Introduction to digital marketing

Introduction to Digital Marketing

Today’s time of Internet has opened the gateway of tremendous digital
marketing opportunities for businesses. By utilizing different channels of digital
marketing, businesses cannot just share their product and services online;
additionally they can gain clients for their business, entice them and can convert
them to boost their ROI. The speed and straightforwardness with which the
digital media transmits data and support a business is astonishing. In this
Introduction to Digital Marketing E-Guide, every single aspect of Digital
Marketing will be discussed to help marketers understand what Digital
Marketing is, how it functions, and how it can help them optimize their marketing
campaign.

The world is super-connected nowadays and all things considered, marketing

and advertising are no more the same as they once were. This is particularly
valid because of the ascent of online networking, which has changed how
organizations speak with potential and existing customers.

So, before jump onto the introduction to Digital Marketing, let’s know what
precisely Digital Marketing is and what does it incorporate? Essentially, it is an
aggregate term, which is utilized where advertising and marketing meet web
innovation and different types of online media platforms. Let’s firstly throw some
light on the basics of Digital Marketing via the definition given below, this is the
first step when we talk about the introduction to Digital Marketing-

Digital Marketing| Definition

Digital Marketing can be understood as a well-targeted, conversion-oriented,
quantifiable, and interactive marketing of products or services by utilizing digital
innovation to achieve the customers, and transform them into clients in a
sustainable fashion. The whole concept and functionalities of Digital Marketing
are more competent, effective, result-oriented and measurable, which make it
very different from traditional marketing.

The traditional way of marketing lets businesses market their products or

administrations on print media, radio and TV commercials, bill boards, business
cards, and in numerous other comparable ways where Internet or web-based
social networking sites were not utilized for promoting.

However, traditional promoting approaches had constrained client reachability

and extent of driving clients’ purchasing conduct. In addition, traditional
marketing methods were not quantifiable too. Let us understand noticeable
difference between Traditional Marketing & Digital Marketing-
Difference b/w Traditional Marketing & Digital
Marketing
Traditional Marketing

1. Communication is unidirectional in traditional marketing, which means, an

organization communicates about its services with its audiences.
2. Medium of communication in traditional marketing is generally phone calls,
emails, and letters.
3. Campaign in Traditional marketing takes more time as designing, preparing,
and launching are involved.
4. It is best for reaching local audience.
5. It is almost impossible to measure the effectiveness of a traditional
marketing campaign.

Digital Marketing

1. Communication is bidirectional in Digital Marketing as businesses can

communicate with customers and customers can ask queries or make
suggestions to businesses as well.
2. Medium of communication is more powerful and involves social media
websites, chats, apps and Email.
3. Digital marketing campaigns can be developed quite rapidly and with digital
tools, channelizing Digital Marketing campaigns is easier.
4. It is very effective for reaching global audiences.
5. Digital Marketing lets you measure the effectiveness of a digital marketing
campaign through analytics.

2. Social Media Marketing

Social Network Marketing incorporates marketing strategies that use social

media channels as marketing tools for optimizing exposure of a brand, targeting
audiences, conversions and returns. Social Media marketing can be done by
adding social media links to the site content e.g. RSS feeds and sharing
buttons. It can also be done by promoting sites through social media channels
by updating tweets, statuses, blog posts, photos and so on. Most of the Digital
Marketing PDF considers SMM as the second most important digital marketing
channels.

 Social Media Marketing aids an online business get direct feedback from
their customer on different social websites like Twitter, Instagram,
Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
 The success of a social media marketing campaign is based on “Personal”
interactions between the user and business.
  Public Relations
 Modern public relations began with a similar function to newspapers —
communicating events or ideas that might inform the public. As the field evolved it
maintained those two key elements: media campaigns & journalist PR. Early PR firms
created flyers and press releases about individuals or companies they represented.
While advertising is directly a marketing activity, public relations was still very much
involved in marketing and promotion.
 PR can indeed be a very public activity. A PR firm will still write press releases about
an individual or a company, and even directly face the media or respond to negative
press in person or in written form. An internal PR rep will speak on behalf of a
company, or an external PR professional will act as a spokesperson at critical
moments in public relations.
 When considered in this way, most people know what PR is. It’s defined as, “The
actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting good will
between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc.” PR
involves, then, both active promotion and organized response.

 What is Online Reputation Management?

 ORM, then, is a behind the scenes process. It is not direct marketing, which is still a
separate function, but it generates goodwill and internet traffic through the creation of
content. The more engaged a company or individual is on the internet, the easier it is
to manage an online reputation.
 Think of it this way: a company may be very well thought of by its own client base,
and yet have virtually no online presence. Or, an organization may have plenty of
useful and engaging online activity, and yet not directly promote company activities
or face a negative story that airs on the nightly news.
 You need both to maintain an excellent reputation. Both PR and ORM might
be reaction techniques to repair a problem with reputation. However, only
responding after the fact does not do as much good as having plenty of positive press
already out there for public consumption.
 So there you have the primary reason why online reputation management needs to be
part of an overall PR and marketing strategy: without enough information available
online, you will not have excellent relations with the public.
However, to manage online reputation, you promote in a less direct way. ORM includes:
 Managing what is said online about a company
 Generating additional online content
 Dealing with negative online data, primarily by utilizing search engine optimization
(SEO) techniques to decrease the prominence of any online criticism
 Responding to negative online commentary or assisting in responses, such as posting
comments to criticism
 Removing defamatory content
Some public relations firms have a branch devoted to online reputation management, but in
most cases, one would have representation for both PR and ORM. The overall brand and
marketing campaigns of a company or individual would include both of those functions so
that a unified message reaches the public, online and in other forms of media.

Viral Marketing: what is it?

Viral Marketing is that which is able to generate interest and the potential
sale of a brand or product through messages that spread like a virus, in
other words, quickly, and from person to person. The idea is for it to be
the users themselves that choose to share the content.

Due to their speed and ease to share, social networks are the natural
habitat of this kind of marketing. The most widespread example in recent
times is the creation of moving, surprising or spectacular videos on
YouTube, which are then shared on Facebook, Twitter and other
channels.

The reason to make use or virality, the ease in spreading and sharing, is
however a double-edged sword. We cannot forget that in this type of
campaign, a large part of the control falls into the hands of the users, and
we risk the message being misinterpreted or parodied. On the other
hand, a successful viral campaign can work miracles for your brand’s
results.

How a viral campaign works

A viral marketing campaign is very simple to carry out: create a video
or another type of content which is attractive to the target, put it on the
internet and plan the first actions to get it moving. Form there on, all you
can do is wait for the fuse to light and for users to start sharing like crazy.

In some cases, virality happens by accident, from a video uploaded by a

private user that all of a sudden becomes popular and begins to circulate
all around the Internet.
As for the dispersion strategy of the videos created by brands, we
have two focus points: the shown or the concealed. In the former, the
user is aware from the first moment that they are viewing advertising
content, while in the latter the participation of the brand is hidden and is
only revealed later.

If you apply concealed marketing techniques, it is important to be very

careful so the user does not feel tricked, cheated or deceived, as the viral
campaign could then turn against you.

No matter what strategy we choose, we should never ever become

spammers, nor go overboard while sharing the content. Instead of
repeating message over and over again, the best strategy is to find the
perfect place and time and let the “viral fuse” light itself.

Advantages of viral marketing

 Low cost. What characterizes viral campaigns is that the users do a significant
part of the work for us, which drastically cuts down the costs of dispersion: it
becomes unnecessary to buy advertising or space on the media.

 Potential of great reach. A viral video on the Internet has the ability to reach a
huge international audience without us having to invest money or make any
extra effort. Due to this, a small company or even a private individual can go
extremely far.

 It is not invasive. In viral marketing, the decision to participate and share

always comes from the user, and so it never comes across as invasive. Like
this, the perception of the brand and the interaction are significantly better,
compared to more classical forms of advertising.
 It helps build up your brand. If we really hit the bull’s-eye in terms of
creativity, we are creating content so incredible that users themselves decide to
share it and, hence create a personal connection with your brand. It is without a
doubt an extremely powerful tool when it comes to branding and awareness.

Social media marketing metrics

5 Essential & Easy Social Media

Metrics You Should Be Measuring
Right Now
Home » Blog » Social Media » 5 Essential & Easy Social Media Metrics You Should Be Measuring Right Now

So your company is now officially participating in social media. You’ve

set up a Twitter account, a Facebook page, even a few Pinterest
boards. You respond to customer questions, follow fans, post important
news, and thank your advocates for their support.

Beyond that, what are you doing to track and monitor these social
interactions? If you’re engaging in social media, then you should be
measuring those activities. How else will you know how you’re doing?
The good news is it’s easier than you think to measure your social
media efforts.
Here are five simple, but oh-so-useful social media metrics you should
be measuring right now.

1. Volume
The first – and easiest – social media metric to measure is volume.
What is the size of the conversation about your brand or your
campaign? Volume is a great initial indicator of interest. People tend to
talk about things they either love or hate, but they rarely talk about
things they simply don’t care about at all.

While volume can seem like a simple counting metric, there’s more to it
than just counting tweets and wall posts. It’s important to measure the
number of messages about your brand, as well as the number of people
talking about your brand, and track how both of those numbers change
over time. For example, Facebook Insights has a useful metric (cleverly
called “people talking about this”) that measures how many unique
people have posted something to their walls about your brand page.
Learn when volume is higher – are there days or times when more
people seem to be talking about your brand? You can use this
information to focus more of your own posts during these times to get
more engagement, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

2. Reach

Reach measures the spread of a social media conversation. On its own,

reach can help you understand the context for your content. How far is
your content disseminating and how big is the audience for your
message? Reach is a measure of potential audience size.

And of course, a large audience is good, but reach alone does not tell
you everything. Reach becomes very powerful when compared to other
engagement metrics. Use reach as the denominator in your social
media measurement equations.

Pick important action or engagement numbers like clicks, retweets, or

replies (more on this in a second) and divide them by reach to calculate
an engagement percentage. Of the possible audience for your
campaign, how many people participated? Reach helps contextualize
other engagement metrics.

3. Engagement
Speaking of engagement metrics, this is one of the most important
areas to measure in social media. How are people participating in the
conversation about your brand? What are they doing to spread your
content and engage with the topic?

In most social media settings, content can be both shared and replied
to. Twitter retweets (RTs) and Facebook shares and posts are helpful to
know who is spreading your content, while comments, replies and likes
are helpful to see who is replying to your content. Think carefully about
your goals with social media. Are you focused more on generating
interaction (replies, comments) or on spreading a message (retweets
and posts)? Be sure you’re using metrics that reflect what’s important to
your brand right now.
And are there types of content that generate engagement? Start paying
attention to what messages generate the most replies and RTs. It might
surprise you what people interact with; it’s not always what you expect.
4. Influence
Who is talking about your brand and what kind of impact do they have?
Influence is probably the most controversial social media metric; there
are myriad tools that measure social influence, and they all do it in
different ways. But one thing they all agree on is that audience size
does not necessarily relate to influence. Just because someone has a lot
of friends or followers, that does not mean they can encourage those
followers to actually do anything.
Based on past actions, we can make assumptions about how influential
someone might be in the future. This type of potential influence is
useful to decide who to reach out to when you’re preparing for a
campaign. Tools like Klout and PeerIndex assign people an influence
score. Tools like these measure online social capital and the (potential)
ability to influence others.

Kinetic influence, on the other hand, will help you understand who is
participating in and driving conversation about your brand and your
campaigns, and who gets others to participate in these specific
conversations. You can find your brand advocates by focusing on
people whose messages are amplified by others, and not just who has
the most followers.

5. Share of Voice
Finally, to really understand how well you’re doing on social media, you
should consider a share of voice metric. How does the conversation
about your brand compare to conversations about your competitors?
Determine what percentage of the overall conversation about your
industry is focused on your brand compared to your main competitors.
And learn from your competitors’ successes; since so many of these
social media conversations are public, you can measure your
competitors’ impact just as easily as you can measure your own.

Consistency and preparation are essential to effective social media

measurement. Pick your favorite metrics and start tracking them now.
Use the same formulas and tools to calculate these numbers every
week or month. Track your numbers over time and pay attention to how
they change. If you see anything that looks higher or lower than what
you typically expect, investigate it. By measuring – and paying attention
to – these five social media metrics, you’ll be able to better understand
the impact and effectiveness of your social media activity.

Search engines

Bing

Bing is Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Google in search, but despite

their efforts they still did not manage to convince users that their search
engine can produce better results than Google.

Their search engine market share is constantly below 10%, even though
Bing is the default search engine on Windows PCs.

3. Yahoo
Yahoo is one the most popular email providers and holds the fourth
place in search with 3.90% market share.

From October 2011 to October 2015, Yahoo search was powered

exclusively by Bing. Since October 2015 Yahoo agreed with Google to
provide search-related services and since then the results of Yahoo are
powered both by Google and Bing. Yahoo is also the default search
engine for Firefox browsers in the United States (since 2014).

Google

No need for further introductions. The search engine giant holds the first
place in search with a stunning difference of 65% from second in place
Bing.

According to the latest netmarketshare report (November 2018) 73% of

searches were powered by Google and only 7.91% by Bing.

Google is also dominating the mobile/tablet search engine market share

with 81%!

So, what is Google AdWords?

To give you the dictionary definition, Google AdWords is an online advertising
service developed by Google to help marketers reach their customers instantly.

When someone searches on Google for a particular term, say ‘travel packages’,
Google would throw a list of searches for you. But if you look closely, you will notice
that the top and the bottom results are generally ads.

1. Use your brand name as your Twitter name.

This seems obvious, but I see many companies not using their brand name as
their Twitter name. They use a cute Twitter name that isn't related to their
brand name.

Related: Using Twitter's Promoted Services

2. Use your logo as your Twitter picture.
Again, this sounds very obvious, but some companies don't use their logo for
some reason.

3. Send Tweets that provide useful information to customers and

prospects.
Always add a link to more information on your website. It should be a page
on your website that adds value to the Tweet but doesn't require them to fill
out a web form to view the information. This complements your lead-
generation Tweets. You don't want to make people fill out a web form every
time or they may get frustrated.

4. Send Tweets to new blog posts or videos.

You can also send Tweets to older blog posts and videos that are still
relevant.

5. You should Tweet 10 to 20 times a day to keep your brand name in the
Twitter stream.
You can schedule the Tweets that have links to valuable content and
complement that with five to 10 personalized Tweets where you are
interacting with other Twitter users.

Related: 10 Things Entrepreneurs Should Be Tweeting About

6. Create a persona for your Twitter presence so people will get to know
your brand.
Investopedia defines brand personality as "A set of human characteristics that
are attributed to a brand name." A brand personality is something to which
the consumer can relate, and an effective brand will increase its brand equity
by having a consistent set of traits. This is the added value that a brand gains,
aside from its functional benefits. There are five main types of brand
personalities: excitement, sincerity, ruggedness, competence, and
sophistication.

 Excitement. It's easy to spot a person who's excited on Twitter.These

people love life, and they love everything they do. They also love to
share their excitement with the Twitterverse, and it's fun to follow
these people. Their Tweets will almost always uplift you.

 Sincerity. We all know the sincere people in our lives. They really
care about you and your well-being. They Tweet the same way by
always being genuine, caring, and sincere when they converse with
 others on Twitter.

 Ruggedness. These are the tough guys who never shed a tear. Their
Tweets sound like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood confronting their
adversaries and never backing down. You'll never see a hint of
compassion or sympathy from rugged Tweeters.

 Competence. This is a well-educated, knowledgeable person who

loves to Tweet information that will impress others. They love to share
their knowledge and use big words in their Tweets, which can be
challenging with the 140-character limit.

 Sophistication. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are sophisticated

Tweeters. They love to Tweet pictures of their shopping trips and
expensive cars, and let you know they're eating in the finest
restaurants.

From my experience, consistency is the key to success when building your

brand on Twitter. People get used to seeing your brand and persona on
Twitter and look forward to your Tweets once they get to know you. You
need to be engaging and entertaining when you Tweet to capture their
attention. People become raving fans when you consistently provide valuable
information and entertain them.

facebook

One of the primary challenges marketers face is building quick

traction for a new brand.

An established brand has it easy. They can target current Facebook

fans, website visitors, customers and email subscribers. These
people all know the brand, so they’re likely to engage positively.

But if you don’t have any of these things, how do you build a brand?
In this post I’ll break down the challenge as well as the simple steps
I recommend brands taking to build a highly relevant audience
quickly using Facebook.

1. Build a Passion Page

People may not be eager to interact with a brand’s Facebook page
— particularly a brand they don’t know — but you may be surprised
by how enthusiastic users are about engaging around a passion.

Create a Facebook page around a passion relevant to your brand

or product. If your brand is a new micro brewery, create a “People
Who Love Micro Brews” page — or something less corny. The main
point is that it’s very general and is not connected to a single brand.

2. Share to the Passion Page

Hopefully you’ve been sharing interesting content for this audience
while it’s been growing. They are engaged. They are eating from
your hand.

Now it’s time to share a blog post from your brand website. Let’s
start with a blog post that remains focused on the passion and less
on the brand. It could be a list of the best micro brews, how to brew
your own beer or something else related.

If you built your audience appropriately, you should see some pretty
amazing results. Not only will reach be sky high (you are reaching
people who want to see your content!), but the engagement and
traffic you drive should come easily.

Repeat this several times. Your goal is to drive traffic to your brand
site with relevant information that this audience will enjoy. While
they’re there, they will now become more and more aware of your
brand.

3. Remarket to New Website Visitors

Okay, so now it’s time to find out just how valuable this new
audience is!

You have been sharing blog posts from your brand’s website to the
passion page and promoting those posts as well. In the meantime,
you should have installed a Website Custom Audience pixel on your
site and you should be building WCAs for all website visitors during
the past 180 days.

1. Invest in getting a professional photo taken. According to a 2016

LinkedIn survey, your profile is 21 times more likely to be viewed if you
have a LinkedIn photo. That’s why Long says: “If you can afford a
professional photographer, it is usually the best investment you can make
in your personal brand and self confidence.”

2. Craft a more strategic headline. Your LinkedIn headline is

important for two reasons: It creates the first impression of you and the
keywords you select for it are the words that help recruiters find you. To
craft a strong headline:

 Be specific about who you are and what you do. For example,
instead of using a generic title like “Marketing Rep,” use
Marketing Executive/Growth Strategy/Channel Development.
 Incorporate relevant keywords. To find the most impactful
ones, look at job descriptions for positions you’d love and check
out LinkedIn groups to find industry appropriate terminology.
 Avoid using “unemployed” in your headline. Instead, use
strategic keywords that convey your value statement. For
example, Marketing Leader/Sales Generation Specialist.

3. Ask for LinkedIn Recommendations. Getting them from your

LinkedIn network, as well as Featured Skills/Endorsements (that’s No. 4),
lets others sing your praises and keeps you from appearing boastful.

For optimal results, ask for a recommendation immediately after the

successful completion of a project or when you receive an important
accolade or award. Make your request in person or by phone, if possible.
It’s more personal than email and gives you an opportunity to talk about
specifics for the recommendation.

4. Manage your Featured Skills and Endorsements. You know

those annoying messages that pop up on LinkedIn asking if you’d like to
endorse your contacts for a variety of skills? I’ve always considered that
feature worthless. After all, I’ve had people endorse me for public speaking
who’ve never heard me speak and received endorsements for career
coaching from people I’ve never met.

But thanks to Long, I’ve changed my tune.

According to a 2016 LinkedIn study, users who display five or more skills
are messaged 31 times more and viewed 17 times more than those who do
not! So as meaningless as Endorsements seem, they do attract more
eyeballs to your page.

Fortunately, LinkedIn makes it easy to edit, rearrange and manage your

endorsements. To manage them, move your cursor over the Meicon at the
top of your homepage, click View Profile, scroll down to the Featured
Skills & Endorsements section and click on any of your skills to
rearrange them so your strongest skills are at the top. You can also block
any endorsements you want to hide.

5. Incorporate photos and video. When it comes to building a

powerful LinkedIn profile, remember the old adage: A picture is worth a
thousand words. You can now easily post photos and videos to your
LinkedIn profile under the Experience, Education or Summary sections.

You can also use images in the background banner of your personal profile,
where you can feature a logo, photo or image that colorfully enhances your
brand. For example, a Realtor might display a photo of the city skyline or
an executive might use a photo of a conference she recently organized.

Remember, it’s far more effective to post a speaking clip that demonstrates
how engaging you are than to simply state, “I am a strong public speaker.”

6. Show off your expertise with SlideShare. LinkedIn recently

bought the SlideShare presentation platform and now integrates it within
your account. This way, you and your work can be easily discovered
through a specific SlideShare search or through Google. It’s another
dynamic and interesting way to display your thought leadership and draw
traffic to your profile.

Here’s more information about how to use SlideShare on LinkedIn.

7. Blog with LinkedIn Publisher. Finally, consider posting blogs on

LinkedIn to build your personal brand as a thought leader. The posts you
write will be displayed on your LinkedIn profile and as your connections
like and comment on them, they’ll be seen by your wider second- and third-
level networks as well as through Google searches.

Definition - What does Google Analytics mean?

Google Analytics is a website traffic analysis application that provides real-time
statistics and analysis of user interaction with the website. Google analytics enables
website owners to analyze their visitors, with the objective of interpreting and
optimizing website’s performance. Google analytics can track all forms of digital
media and referring upstream web destinations, banner and contextual
advertisements, e-mail and integrates with other Google products.
Techopedia explains Google Analytics
The data provided by Google analytics is designed especially for marketing and
webmasters alike in gauging the quality of traffic they are receiving and the
effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Google analytics can provide the response of a marketing campaign by tracking
visitors from all the referring sites and the number of visitors converted to customers
or members from each. Google analytics works by via a snippet of Javascript on the
website to be monitored. There is no hardware or software to install as the
application is entirely cloud based.