Core Components of Digital Marketing (2 of 4)
What does it mean to market online?
Most businesses have no idea that their troubles could be quickly alleviated by investing in a reliable digital marketing program. Not only will they find solutions that fit their budget, but I seen the payoffs exceed my client’s wildest expectations.
You can look at the digital world as a world on its own, sort of like the movie Ready Player One. Your website, social channels, and other channels and content all exist in this world as neighborhoods, shopping malls, and centers of commerce. Let’s review each area with a little more depth.
We will look at these core components of digital marketing and how they are classified:
- Your Digital Portfolio
- Digital Marketing Channels
- Organic vs. Paid Marketing
- The Digital Media Mix
Your Digital Portfolio
Your Website — Websites fall into four broad categories, lead generation, eCommerce, brand awareness, and SaaS websites (software as a service). I explain this with a little more depth in my post, Types of Websites.
Knowing your website’s purpose will help establish your brand’s tone and help measure performance and ROI against your organization’s goals. Your website is also your storefront or home online. It’s where you invite customers and entertain guests. It’s the most representative aspect of who you are or what your organization stands for.
Your blog serves the same purpose, but it’s more for your guests than for you or your organization. One of the most prevalent activities online is to make sure your blog is updated with fresh content on a routine basis and sharing that content across the website.
Your Social Accounts — Social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest are the social areas of the digital world. They are your digital coffee shops, bars, clubs, malls, and convention centers. These are the primary areas where you meet people and exchange ideas, information, and inspiration.
Online Listings & Links — Online listings such as Google My Business or Yelp are crucial to brick and mortar businesses. Think of listings and links to your website as your website’s popularity online. The only difference is that you have a little more control over your reputation, popularity, and demand online. The more you use the digital marketing principles below to grow your brand, the more you’ll start popping up consistently across all web.
Search Engines — Search engines are the doorways of the Internet. Unfortunately for its competitors, as of April 2020, just under 92% of users use the Google search engine for their search queries. Bing and Yahoo account for the remaining 8%. Search engines have four jobs, crawl web pages, index those web pages, rank those web pages, and serve those web pages when a user searches for them. Picture the search engine as the town square.
The search engine is a pivotal point in the marketing journey since search queries tell us exactly what people are interested in with other key indicators such as user location, time, and device. My digital marketing career started with my discovery of Google Trends. I invite you to take a look.
Digital Marketing Channels
When we talk about digital marketing, we are often referring to a particular set of channels and their corresponding skillsets. Chances are, you won’t need them all, but you will need to understand the underlying principles that govern them. These channels are digital analytics, search engine marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, display advertising, and content marketing.
Each avenue brings with it its own set of challenges, rewards, methods of execution. These channels are different, but all operate under the same underlying principles that make them more effective than your run of the meal marketing tactics.
There are various ways to classify these channels based on how you are evaluating your business needs. In most instances, your digital marketing efforts will correlate to your marketing initiatives, with each channel corresponding to its particular skillset. You want to search Google Ads, then you need a Paid Search Manager, likewise with a Social Media Manager. This perspective is also useful for managers who manage the day-to-day channels of digital marketing.
- Digital Analytics
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM, PPC, Paid Search, Paid Media)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO, Organic Search)
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Marketing Automation (Email Marketing)
- Display Advertising
Digital Analytics — Digital analytics is the ongoing act of collecting, measuring, and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data and using that to optimize or enhance your overall business and marketing operations. Digital analytics is the backbone of digital marketing based solely on the fact that measurement is such an essential piece of digital marketing.
As your journey into digital marketing grows, you’ll find that there is no shortage of online data. Data is continuously being accumulated from websites, search engines, mobile applications, sale applications, and marketing channels. Finding insights into this data is no easy task. Digital analysts and data scientists are some of the most sought after professionals in the industry.
Search Engine Marketing — Search engine marketing is the marketing of your products or services using paid ads that appear on the search engine results page when a keyword you are bid on is searched. These ads correlate to search engine searches.
This profession or skill has many other common names such as search marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), cost-per-click (CPC), and paid search. It’s also good to understand that occasionally people refer to ALL online advertising as search engine marketing. By definition, this is incorrect since social advertising and display advertising doesn’t occur on a search engine.
“Paid media” is a term used to ALL aspects of online advertising, such as social advertising and display advertising. We’ll discuss the classification of these channels later.
Search Engine Optimization — Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the most fundamental tasks in digital marketing. It’s the process of improving your website’s organic ranking on the search engine results page. The work of SEO consists of helping the search engine find and understand your site and then assisting users in using your website.
Search engine optimizers meet these goals with technical SEO strategies, link building, and content marketing. Content Marketing and SEO intersect because your SEO strategy should directly influence your content marketing strategy. For a more in-depth outline of SEO, you can read The Invaluable Art of SEO.
Social Media Marketing — Social media marketing is criminally underutilized by many brands. Marketing on social sites is treated like the red-headed stepchild because social media is often viewed as a young person’s game. What many don’t know is that major Fortune 500 companies have been taking advantage of social media for years, spending upwards of billions on social.
I managed millions in Facebook Ad spend with large clients driving leads 45 years old and up. But the most important thing to know is that you can serve ads for your business or brand for as little as $5 a day. There are countless other reasons not to ignore social, even if you arent using social ads. Social media works seamlessly with SEO and content marketing to drive traffic to your site.
The major social media players are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok. Keep in mind two points:
- Social media marketing consists of organic posting AND serving targeted social ads. Both work hand and hand to drive traffic to your site.
- Facebook, by far, has the most robust targeting system of any paid media platform on the market. You will not find another advertising platform that correlates to marketing personas AND has the type of reach Facebook has.
Content Marketing — Content marketing consists of creating and distributing content online to attract and retain website traffic and an audience online. Content marketing can include any type of content deemed valuable to the user. This includes, but is not limited to, blogs, infographics, quizzes, ebooks, webinars, podcasts, and videos.
Content marketing often seeps into other marketing channels as content can be viewed as anything created for the purposes of marketing a brand. And if it’s not attributed to other channels, it’s at the very least essential for any dangerous social media strategy. Social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO work seamlessly together to enhance your digital presence.
Affiliate marketing is sometimes considered its own channel, however, it depends heavily upon content marketing. Affiliate marketing consists of businesses incentivizing partner or “affiliate” websites for driving visitors, customers, and revenue to the business's website, digital products, or sales and marketing initiatives.
Marketing Automation — Marketing automation refers to the process of leveraging software to deliver personalized messages to your target market. The message sent to everyone differs depending on a range of factors, such as past interactions, spending habits, and other factors.
Marketing automation can be a complicated topic because there are so many ways you can automate various marketing tasks. When done correctly, marketing automation can be immensely helpful for sales and marketing teams looking to achieve a range of goals and objectives.
Email marketing is the most prevalent form of marketing automation because it gives you the most bang for your buck. Email is the most direct and personal digital channel in which you can engage your customers. So much, so that email lists are considered precious assets of a company upon evaluation.
Display Advertising — Display advertising is the billboard ads of the digital world. They consist of images, animated images, videos, graphics, and other rich media that show up on websites and social media platforms. Display ads like billboards are derived with the intention of creating visibility online.
One of the key differences between creating a billboard and serving banner ads is that you can access accurate data as to how many people have viewed your ad and how did they engage with your ads. The two of the most common metrics used with display ads are “impressions” and “reach.” Your reach is the number of people who have seen your advertisement or content. An impression is counted every time your ad or content is displayed.
Organic vs. Paid Marketing
The Organic/Paid model can be thought of like the difference between marketing online and advertising online. Marketing, from a high level, can be considered as aligning a brand, product, or service with a target demographic. Advertising is the act of bringing awareness to a brand, product, or service.
The lines are blurred when it comes to digital marketing. “Marketing” is in the name, but digital marketing is composed of equal parts of marketing and advertising. The tactic of serving ads online is essentially marketing because you are aligning your brand, product, or service with a specific target demographic.
What’s more, is that when you advertise online, you are given more data to analyze than both organic and offline marketing tactics. We can go a bit deeper and distinguish these two groups by push or pull marketing tactics. Although the lines are blurry, in general, you want to think of organic digital marketing as making your home more attractive to visitors while paid is actively inviting people to your home.
Organic (Marketing)
- Search Engine Optimization
- Content Marketing
- Marketing Automation/Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
Paid (Advertising)
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media Advertising
- Display Advertising
The Digital Media Mix
When it is time to evaluate your business’s assets, you can view your digital marketing efforts as forms of digital media. The word “media” simply means a form of mass communication. With that in mind, we can look at our channels as valuable assets to a business’s bottom line.
For example, when I was in the market to purchase online businesses, the number of followers and likes the business's social media accounts owned was a critical factor in pricing the company. This works the same for companies that have massive email lists. Email lists can be a highly valued asset, especially in the eyes of potential investors. I like to name this “digital marketing statement” as “Digital Media.”
Earned Media: viral marketing, social sharing, lore, fanfiction.
- Content Ecosystem
- Social Media
Paid Media: all forms of PAID online advertising and media buying in which clicks and impressions are paid for.
- Paid Search
- Paid Social
- Display Advertising
- Retargeting
- Paid Influencers
- Display Advertising
Owned Media: Media produced by an organization.
- Websites
- Apps
- Blogs
- Social Channels
Learn these aspects of digital marketing and you have a genuine understanding of the landscape you’re about to venture off into.
Next Up! — New To Digital Marketing? Learn These 10 Things First These 10 essentials will guide you in every digital marketing endeavor.
