Digital Marketing

What is digital marketing?

“Digital marketing” is the process of building and maintaining customer relationships through online activities to facilitate the exchange of ideas, products, and services that satisfy the goals of both parties.

Digital marketing is a powerful new tool that you can use to reach out to your customers and prospects. Because of the ability to interact directly and converse with potential customers, this tool can be far more effective than traditional marketing. 

Mastering online marketing is not easy. You need the help of a professional expert to come up with a winning strategy. Without a strategy, playing around with a blog, Facebook or Twitter will be useless. With the right strategy, these tools can bring new customers in and create loyal followers from present customers. 

Key components:-

ü  Website design (user experience)

ü  Search engine optimization (SEO)

ü  Pay per click (PPC)

ü  Social media marketing (SMM)  

ü  Email marketing

ü  Display advertising (banner ads)

ü  Affiliate marketing

ü  Content marketing

SEO:- Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a webpage to improve ranking and to achieve higher visibility in search engines.

Types of SEO

SEO is traditionally divided into two main areas

1. On Page Optimization - On Page Optimization is a process of what can be done on the pages of a website in order to make it more search engine friendly to achieve good search engine ranking for targeted keywords. 
2. Off Page Optimization - Off-page SEO is a process of optimizing your web pages outside your website by getting links back to it as the only thing you can do outside your website is to build links back to it.

 On- Page Optimization:-

On Page optimization is one of the very first step of SEO which every webmaster should look into.

• This technique includes the optimization of texts, images, tags, URL structure, internal links, headers etc.
• Proper on-page optimization for a website will not only rank well in a search engine but also increase the overall readability of the website for our visitors.
• On page search engine optimization is the most important part in the process of SEO. It is said that if on page SEO is perfect, 70% job of the SEO is done and rest depends on the off page SEO.

ON Page Optimization consists of following-

• url structure
• website analysis
• title tag
• meta description
• meta keywords
• keywords density checking
• Heading Tags(H1,H2,H3)
• Broken Links Checking
• HTML sitemap creation
• Xml sitemap creation
• Creation of Robots.txt
• Google Analytics
• Webmaster Tools
• Image & video Optimization
• Competitor Analysis
• Keyword Research /Analysis
• Internal/Inbound Links

OFF Page Optimization consists of following-

• Directory Submissions
• Blog Setup, Customization & Optimization (Web 2.0)
•  Blog Commenting
• Blog Directory Submission (Manual)
•  Blog and Feed Submission to Ping Services
•  RSS Feed Syndication and Submissions
•  Article Submissions
•  Press Release Submissions
•  Social Bookmarking Profiles Creation & Bookmarking
•  Social Media Promotion & Promotion in Social Networking Sites
•  Classified Ads Submission
•  Local Business Listings
•   Yahoo Answers
•  Forum Posting
•  Link Exchange

 Advantages of SEO:-

ü  Your website will be found

ü  Improve your competitive edge

ü  Expand your customer base and target audience

ü  Cost effective

ü  Long term standings

ü  Free traffic

ü  Targeted traffic

ü  Higher sales (ROI)

ü  Global reach

ü  All the results can be measured

ü  Better conversion (sales)

ü  Pull marketing

ü  Increased visibility

ü  Your own 24 hour marketing team and shop front

Disadvantages of SEO:-

ü  Often, websites are never “indexed” by the search engines

ü  After sites are indexed, often they are not indexed for specific keyword(s)

ü  Website owners have no idea which search terms would really be best to drive traffic

ü  Fresh content is very important, but hard to keep up with

ü  Domain age plays a role

ü  It’s hard work and time consuming

ü  No one really understands how Google works

ü  If your competition is high, it gets more difficult

ü  Takes a long time to see the best results

ü  Gestation period is long *

ü  Ongoing process

PPC:-

PPC definition:-

Pay per click (PPC) is a type of sponsored online advertising that is used on a wide range of websites, including search engines, where the advertiser only pays if a web user clicks on their ad. Hence the title, 'pay per click'.

Advertisers place bids on keywords or phrases that they think their target audience would type in a search field when they are looking for specific goods or services.

 Advantages:-

ü  Very fast

ü  Get targeted visitors within hours (sometimes minutes)

ü  Provides a path for search engine optimization

ü  Can yield highly profitable results

ü  Great testing platform and can be highly targeted

ü  Time of day

ü  Geographic area

ü  Keywords and phrases

ü  Content network (Google)

ü  Immediate feedback

ü  Easy implementation

ü  Flexible

Disavantages:-

ü  Missing bulk of the traffic (focusing only on selected keywords)

ü  No guarantees

ü  Heavy competition

ü  Less trusted

ü  Expensive

ü  Complicated

ü  Click fraud

ü  You pay regardless to any sales

ü  Bidding war

ü  Competitive keywords demands higher bids

ü  Restricted to text and image ads

ü  Traffic stops when you stop paying

Social Media Marketing(SMM):-

Social media is a medium and the medium is only a vehicle that amplifies social behaviour.  The medium is an instrument on communication, like a newspaper or a radio, so social media would be a social instrument of communication.

Advantages of SMM:-

ü  Better targeting

ü  High return on investment (ROI)

ü  Does not require specialization or vast technical skills

ü  Increased visibility

ü  Targeted traffic

ü  Content promotion

ü  Helps with PR

ü  Fun way to do business

ü  Ability to go viral

ü  Expedites online brand development

ü  Cost effective (only time and effort)

ü  Market research (what are your customers talking about?)

ü  Create relationships with your customers

ü  Campaigns has the ability to drive huge amounts of traffic

ü  Supports traditional and other digital marketing campaigns

Disadvantages of SMM:-

ü  Wrong strategy can hurt your reputation

ü  More time consuming than SEO and PPC

ü  Interaction is needed at each location point

ü  No short term ROI

ü  No clear definition of social media ROI

ü  Risk of negative comments

ü  ORM processes are needed for big social media marketing campaigns.

ü  Negative influence on worker productivity

ü  Everything is public

ü  Commit resources

ü  Ineffective use = brand credibility loss