Today, digital marketing has surpassed inbound marketing. Thanks to social media and google SEO, many businesses have turned to changing their strategies online. Instead of walking to traditional sources, they started to meet their needs with mobile phones, tablets or computers. Finding the product they are looking for online provides convenience to users in an easier and digitalized world. Content marketing has multiple methods and ways. Following the steps correctly can achieve success with a quality product and a quality team. Digital marketing courses are provided by Google (certified), Udemy, YouTube, and training provided by some companies. Businesses that don’t have the time can interview digital marketing experts on a variety of worker-providing platforms. Many businesses can succeed with digital marketing. It can be conducted in conjunction with either inbound marketing and digital marketing. With carefully executed methods, the digital marketer can take you to the very top. The fundamentals of digital marketing are based on several steps. Search Engine, websites, social media platforms, email and mobile locations. However, everyone has one question in mind: What is the basics of digital marketing? How can we do digital marketing? There are basically 6 ways of digital marketing. Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Pay-per Click, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing and finally Affiliate marketing.
Define your marketing goals. What should your content provide for your company? Choose specific goals that reflect the realities of your business. Research your target audience. What is the demographic of your audience? What are their values and pin points? 50% of content marketers say connecting with their audience on these topics is a key factor in the success of their strategy. Choose content formats and distribution channels. Will you use written or visual content, or will you use both? Will your target audience be able to find your content through organic search or social media? Focus on the types of content that will truly resonate with your audience. Conduct a content audit. Compile a list of every content asset you have and whether they’re helping you achieve your marketing goals. Find ways to renew or reuse the non-renewable. Create an editorial calendar and action plan. Use the information you gather to plan content 3 to 6 months in advance. Begin listing tasks and assigning work to your team. These are pretty simple steps, so you’ll need a little more planning to get started.
Inbound Marketing vs Digital Marketing: Which One is Better?
The difference between these two types of marketing can be confusing. Many people use these terms interchangeably, but they actually refer to different types of marketing and do different things. If you’re wondering what the difference between digital marketing and inbound marketing really is, we’ll go over it for you:
Digital Marketing
The term digital marketing serves as a sort of catch-all for any marketing tactic done in a digital environment. Things like search engine optimization, website banners, social media campaigns are all examples of individual digital marketing tactics.
While there is a lot to do with digital marketing, the term itself does not imply any strategy. Think of it more like a toolbox with all the marketing tools you can use to increase brand awareness, get more traffic, and appear online.
Inbound Marketing
Unlike digital marketing, inbound marketing is a clear and defined marketing strategy with precise steps and best practices. An inbound marketing strategy is a set of methodologies that work to attract qualified visitors and generate leads while leveraging many digital marketing tactics like blogging and improving SEO.
This is an ongoing, holistic strategy that encompasses a number of specific steps. We could think of inbound marketing as a philosophy that tries to put customers first, and digital marketing tactics help them achieve this goal.
How to Choose the Correct Option?
Now that you know the differences between digital marketing and inbound marketing, how can you know which option is best? It depends on your goals. If you’re just trying to increase brand awareness and attract a past visitor to your website, a few different digital marketing tactics can help. Digital marketing tactics are tools to achieve short-term goals like increasing the reach of your Facebook page or increasing traffic to your website. On the other hand, if you’re trying to generate leads that turn into legitimate, qualified customers, inbound marketing tactics are probably the better choice.
You can run a Facebook-like campaign or start running banner ads, but these techniques by themselves will only produce limited results. A similar campaign will definitely get you more likes and banner ads may attract more people to your site, but that’s all. An inbound marketing strategy takes each of these digital marketing tactics and mixes them into a larger strategy that does something with the results of each tactic. With an effective inbound marketing strategy, you create content that attracts qualified leads, develop landing pages and calls to action that capture the contact details of people interested in your offering, and distribute relevant email campaigns.
When you have a complete inbound marketing strategy, it works long-term to continue to bring you qualified leads and increase your conversion rates over time.
Harmonizing the Two Strategies
Choosing inbound marketing is like playing a long game; it leads to more robust, consistent results. Digital marketing plays the short game where you get instant results, but oftentimes it’s not that valuable in the long run.
In our opinion, the most effective way to take advantage of both is to use digital marketing tactics to guide your inbound marketing strategy. Applying digital marketing tactics can help your inbound marketing strategy grow exponentially, attracting more of the right leads in less time and for a greater overall return on investment.
In the end, it’s up to you to determine what your goals are for your business’ marketing strategy and whether to choose inbound or digital marketing.
Does Digital Marketing Work For All Businesses?
In today’s conditions, many businesses have transformed their services and products into online platforms and websites. Every job you can think of is offered online and physically serviced. In the globalizing world, workplacesget rid of inbound marketing methods and use digital marketing methods to become successful very quickly.
For example, think of a bicycle mechanic, your bicycle broke down and you need repair service. You are in the center of Izmit, you grabbed your phone and google “Izmit Merkez bicycle repair”. Thanks to local indexes in the search results, you have found the nearest bicycle repair shop. You have seen the address on the website very close to you.
Being able to offer even a service like bike repair digitally means being able to offer any service you can imagine online to potential customers.
Various Ways of Digital Marketing
There are six different steps for digital marketing. Do we have to do all of these together? Of course not, but using them all together will help you avoid non-users. So what are the basics of digital marketing that begin with using six ways?
- Content Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Pay-per Click
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate marketing
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is the marketing work of producing useful content to help solve the problems of the target audience, rather than advertising.
Howard Gossage, one of the important names in marketing and advertising, expressed the first steps of Content Marketing with these words: “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.” Content marketing was inspired by this sentence and took its current form.
Content marketing, which started through traditional media, has turned its course in this direction with the development of digital media. Blogs, social media apps, video and music platforms are big factors in content marketing today. It is possible to reach the right audience quickly by preparing visual content, videos, blog posts and podcasts on these platforms.
There are many important criteria to be successful in content marketing. The most important of these criteria is to determine the right audience and produce content that will appeal to their interests. Content that appeals to interests and contains information shows that the marketing method is successful.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO or search engine optimization is the process of optimizing websites to rank well in search engines with organic (non-paid) searches. In other words, your website needs to meet certain leads that platforms like Google are looking for. Since Google wants to provide searchers with a positive user experience, it wants to provide the best possible information. SEO is essentially the process of getting search engines to recognize your content as the best information on the web for a particular search query.
Pay-per Click
As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, Pay Per Click represents Cost Per Click. So what does this mean? It is a rule that specifies how the budget of each campaign will be spent on ads created on Google Adwords, Facebook and Twitter. When you apply the PPC rule for the budget management of your ad campaign, you pay a certain fee when a user sees your ad and clicks on this ad. For example, when you create an AdWords campaign, you will see a certain PPC cost for the campaign content. When you create a $1-per-click ad option, if a user sees your ads through Google searches and clicks on that ad, it will cost you $1.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media is an area where the importance of brands increases day by day and serious investments are made in this sector. Today, it is among the platforms where the most effective marketing activities take place. Social Media Marketing is the process of promoting a product or service on social media networks, advertising, increasing brand awareness, etc. It is a marketing method in which transactions are carried out. In other words, all marketing strategies made through social media platforms are called ‘Social Media Marketing’. One of the most important reasons why brands prefer this marketing method; In traditional marketing, it is not possible to reach the target audience completely or it costs much more. However, social media marketing allows brands to reach the right target audience and more people with less budget. Another important reason is; two-sided interaction is provided and this happens in a short time.
For instance, there has been a negative situation with a product or service. The fact that the consumer conveys this complaint through the social media accounts of the brand and the brand resolves this complaint in a short time can not only protect the brand from a possible disaster, but also provide convenience and time savings to both parties.
Email Marketing
Direct mail sent electronically instead of the traditional postal service is called e-mail or electronic mail. Therefore, what is email marketing?
Email marketing is the use of e-mail service to develop relations with existing customers or potential customers and to promote products and services.
Order confirmation e-mails, answers to customer questions, campaign notifications or automatic mails can be considered as e-mail marketing methods. In addition to this, email marketing can be defined as internet marketing, which is done through many social platforms and includes e-commerce marketing.
The content of these mails may consist of issues such as newsletters, promotions, campaigns, discount days or membership opportunities for subscribers. Campaign and promotional e-mails that you will send to your customers on a monthly or weekly basis can be a suitable marketing method for your brand.
Requesting e-mail addresses from your customers during shopping on your e-commerce site can be a way to turn your target audience into permanent customers. A common example of email marketing, this would be a great opportunity to get permanent and potential customers.
Affiliate marketing
Digital Marketing is a marketing tool that is more advantageous and preferable than printed publications in today’s technology, where you can promote your products or services to electronic media. Means sales and marketing partnership
It is known that it is possible to earn money from the internet with affiliate marketing. Persons participating in affiliate marketing can gain certain percentages over these target audiences by reaching other audiences with the reference link of the site from which they receive affiliate marketing through banners and links on various sites. You can read the rest of the article to see what you can do with affiliate marketing.
What Does A Digital Marketer Do?
Digital marketing experts work to strengthen the image of the company and ensure the growth of brands. Some of the duties of a digital marketing specialist include:
- Following the trends and the innovations in the digital world,
- Participating in dynamic and self-improving activities,
- Evaluating social media platforms well in terms of advertising,
- Being knowledgeable about SEM, e-mail marketing, Google Analytics, mobile marketing and SEO,
- Developing strategies and increasing the preferability of the brand by reaching more audiences.
