What is Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is the integration of all the marketing efforts which takes the aid of various electronic as well as digital mediums in order to disseminate the information and establish a connection with their prospective customers. The craze for Digital Marketing is at its peak because businesses have realized the importance of digital presence in order to increase their sales.

People are now socially active and brands being able to recognize this gap are able to promote their businesses online much more effectively than in traditional marketing as online or digital marketing is cheap and everything can be analyzed and interpreted. Digital team force has been employed by various companies to target the right customers at the right time through various digital marketing tactics and to cite some of them are:-

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – It stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a systematic process of making your website rank amongst the top websites through various tools and techniques. Its overall purpose is to gather traffic to your website organically. SEO is basically of two types -Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. SEO can be applied in websites, blogs, and many other social mediums.The popular tools that are used for SEO out of which some are free and some are paid are -Google Search Console, Ahrefs keywords research tool, Keyword Shitter, Ubersuggest, SEMrush and many other to bank upon
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – In Search Engine Marketing, the ads are displayed on the search engine pages through paid advertising. Advertisers bid on keywords that are most searched by the users and according to that prices are decided. The most important thing is that it lets the ad be present in front of the consumer before the organic websites in the search result pages so that the customers can take the call to action on the respective advertisements.
• Social Media Marketing – Almost every brand or company is trying to make their presence socially so the urge of social media is gaining prominence day by day. With the advent of social media, brands can promote their services or products or can share the content with their customers so as to maintain brand awareness and generate leads for their business.Some of the popular social media tools used by social media marketers are-Hootsuite, Buffer, Lithium, Sprout Social, Zoho Social, and plenty of others.There are numerous social media channels present as of now but most prominent ones are:
  1.  Facebook
  2.  Instagram
  3.  Twitter
  4.  Snapchat
  5. Pinterest
• Pay Per Click – It is a method when a payer pays whenever its ad is getting clicked by the customer. Pay per click can be put to use in running paid ads on Facebook, promoted tweets on Twitter, sponsored messages on LinkedIn and many other social mediums too.
• Content marketing – Content will be always remain king and adding to that Content Marketing comes in handy for the brands as they get to promote their valuable sources of content with their customers. Content Marketing involves creation and promotion of content materials for generating brand awareness, lead generation and to drive website traffic. blogs, infographics, ebooks and various other online publishing mediums can be used in content marketing for a particular brand.
• Affiliate marketing – In simpler terms, it means whenever you promote any other services or products through your own website or social media channels you will receive a commission on a performance basis.
• Inbound marketing – Inbound Marketing differs from Content Marketing as inbound involves creating a new strategy to attract new users and retain the existing ones while content marketing emphasizes more on executing that strategy.
• Email Marketing – Emails are still the most effective medium to communicate with your audience and through Email marketing business messages can be delivered to the target audience and if any special offers, discounts or specific information needs to communicate then it can also be done easily with a proper email marketing channel.It is an effective medium to make a connection with your customers as it keeps the businesses in constant touch with present and prospective customers.
• Native Advertising – It is the form of a paid ad which follows the user ’s natural form and its experience. The ads can be displayed in the form of text or short videos where the user is active and the ads are placed according to the user’s past experience on the platform.
• Data and Analytics – Data plays a major role as businesses can determine and analyze the behaviors, patterns, purchase trends of their customer with various data analytics tools and software available as of today and to name some of the most used ones are -Crazzyegg, Buzzsumo, KissMetrics, HotJar, MixPanel, and many others

Having been gathered some insights about what is Digital Marketing and what are its components now is the time to delve into the future as more than 650 million internet users are there in India and this number will sure shot be going to burgeon in the coming years so there are immense opportunities for both  businesses and people searching out for jobs. Brands are spending a lot of their money on social media because engagement there is very high. With the advent of new technology like Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality brands are using these technologies and giving their customers a unique experience. There are some terms which kept on buzzing in 2019-20 and in future they will surely hold a prominent place and these are Influential Marketing, Voice Search, Video Marketing, and Programmatic Advertising.