The Step-By Step Guide to Digital Marketing

If you are an Entrepreneur, we would like to ask how you find paying clients for your business?

Business Growth doesn’t just happen overnight. Most of us will never think about creating a viral post or blog, that leads to 100k new subscribers and $100,000 budget won’t give you any good result if you waste it by trying thousand multiple approaches that are not effective.

Actual growth comes from consciously making a consistent flow of traffic to your site. Because:

•The more traffic you generate, the more reader you get
•The more reader you get, the more subscriber you have
•The more subscriber you get, the more sales you create.

More sales are the key to the door of business success. And for this, you can hire a dedicated team of expert developers and marketers to free up your time. Either you can build a new product or service or you can invest in better technology. If we talk from the personal point of view, more sales can benefit for you to make more money for your own personal life.

All of this is possible only when you use free or low-cost digital marketing strategies. Most of us have the faintest of the idea of what digital marketing means, right? Even if you don’t, here we will describe a detailed guide on digital marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is just another fancy buzzword that sounds smart in deals or is it real? Let’s dive deep into the discussion.

In earlier 2000’s it popularized first time as a term and since then it is growing continuously. You may have read about digital marking on Wikipedia like it is a process of marketing or promotion for the targeted, measurable, and collaborating marketing of products or services. Let us tell you an easy and simple one definition: Digital Marketing is marketing of products, things, and services with the help of digital platform including Smartphone, tablets, PCs, and other. It can be done both online and offline. And both of these are crucial for excellent digital marketing strategy.

Digital Marketing is anything you do online to get:

•Attention
•Drive visitors to your site
•Convincing those users to connect with your email list and/or buy your product and service or download your application.

Unlike, traditional marketing, digital marketing is measurable. -It means you can track and identify what is right or what is wrong and you can analyze the various metrics and save your time and efforts in a fruitless campaign.

There are two main pillars of digital Marketing: online marketing and offline marketing. Here we’ll discuss only online marketing.

Online Marketing

Online marketing is a tool or method of promoting a business or brand name out to the public. Basically, anything that you do online to get more views, grab more user’s attention and get them to buy something from your website hopefully at the same point falls under online marketing.

Online Marketing has changed dramatically in the last few years. When Google updated their Panda and Penguin algorithm, many business owners were struggling as Google Algorithm updates hit their website. Those who built a strong white hat online marketing strategies were not affected. Unfortunately, there were also those businesses who were stuck in the middle. Most of the website in this category was powered by those business owners who have focused on the day to day operations.

Creating a successful marketing strategy is like building anything and it starts with a solid marketing approach which includes three types of method:

•Search Engine Optimization
•Content Marketing
•Social Media Marketing

But, knowing these methods is not enough. As many website owners found after Google updates, applying and putting even well-established techniques in an incorrect manner can hit your search engine ranking.

Search Engine Optimization

Sure, you know SEO stands for search engine optimization, but what gets optimized?

When people think of online marketing, SEO is the first thing that will cross your mind. SEO is used to maintain a site that the search engine will rank as one of the most relevant pages for a given specific term. The fact is, 95 % of visitors click on first top 10 results which appear on the first page of the Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Alright, let’s understand the SEO. It is the process of optimizing your website content so that a search engine whether it is Google, Yahoo or Bing works to display it as top results on SERP for a specific keyword for a targeted location.

If you have a blog about how to make crispy corn, you want the search engine to display it as a top result to anyone who searches for the specific phrase “crispy corn”. It is like magic, you have to work for your blog in order to rank in top results whenever someone searches for that phrase.

95% of online experiences start with a search engine, 70% of which uses Google to do so. Combine the fact that the first 5 result in Google gets 65% of all clicks, and from this, you can figure out why search engine optimization is so important. Also, how crucial it is to hit the first page of Google.

Now that you have understood the basic idea of SEO, we’ll jump into the some of its components in detail.

There are two sides of SEO and you have to choose yours, right now.

White Hat VS. Black Hat

With search engine optimization, some people do it for the instant result and others do it for a long time. Black hat SEO mainly focuses on optimizing your web content only for the search engine, not for humans. As there are lots of ways to get your sites to rank high by breaking the Search Engine’s policy and rules, these are a welcome way for Black hat SEO to make more money fast.

Ultimately, this is spamming and crappy pages which often get banned very fast and leading to severe disaster for the marketer or business owners, ruining their opportunities of building something sustainable in the near future.

On the other hand, white hat SEO, it is the way to develop a sustainable online business. If you do your SEO by utilizing white hat SEO techniques and following all the search engine policies, you will focus on your audience, trying to offer them the best content possible and making it easily accessible to them.

Optimize your site inside and outside:

On-page SEO VS Off-page SEO

There are 2 broad categories of SEO one is ON-page SEO and OFF-page SEO.

On-page SEO handles all of Google’s ranking factors that are directly determined by viewing the page you try to optimize, like headlines, page URL, content and page structure. While Off-page SEO concerns all variables search engine views at, which is not exclusively in your own hands, but it depends on the other sources like social networks, link building, and blog posting etc.

Both of these are different, but you need to do both in an appropriate manner in order to get the best result with SEO. For example, if your web page is extremely optimized around on-page SEO, has well-optimized content and looks great, but no one ready to give you credit for it.

When a user visits your site and leaves your site after viewing only home page, in search engine’s eyes that visitor is considered as a bounce. The higher your bounce rate, the lower your page will rank in SERP. That’s why you have to optimize your both On-page and Off-page SEO.

On-Page SEO

There are mainly 3 components in on-page SEO that you need to take care of. The first and most important is:

Content – most of us heard the term “content is king”. Why? Because a customer is happy when he gets the results that serve his requirements in the best possible way. Google always tries its best to provide you the best experience by offering you the great content. That means, your first priority, in order to do well with SEO, is to offer great content. There are some factors that make up the great content.

•Content Quality
•Keyword Research
•Use of Keywords
•Freshness of content

HTML – The next big thing you need to take a look at. Once you are done with your content, the next is HTML. For this, you don’t have to be a professional coder, but running a business without knowing the basics of HTML would be like driving without knowing the traffic rules. There are 4 parts of HTML you should optimize.

•Title Tag
•Meta Description
•Schema
•Slug

Architecture –This is the last component of on-page SEO, there are few things that everyone should take care of, to improve your website SEO. A good website architecture brings a great user experience when a user navigates your page, through things such as fast site loading time, a safe connectivity and a mobile and user-friendly design. The more accessible your website is to a search engine, the better it will rank on SERP. You have to optimize some factors

•Create sitemap for easy crawling
•Avoid Duplicate Content
•Mobile Friendliness
•Page Download Speed
•Put keywords in URLs
•HTTP and SSL

Off-page SEO

Now it’s time to optimize your off-page. We’ll explain you 4 major areas of off-page SEO.

Trust- Pagerank, it is the popular formula invented by the founders of Google. They measure ranking pages in the top 10 search results. Trust is getting extremely important and recent Google update has hit the spammy and doubtful websites. There are 4 ways to build trust:

•High Authority (DA, PA)
•Low Bounce Rate
•Identity

Links – Backlinks play an important role in off-page SEO. Although, there are plenty of ways to get backlinks, don’t wait for people to link to your site, you have to take initiative and ask for them. Keeping in mind 3 factors while getting backlinks.

•Quality of links
•Anchor text
•No. of links

Personal – This is the third thing that comes in the Off-page category. Although most of the things are out of your control, still there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of getting traffic. For example, Google shows results relevant to the country. The Geo targeting go further based on the city. This is the reason when you search for a restaurant, you get results from right around your location.

When Google recognizes that you have signed-in and you like a brand on a social channel, it is more likely to display your results from those brands or even personal contacts you have.

Social – Lastly, you should consider social factors of off-page SEO. Besides social signals directly from the searcher, there are other ways to get good results on social media that will help you rank better on SERP. The two main factors are:

•Quality of shares
•No of shares

Content Marketing

As we know, content marketing is not a new concept. In fact, John Deere started the trend in 1895 when they launched The Furrow, an agricultural magazine. Content marketing is all about providing correctly and relevant value to your customers. It is important because it helps create your brand and inspire confidence in your business strategy. In fact, six out of ten customers say that after reading your web content or blog, they feel better about the business.

In present market scenario, content marketing has extended the field to include blogs, training videos, Podcasts, and video games as well. But like every other strategy, it has its downsides too. The common mistake is low-quality content and it can affect your rankings and damage your brand value.

For example, Content riddled with grammar, duplicate content, the spinning of the content and spelling errors make you look careless and unprofessional. Giving statements without verifying can make you look stupid. You should remember that the content you provide for your site might be the first impression a client gets from your business.

Another mistake many marketers make is to pull away from content marketing altogether. This is like getting the result from a trend against guest blogging before the recent Google algorithm updates. Some aggressive marketers are making the blog post in bulk and sending them to anyone who would post them in return for a backlink to their site. These backlinks were thought to be the best combination of the content marketing and good SEO.

However, Google thinks differently, it saw poor quality content which has no value used for nothing more than backlinks. So Google took action against these aggressive marketers and now many have dropped the idea of guest blogging and content marketing, thinking that their rank would fall. But it doesn’t mean that guest blogging would result in poor rankings. You should provide valuable and relevant content and post it on trustworthy site.

Social Media Marketing

The Social media industry is booming in the current marketplace and growth rate is tremendous. Every day, a new social media platform emerges out there. From a personal point of view, social media is nothing more than a way to stay connected with your friends and family. But for business, it is a way to link SEO and content marketing together. The Search engine considers the no of shares a page gets when it ranks at that specific piece of content.

Social media is also becoming the primary platform for sharing the content. Major social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Stumble upon, and Reddit all allows users to share valuable and relevant content with other users in their networks. Recent research shows that people like to trust content shared from people they know very well.

A common myth in social media marketing is having a large no of followers can give you the best result. There is nothing like that, in fact, many digital marketing companies in India have sprouted up offering to sell you 100 real fans. Keeping in mind that friend and fans are not enough, you have to build engagement. They will not help you achieve your business goals.

In order to make solid social media marketing strategy, you need to interact with your customers and fans and create a real community. So you are accessible by allowing the audience to ask queries, voice concerns, and complaints as well. And this is done in a professional manner. You have to provide them content that is interesting not just for promotion.

Instead of considering social media as a sharing platform where you share the content that you created on one platform for all the others, you need to try to tell stories that match the context of each platform.

Conclusion

Hope this guide expanded your view and described you that digital marketing is more than anything. We can say that it is a real deal. These marketing techniques are just the foundation of building a successful digital marketing strategy. But without a deep understanding of these approaches, you may find your efforts wasted. With the right marketing strategies, you can achieve your business goal. Of course, we should thank the power of the internet; anyone and everyone can boost their online presence and be benefitted through digital marketing.