The advent of Digital Marketing & How it is Replacing Traditional Marketing

If you are reading it, you might be familiar with what digital marketing is, following the convention let me define it for you. It is a way to advertise anything which a marketer wants to sell online without going anywhere remotely sitting merely on a desktop.

Digital marketing makes it easier for marketers to attract customers by running more precise and targeted ad campaigns via emails, tv channels, games, websites, and other digital mediums. However, things were not this sane before the advent of digital marketing. Still, there is much more to it than ad campaigns.

Before digital marketing when people were not familiar with digital mediums, and these mediums were not expected too, marketers used traditional marketing techniques to advertise products, and brands by publishing ads in newspapers, magazines, banners, and billboards.

Transformation of Marketing

Different approaches were used traditionally by marketers for advertisements. For instance, in door-to-door marketing one of the traditional marketing approaches a bunch of team members used to do marketing campaigns at the doorsteps of their potential customers. 

Some of these traditional approaches are still in practice and effective, but potential customers are not that responsive towards the digital mediums. Conventional approaches do help a lot, but digital marketing techniques are more cost-effective and have a more considerable impact on the audience with the assistance of the amount of data available today.

This formal introduction is enough to understand the real meaning and the advent of digital marketing. The image below demonstrates a few benefits of Digital Marketing

Advantages of Digital Marketing

Search Engine Optimization & Marketing

You guys might be familiar with SEO, it represents Search Engine Optimization which is a practice of improving a website’s visibility in Search Engine Result Pages. SEO fits in a broader Digital Marketing strategy and is more focused on obtaining free or organic traffic; other digital marketing roles can work in close alignment with SEO strategy.

Other roles within the digital marketing umbrella concerned with Search Engines include Search Engine Marketing. Which is the practice of bidding for paid advertisements in search engines SEO and SEM have diversified the role of digital marketing.

That was the formal introduction to what SEO is & and for what purposes it is used. There are different approaches to SEO the most common ones are,

On-Page SEO

On-page is a term used to define the content which is present on the website, such as posts and pages. While on-page SEO refers to optimizing this content for search engines using best practices for superior visibility in SERPs.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to the optimization of link building of the content present on your website for higher rankings on SERPs. Link building can be further categorized into Inbound-link building and outbound-link building.

Inbound link building is linking to the content within your website for better navigation. In contrast, outbound-link building refers to the quality websites linking back to your websites which can produce link juice for your website ultimately resulting in better rankings and page authority.

Technical SEO

This type of SEO is mainly focused on optimizing how your website should be structured, image optimization and compression, the loading time of the website, and optimizing the CSS files and other scripts used to build the website.

These factors help to increase the website’s loading time which is one of the ranking factors. It helps to provide a better user experience for the visitors, which helps to control the bounce rate effectively.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a process in which you target the audience who has an interest in the product. In order to learn about the rationale of the audience, a bulk amount of emails are sent regularly to email handlers from which you get to know the potential audience.

How can we send a massive amount of emails at the same time? You can use plenty of tools available online to send tons of emails concurrently. Some of these tools are free, and some of them are paid.

Free Tools

• Send in Blue
• Mail Chimp
• Mad Mimi

Paid Tools

• Sendloop
• Aweber
• Mail Get Bolt

Why do we need these paid online tools when we can easily use one of the free tools to send unlimited e-mails to target our audience?

The emails from these free tools usually end up being in the spam or promotional section of the email box, which results in Low Conversion Rates because most people don’t bother opening their promotions boxes.

On the other hand, when you use a paid tool or site for sending e-mails, it sends your emails directly into the primary box of the audience which makes you avoid low conversion rates. It also elevates the chances of people converting to your target source.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is composed of both free and paid social advertising and engagement practices.

What is a social media marketing strategy? This marketing aims to seize the audience for your website through social media. However, most of the traffic from social media comes via paid campaigns, although some of it can be organic. 

Social Media is widely used to run ad campaigns for product advertisements; Facebook is the most used social media around the world and is one of the best platforms to advertise your products and brands. 

Content understanding is required in social media marketing because you are running paid campaigns. Suppose the audience can’t understand your product or the brand. In that case, it means your Ad is exceedingly dull or too towering for the customer to apprehend if it is so, they will skip your ad eventually.

The whole Ad should focus and revolve around your content this way your ad can be worthy enough otherwise if your content has more irrelevant stuff it will eventually distract your audience.

Content Marketing

It is a strategic approach in which content makers have to create or distribute relevant and valuable content from which they can attract the audience. If the content has irrelevant things in it or it shows something which customers cant understand, then it will be your loss, and you will lose your audience sooner or later.

Content should be valuable, or it should be according to the interest of your audience if the content is old or people are already informed about it, then why would they waste their time again?

Although Content marketing is a lot different from content writing because some people think that content marketing is content making, which is not. The infographic demonstrates a few of its types and their distribution channels.

Pay Per Click

Pay per click also known as PPC is used to target the audience which might be interested in your product this can be done by paying the publishers to publish your ad on the top slots and every time a visitor clicks on this ad you have to pay for it.

Google Ads and Bing Ads both of these platforms can both be used to advertise products or brands on it. The niches which are prohibited or banned to advertise on Google ads and bing ads are Drugs, weapons, or any other illegal product.

With the Help of PPC, You Can Achieve These Goals

• Increasing Sales
• Generating Leads
• Promoting Brand Awareness

Other Platforms You Can Use for PPC Include

• Facebook Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn

Affiliate Marketing

Simply affiliate marketing is getting a commission or profit for promoting or selling someone’s product in the market.

This means when a manufacturer or supplier contacts you for their product to sell in the market you just deal with them about the percentage of your commission and start promoting their work online via Ads on your TV channels, websites, email, mobile, and apps.

Affiliate agents simply earn their commission by providing customers to the manufacturer or supplier, per sale they made.

It depends upon the affiliate agents that how they promote the product and where they advertise it. Maybe they have good websites capturing plenty of traffic monthly, or perhaps they can promote or advertise the product by sending mails to the audience, there are several other ways to do affiliate marketing as well.

Whenever you deal with affiliate agents, it is ideal to make sure about their previous tasks, and whether they have enough audience on their respective platforms or not, influencers from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Websites can be outreached.

Components of the Affiliate Marketing

Vendors

Vendors are those, who contact affiliates for the promotion of their brand or products.

Affiliates

Affiliates are those taking commission on each of the sales of the product they are making while promoting it to their audience.

Affiliate Network Vendors

This is actually a bridge between Affiliates and vendors, Affiliate networks help affiliates and vendors to don’t get messy and provide them with a suitable vendor or affiliate as per their requirements.

Native Advertising

Native advertisement is a product or brand endorsement via ads alongside the non-paid ad. In this mechanism, content should be related to the advertisement in order to generate reasonable conversions; otherwise, it might just distract the visitors.

If the native ad is not related to the content or maybe has a totally irrelevant baseline, then the audience will skip your ad, or they might just block it which is the only thing you as a marketer is not looking forward to perhaps.

Online PR

The public relationship focuses on acquiring relationships and promoting newsworthy content and other related roles. Online PR is a process that works on strategic ways to enhance business relationships with the public; it is traditional PR except for the fact that it’s online. 

Suppose a company wants to run its business adequately, earn a hefty amount of reputation among the masses, and make its name on the top. In that case, the company has to maintain its relationship with the buyers, suppliers, advertisers, and others falling within the territory of your respective company.

Channels that can be used to optimize your online PR:

Active Engagement on Social Platforms

Active engagement on social media platforms can be helpful for your consumers to enquire about their queries more conveniently; it helps to develop a personal relationship with the consumers.

Developing Relationships with Bloggers online

Developing a good relationship with the bloggers who review products of your niche for a personalized experience can be helpful for your brand. Also, reach out to bloggers reviewing your product whether it is bad or good for a better understanding of each other’s perspectives.

Sponsored Marketing

Sponsored Marketing is a powerful marketing tool if you are looking to scale your business. In this type of marketing, sponsors are outreached to write about your brand or product, Social media influencers, YouTubers, and Bloggers can be used for sponsored marketing.

If you are willing to advertise your new clothing brand, you can sign a contract with a model who is actually quite famous in the market and has a bulk amount of audience on social media. Bloggers or reviewers with good reputations or audiences can also be outreached for the same purpose.

The artist or influencer who sponsors your product is a paid artist or influencer who takes money to advertise your product or brand, you can make a fixed amount, or lead a generation-based contract with the sponsor for the time period that suits best each of you.

Marketing Automation

In Market Automation, different tools are used to automate online marketing processes. If you are not available 24/7 or don’t have enough budget to maintain a team that can respond to your consumer’s queries, you can use automation tools. These primarily chat, and email bots are used as frontline interaction booths for the general questions of the consumer.

The purpose of these chat and email bots is to scale people in business relationships with their customers online. For lead generation purposes, for this motive, social media, email, web, and texts are used.

If it is executed right, it could generate a massive lead for your business, but there are few complications in its execution, read this article for a comprehensive guide to marketing automation.

Influencer Marketing

It is a process in which influencers online with a certain amount of audience or having an audience of the same categories in which you can sell your product quickly are outreached to drive your brand’s message to the masses.

Influencer marketing can be quite helpful in building your brands reputation and if it is done in the right way it can convert a hefty amount of audience for you and the dedicated and loyal audience of that influencer might become loyal to you as well because of their endorsement of your brand or product.

Conclusion

With the advent of digital marketing, traditional marketing approaches have become void in Marketing. However, they are being practiced in places where digitalization has not happened in its true sense and the places where there is a gap in technology. However, the traditional approaches are destined to be replaced thoroughly due to their cost and ineffectiveness as compared to digital marketing.

Digital Marketing has the leverage of data and analytics, which helps the marketers to target the right audience at the right time. Digital Marketing has its own respective challenges that come along with all of these benefits, but it has more manageable drawbacks as compared to traditional marketing. Business giants all over the world are focusing more on their digital marketing campaigns to scale their businesses further, and why they should not, it is the future indeed.

Recap

Here is the breakdown of what we have read so far in this article a recap.

1.  Search Engine Optimization & Marketing.
2.  Email marketing.
3.  Social media marketing.
4.  Content Marketing.
5.  Pay per click.
6.  Affiliate marketing.
7.  Native Advertising
8.  Public Relations.
9.  Sponsored marketing.
10.  Marketing automation.
11.  Influencer marketing.

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