Essentials of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel. A successful digital marketing program requires qualified inbound traffic to your website.

Website traffic refers to web users who visit a website. Web traffic is measured in visits, sometimes called “sessions,” and is a common way to measure online business effectiveness at attracting an audience.

Website traffic can be categorized into 6 categories:

1.        Brand and Direct Traffic: Direct visits to your site (via links or typing in your URL) or from visitors searching for you by brand/product name in search engines.

2.        Organic Search Traffic: Traffic from search engines based on industry and product keywords

3.        Paid Search Traffic: Traffic from paid search and display ad campaigns.

4.        Promotional & Social Traffic: Traffic from outreach marketing such as email newsletters or engagement-based interactions such as social media.

5.        PR and Referral Traffic: Traffic from other websites that link to yours.

6.        Offline Traffic: Traffic from print ads and other offline sources.

There are two ways to drive quality traffic that converts to your website; which are Paid Search and Organic Search.

These allow you to be found when your potential customers are looking for you. Sending you site traffic of only people looking for your products and services. It is not rocket science.

The problem could now be that your potential customers can find you but your website is not properly optimized for conversion. So, you make no sales.

Paid Search also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search marketing, often referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC), means paying for listings to appear on search engines and related websites. You only pay when your ad is clicked on, and you can make improvements to your campaign at any time.

Search marketing is perfect for you if you would like to:

1.        Scale up traffic quickly.

2.        Appear on search engines for keywords you are not ranking for organically.

3.        Diversify your traffic sources in order to mitigate risk.

4.        Test your marketing or new offerings in real time.

Organic Search also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of your website in a search engine’s “organic” or unpaid search results.

SEO allows you to:

1.        Rank higher on search results than your competitors.

2.        Appear on search engines for keywords that are related to your products and services.

3.        Increase the number of qualified leads for your business. However, the truth is that it is very easy to get website traffic: You can pay for as much traffic as you want to your website. The problem here is that you get charge per click and the lower your click the more traffic you can get. Optimizing paid traffic campaign to reduce the cost per click to the lowest while maintaining over industry standard conversion rates. Always know that for you to rank higher; you need to explore all available media tools.