Complete Guide To Fundamentals Of Digital Marketing

Did you know that 3 out of 10 Americans are online daily? One-fourth of them stay online constantly!

The world’s digital space is rapidly changing, and any entrepreneur who wants to stay on the hunt must start thinking about digital marketing to reap the benefits of this rapid transformation.

The Dallas Digital marketing agency agrees that delivering marketing communications to your target audience is much easier and more effective with the tools and strategies of digital marketing.

In this article, we will discuss in detail the concept of digital marketing, its significance, and its types.

Why Think About Going Digital?

Before we move on to the nitty-gritty, here are a few meaningful stimuli for you to “think digital”!

• The global number of internet users is more than 5 billion, i.e., approximately 63% of the total global population.
• 91% of the US population uses the internet. In absolute numbers, approximately 307 million people out of the total current US population of around 338 million are active internet users.
• Out of that, close to 31% go online daily, and 43% of them visit the internet more than once daily. What more? 26% of the users are constantly online.
• The average number of hours spent online by an average American user is more than 6 hours per day.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a marketing activity that uses digital channels to reach out to customers, prospects, and other stakeholders, and deliver marketing messages to them. Digital marketing involves using marketing strategies in the digital platform.

Marketers use email, social media, websites, texts, multimedia messages, etc. These are the most common digital platforms to deliver the marketing message digitally to the target audience. The top digital marketing agencies in Dallas understand that essentially if any form of digital communication is used to deliver a marketing message, it is digital marketing.

Why is Digital Marketing so Important?

When you know that your target audience can be reached through a digital platform, why not use it? Your audience would prefer communication through digital mode better than the traditional mode of communication.

Although any form of marketing effort, be it digital or otherwise, can benefit the company, it is important to understand how easily accessible digital channels have become. It is also vital to take into account user preferences. With over 5 billion online users globally, the message is loud and clear. Audiences love digital.

Both the company as well as its customers, prospects, and other stakeholders benefit from digital modes of communication. The digital marketing companies in Dallas conclude that it is fast and precise! However, let us glance through the snippets of why digital marketing is important for any entrepreneur to succeed and let their business take off to the next level.

1. Fast – It is far quicker to send out emails and text messages to customers, prospects, and target audiences than to cold-call 100s of them. With the click of a button, you can send your message to thousands of people online.

2. Interactive – When your target audience reads your marketing messages and acts on the call to action, there is a relationship established between you and your prospects. You cannot know the response of the readers through traditional marketing tools such as billboard advertising, etc.

3. Cost Effective – Digital marketing gives you a higher ROI than traditional marketing. The Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC, which essentially means the cost incurred to acquire a customer, is much lower in digital marketing campaigns. The cost to run email or social media campaigns etc. proves to be lower than the cost to run traditional marketing campaigns when compared with the number of sales conversions through these channels.

4. Measurable – With digital tools to communicate your marketing messages, it is easy to track, measure, analyze and quantify your marketing efforts and the results it brings.

For instance, when you track the number of conversions and compare it with the number of visitors to your website, you get specific, actionable, and precise data. You can sit back and see if you need to change any strategy, which of your products or services are a hot cake for your consumers, etc.

5. Targeted – With digital tools on your side, you can find out who your ideal audience would be, where can you find them, and how to reach them. You no longer would shoot on air in the darkness.

You can target your marketing campaigns according to various segregations such as demographics, consumer behavior, geography, preferences, gender, age groups, etc. It streamlines your efforts and makes the messages more direct, focused, and even personalized, resulting in a quicker response and an increase in conversions.

6. Adaptive – With traditional marketing, all the data can be gathered only at the end of the campaign. Whereas with digital marketing, you get real-time access to your initiatives. As such, you have the facility to adapt or change a particular campaign strategy right in the middle of the campaign.

Read more about why digital marketing is essential for any business in 2023.

Components of Digital Marketing

Having gone through the what and why of digital marketing, let us dive into the how of digital marketing.

The Dallas digital marketing company points out that many marketers like to refer to the how of digital marketing as components of digital marketing since many believe that digital marketing is inclusive of each of the types, and must include all or most of them.

However, a digital entrepreneur may choose to adopt all, or some of them to include in their marketing campaigns.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization

The scope of SEO by and large is vast in its entirety. However, to put it simply, once you have built your business website, you want people to find it through search engines. To achieve that, your website should be search engine friendly and search engine optimized.

You would want to know in detail what people are searching for related to your product, and how are they searching for them. The Dallas digital marketing company points out that you would want to understand what are the words, phrases, questions, and search queries that your target customers are searching for on a search engine. In short, you are looking for the keywords related to your product that people are using to search.

Once you have identified the keywords, you would want your website content, product descriptions, image captions, etc, to align with those keywords. This is done with the hope that the next time anyone conducts a search using those keywords, the search engine will pull up your website and show it in its search results.

SEO covers a whole range of activities, including identifying and analyzing the volume of traffic through organic search, direct search, paid search, etc. There are various types of SEOs

• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• White-Hat SEO
• Technical SEO
• International SEO
• Local SEO
• Ecommerce SEO
• Content SEO

Here’s your ultimate On-Page SEO optimization guide.

This requires a high degree of expertise, exposure, and knowledge of digital marketing strategies. This is where many seasoned entrepreneurs shy away from digital marketing. If you need your business website to be search engine friendly, consult an expert digital marketer such as the Dallas digital marketing agency.

Content Marketing

Once people find your business website and visit it, the web content makes them stay longer on your website, consider buying, and eventually convert into a customer. Also, you can turn a one-time customer into a repeat and regular customer through your content.

Good digital marketing always has good content. But, it is not enough to only generate good content, it needs to be marketed right to fetch the best results. Content marketing is a whole gamut of digital marketing that will make the connection between your business and the customer.

You may start with content that provides free and valuable information to your customers. Thereby establishing a bond with them and eventually knitting it closer and stronger with each subsequent content delivery and bringing your customers closer to your products.

Contents could be of various types, viz., texts, images, videos, blogs, animations, one-liners, articles, ebooks, etc. Each content can weave a connection with your visitor.

However, it requires strategy and skill to come up with engaging content that holds your customers and converts them. It is where experienced and skillful content marketers from digital marketing agencies in Dallas play an important role.

Read more about creating a content strategy that works.

PPC or Pay Per Click Marketing

Organic traffic coming from SEO activities and content marketing takes a bit of time to fetch results. It is where PPC or Pay Per Click marketing comes in. As the name suggests, it is a marketing strategy that brings visitors or clicks to your website, but it is paid.

Consider the following numbers to understand the importance of PPC:

• If a user is looking to buy a product or service online, approximately 65% of them will click on a PPC advert.
• Around 80% of businesses agree that PPC adverts are a huge business generator for them.

Nevertheless, synchronizing your SEO and PPC activities gives the best results for your website to rank in the search engine results pages.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has provided a platform to interact with customers directly. It is a great tool to build brand awareness through regularly posting relatively smaller sizes of content that are entertaining and engaging. Of the 4.7 billion social media users, the digital marketing space in social media platforms is becoming alluring and exciting.

Social media also gives a business an opportunity to sense the pulse of its target audience since it is a more direct communication channel.

Email Marketing

Marketing Automation through emails is a very effective lead-generation tool. When visitors turn up on your website, you have a chance to offer them something free in return for their email addresses. This will build a list of email IDs for your visitors.

The content in your email could be to educate the customers, provide valuable information, or inform them about a new product, sale offers, etc.

The best digital marketing companies in Dallas agree that the gold mine is often hidden in your email list.

• It has a very high ROI. For every dollar spent on email marketing, the ROI is $36.
• The number of daily active email users is a whopping 4 billion.

However, there’s a catch. No one likes to receive a bunch of promotional emails now and then.

Hence, it is important to have a solid email marketing strategy considering the customer preferences, the information they would enjoy consuming, the frequency that won’t irritate them, etc. Email marketing is very effective if done in the right way!

Native Advertising

Have you ever read an article and found at its end a recommended article on the same lines? You click on the article’s link and read it to find that it has something to promote.

Advertising copies, articles, videos, images, etc., shown in a particular platform that appears so cohesive, natural, and similar to the platform’s content that users feel it is the content produced natively by the same platform.

The term ‘native’ here refers to the matching resemblance of appearance and style of content with that of the platform it is being displayed on.

Native Adverts help massively in generating clicks and traffic to your website. If used smartly, it is a classic lead generation and sales conversion tool.

Mobile Marketing

Whenever a promotional marketing activity takes place on a smartphone or other handheld mobile digital devices such as tablets, etc., it is mobile marketing.

8 out of 10 Americans own a smartphone, and marketers do not want to miss this opportunity. Therefore, mobile marketing has become a core component of the whole marketing strategy.

Through mobile marketing, digital marketers aim to reach users via text (SMS), push notifications, mobile applications, and mobile-optimized advertisements.

It is a crucial tool for marketers since it establishes a more direct connection with the users. Hence, mobile marketing messages can have a massive impact on users.

Wrap-Up

Apart from the above core components, there are various other components of digital marketing, such as affiliate, and influencer marketing, video marketing, etc. The digital marketing company in Dallas reiterates that with the new age preferences of consumers, digital marketing has become an essential part of the marketing mix.