Did you know that 80% of shoppers do product research online before they consider buying anything? What about the fact that over 50% of Americans who follow a brand on social media remain loyal to it?

Both of these numbers reflect a massive shift in the past two decades toward digital shopping, often with positive results for businesses. For you to meet with the same success that other companies have had online, though, you have to employ digital marketing.

Digital marketing is something you can’t afford to pass up if you want to take full advantage of the available customer market. But what is digital marketing, exactly? What distinguishes it from traditional marketing?

If you find yourself wishing that someone would explain digital marketing to you in an easy-to-understand way, don’t worry — that’s exactly what we’re here to do. Read on for a full digital marketing overview.

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What is digital marketing?

To effectively explain digital marketing, we first have to ask: What is digital marketing?

Essentially, digital marketing is any form of marketing that takes place through digital channels, particularly on the Internet. That may seem like a broad definition, but there’s a reason for that — there are many types of digital marketing, making it hard to get more specific.

The idea of digital marketing is to take advantage of the new and unique opportunities offered by the Internet and other digital media. From social media to remarketing, online marketing allows businesses to reach potential customers in ways they otherwise couldn’t.

What are some different types of digital marketing?

Digital marketing doesn’t make up a single marketing strategy. On the contrary, there are several digital marketing strategies that your business can employ, and they all function differently from one another.

For the remainder of our digital marketing overview, we’ll cover each of the five biggest types of digital marketing and how they work.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy that involves optimizing your web content to rank in Google search results.

When people search for things on Google, Google’s algorithms rank the search results based on a variety of factors. When you optimize your web content for those ranking factors, you give it a better shot at ranking high on the page.

Some of the main Google ranking factors include:

• Relevance to the search query (user search intent)
• Keywords (search terms) you include in your content
• Page load speed on your site
• Mobile-friendliness
• Backlinks (links to your content from third-party sites)

By optimizing for these factors and increasing your content’s position in rankings, you can increase traffic to your website, driving up the number of people who buy your products or services.

2. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Another of the most effective types of digital marketing is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. PPC ads are ads that you can pay to display at the top of Google search results. They generally advertise a particular product or service.

You can also display PPC ads in the margins of third-party websites and in other locations online, but search ads are the most popular type.

You can launch a PPC search campaign through Google Ads. You can start by bidding on the keywords you want to target. Then you can craft the ads that will appear in search results, along with the landing pages they’ll take users to when they click on them.

Whenever someone searches for a keyword you bid on, Google will display ads based on two factors:

• The business with the highest bid for that keyword
• The business with the highest quality score (Google’s assessment of overall ad quality)

The best part of PPC is that you only have to pay for an ad when someone clicks on it, making it highly cost-effective when done right!

3. Social media marketing

If there’s one place people like to go online, it’s social media. In fact, social media accounts for 28% of the average user’s Internet time. That makes it a fantastic place to reach your target audience online.

The first way you can reach people on social media is by creating an account for your business and posting from it. When you post informative and engaging content like infographics on a regular basis, you’ll attract new followers and draw people to your brand.

You can also expand your social media influence by using paid social media advertising. Most platforms will allow you to create in-feed ads, which appear in users’ social media feeds. You can even target groups of people based on various demographics to refine your audience.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing gives you an opportunity different from the previous ones, as it allows you to send your marketing materials directly to users’ inboxes. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should send unsolicited emails to random addresses. Instead, you should let people sign up.

On your website, you can include email capture forms on various pages. These forms take the form of calls to action (CTAs) offering users the opportunity to sign up for special offers or newsletters. When enough people submit their email, you can build up an email list.

With a large enough email list, you can begin sending out emails to the addresses people have given you. Those emails should provide whatever it was that you initially offered them. Eventually, you could end up drawing people back to your website to buy from you!

5. Web design and development

The final major digital marketing strategy is web design and development. This strategy simply consists of the way you construct and format the pages on your website, but it can make a huge difference in the success of your marketing since most other strategies lead to your site.

Numerous elements play into successful web design, including the following:

• Responsive design
• Fast page load speeds
• Easy site navigation
• Multimedia (videos, images, etc.)
• Branding elements (color schemes, fonts, etc.)

A successful web design will present a positive experience for users, enforce your business’s unique brand, and direct visitors toward buying your products or services!

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Their focus on ROI and their innate ability to communicate this information in a way that I understand has been the missing link with other digital marketing firms that I have used in the past.

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Get help optimizing your digital marketing strategy from WebFX

After this digital marketing overview, you should now have a basic understanding of what digital marketing is and why your business should pursue it. But digital marketing is such a vast topic that it can be hard to know how to get into it. Fortunately, that’s why WebFX is here!

Our digital marketing services can help you achieve success with any of the strategies listed above and more. With over 500 client testimonials to our name, we’re the agency that businesses trust to drive results.

To get started with us, just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!