spend a large amount of money. Currently, there are more than 3.96 Billion people using social media worldwide. Digital marketing allows you to advertise to those people easily.

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Types of digital marketing

There are many different types of digital marketing. Some of the more popular ones are listed below.

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-Content marketing

-Social media marketing

-Search engine optimization

-Affiliate marketing

-Influencer marketing

-Email marketing

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For starters, we will be focusing on social media marketing and email marketing. 

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We use these different types of marketing to set up campaigns. Digital marketing will have goals that you want to achieve, such as lead generation, conversion, driving engagement, and increasing revenue.

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Every type of marketing campaign is slightly different and requires different types of approaches to maximize the effectiveness of the campaign. 

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Paid Advertising VS Organic Advertising

Paid advertising is where you pay a social media channel, for example, Facebook to advertise and reach your target audience. 

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Organic advertising is where you do not need to pay to reach your target audience. This can be done through Search Optimization which will be discussed further in the future. Search Optimization allows your business to show up more often in search results of Search engines such as Google. Thus your cost of acquiring a customer is technically $0.

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Now that we know what are the basics of digital marketing. Let us focus on how you can leverage digital marketing to get more customers for your business.