From SEO to Social Media: A Comprehensive Guide to Digital Marketing Channels and Tactics

• By Fahad Khan
• 25-05-2023
• Digital Marketing

Being a marketing professional, you are desperately hunting for effective strategies to increase your digital footprint. With marketing paradigms evolving in the virtual business space, digital approaches seem to hold tons of promises. This guide to digital marketing strategies will help you understand different marketing tactics through viable channels on digital platforms.

Simply defined, digital marketing involves promoting your products, services, business, or brand to your target audience through digital means. In the age of information, you would find your audience readily hooked to mobile devices, laptops, and PCs. With the right guide to digital marketing, you will be able to pitch your merchandise contextually at the fingertips of your audience.

In 2023, digital advertising spending is set to hit the $602.25 billion mark. Besides, smartphones account for over 55% of global internet traffic. This defines the potential that digital marketing holds for your business.

Why is digital marketing important in the age of information?

The massive inflow of information from a multiplicity of sources in the digitized business environment makes digital marketing crucial for your business. With this comprehensive guide to digital marketing, marketers and online retailers can grasp the potential that different digital advertisement channels hold for them.

In the first place, let’s check out how digital advertising spending has increased over the last decade in the retail segment in the US.

Source

This graph shows the increment in digital advertisement spending in the retail segment in the US from 2010 to 2023. Notably, the expenses jumped from $35.38 billion in 2020 to $66.64 billion in 2023.

The popular means of marketing your products and services digitally include email marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, content marketing, video marketing, and others. With competition raging high in each industry vertical, it’s crucial to go through the best guide to digital marketing. This will help marketers identify the true potential of tapping fresh clientele through digital means across different industry verticals.

Your guide to digital marketing across different channels

Now, let’s take a deeper look into the different digital marketing channels. In this guide to digital marketing, we have covered all these channels, so that marketers can streamline their respective approaches.

• Search engine marketing (SEM)

SEM is one of the most effective digital marketing channels, where your businesses can reach your target audience through popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. On average, Google records more than 8.5 billion searches each day. Why not tap this immense potential to cater to your customers digitally?

In this guide to digital marketing, we are going to talk about both paid ads and SEO. SEM includes paid advertisements and search engine optimization. When you strategically use keywords in your content to rank your web pages organically on search engines, it comes under your SEO strategy. However, paid advertisements on Google are also popular, where the marketer pays for each click that a potential customer makes on their listings.

A survey reveals that 53% of the trackable internet traffic is organic, while 15% comes through paid ads. With the right set of keywords, marketers can rank their websites on the first page of search engines. In the process, the SERPs show these pages to potential customers who search using relevant keywords.

While paid advertisements generate instant results and are effective as a short-term advertisement strategy, SEO involves more effort, but serves as a more lasting tactic. This explains why marketers count on evergreen content of high quality, including blogs, articles, guest posts, product descriptions, reviews, and other types of online content.

Besides reading this guide to digital marketing, check out this blog on content creation using AI and ML to streamline your SEO strategy.

• Social media marketing

Do you know that more than 4.89 billion internet users across the globe are active on social media channels? Why not capitalize on this information channel of marketing to grow your clientele digitally?

In this guide to digital marketing, we have explained the value of tapping customers who are active on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, and other popular social media platforms.

Social media networks are powerful enough to help brands reach their marketing goals. Creating effective content on social media empowers brands to engage with their audience informally during their leisure hours.

Social media marketing, just like SEO, is an ongoing process and involves several tasks. These include:

• Optimizing business profiles on social media and maintaining them.
• Posting videos, pictures, stories, and live videos representing your business to engage the audience.
• Engaging customers and following them, and working with influencers to develop a brand community.
• Responding to your audiences’ comments, likes, and shares while monitoring the reputation of your brand.
• Investing in paid advertising through social media channels such as Facebook to make your page appear before carefully targeted users.

Source

The infographic represents the different benefits of social media marketing. High internet exposure, gaining website traffic, and engaging loyal fans constitute the top reasons for using social media as a channel of digital marketing.

Considering the tremendous potential of social media marketing, it’s important to explore this channel in this guide to digital marketing.

• Email marketing

Email marketing continues to be one of the oldest and most effective means of digital marketing. No wonder, why we have included email marketing in our ultimate guide to digital marketing. Compared to other means of communication, your customers consider emails to be much more authentic.

Through email marketing, your subscribers would receive newsletters and emails from time to time. The text conveying your marketing message should be subtle enough, and brands need to obtain the consent of the respective receivers before dispatching these messages to them.

As a marketer, you may be using different tools to collect email addresses of potential clients and add them to your database. Sending customized emails to update your customers about relevant developments in your business, the launch of products and services, or pitching sales emails can click for your brand.

As a part of this guide to digital marketing, marketers should understand the strong potential to earn returns from email marketing. Every $1 that you spend on email marketing has the potential to fetch you a return of $42. So, digital marketers can strategically utilize this channel to engage their subscribers, convert them, and leverage their revenue.

• Content marketing

You might have heard the popular cliché ‘Content is king’ from digital marketing professionals. Content remains at the center of your digital marketing strategy. The text that your target audience reads on different digital marketing platforms should be relevant, informative, and engaging. No wonder, we have demonstrated the significance of content marketing in this practical guide to digital marketing.

Brands operating on digital platforms can convey their marketing messages to their target audience through a variety of platforms. These include:

• Website pages
• Blogs
• Articles
• Press releases
• Product reviews
• Product descriptions
• Guest posts
• Case studies

Even if your content doesn’t have any sale intention, you can simply educate your audience about your merchandise through relevant blogs and articles.

With a comprehensive strategy for content marketing, you can circulate your marketing messages over websites, social media channels, and emails.

The concept of content marketing inherently involves SEO. Search engine optimization goes a long way in ranking your website above your competitors on SERPs. Successful brands also use powerful content management systems to streamline their content marketing strategies.

• Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a popular digital marketing strategy, where marketers or advertisers can sell their merchandise through affiliates or third-party publishers. Each time someone makes a purchase, the affiliate earns a commission and the advertiser makes a sale. By looping in effective affiliates, you can leverage your sales through digital platforms.

As you sharpen your skills through this guide to digital marketing, make sure to grow your affiliate network and increase your sales. Even if you don’t have a ready customer base to tap, affiliate marketing can help you explore a potential clientele through the third-party network.

In affiliate marketing, marketers need to create an affiliate link, which is a personalized URL used for referrals. The affiliates promote their products and services by using this link in their articles, blogs, emails, and social media messages. This, the entire transaction remains trackable when a sale happens.

If you run a business model where you can benefit by converting your loyal customers into referral partners to boost your revenue, affiliate marketing would be a highly effective strategy.

Marketers willing to explore the potential beyond this guide to digital marketing can visit blogs at Ubuy Egypt.

• Mobile marketing

Our guide to digital marketing would remain incomplete without the mention of mobile marketing. With your potential customers already available on mobile devices, it’s time to explore the potential of mobile marketing. The concept of mobile marketing is an umbrella term, as marketers deploy different channels of communication through mobile devices. For instance, you might target selected groups of customers through text or SMS.

The open rates of SMSs are much higher compared to other channels of advertisement. A study shows that the open rate of emails is just 20%, while that of SMSs is as high as 98%. No wonder, this guide to digital marketing will inspire digital marketers to venture into mobile marketing.

It’s easy to connect with customers who are active on their smartphones through mobile marketing. Simply make sure that you don’t end up bombarding people with promotional messages.

Mobile marketing involves advertisements that appear on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Marketers incorporate different styles, designs, and formats while presenting their messages. Sometimes, mobile texts contain links leading to other websites, pages, and social media platforms. In other cases, mobile marketing prompts users to download your apps.

A survey shows that people spend as much as 85% of their time on mobile devices using different apps. Why not count on strategies like app-based marketing, in-game marketing, location-based marketing, and mobile search ads?

• Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing comes partially under the wide ambit of social media marketing. However, in this guide to digital marketing, we have included influencer marketing separately as brands can carry out social media marketing even without the involvement of influencers.

Influencers are popular social media users, who have developed their own niche audiences. They also hold authority in certain domains, which explains why brands reach out to selected influencers. For instance, you might have noticed apparel and cosmetic product brands collaborating with influencers who are fashionable indeed. Most of the time, these influencers have a sizable follower base who would be prompted to use products that they wear, advertise, or recommend.

Now that you have come to know about influencer marketing in this guide to digital marketing, you may consider collaborating with influencers through paid partnerships or sponsorships. So, if you are trying to increase your visibility among a niche audience, influencer marketing is worth going for.

• Podcast marketing

Well, podcast marketing is relatively new to the ambit of digital marketing. Through podcast marketing, businesses can address audiences who are active on different podcasting platforms such as Apple, Spotify, and others. Although relatively less used, this guide to digital marketing would help you grasp the concept of podcast marketing.

As a marketer, you can connect with your audience through podcast advertisements. Other means of leveraging your brand through podcast marketing include launching podcasts to cover relevant topics in your respective industry or participating in interviews.

Advertisers in 2021 spend $1.33 billion in sponsorships and podcast advertisements. It is estimated that US podcast audiences will hit the 144-million mark in 2025. Podcast marketing can help your brand spruce up its visibility. Besides, podcasts remain an asset for digital brands to acquire SEO links.

Wrapping up

Apart from the popular digital marketing modules we covered in this guide to digital marketing, marketers should also explore public relations, streaming TV marketing, video marketing, and voice marketing. Compared to traditional marketing mechanisms, digital marketing has proven to be much more effective. Besides, all your efforts and investments in digital marketing remain measurable. Accordingly, you can tweak your policies once you are done going through this guide to digital marketing.

It pays to work with one of the reputed digital marketing service providers to capitalize on the true potential in the virtual marketing paradigm. Depending on the purpose and stature of your business, you need to use your discretion to choose the right digital marketing channel.