What is Digital Marketing? Quick Answer

 What is digital marketing is a bit of a trick question.  Technically digital marketing is any marketing that uses digital technology – so digital TV ads are considered digital marketing.  Most people use digital marketing to refer to online marketing. 

What are the most common kinds of digital marketing?

SEO:  Search Engine Optimisation.  Making your website easy for Google, Bing and all the other search engines to find and rate.  It starts with good web design (there are a bunch of rules for designing a good website - to be found in another thread) and then it gets trickier – because getting on the front page of Google is so competitive there are 1001 SEO tips and tricks  for doing it – some are OK by Google, some are not.  One way Google determines if you are important or not is if other important websites link to you.  To see your site how Google sees it visit www.seomoz.com and play around with the toolkit.

SEM:  Search Engine Marketing.  All the search engines have ad placement.  On Google, it’s in the right hand column and it’s a way to get people to see your site if it’s not on the front page already.  You organise this through Google Adwords – where your ad is positioned depends mostly on how much you are willing to pay per click (PPC) – so unlike conventional advertising where you pay per display in a newspaper for example, with Adwords, usually you pay per time your ad gets clicked. You can opt for the pay per display (called impressions) option but PPC is the best option in most situations.  You can secure the top ad position by selecting your keywords and audience very carefully too but it takes some expertise

Social Bookmarking:  There are specialized search engines that allow users to surf the web in the same fashion as you would watch TV on your favourite channels.  Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious and similar applications deliver you to websites that “rate well” amongst people in your “demographic”.  You are not targeted by age or location but by things you like – when you “like” (or Digg or Thumbs Up) a page, the application shows you more pages like it, that are “liked” by people with similar taste to you.  Soon, you have customized your surfing preferences and will be delivered only to pages that interest you.  Getting your website listed as being likable on one of these applications is not simple but, if you are successful, you can receive tens of thousands of hits to your site.  Adding Social Bookmarking code to your website makes it easy for people to bookmark your site for other surfers.

SMM - Social Media Marketing– Social Media refers to pages like Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Pinterest, You Tube and anything you might say is similar to an online club.  Done well, it’s free, it’s targeted and the audience is ready and willing to listen. There's also user friendly Facebook advertising options which are popular with small business.  Like Facebook, using Twitter for business is pretty much expected of businesses these days - so you may as well learn it!

Content Marketing (inbound marketing) – Using content to draw buyers in from search results.  

Article Marketing – Creating content for other websites in exchange for referrals

Mobile and GEO marketing – Advertising targeted to the user in their current location

 Banner Ads and affiliate marketing – Clickable ads on websites

Contextual Links and other in content ads - where a link is added to your product where that product name appears in the text of another website.

Email Marketing (EDM) – sending marketing materials via email

Web feeds – gathered information sent in a single feed (eg RSS feeds)

There are also more inventive and creative forms of digital marketing, utilising platforms such as games and applications.

What is pull digital marketing?

Most traditional media are push marketing based – that is, they're pushing the consumer to take an action, in digital marketing an example would be email marketing.  Pull digital media (such as content marketing) pulls in potential buyers already searching for their product.  Having a website or blog filled with useful content is the best way to be a successful inbound marketer.

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