Digital Marketing Explained for Beginners - Oversimplified (2024)

Do you want to improve your Digital Marketing knowledge for your business or your daily work conversations?  Are you a beginner and need help figuring out where to start? If so, this blog post will help you get an overview of what and why digital marketing is and the most popular tactics you hear about in a beginner friendly and simplified way.

I hope this post helps you learn the essentials of Digital Marketing and get your business noticed online.

After reading this blog post, you will have learnt the following in an over - simplified way:

• What is Digital Marketing?
• Why Use Digital Marketing for your Business?
• What are the Types of Digital Marketing Tactics?
• Overview of 9 Digital Marketing Tactics 

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is an overarching term that covers different forms of marketing by using digital technologies and digital communication methods such as the marketing campaigns you see on your computer, phone, or tablet, for example, using digital communications, our digital marketing campaigns.

It helps you to position and promote your brand and products online, connect with your potential customers, advertise products, and make sales.

Digital marketing is not a single thing, but a collection of different marketing efforts and strategies.

Why Use Digital Marketing for your Business?

There are many benefits of using digital marketing. Here are my top 6:

1. Reach: Digital Marketing has a broader reach than any other form of advertising.
2. Cost-effectiveness: Digital Marketing can be cheaper than traditional forms of advertising
3. Personalization: With Digital Marketing, you can tailor your message to suit your audience
4. Speed: It allows you to share your message with many people quickly.
5. Flexibility: It's easier to adapt and change a digital marketing strategy after implementing it.
6. Measurability and Data: It helps you get insights from your website, blog, and social media campaign and take relevant actions based on data, not on what you think works or might work.

What are the Types of Digital Marketing Tactics?

Here are 9 commonly used digital marketing tactics to help you have an overview, and we will deep dive into each one of them in the next blog posts or videos.

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing is a digital marketing tactic that uses search engine optimization and paid search advertising to drive traffic to a website.  It is a form of advertising on the web that uses keywords to rank your website higher with search engines. For example, using Google Adwords is an example of this.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is about optimizing your website to achieve higher rankings in search engine results pages.

There are sooo many criteria that search engines use, and some of the most important criteria for ranking well on Google are relevance, authority, trustworthiness, and quality. These factors can be optimized through proper keyword research and selection, link building, and content creation.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a form of marketing that uses social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Linkedin, Youtube, and Pinterest to create awareness and reach a broader audience.

4. E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is sending an advertisement, announcement, or another marketing message to a group of people using e-mail. 

5. Content Marketing

It is a way of marketing that focuses on creating and distributing various types of content such as videos, blog posts, shorts, infographics, image posts to attract customers and build relationships with them. It is often used to spread the word about products or services, build an online presence. For example, this blog post you are reading is an example of using content marketing.

6. Display Advertising

In display advertising, advertisement content such as banners, videos, text and images are placed on various websites, and mobile apps. Remember when you visit a website to read the news and see advertisements as videos or pictures related to the last internet search you made for your summer holiday in Zurich? These are examples of display advertising. Companies do "media buying", which means they book spaces to show their advertisements on relevant websites.

7. Mobile Marketing

This is a term used to describe the marketing of products or services on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

8. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a form of digital advertising that rewards publishers for driving qualified sales leads to other companies products.

The affiliate marketer provides the advertisement displayed on the affiliate's website, blog, and social media page. Affiliates promote advertiser links by posting them on their channels so visitors can click through to the advertiser's site. The affiliate is paid for their referral if the visitor makes a purchase.

        9. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is about promoting a product or a service with the help of somebody with a large following on social media. An influencer typically has followers on channels like Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn and Tiktok who can easily promote a brand`s product to their followers, and as they have a large target audience, it would be much quicker and (mostly) more authentic. 

Influencers are often celebrities or well-known figures in a particular industry, but they can also be experts or people interested in specific fields such as like lifestyle, travel, food, shoes, or fashion. Many brands also work with micro- influencers and in the corporate marketing world they might also be called KOI (Key Online Influencers).

Here is the Overview of the 9 Tactics:

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Social Media Marketing
4. E-mail Marketing
5. Content Marketing
6. Display Advertising
7. Mobile Marketing
8. Affiliate Marketing
9. Influencer Marketing

I hope this helps you take a first step towards learning the essentials of digital marketing, taking your business to the next level and growing your business online.

Stay tuned for more over - simplified digital marketing information, tips and tricks.

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