Digital Marketing Fundamentals

The beginner’s guide of digital marketing and common tactics

Have you heard of digital marketing? Do you want to be a digital marketer? If yes, get ready to feel overwhelmed. You might think digital marketing is just running ads online, managing social media accounts, or writing blogs. How difficult can it be? Well, it’s true that digital marketing is super accessible. Everyone can create a business account easily and start to promote their brands right away. But the problem is how to stand out from the competitors and thrive in this digital jungle.

What is digital marketing?

First, let’s define the boundary of digital marketing. We all know about marketing. Its core idea has been always about connecting your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to find them where they are already spending time: on the internet. So, traditional marketing had to evolve along with the digital world and formed a series of new tactics — digital marketing. In short, digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use through digital platforms. For instance, search engines, social media, email, and websites.

Digital marketing roadmap

In the real world, we have a lot of ways to approach customers. We can run a commercial ad on TV, rent a billboard by highway, or send out product catalogs to customers’ mailbox. Different channels need different marketing techniques to tell the best story. It is the same in the digital world. Because users go online through different devices and platforms. Thus, we develop unique marketing tactics to score in each area. Like, SEO provides organic visibility of the website, social media allows brands to engage with customers, and marketing automation helps marketers to customize the most appropriate content for each customer.

There are many techniques and programs already in digital marketing, and they are still changing and evolving. For those who just entered this industry, it is necessary to have an overview of the whole roadmap and understand the structure of all marketing strategies. Here’s a quick rundown of the most common digital marketing tactics and the channels:

• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Email Marketing
• Marketing Automation

Content Marketing

Content marketing covers the creation of all types of content assets to achieve various long-term purposes: brand awareness, traffic growth, authority score, lead generation, customer engagement. The channels that play a part in content marketing strategies include:

• Blog posts: Publishing articles on a company blog regularly helps you show the industry expertise and build the reputation of your brand. It can also improve the organic visibility and authority score of your site on search engines.
• Ebooks & white papers: Ebooks, whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps further educate potential customers. It also can be a great tool to exchange content for readers’ contact information, generating leads and moving them toward the buyer’s journey.

Social Media Marketing

Social media serves as both owned and paid medium in the digital marketing landscape. Brands can create their own social media accounts and publish content to promote their business. It’s also a great place to converse and engage with their customers or followers and build up the reputation. On the other hand, social media provides brands options to run paid ads and display the content to the selected audience. Since the cost of running campaigns on social media is usually charged per click, per view, per impression, these type of tactics may also refer to “paid per click” or “paid social” or “display ads”.

The channels you can use in social media marketing include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is the practice of optimizing your website to ranking in search engine, thereby increasing the visibility and increase organic traffic of your website. There are many ways to approach SEO:

• On page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all content that exists “on the page” at a website. Through researching keywords, topics, and questions that directly relevant to your business and industry, you can build a high-authority pages that rank higher on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
• Off page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on the activity that takes place “off the page”. “What activity not on my website could affect my ranking?” You might ask. The answer is inbound links, AKA “backlinks”. The number of publishers (or high-authority websites) that link to your site affects how potentially you will rank for your target keywords.
• Technical SEO: This type of SEO focuses on the backend of your website, and how your pages are coded. Search engines evaluate the technical quality of your website, for example, loading speed, image compression, structure data, CSS file. All these factors impacting user experience while visiting your website can affect your organic ranking.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM, often referring to paid search, is another option to rank higher, but unlike SEO that relies on longterm optimizations to improve website quality and authority scores, SEM allows you to buy your way up immediately. If your goal is to show up on the top list for certain keywords in a short time, SEM is the way to go.

One of the advantages about using SEM is that you can add extensions on your ad copy and make your ads more persuasive, for instance, call-to-action, side links, a map, app download, or a carousel of your products. Search engines save the most potential spots on search result pages and decide which ads to show based on the quality score of your site and the “bid”, which is the highest price you are willing to pay each time people click on your ads.

Red: Paid Search Result; Green: Organic Result

Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a method to attract traffic to your website by paying a digital platform every time your ad is clicked. These platforms include online publishers, social media, and search engines. The most common PPC channel is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for top slots on it’s search engine results pages at a price “per click” of the links you place. Other channels where you can display PPC strategy include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Snapchat.

Also “click-through” is the first charging and bidding methods in digital advertising but now there are many options for advertisers to choose depends on KPIs of their business. For example, if you are promoting an upcoming movie, your goal is to maximize the number of views of the trailer. Then you can set your bidding option to “per view” of your video ads, or “per impression” of your display ads.

Email Marketing
Email is an effective marketing channel, especially at the conversion and retention stage of the customer journey since emails allow companies to communicate with their audiences about latest promotions, discounts, and events, as well as to direct people toward the landing page. The types of emails campaign include:

• Blog posts or newsletters for subscribers.
• Follow-up message to website visitors.
• Customer welcome or thank-you emails.
• Special promotions to registered members.
• Tips or similar series of emails for customer nurturing.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation was initially invented by the software that serves to automate basic marketing operations, for example, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Hubspot. They allow marketers to automate repetitive tasks or scheduling posts, such as:

• Email newsletters: Email automation allow you to automatically send emails to your subscribers or website visitors. It can also help to optimize email list as needed for better ROI and lower attrition rate.
• Social media post scheduling: One of the key points to growing your company’s social media presence online is to post quality content consistently and frequently. Social media scheduling tools publish your social media messaging automatically as you plan, so you can spend more time focusing on developing high-quality content.
• Lead-nurturing: Generating new leads, and converting them into customers, can be a long process. You can automate that process by defining key touch-points of customer journey and sending specific emails and promotions, such as when they register your webinar, the automation program will send a related guidebook to follow up their interests.