What is Digital Marketing and How Does It Work?      

Digital Marketing Introduction

In recent years, digital marketing has exploded onto the marketing scene, and its effects have been anything but small. Traditional marketers and old-school companies have struggled to keep up with the ever-changing world of Internet marketing while customers, leads, and clients have become more adept in this new landscape. But companies can’t afford to ignore changes in the way people look to buy, and that is why they have stepped into the modern way of marketing.


Top 7 Impacts of Social Media: Advantages 


  1. The Impact of Social Media on Society

  • Almost a quarter of the world’s population is now on Facebook. In the U.S., nearly 80% of all internet users are on this platform. Because social networks feed off interactions among people, they become more powerful as they grow.
  • Thanks to the internet, each person with marginal views can see that he or she is not alone. And when these people find one another via social media, they can do things — create memes, publications, and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream
  • Without social media, social, ethical, environmental, and political ills would have minimal visibility. Increased visibility of issues has shifted the balance of power from the hands of a few to the masses.

  Basic Facts About YouTube

  • YouTube is the most widely used video platform out there. One of the main reasons YouTube's popularity has skyrocketed over the years is due to its simplicity. YouTube makes it incredibly simple for small businesses and content creators to share their work with a wide audience and subsequently generate income from it. Let's go over some key marketing statistics that will give you an idea of how to market your business and product on YouTube in light of the millions of channels that are available.


  User Engagement YouTube Marketing Stats

  • 70% of viewers claim that YouTube makes them more aware of new brands.
  • More than 9 billion people have watched the most popular YouTube video.
  • Daily views of YouTube Shorts are 15 billion.
  • YouTube launched a $100 million Shorts Fund to entice Creators to experiment with producing short-form videos.
  • Viewers claim that the likelihood that they will buy anything after seeing it on YouTube has doubled.
  • By 2024, the number of YouTube users in the United States might reach 228.1 million.
  • Every week, 92% of internet users watch some form of YouTube video. 
  • The most popular YouTube videos are music videos
  • YouTube is a thriving platform for gaming content, with 90 million people projected to watch sports there by 2025. 
  • YouTube figures show that 90% of the company's revenue comes from selling ads, and 10% comes from subscription services.

  • YouTube made $19.77 billion in advertising income in 2020.
  • YouTube generated $28.8 billion in revenue in 2021.
  • YouTube's global advertising sales reached $7.07 billion in the third quarter of 2022.

  1. Types of Digital Marketing

  • If you have a computer or a smartphone, as many of us do, you’ve experienced digital marketing. It could be an email in your inbox, a search result when using Google, an ad on Facebook, a text message sent to your phone, or a post by an influencer on Instagram. As you can see, Internet marketing is an expansive field with many areas of specialization. The core forms of digital marketing,

(SEO) Search Engine Optimization

  • SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search for:
  • Products you sell.
  • Services you provide.
  • Information on topics in which you have deep expertise and/or experience.
  • The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to be found and clicked on. Ultimately, the goal of search engine optimization is to help attract website visitors who will become customers, clients, or an audience that keeps coming back.

Email Marketing

  • Types of SEO
  • There are three types of SEO:
  • Technical SEO: Optimizing the technical aspects of a website
  • On-site SEO: Optimizing the content on a website for users and search engines.
  • Off-site SEO: Creating brand assets (e.g., ​​people, marks, values, vision, slogans, catchphrases, colors) and doing things that will ultimately enhance brand awareness and recognition (i.e., demonstrating and growing its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) and demand generation.
  • You maintain 100% control over content and technical optimizations. That’s not always true with off-site (you can’t control links from other sites or if platforms you rely on end up shutting down or making a major change), but those activities are still a key part of this SEO trinity of success. 

  • Imagine SEO as a sports team. You need both a strong offense and defense to win – and you need fans (a.k.a., an audience). Think of technical optimization as your defense, content optimization as your offense, and off-site optimization as ways to attract, engage, and retain a loyal fanbase.

  • Technical Optimization
  • Optimizing the technical elements of a website is crucial and fundamental for SEO success. 

  • It all starts with architecture – creating a website that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. As Gary Illyes, Google’s trends analyst once put it in a Reddit AMA: “MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE.” 

  • You want to make it easy for search engines to discover and access all of the content on your pages (i.e., text, images, videos). What technical elements matter here: URL structure, navigation, internal linking, and more.
  • Experience is also a critical element of technical optimization. Search engines stress the importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness and usability, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive interstitials all matter in technical SEO. 
  • Another area of technical optimization is structured data (a.k.a., schema). Adding this code to your website can help search engines better understand your content and enhance your appearance in the search results. 


  • Plus, web hosting services, CMS (content management system), and site security all play a role in SEO. 
  • Content optimization
  • In SEO, your content needs to be optimized for two primary audiences: people and search engines. What this means is that you optimize the content your audience will see (what’s actually on the page) as well as what search engines will see (the code).

  • The goal, always, is to publish helpful, high-quality content. You can do this through a combination of understanding your audience’s wants and needs, data, and guidance provided by Google.
  • When optimizing content for people, you should make sure it:

  • Covers relevant topics with which you have experience or expertise.
  • Includes keywords people would use to find the content.
  • Is unique or original.
  • Is well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors.
  • Is up-to-date, and contains accurate information.
  • Includes multimedia (e.g., images, videos).
  • Is better than your SERP competitors.

  • Is readable – structured to make it easy for people to understand the information you’re sharing (think: subheadings, paragraph length, use bolding/italics, ordered/unordered lists, reading level, etc.).

  • For search engines, some key content elements to optimize for are:
  • Title tags
  • Meta description
  • Header tags (H1-H6)
  • Image alt text
  • Open Graph and Twitter Cards metadata
  • Off-site optimization
  • Several activities may not be “SEO” in the strictest sense but nonetheless can align with and help contribute indirectly to SEO success.

  • Link building (the process of acquiring links to a website) is the activity most associated with off-site SEO. There can be great benefits (e.g., rankings, traffic) from getting a diverse number of links pointing at your website from relevant, authoritative, trusted websites. Link quality beats link quantity – and a large quantity of quality links is the goal.

  • And how do you get those links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that synergize with SEO efforts. These include:
  • Brand building and brand marketing: Techniques designed to boost recognition and reputation.
  • PR: Public relations techniques designed to earn editorially-given links.
  • Content marketing: Some popular forms include creating videos, ebooks, research studies, podcasts (or being a guest on other podcasts), and guest posting (or guest blogging).
  • Social media marketing and optimization: Claim your brand’s handle on any and all relevant platforms, optimize it fully, and share relevant content. 
  • Listing management: Claiming, verifying, and optimizing the information on any platforms where information about your company or website may be listed and found by searchers (e.g., directories, review sites, wikis).
  • Ratings and reviews: Getting them, monitoring them, and responding to them.
  • Generally, when talking about off-site, you’re talking about activities that are not going to directly impact your ability to rank from a purely technical standpoint. 
  • However, again, everything your brand does matters. You want your brand to be found anywhere people may search for you. As such, some people have tried to rebrand “search engine optimization” to actually mean “search experience optimization” or “search everywhere optimization.”


SEO specialties

  • Search engine optimization also has a few subgenres. Each of these specialty areas is different from “regular SEO” in its own way, generally requiring additional tactics and presenting different challenges. 
                                                                                                                Five such SEO specialties include                                                                                     
  • E-commerce SEO: Additional SEO elements include optimizing category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking structures, product images, product reviews, schema, and more.

  • Enterprise SEO: This is SEO on a massive scale. Typically this means dealing with a website (or multiple websites/brands) with 1 million+ pages – or it may be based on the size of the organization (typically those making millions or billions in revenue per year). Doing enterprise also typically means delays trying to get SEO changes implemented by the dev team, as well as the involvement of multiple stakeholders.

  • International SEO: This is global SEO for international businesses – doing SEO for multiregional or multilingual websites – and optimizing for international search engines such as Baidu or Naver. 
  • Local SEO: Here, the goal is to optimize websites for visibility in local organic search engine results by managing and obtaining reviews and business listings, among others.
  • News SEO: With news, speed is of utmost importance – specifically making sure you get into Google’s index as quickly as possible and appear in places such as Google Discover, Google’s Top Stories, and Google News. There’s a need to understand best practices for paywalls, section pages, news-specific structured data, and more.
  • How does SEO work?
  • If you found this page via Google search, you likely searched Google for [what is seo] or [seo]. 
  • This guide is published on Search Engine Land, an authoritative website with great expertise on and experience in the topic of SEO (we’ve been covering all SEO changes, big and small since 2006).
  • Initially published in 2010, our “What is SEO” page has earned a whopping 324,203 links.
  • Put simply, these factors (and others) have helped this guide earn a good reputation with search engines, which has helped it rank in Position 1 for years. It has accumulated signals that demonstrate it is authoritative and trustworthy – and therefore deserves to rank when someone searches for SEO. 
  • But let’s look at SEO more broadly. As a whole, SEO really works through a combination of:
  • People: The person or team responsible for doing or ensuring that the strategic, tactical, and operational SEO work is completed.
  • Processes: The actions taken to make the work more efficient.
  • Technology: The platforms and tools used.
  • Activities: The end product, or output.
  • Many other things factor into how SEO works. What follows is a high-level look at the most important knowledge and process elements. 
  • Six critical areas, in combination, make SEO work
  •  Understanding how search engines work

  • Simply, if you want people to find your business via search – on any platform – you need to understand the technical processes behind how the engine works – and then make sure you are providing all the right “signals” to influence that visibility. 
  • When talking about traditional web search engines like Google, there are four separate stages of search:
  • Crawling: Search engines use crawlers to discover pages on the web by following links and using sitemaps.
  • Rendering: Search engines generate how the page will look using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS information.
  • Indexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of the pages it has discovered and add them to a database (though there’s no guarantee every page on your website will be indexed).
  • Ranking: Complex algorithms look at a variety of signals to determine whether a page is relevant and of high enough quality to show when searchers enter a query.
  • However, optimizing for Google search is different from optimizing for search other platforms like YouTube or Amazon. 
  • Let’s take Facebook, for example, where factors such as engagement (Likes, comments, shares, etc.) and who people are connected to matter. Then, on Twitter, signals like recency, interactions, or the author’s credibility are important. 
  • And further complicating things: search engines have added machine learning elements to surface content – making it even harder to say “this” or “that” resulted in better or worse performance.
 Researching

  • Research is a key part of SEO. Some forms of research that will improve SEO performance include:
  • Audience research: It’s important to understand your target audience or market. Who are they (i.e., their demographics and psychographics)? What are their pain points? What questions do they have that you can answer? 
  • Keyword research: This process helps you identify and incorporate relevant and valuable search terms people use into your pages – and understand how much demand and competition there is to rank for these keywords.
  • Competitor research: What are your competitors doing? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What types of content are they publishing? 
  • Brand/business/client research: What are their goals – and how can SEO help them achieve those goals?
  • Website research: A variety of SEO audits can uncover opportunities and issues on a website that are preventing success in organic search. Some audits to consider: technical SEO, content, link profile, and E-E-A-T. 
  • SERP analysis: This will help you understand the search intent for a given query (e.g., is it commercial, transactional, informational, or navigational) and create content that is more likely to earn rankings or visibility.


Planning

  • An SEO strategy is your long-term action plan. You need to set goals – and a plan for how you will reach them. 
  • Think of your SEO strategy as a roadmap. The path you take likely will change and evolve over time – but the destination should remain clear and unchanged.
  • Your SEO plan may include things such as:
  • Setting goals (e.g., OKRs, SMART) and expectations (i.e., timelines/milestones).
  • Defining and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics.
  • Deciding how projects will be created and implemented (internal, external, or a mix).
  • Coordinating and communicating with internal and external stakeholders.
  • Choosing and implementing tools/technology.
  • Hiring, training, and structuring a team.
  • Setting a budget.
  • Measuring and reporting on results.
  • Documenting the strategy and process

  •  Creating and implementing

  • Once all the research is done, it’s time to turn ideas into action. That means:
  • Creating new content: Advise your content team on what content needs to be created.

  • Recommending or implementing changes or enhancements to existing pages: This could include updating and improving the content, adding internal links, incorporating keywords/topics/entities, or identifying other ways to optimize it further.
  • Removing old, outdated, or low-quality content: The types of content that aren’t ranking well, driving converting traffic, or helping you achieve your SEO goals.
  • 5. Monitoring and maintaining
  • You need to know when something goes wrong or breaks on your website. Monitoring is critical. 
  • You need to know if traffic drops to a critical page, pages become slow, unresponsive or fall out of the index, your entire website goes offline, links break, or any other potential catastrophic issues.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing in which companies reach out to third-party websites to advertise their products and services. These are also known as referrals. The target audience of the affiliate website becomes important in this aspect of digital marketing. Some of the ways that affiliates are incentivized are based on:

  • Registrations
  • Email sign-ups
  • Sales and
  • Subscriptions

Marketing automation

Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns, improving the efficiency and relevance of advertising. As a result, you can focus on creating the strategy behind your digital marketing efforts instead of cumbersome and time-consuming processes

While marketing automation may seem like a luxury tool your business can do without, it can significantly improve the engagement between you and your audience.

According to statistics:

90% of US consumers find personalization either “very” or “somewhat” appealing
81% of consumers would like the brands they engage with to understand them better
77% of companies believe in the value of real-time personalization, yet 60% struggle with it
Marketing automation lets companies keep up with the expectation of personalization. It allows brands to:

Collect and analyze consumer information
Design targeted marketing campaigns
Send and post-digital marketing messages at the right times to the right audiences
Many marketing automation tools use prospect engagement (or lack thereof) with a particular message to determine when and how to reach out next. This level of real-time customization means that you can effectively create an individualized marketing strategy for each customer without any additional time investment.



Mailchimp's marketing automation tools ensure you can interact with your audience via behavior-based automation, transactional emails, date-based automation, and more.

Email marketing
The concept of email marketing is simple—you send a promotional message and hope that your prospect clicks on it. However, the execution is much more complex. First of all, you have to make sure that your emails are wanted. This means having an opt-in list that does the following:

Individualizes the content, both in the body and in the subject line
States clearly what kind of emails the subscriber will get
An email signature that offers a clear unsubscribe option
Integrates both transactional and promotional emails
You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valued service, not just as a promotional tool.

Email marketing is a proven, effective technique all on its own: 89% of surveyed professionals named it as their most effective lead generator.

It can be even better if you incorporate other digital marketing techniques such as marketing automation, which lets you segment and schedule your emails so that they meet your customer's needs more effectively.

If you’re considering email marketing, here are a few tips that can help you craft great email marketing campaigns:

Segment your audience to send relevant campaigns to the right people
Ensure emails look good on mobile devices
Create a campaign schedule
Run A/B tests

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to engage with your target audience on their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This can be via SMS and MMS messages, social media notifications, mobile app alerts, and more.

It’s crucial to ensure that all content is optimized for mobile devices. According to the Pew Research Center, 85% of Americans own a smartphone, so your marketing efforts can go a long way when you create content for computer and mobile screens.

The Benefits of Digital Marketing


Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. However, it also offers several other advantages that can boost your marketing efforts. These are a few of the benefits of digital marketing.

Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business’s overall marketing strategy. Never before has there been a way to stay in such consistent contact with your customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalization that digital data can provide. The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you'll be able to realize your company's growth potential.




How to create a digital marketing strategy

For many small businesses and beginner digital marketers, getting started with digital marketing can be difficult. However, you can create an effective digital marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, engagement, and sales by using the following steps as your starting point.