Let’s start with the basics… What is digital marketing? Put simply it’s any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic devices. Sounds easy enough right? But there’s a whole lot more involved than that. A recent survey found that people are spending upwards of 10 hours a day on electronic devices… that’s 70 hours per week, 280 hours per month and 3 360 hours per year but I think you get the point.
With people spending more time using electronic devices than ever before, it creates the perfect opportunity for your business to grab their attention as you now know where they are. But let’s get back to digital marketing. There are 2 main pillars of digital marketing, the first being online marketing and the second offline marketing.
The 7 important categories of online marketing:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
Now that we have a good overview let’s look at the Online Marketing categories.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the practice in which marketers craft unpaid marketing content efforts in such a manner as to rank higher with search engines – this is also known as organic listings. You can get more information about all things SEO here.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Relatively similar to SEO, however SEM is the practice of buying traffic through paid search listings. Basically it’s the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.
Content marketing
Storytelling in its basic form is passing on information from person to another and has been used since the beginning of time. However, content marketing is a little bit more complicated but not overly as it’s focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience. You can check out more about content marketing and its importance here.
Social media marketing (SMM)
Billions of people are actively liking and sharing content on social media platforms every day and businesses are no different. Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote your products or services. This form of digital marketing has become one of the primary means of communication between businesses and consumers. To really get into how it works, click here.
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
PPC stands for pay-per-click and is a model of internet marketing whereby advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads receives a click. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically. One of the most popular forms of PPC is search engine advertising which essentially pertains to advertisers putting in bids for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering.
Affiliate marketing
As explained on Wikipedia – ‘Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts’. Confused? Me too! Basically, affiliate marketing is when someone (known as the affiliate) searches for a product they enjoy, promotes that product, each sale is tracked via affiliate links from one website to another and they earn a piece of the profit from each sale they helped complete.
Email marketing
It might be old but it still works. Every day billions of people wake up and one the first things they do is check their inbox and that’s where you want to be. Email marketing is the practice of sending various types of content to a predefined list of subscribers via email. What you send impacts the desired response and could be to generate website traffic, leads, or even product signups for a business.
Connect with Azapi today and we’ll guide you through your own digital marketing journey!