Promoting your company through the world wide web is the best way to generate valuable leads, but learning digital marketing 101 is the best place to start if you don’t have experience advertising your business online.
By learning the basics of digital marketing, you’ll understand the different moving elements that can make up your different campaigns. Not only this, but learning about PPC or pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and all other forms of online promotion will allow you to build a better digital marketing team and significantly reduce your turnaround.
At Fannit, we’ve been helping companies bolster their digital marketing efforts through a variety of channels for more than a decade. As a full-service agency, we specialize in a range of online marketing tactics, so our team is familiar with the different elements to attract targeted audiences in various industries.
In this article, we’ll share everything you need to know about digital advertising and online marketing basics. This includes definitions of key terms you’ll need to consider while creating high-quality content and building different parts of your digital marketing campaign. Lastly, we’ll provide tips to help you stay tuned with the latest updates and relevant changes in the world of online marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Before going into the different digital elements that make up your campaign, let’s go over some online marketing basics.
First off, what is digital marketing?
In short, it’s the practice of promoting your goods and services through the internet in order to build your marketing funnel. There are many different digital marketing channels you can target. But, each digital channel represents an investment of resources. Therefore, you need to find the best alternative, generate relevant content on this media, and ensure it’s aligned with the rest of your strategy.
We’ll cover some of the best digital tactics in the next section. But, one of the most important lessons you need to learn in your online marketing 101 research is that this form of promotion is very different from traditional means.
Simply put, digital marketing practices are inherently different from offline marketing because the former can be tracked, managed, and adjusted easily after publication. The best part is that this doesn’t incur additional fees, unlike many types of traditional marketing like billboard advertising.
Helpful Reading: Digital Marketing Plan
Which Are the Best Digital Marketing Tactics?
Now that we’ve covered some of the basics of online marketing, let’s take a look at some of the approaches you can use to attract your target audience.
Just a few decades ago, video marketing in the form of television ads was the ultimate form of advertising. Today, consumers turn to the internet to find new products and services. Which makes online channels the best way to reach your audiences.
There are so many different digital marketing components that simply creating the right mix can be a challenging, time-consuming process.
This is why it’s necessary to have knowledge beyond digital marketing basics and leverage this profound understanding in the creation of your marketing strategy.
Note that there is no perfect formula to help you find the ideal marketing mix. Your digital marketing strategy should be tailored to your business’s specific needs. So, before choosing the digital channels you’ll use to drive website visitors, take the time to research your business and customer.
Only then will you be able to ensure a great experience from the moment your prospects’ online experiences begin to after they become customers.
Here are some of the best methods to boost your digital marketing efforts. Remember, every company is different, so you should evaluate each digital marketing tactic separately to determine if it’s the right fit for your business.
Your Website and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
If there is one thing you should take away from our digital marketing basics is the power of your website.
Your target audience sees your website as a direct reflection of your company. If your pages are slow, have an unappealing design, and fail to provide relevant information. On the contrary, having a more modern site that contains fast, functional pages packed with useful information can boost your lead generation.
But, how do you make sure your site has all the necessary elements?
Conversion rate optimization, also known as CRO, is the practice of adjusting your content in order to generate a higher number of leads. In CRO, the term “conversion” refers to a sale, quote request, consulting booking, or any other type of interaction you proactively want to achieve.
So, implementing a CRO digital marketing strategy means that you’re constantly reviewing your content and making adjustments to help improve performance. But, for this to ha[[en, you need to familiarize yourself with the different digital channels in your strategy and how they impact your website performance.
PPC Ads and Other Forms of Paid Advertising
PPC is a form of online paid advertising. As you can probably deduce, this type of digital marketing focuses on promoting your goods through paid platforms.
Google Ads (previously known as Google Adwords) has become the best place to run paid digital marketing campaigns. The practice of promoting your company through Google and other search engines is called search engine marketing or SEM.
Not to be confused with search marketing (which includes both paid and organic), SEM PPC ads are performance-based. In PPC advertising, companies only have to pay for interactions like clicks and, in some cases, even conversions. This means that you don’t have to pay for users simply viewing your ads, although this option is also available.
That said, social media platforms can also offer great alternatives depending on your goals and industry.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of making adjustments to your website and other areas in order to boost your organic rankings on search engines.
Focusing on your website’s SEO has become a major digital marketing strategy because it allows you to connect with users while they conduct queries on search engines. Many of these individuals use search engines to find products and services, so having a digital marketing strategy crafted to claim the top spots on Google is a great way to engage and convert these users.
Unlike PPC campaigns, you don’t have to pay for the website traffic you generate through SEO. And, search engine optimization can also boost other tactics you implement, including social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and inbound marketing, among others.
Content Marketing
The idea behind content marketing is simple: create great materials that your target audience finds valuable. Whenever these prospects need assistance, they will either turn to your content marketing materials. If they can’t solve the issue, the next natural step is to contact your business and get help from a knowledgeable professional.
Although it’s easy to explain, creating a content marketing strategy that actually works is much more difficult.
First off, you need to create a blueprint based on your goals and resources and have the right marketing automation flows in place. Plus, you have to publish a blog post weekly at the least, make sure it’s relevant content, and monitor online reviews for this form of inbound marketing to be successful.
Email Marketing
If digital marketing strategies were cars, email marketing would be one of those classics that can compete with today’s modern wonders.
Email marketing is a superb technique because it can boost your branding, funnel building, and lead generation efforts simultaneously. That said, building a solid email marketing campaign takes a significant amount of time and effort.
Your email marketing sequences need to be divided into different parts to reflect your funnel. Moreover, in addition to promotional materials, your sequences should also include additional content, like posts on your blog, for your digital marketing work to be successful.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing may not be as old as email marketing, but there is no doubt that the former can generate formidable results. This is because consumers now use social media channels like Facebook and Instagram to research companies before purchasing from them.
In addition to designing engaging organic marketing social media posts, remember that you can also opt for paid ads. Social media advertising allows you to place different types of ads throughout networks in a variety of formats.
But, you need to understand the different social media ads options at your disposal in order to build a great campaign.
User Experience and On-Site Engagement
Adjusting on-site engagement variables and focusing on user experience as a whole has become one of the best methods to generate leads online.
Whether your traffic comes from a search engine, content marketing, or email marketing campaign, your visitors won’t become leads if they have a bad experience.
You can improve this by focusing on the variables that, albeit small, have a huge impact on the way users interact and perceive your site. These elements include site speed, contrast, page design, images used, and many other variables.
Moreover, you should also implement conversion and engagement-driving features, including email marketing subscription pop-ups, exit intent pop-ups, and similar elements.
General Digital Marketing Terms
If you’re looking to promote your business website through a search engine, social media channel, or another type of online platform, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with certain digital marketing topics.
Let’s take a look at some key digital marketing terms 101.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
Search engine results pages or SERPs are generated when a user performs a search on Google or another platform. In simple terms, this is the page that contains the results of the user’s search. In search marketing, the SERP usually contains 10 results, which is the reason why most businesses aim to obtain one of these top spots.
Customer Acquisition
This term doesn’t only apply to online channels, but it’s an essential digital 101 piece of information. Customer acquisition describes the process through which you attract clients to your business, including all marketing and promotion practices you have in place.
Impression
An impression is a digital interaction that involves a user simply viewing an ad or SERP link. Additionally, this value can be used to calculate other metrics because it enables you to compare the number of people that saw a link to your content versus the number of people that clicked on it, whether it’s on a paid or organic campaign.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
CTR is a digital marketing metric used that allows you to see the percentage of people that click on your ad or SERP result. Search engines like Google use the number of impressions and clicks to calculate the CTR of specific ads, ad groups, and entire campaigns. That said, this metric has to be used in combination with other online marketing statistics to provide a wholesome picture of your performance.
Bounce Rate
Getting a top rank on search results and driving a lot of traffic to your website is a great start. But, the bounce rate, which is the percentage of people that visit a single page without exploring the rest of your site, can help you assess the success of your content.
Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising is a common element of strategies like influencer marketing and PPC. Simply put, context advertising is the process of adjusting a marketing message based on the user’s context.
Buzz Monitoring
The online “buzz” your company generates can be compared to the amount of visibility you get. If you create more buzz on search engines, social media networks, and other marketing channels, you’ll see a rise in brand recognition, SEO rankings, and overall results.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate advertising is the practice of partnering with an independent digital marketer that helps you promote your products and services through social media and other channels.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is the practice of creating two or more versions of an ad, page, or another form of content in order to compare both. The goal is to identify the best performer and repeat the process to ensure the best outcome. This can be used to build a better keyword strategy, boost rankings on search results, and craft a better social media campaign, among other uses.
Brand Positioning
Brand positioning refers to your company’s reputation and how it measures up to competitors. In addition to how users perceive you, brand positioning also includes your product’s quality, prices, and other variables that can help determine your success.
Customer Segmentation
In traditional and online marketing, customer segmentation refers to the process of separating your target audience into different groups based on common demographic factors. This allows you to create digital marketing content for specific cohorts and distribute these materials among distinct groups in order to get better results.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Terms
PPC has become a major staple of online marketing and for good reason. That said, paid digital marketing campaigns represent a direct investment. So, you need to have an in-depth understanding of keyword research and other practices that go beyond basic digital marketing.
Here are essential PPC digital media 101 terms you need to know.
Search Volume
Search volume represents the number of users who search for a specific keyword on a monthly basis. While also applicable in organic approaches, search volume usually determines the cost of a paid ad. Which makes this term an essential part of paid digital advertising campaigns.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC)/Keyword Price
Cost-per-click or CPC is a metric that tells you how much it costs, on average, to run an ad with a specific keyword. The CPC of a word can vary tremendously, so you need to research the cost of your keywords before building your paid digital marketing plan.
PPC Tracking
PPC tracking is the process of tracking and monitoring the performance of your paid campaigns. This area of digital marketing helps ensure that your ads are producing results, whether it’s through an SEM or social media campaign.
Bid
In the PPC context, a bid refers to the maximum amount of money you are willing to pay for an ad. To be successful, your bids usually have to be around or higher than the CPC value. With that said, many companies opt to leave this part to the platform’s marketing automation system, but this doesn’t always provide the best possible results.
Search Engine Optimization Terms
No list of key internet marketing 101 terms is complete without an SEO section.
Here are the concepts you’ll need to understand in order to learn the internet marketing basics of this approach.
Search Term/Keywords
In digital marketing, a keyword refers to the term or phrase that an individual uses to perform a query on a search platform.
Crawl Depth
The crawl depth refers to the number of pages that a search engine robot has indexed during a single crawl or analysis.
Query Refinement
In digital marketing, this is the process that users go through to find out exactly what terms they need to search for in order to find the content or product they need.
Meta-Search Engine
Also known as a search aggregator, a metasearch engine uses multiple search engines to come up with results whenever a query is performed.
Gateway Page
A gateway page in digital marketing contains a list of links and resources that users have to analyze in order to find what they need.
Sitemap
A sitemap is an XML file that contains a list of every single page on your website.
What’s the Best Way to Stay Updated with Digital Marketing?
Learning about the best online promotion techniques goes beyond digital marketing 101. The best way to keep up with the most recent changes is to be connected to the right outlets and apply what you learn in your campaigns on a daily basis.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
Online marketing is essential because it allows you to connect with your audience while they are searching the web. This means that your potential customers are already engaged and looking for great content, which creates a golden opportunity for you to deliver outstanding materials.
Conclusion
Want to get more tips and learn concepts beyond digital marketing 101? Stay tuned to our blog and contact us today if you need help creating an online marketing strategy for your business.