Since the inception of the web, digital marketing has been a marketing mixture of online and offline marketing, but with the explosive growth of online marketing, as shown by the 2018 Google Analytics Trends report, more industries are seeing the power of digital marketing.

You may be familiar with the term "digital marketing", as it’s also referred to as ‘online marketing’ or ‘web marketing’. However, this is a broad term and can refer to a variety of tactics used to advertise your products online, including Search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing (SMM), and email marketing. If you’re reading this, I assume you’re probably already aware of SEO and PPC (I hope!), but for the sake of those reading who aren’t, here are definitions for SEO and PPC:

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of helping websites appear at the top of a search engine’s search results when a consumer types in a query. Ideally, you want your website to show up first when someone types in a key phrase or keyword associated with your business.

There are several steps to optimizing a website for search engines, but let’s focus on the first one – on-page optimization.

An on-page optimization audit will help you identify elements within your website that you can improve upon to gain more organic traffic from search engines. You’ll work with a digital marketing agency to assess the general performance of your website. They’ll look at things such as your bounce rate, time on page, and the like. Once this step is taken care of, the next step is to implement changes to your site, based on the results of your audit.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

PPC advertising, also known as ‘pay-per-click advertising’ or ‘Google AdWords’, is a type of online advertising that allows you to pay per click. Essentially, you’ll pay each time a person clicks on your ad. There’s little to no upfront investment and you can get started quickly and easily.

This type of advertising can be highly effective as long as you keep your costs down and don’t overuse it. Since you’re paying per click, you’ll want to be sure that you’re targeting the right audience. You can also use PPC to advertise on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Social Media Marketing

SMM is the use of social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to promote brands and products. When someone clicks on a brand’s or product’s banner on a social media platform, they’ll be presented with an ad for that brand or product. Ideally, you want your social media posts to be engaging enough to make the person reading it interested in your brand or product. Additionally, you want them to feel like you’re speaking directly to them – creating a sense of connection.

SMM is a type of digital marketing that relies on key influencers to spread the word about your product or service. If you want to get in on the action, build a presence on social media platforms and start engaging with your followers.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the act of sending email communications to people with the purpose of promoting a product or service. To maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing, you need to identify and then segment your email list.

You can do this manually by creating different lists for different groups of people. Alternatively, you can use a tool like MailChimp to automatically create and send emails to your customer base. As with all other forms of digital marketing, it’s important to measure the results of your email marketing campaign, so you can determine whether or not it was successful.

As you can see, there are several forms of digital marketing. While SEO and PPC are two of the most popular methods, there are hundreds of different tactics and strategies that you can use to market your products online. If you’re looking for ways to improve your overall marketing strategy, check out the Google Analytics 360 Suite, which is where I’ll leave you today!