The art of attracting clients or customers for a business using the internet or other digital mediums is what is known as digital marketing
If you are new to digital marketing, it’s essential that you know that there are various components or topics that make up digital marketing as a subject of study.
Categorically, there are two main mediums through which marketing activities can be carried out, offline digital marketing medium which is also known as traditional marketing medium and online marketing medium which is also known as internet marketing.
In this post, we will be looking at various components that make up the type of digital marketing that is carried out online, Internet marketing.
Internet Marketing Component
Internet marketing components are like different paths or channels online that marketers use to carry out marketing activities in the online world.
If you are going to be using digital tools and resources to promote and market your business, it’s necessary that you understand these different components. Understanding how some of these components work will help you make better decisions on how and which online channels or strategies can help you build, grow, or scale your brand or business.
Let’s be honest here, digital marketing on its own is a vast subject even when you break it down to the two major mediums mentioned earlier it may still seem impossible to master all of the components in each medium.
The best approach I have found in learning digital marketing skills is to understand the concept of marketing and digital marketing and then focus on any of the online or offline digital marketing components that will be very helpful in building your brand or business.
Before making decisions on the online marketing components to use for your brand or business, you need to understand how the components in different mediums of digital marketing work. This is the only way you can figure out how to use them in your business.
Our focus of discussion will be on the components of Internet marketing. This is because today when you hear people talk about digital marketing, they are always likely referring to the online marketing medium of digital marketing.
So let’s learn more about online marketing, so that we can make better decisions for our business or clients.
Major Components In Online Marketing
The major components of internet marketing include:
- Content Marketing
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Paid Advertising
- Analytics
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Automation Marketing
- Marketing Integration
Other components include
- Mobile Marketing
- Conversions rate optimisation
- Ecommerce Web and Marketing
Let’s briefly look at each of them.
Before we get started I will like to let you know that my intention with this post is to point out what these components are all about, I will be writing an elaborate post on each of the components to explain more about them.
Content Marketing
Content marketing as the name implies is all about the marketing of content, it involves the process of creating and distributing useful and valuable content in form of articles, videos, images, audios, infographics, etc, through different platforms like social media, blogs, email, video platforms, audio platform and forums.
It’s a form of marketing that focuses on building trust with customers before selling to them.
The objective of most content marketing is to attract prospective customers, build trust, nurture them and hopefully turn them into paying customers or loyal fans.
Content marketing is one of the most popular digital marketing strategies used by entrepreneurs or business owners today. Among the many reasons for its popularity is that it’s cost-effective and has a high Return on Investment (ROI).
Social Media Marketing
When you hear the phrase ‘Social Media Marketing’ it simply means using social media platforms to carry out marketing activities.
Any marketing activities you engage in on any of the social media platforms are known as social media marketing.
You can use various Social Media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc to create awareness about your brand or business, generate leads or gain loyal fans, negotiate deals, nurture your prospective customers and increase sales.
Marketing activities are possible on social media because of various tools and features that social media platforms make available for marketers, tools and features as the ability to run paid advertising, publish posts, interact with your audience and a lot more.
Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most technical modules in Digital Marketing.
It’s about optimising web platforms (websites, blogs, social platforms, etc) to organically rank high in search results on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engines, by that marketers can attract prospective customers to their platforms for free and possibly convert them into customers.
SEO is complex but it’s one of the most cost-effective online digital marketing components. It’s cost-effective in the sense that you can get leads and customers without paying for it, but SEO becomes cost-effective only when it’s producing results, and there are best practices to making that possible.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing is the paid version of SEO, it involves placing Advertisements (Ads) on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engines.
Unlike Search Engine Optimization (SEO), instead of hoping that your content gets ranked high in search results for people to see it, you can pay search engines to show your content on the top first page of search results.
There are tools for SEM, one of the most used tools for search engine marketing campaigns is AdWords which is owned and managed by Google.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is simply the act of paying another platform so that you can show your business to their audience.
It involved that you find businesses that have a similar audience to your business, if you can think of where your customers hang out online you pay the platform to show your business to their audience.
They are different platforms that offer paid advertising services, Facebook is one of the top platforms out there today, also we have Instagram, YouTube which is owned by Google.
You can do paid advertising on any platform that offer paid advertising service, if you figure out any business that you know that has similar audience to your business you can reach out to them and pay them to show your business to their audience.
Your ads could be in form of a video, written content, banners or flyers.
Analytics
Analytics is about understanding various processes and activities (behaviour) of the users of your online platform/website.
Analytics is one of the things that makes online digital marketing more effective than offline (traditional) marketing. Analytics enables online marketers to understand the behaviour of customers and prospective customers.
Analytics helps to monitor the source of the traffic to a platform, like where users are coming from, what they are viewing, how long they are spending on the platform and the links they are clicking when they are on the platforms.
You can use analytics to determine and develop digital marketing strategies, it will help you understand how to draft your campaigns and where to focus on your marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing
Any marketing activities that are performed through email are known as email marketing.
Email marketing is also one of the most cost-effective marketing channels in online digital marketing, it enables an end to end communications with prospective customers and already-buying customers.
It’s cost-effective in the sense that when you have an email address of a prospective, you don’t need to pay for any promotion to reach that person, you can always communicate to the person any time and any day.
But there are best practise to follow in email marketing, to avoid violation of privacy.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing in which an affiliate (referral) is rewarded for referring a visitor or customer to a business.
It’s a performance-based marketing. You get paid commission based on the results of the action the person you referred to a business produced.
Automation Marketing
Automaton involves setting up digital marketing activities to run automatically.
For example, there are tools that you can use to automatically publish your post from your blog to your social media platforms, also schedule your post for publishing on your blog or social media platforms, or schedule an email to be sent to your email list, or automatically reply to messages through email, blog, or social media. That is how marketing automation works.
Automation marketing makes marketing online easy and flexible. It allows you to do more with less time.
Mobile Marketing
Companies and consumers are connected through mobile marketing.
More people than ever before rely on their smartphones for information. In actuality, mobile devices account for 58% of all device sales, while desktops account for 39%. The YouTube mobile app is used by 4.67 billion people worldwide each month for 24 hours.
As a result, businesses must begin developing and customizing content with mobile users in mind. Ignore this advice and you run the danger of falling behind. In 2021, the total amount spent on mobile advertising worldwide surpassed $288 billion.
Integrated Digital Marketing
Integrated Digital Marketing involves blending together various components of Digital Marketing in a way that they serve and complement each other toward your overall marketing objective.
For example, you can create a blog post, share it on social media with a link and gain traffic to your website or blog. The traffic might convert to leads, and in the future, to paying customers.
You can combine various digital marketing tools and components like content marketing, social media, email marketing, etc., to achieve your overall marketing objective.
An effective online marketing campaign will always make use of two or more online digital marketing components, and that is what is known as integrated digital marketing.
Conclusion
There are other modules like conversion rate optimization, which is all about improving your marketing strategy and the results you are currently getting and also Automation which involves setting up your business in such a way that things get done without your presence or involvement, setting your business to run in God mood.
As I mentioned earlier that digital marketing is a vast subject if you are new to digital marketing, this idea is not to discourage you from developing expertise in digital marketing.
The thing is marketing and digital marketing are interesting and viable skills to learn in the day and era we live in today, when it comes to learning digital marketing, you don’t need to master all the components listed above before you call yourself a digital marketer or start growing your business with digital marketing tools resources, you can focus on one or two modules that resonate with your strength or can help you in building and growing your business.
It might be difficult to master all the components but you can become an expert in one or two components and produce prolific results.
I hope this post has helped you understand the major components of online digital marketing.
If you have learnt something from this post, feel free to share it with your friends, they might find it useful and I will appreciate it too.
What do you think? Which component of online digital marketing are you going to learn? comment below.
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