Learning about Digital Marketing is something that requires a lot of study and time, even more so for someone who is starting in the area.
Every day new terms, fields of study and innovations emerge that impact the daily lives of those who are in contact with digital marketing, whether studying, working or even consuming.
That’s why we developed this post with everything you need to know to get started in this wide universe.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is a set of online actions that a person or company can perform in order to generate new business, better relate to its audience and strengthen the brand.
Digital Marketing has advantages over traditional offline marketing, such as the ease of measuring results — which is essential for companies to understand if their strategy is meeting their goals.
Although Digital Marketing is something relatively new, it has been around longer.
Its emergence dates back to the 1990s when the internet was still in the Web 1.0 phase.
At that time, the internet was made up of search engines and websites that did not allow interaction between users. So they could find what they were looking for, but they couldn’t change or add information to the content.
The first interactions began to happen with the emergence of the first clickable ads in the mid-90s until in the 2000s Digital Marketing took a similar format to what we know today, as it was the arrival of Web 2.0.
At that time, communication became more expansive: everyone also became content producers with space and importance that, before, only large companies and media portals had.
This made Digital Marketing become really active to the point where companies and customers interact with each other. Furthermore, digital media can deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Why is Digital Marketing important?
Thus, Digital Marketing has grown more and more and has been applied by many companies in the most diverse segments.
A strong reason for this is the fact that people are increasingly connected to the internet, leaving aside other traditional media channels and most companies adopt the process of digital transformation. A digital ad that can be viewed anytime and any time by mobile.
What’s more, people can easily communicate with companies through online means. This goes for both the purchase of a product you have just seen and for being served, as many channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp have been used to provide customer service.
The coolest thing is that every time a person interacts through a digital channel, information about them can be obtained. This helps the company to better understand its persona and make its marketing actions increasingly efficient.
So campaigns can be created based on data rather than guesswork.
And, as everything on the internet happens very quickly, it is possible and highly recommended that these actions be monitored periodically.
This follow-up should not only be at the end of a campaign but also during it. After all, some actions can be quickly adapted in order to increase performance and avoid wasting money and time on something that is not working.
Fundamentals of digital marketing
Digital marketing has several channels that can be used to achieve projected results.
Here we list some of the most recurrent channels in digital marketing strategies that every professional in the area should know about.
Blogs
Remember the days when blogs were nothing more than virtual diaries where people posted about their personal lives? Well, that time is over.
Of course, blogs like this still exist, but when it comes to digital marketing, corporate blogs have taken up considerable space when it comes to online visibility and authority.
Through this channel, a company can turn part of its visitors into potential customers.
A person who lands on a corporate blog after doing a Google search may be much closer to buying the company’s product or service.
In addition, creating a blog does not require a lot of financial resources!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is an important digital marketing practice that aims to optimize the position of a website or blog in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
A good SEO job requires a series of actions that start with optimizing your website so that it loads faster in browsers to generating content that can bring new visitors to the company’s corporate blog.
The ultimate goal of SEO is to make a website or blog appear in the top organic positions on Google, reducing investment in paid media. So it’s a great way to get visitors to your website or blog!
A requirement for SEO to succeed is to focus on quality content, as well as good keyword usage and user experience.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM is the acronym for Search Engine Marketing refers to a set of Digital Marketing techniques focused on search engine results.
The SERP — the acronym for Search Engine Results Page, or Search Engine Results Pages — is made up of both organic and paid results.
Therefore, SEM actions can be done both organically (such as SEO and Content Marketing) and in paid media (such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads).
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a way to attract the target audience through relevant content that arouses people’s interest, thus increasing the chances of capturing prospects and customers.
This tactic is very valuable for a company, as it works directly by thinking about the sales funnel, which is composed of three main stages:
- Top of the funnel: when the person has a problem they want to solve.
- Middle of the funnel: At this stage, the person starts looking for possible solutions to this problem.
- Bottom of the funnel: here, at last, she finds the company whose product or service can bring her the solution she was looking for.
This journey must be in line with the company’s persona, which is the company’s ideal consumer.
As the main channel of content marketing are blogs, it is possible to produce content oriented to each of the stages, aiming to solve the persona problem. Content usually follows this logic:
- Top of the funnel: This type of content starts with the pain of the persona. Here, the contents focus on more general themes and broad keywords, aiming at the attraction.
- Middle of the funnel: content takes on another footprint, providing alternatives and tips for the persona to solve their problems. The themes become more punctual and the keywords more specific.
- Bottom of the funnel: This is the only stage where content directly addresses the company, products, and services, as this is where users are ready to buy. This is how the customer journey through Content Marketing ends.
Thus, it is clear that Content Marketing is not just about writing articles on a blog, period, but strategically attracting the persona through the blog and generating results.
Social networks
Social Media Marketing is geared towards using social media to promote a company’s products and services.
The objective here is not just to promote products and services, but to generate greater engagement with the public through shares, comments, likes, etc.
After all, social networks are not sales channels, but engagement channels. For this reason, posts must follow the 80/20 rule, that is, 80% of the content must be focused on subjects that interest the public and 20% on the promotion of the company’s products and services.
However, for the strategy to be effective, you need to know which social networks your audience is on.
From there, strategies on social networks can be set up and monitored.
They must have objectives and constant monitoring to make sure that the results are meeting the company’s objective.
Paid Media Ads
When we talk about paid media, we are referring to the channels in which a person or company has to pay to appear among on the results of a certain channel. The best known are Google Adwords and Facebook Ads.
Google Adwords offers space for sponsored links, that is, ads that appear at the top of searches every time a user makes a specific search for a term or keyword.
For example, let’s suppose that someone searches for the term “Digital Marketing”.
Below the search bar, that person will find results referring to Google Adwords sponsored links referring to those that are paying to appear every time someone makes that specific search. After these ads, the organic results start that are there for excellent SEO performance.
In Facebook Ads, ads are linked to Facebook itself and can be planned in different ways, with different objectives and different types of segmentation according to these objectives.
Affiliate Marketing
Have you ever seen a blogger tell you how good a product is to the point that you should use it too?
It is common for well-known people on the internet to pass on these tips followed by a link where you click to buy the advertised product.
At the same time that you are happy that you bought something that your favorite vlogger recommended, he is also happy that he earned a little money on top of your purchase. Yes, that’s right. The name of this process is Affiliate Marketing.
Let’s reverse the roles to make the concept clearer. Let’s say you have a blog that gets a million unique visitors a month and you now want to get some monetization on that traffic.
One of the ways is to do Affiliate Marketing, that is, to offer products that can help them.
Email Marketing
It is common to hear nowadays that Email Marketing is dead. But that’s not true! Many people use email, including most adults online.
Email marketing is a great way to build a closer relationship with customers, potential customers, and users in general who have provided some information.
It can be a channel used to disseminate content, offers, and send newsletters, that is, offer valuable content to those who are in contact with a company.
Inbound Sales
Saturday morning, at approximately 9 am, you are sleeping and the landline phone rings. You answer and discover that it is an agent who wants to offer you a credit card that you have no interest in buying.
How do you feel after receiving a phone call like that? Angry, to say the least. This technique is called Telemarketing, which has been used very effectively for a few years. But nobody likes to be bothered, right?
The inbound sales technique works in the opposite direction. Instead of bothering a potential customer, she first identifies who is interested in the product and then gets in touch, approaching the person in a more effective way that can bring mutual benefits.
In this approach, there is a genuine interest in helping a person and not simply taking their money by hiring a plan.