Digital Marketing is the umbrella term for all the marketing efforts of a company or professional that are done online. This includes a broad range of activities including, but not limited to, Social Media Engagements, Search Engine Optimisation, Content Marketing and Email Marketing. This is a new age media as compared to traditional media which includes advertising and promotion on television, radio, newspapers and hoardings.
There are many textbook definitions of a digital marketing agency or a digital marketing company, however, we want to keep it simple. For us a digital marketing agency is your brand custodian when it comes to building a brand presence online. They are the ones who strategise, ideate and execute a complete digital presence such that it leaves an impression in the minds of the companies target audiences and urges them to take the required action.
A digital marketing agency can do a wide range of services for building your brand presence online. They can do online research, which involves gathering data and analysing it, they can devise an online brand strategy and build a complete campaign around it, they can even execute and manage the campaign, giving you a report of its ROI and success. Apart from this they can do SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) activities, do content marketing, web development and lead generation.
A digital marketing company is primarily focused on providing solutions in the online world or on digital media. On the other hand, an advertising agency is providing solutions that appear in traditional media (print, television, radio and outdoor). An advertising agency may or may not have the capability and expertise of handling digital marketing.
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a brand, product, person or place.
Social Media Marketing is a part of Digital Marketing. While digital marketing is a much broader term that encompasses promotion on various channels, social media marketing is specific to social media platforms. Today the terms, social media marketing agency and digital marketing agency are used interchangeably but in the future they could be completely different service providers.
According to the latest reports from Hootsuite and We Are Social, an average individual spends about 6 hours and 42 minutes online daily. Half of this time is spent on mobile and tablet devices and half on desktops or laptops. Also, 45% of the world’s population is on social media websites. So, isn’t it intelligent to be where your audience is and connect with them in a way that they seek you out rather than visa versa? So yes, whether you are a B2B business or a B2C business, whether you sell and end product, intermediary product are a wholesales, retailer or even a professional – social media marketing will benefit you and your business.
It is a misconception that only e-commerce and online retail companies need to promote themselves on social media. All kinds of business, across all industries benefit greatly from digital marketing. While e-commerce has a direct link to online sales via digital promotions, other businesses need to view their online presence as a brand building exercise. Once the brand is established in the customers mind, it definitely plays a big role when it comes to purchase decision, offline or online.
While you should have a holistic digital marketing effort that covers all channels, the most basic choices are search engine optimisation (SEO), marketing on social media channels and marketing directly through search engines.
A broad spectrum of digital marketing services provided by a digital marketing agency include Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content Marketing, Mobile Marketing Video Production, Website esign/Microsite Development and Online Public Relations. However, more importantly a digital marketing agency should be able to strategise, ideate, conceptualise and execute brand campaigns and content across all online channels to achieve the online marketing objectives.
We believe that a strategy is made of 3 important components;
(a) It is a broad outline within with you want to operate
(b) It has a goal as to where you want to reach
(c) It has a step by step plan on how to reach the goal
Hence a social media strategy is an understanding of what is the goal of a brand on social media, what is the plan to achieve this goal and what is the outline within which the team has to operate such that there is enough freedom for creativity but not much deviation from the objective.
A beautiful definition of content marketing is given by the Content Marketing Institute. It is as follows: Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
So instead of pitching your products or services, a content marketing agency can ensure that you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.
In digital marketing terms a vlog is a video blog post. It is a place where one regularly posts short videos, animations and dynamic content.
The world of digital marketing is constantly changing. The digital experts today are not grey-haired, bespectacled, experienced blokes but rather youngsters who know how to predict and ride the trends of the ever changing online industry to drive brand success in a virtual world, albeit with real profits. While you could do your digital marketing in-house, a full service digital agency can help understand, predict and maximise digital trends, give you access to digital tools and save you the time to understand and learn a whole new world of digital marketing. This can help you focus on what you do best – your business.
A keyword is a word or phrase that best describes the content on your page or post. It is a search term that you want your website to rank for so that when people search on google, bing, yahoo or other search engines for these keywords your website appears in the search and also ranks high.
According to google analytics, a page view is an instance of a page being loaded or reloaded on a web browser. It is the total number of times a page has been viewed by anyone who is on the internet. It is important to understand that page views do not reveal much about how many people viewed the page, as one visitor can be responsible for a lot of views.
Unique views or unique visitors are the number of people who have visited a page or multiple pages on your website in a given time period. If a single user views a link 5 times in one day, the server will record 5 page views but only 1 unique view.
PPC is an abbreviation for pay-per-click. It is essentially a pricing model in the digital marketing ecosystem wherein a marketeer pays a search engine a certain fee for every time one of their ads is clicked.
Simply put, a cookie is a ‘packet’ of information that is stored as text strings on your machine. Typically, a web server or website sends you a cookie and your browser stores it. The purpose of a cookie usually is to keep track of where you are and help create customised content for you or to save login data.
Let us consider an example here. amazon.com is a website that uses cookies to store login information. When you ordered a product from amazon, you generally must have filled in a form with your address and contact details.
What amazon has then done is as follows:
(a) Amazon assigns you an ID, stores your information associated with
that ID in its database, and sends the ID to your browser as a cookie
(b) Your browser stores the ID on your hard disk
(c) The next time you go to Amazon, the ID is sent back to the server
(d) The server looks you up by your ID and customises the Web page it sends back to you. The page might say, “Welcome back, Anita”
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that have landed on your website but have not stayed long enough or clicked on other pages. Many-a-times, when you are browsing the internet you land on sites that you have little or no interest in. It could also be that you clicked on them by mistake and shut them immediately. However, if you landed on a website, even if only for a couple of seconds, then you have contributed to its page view. If you left it too soon then congratulations, you have contributed to its bounce rate!
When certain content (text, image or video) is shared multiple times on the internet by multiple people in a short period of time it is said to go viral.
SEO is the process of making your website or a page on it search friendly. Did you know there are 2 billion websites in the world! Search engines scrawl data on all websites to give you relevant search results. SEO helps the scrawling process by making the website in a language and categorisation that these search ‘crawlers’ understand. The process of SEO includes optimising your website content and code. The objective of SEO is to rank higher on search engines like google thereby increasing the quantity as well as the quality of visitors that your website sees.
On-page SEO involves activities that you or your digital marketing agency does ‘on’ the page of your website to raise its ranking on search engines for relevant keywords. It is the practice of ‘optimizing’ web page content and code so that the organic traffic on your site increases.
“Off-Page SEO” involves activities that you or your digital marketing firm does away from your website to increase the ranking of a page on your website with search engines. Think of it like this, while on-page SEO helps search engines understand what you want to communicate about your product, service or website, off-page SEO helps search engines understand what others really think of your product, service or website. Though off-page SEO is often associated only with link building, it includes a host of other things.
While link building is an important component of off-page SEO it is not the only one. A good digital marketing agency will include in their off-page SEO package a host of things like brand mentions, influencer outreach, social bookmarking, content marketing, newsletters, articles, white-papers, newsletters and social networking.
A search engine (like google) is a tool that gives relevant results to users that search for some information from its database. The results are websites, images, videos and content that semantically match with the search of the user.
Search engines have search crawlers, or bots, that search billions of pages on the web, index and categorise them and provide an ordered list of results based on a search algorithm. This list is your SERP or Search Engine Results Page.
The most important factors to rank high in the SERP of google are website content and its relevancy and the strength and relevancy of backlinks that the website has. Other factors that are also important include mobile optimisation, content structure and optimisation, usability, accessibility, security, loading speed and overall domain authority.
In digital marketing, remarketing also called retargeting, is a way to connect with people who have already previously visited your website or mobile application. In remarketing, you strategically positioning your ads in front of these audiences as they browse competitor websites or even make google searches. It is a way of reminding them to complete their purchase on your own website.
So that shirt you liked on one website, keeps popping up when you are surfing other websites? You feel it is following you around online! Well that is remarketing.
Affiliate marketing is like a person in your company that works purely on commission basis. If he/she makes a sale, they get a commission on the sale. So, in digital marketing terms, affiliate marketing is a type of performance based marketing wherein a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The entire gamut of affiliate marketing is a world in itself, however it is important to understand what it is and work towards having affiliates online who promote your products. This is specially true if you are a B2C business.
Web 2.0 is the 2nd generation of the internet. The essential difference being that Web 2.0 moved from the simple HTML pages to more interactive and dynamic content. The previous static pages and one way conversations gave way to multiway conversations wherein everyone could contribute to content on the internet irrespective of technical knowledge. From passive users of the internet, people became active participants.
Google describes its product Google adwords as ‘an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers pay to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content, and generate mobile application installs within the Google ad network to web users. It can place ads both in the results of search engines like Google Search and on non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos.’
UI is the abbreviation for User Interface Design. It includes the series of screens, pages, buttons, icons, etc that enable a person to interact with a website or an application.
UX is the abbreviation for User Experience Design. User experience is much deeper than UI as it involves the internal experience that the user has as he/she interacts with every aspect of a company’s products or services.
Behavioural targeting is extremely beneficial for both marketeers and end buyers/users/viewers. It is the process of showing tailored advertising to the relevant audiences based on their previous web browsing behaviour thereby showing them products, services and content that they generally search or look out for online. Behavioural targeting is one of the highlights of social media marketing as it doesn’t segment people just on demographics and geography like traditional media does, rather it speaks about people’s attitudes, references, likes and associations – which are extremely important for all brand builders.
Performance and analytics are very important for any digital campaign to be successful. One of the key advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing is that it is measurable in terms of ROI. Many digital marketing tools are used to measure and track performance. Some of the most famous tools are Google Analytics, SEM Rush, Google Adwords, Keyword Planner, HootSuite.
Performance marketing is a subset of digital marketing and is a service that only some of the best digital marketing agencies can provide. It focuses on online marketing and advertising efforts with the objective of getting queries, conversions, qualified leads and sales. In Performance Marketing the focus is not on how many views, or how many impressions, or how much reach, it is
something that any sales manager would love – How many conversions and how much mullah.
Websites that are not updated for long go unnoticed on search engines like google. They are unlikely to perform and be in tune with the digital objectives of the company. To be found in search engines and to rank in them you need to update your website regularly with small, relevant changes to keep the search crawlers updated that something new is always happening. So, although a static website is good, if you are really looking for online leads via search engines then you need to be more than just a digital brochure.
The prevalence of mobile today is undeniable. Mobile phones are the most used technology today. When most of your potential prospects spend a majority of their time on this device, it would be essential that you invest in marketing here. Mobile marketing focuses on mobile strategies like mobile applications, responsive websites and messaging.
Content marketing is beautiful as it keeps the user at the centre. It is all about creating valuable content that is beneficial for the user and not only the company creating it. Most popular content marketing formats used by global digital marketing agencies include blog posts, articles, ebooks, infographics, microsites, videos, courses, case studies, newsletters and dynamic visuals. These are all part of interactive content available online.
There is no defined rule of number that answers this question, but to put things into perspective it is important to understand that search engines index your site as often as you publish content. However, neither your viewer or any search engines are interested in content that makes little or no sense, or that is updated or created without any value. So a good digital marketing and content creation agency would always recommend that you create content as often as you can create good, valuable, informative and engaging content.
In Content Marketing both short-form and long-form content are important. Short-form content is perfect for social media channels where people don’t typically like to read but want to get a jist of things in a jiffy and move on. Short-form value-packed content also makes readers feel that you care for their time and they appreciate the crispness in the communication. On the other hand long-form content tends to perform better on search and gives your blog or website more substance to help establish your expertise. Hence a good digital marketing agency will always try to maintain a balance between short and long content when it comes to content marketing for clients.