List of The Most Effective Digital Marketing Techniques You Can Use

Digital marketing techniques have been around for a long time now. With the Digital India initiative of the government since 1st July 2015, a digital transformation has started in the country. Further, when JIO launched 4G services with free mobile data, internet penetration in rural India happened. 

In this article, you will read the following.

• A change in perception
• Digital marketing jobs
• How to do digital marketing?
• Bird’s eye view of digital marketing techniques
• Types of digital marketing techniques

In the past, traditional marketing techniques ruled and so we found handbills, door-to-door marketing, print advertisements, billboards, television ads, radio ads, direct mails, press releases, magazines, and newspaper advertising. While these continue to exist, digital marketing techniques have taken the marketing game to the next deeper level as the reach is direct to the user. Companies directly reach out to the users anytime anywhere.

Digital marketing techniques refer to using the digital medium, internet, search engines, and its various platforms to educate the consumer about their problems, and how to solve the problem using products or services. For example, people moving cities need real estate and related information before they plan their move. Or a student intending to study abroad will do their research before making decisions. 

More example, during the covid-19 lockdown, a person has difficulty managing work-from-home situations along with household chores like dishwashing. They see a sponsored post on Facebook about a dishwashing machine product review. This makes them aware of their problem and a possible solution to it.

Companies put their information with website links on the internet to generate leads and sales. Their campaigns run on social media to engage users, give product awareness, and create leads. Have you seen Amazon ads in your Facebook newsfeed scroll? 

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A Change in Perception

The first go-to place for information anywhere anytime is an internet search engine like Google. The power of the web is tremendous and digital marketing makes sure that the product information reaches the right people at the time. Digital marketing gets a wider user reach based on the artificial intelligence of search engines.

Digital marketing techniques are affordable, cost-effective, and give a direct reach to a large number of users. The analytics of search engines and social platforms give insights into campaigns. It becomes possible to control the campaign based on these insights.

There are almost 700 million internet users in our country. Almost an equal number of users are mobile smartphone users of the internet. More users are being added every day across demographics. The Discovery of the internet and its multiple growth-related beneficial uses is an eye-opener for all age groups. The availability of affordable mobile data and an affordable basic smartphone has boosted this growth.

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Digital Marketing Jobs

Job profiles could range from content writing, email marketing and automation, paid ads, SEO, e-commerce SEO, social media marketing, google ads, Facebook ads, and affiliate marketing.

As a digital marketer, you could be a virtual assistant. You could do infographics, data collection, research, managing and coordinating, captioning of videos. As a beginner, you could connect to Facebook groups of a digital marketers support group, send Instagram DM to big influencers and companies for virtual assistance jobs. 

Upwork, Fiverr, freelancer.com are places to find legit freelancing work for digital marketing. Keep your portfolio ready before approaching digital marketing jobs. You have to be consistent in meeting deadlines. Take advance payment when doing freelancing. Make it a habit to spend two hours every day learning something new. 

You could work in companies or agencies as a digital marketer, SEO writer, or social media marketing professional. If you have expertise in baking, financial planning, life coaching, or anything else, you can launch your website and social media profiles as a trainer/coach. Develop courses and get into online tutoring. Run affordable campaigns and get leads to convert into sales.

You could develop e-books, blog articles, and connect an AdSense account. It is all up to you how much time, effort, and passion you have to make optimum use of the digital platform.

After the Covid-19 pandemic, the majority of people and businesses have realized the value of the internet. As a positive impact of the extensive internet use during the pandemic, most big, medium, and small businesses will now have a strong online presence. There is a likelihood that those who do not choose online marketing of their products and services might limit their business and struggle offline. 

How to do Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing techniques involve using digital mediums or electronic devices for the marketing of products and services. Digital channels and platforms like social media, email, websites, google ads, Facebook ads, and any new emerging digital platforms are used for digital marketing. So if you have basic knowledge of how to use computers, you could become a digital marketer. There are no strict eligibility criteria for doing online courses in digital marketing. 

The first step in a digital marketing strategy is to define your goal and what exactly you want to achieve. Decide whether you want to educate the audience about the client’s product and services, create a sales page, optimize the website, write SEO blogs, and so on. Define your objective clearly before you begin. 

Bird’s eye view of digital marketing techniques

Find your digital marketing objective:

Your marketing objective could be to educate the audience about the product, generate engagement in the product, create leads, and conversions. You may want to generate curiosity in the product so they subscribe to a newsletter or download an e-book, or read blogs, take part in contests/questionnaires, to generate leads.

Form the user persona:

Study in detail about the targeted audience. What they do for a living, age group, income, general likes, and dislikes, life purpose, and passion, online behaviour, education, etc. This will decide how you target the audience with your marketing strategy.

Run analytics:

If you have a website, you will have to study analytics and find the website visitor behaviour. Based on this data, you decide what works and what doesn’t. You could change your strategy based on this data.

Run digital advertisements:

There are Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Instagram ads, google ads. You could make use of these paid ads to reach a wider audience and build followers. They have analytics too which you can run to find ROI based on your company budget.

Doing keyword research:

Keywords are those words your audience or user will search in the search engines. Use long-tail keywords focusing on the keywords related to your niche. Study your competitors

You will need to study how high your competitors are ranking for the keywords. Work to push your content and website to a higher rank on the search engine result page. 

Optimize your website and landing page

Have a good website architecture, loading speed, and apart from your blog, optimize every page with the keywords you chase.

Run social media ads:

Make use of Facebook and Instagram ads to reach your audience. Study analytics and create reports of ROI.

Types of Digital Marketing Techniques 

Now that we had an overview, let’s have a closer look.

As a digital marketing professional, you will need to create digital assets like e-books, video content, infographics, customized images, reviews, testimonials, and handle client social media pages.

Digital media is constantly evolving and new channels/platforms sprout regularly. Therefore you need to be agile and adapt to the changes. You need to have a learner’s mindset to adapt to the highly competitive digital space.

Digital marketing techniques are of the following types.

1. Email marketing
2. Lead generation techniques
3. Organic SEO (search engine optimization) or SEM (search engine marketing)
4. Conversion optimization
5. Google analytics
6. Content marketing
7. Pay per click (PPC)
8. Social media marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What is SEO?

SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It means presenting your online content in such a way that the web search engines find it and show it in the relevant search engine results. For the search engines to access your website or content, it has to be recognized by the search console. The search console visits your website regularly to index the content on your website. 

You chase certain keywords and your content revolves around these keywords. The search engine robots crawl the pages and put them in subject categories so that whenever there is a search related to those keywords, your web pages are shown in the search results. 

Your content should be in simple language such that even a fifth-grade student will be able to understand it. Use short sentences for a good readability score. This will depend on whether your website is for B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to client).

Other factors determine whether your content will be visible in the search result. These are site architecture, mobile-friendliness of content, among others. While you can create ads as a marketing strategy on Google or social media, you cannot pay the search engines to get a higher ranking. You have to work hard with SEO on your website and content, create backlinks and other strategies so that you get more traffic to your content.

You can optimize your website and content for local search, image search, video search, and voice search. 

Website and web pages optimization 

Doing good keyword research is the first step to your website optimization. Extensive research on selecting keywords will help in your marketing strategy. Answer the public, related searches, google keyword planner, search bar autofill, etc. will help you create a good database of keywords.

The next step is creating a mobile-friendly website. The layout of your content has to be responsive to the mobile screen. The pages should have mobile versions so that the user can have a good experience visiting your website. 

Your content should be adaptable to any device like tablet, mobile, or desktop. The images should be responsive for mobile users. The meta titles have to be short so that they are responsive to mobile devices. Run a website audit for SEO Optimization.

The loading time of a website is another factor affecting the User experience. If your website takes more time to load, the visitor can jump to another website. 

Depending on who your website caters to, the readability has to be adjusted. For example, if your website is about machine parts and your clients are other companies or businesses which need these machine parts for running their plant, then your website will have technical jargon and specification details. If your website is an e-commerce site like Amazon then you will need to have content that can be understood by any reader.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a Digital Marketing Techniques

Search engine marketing refers to using paid advertisements on Google and other search engines so that your website appears on the search engine results page in the space for relevant paid advertisements. As an advertiser, you can bid for keywords that potential users of your product and services might search in the search engine address bar. 

With this kind of paid advertising, your product and services get an opportunity to appear on the search engine results page alongside the organic results. These ads are known as pay-per-click. The ads can be text-based or visual product-based. This kind of ad facilitates the appearance of your products in front of potential customers at the right time when they require it.

This is is a very powerful medium as compared to any other advertising medium. Businesses can use search engines like Google to show their advertisements. Search Engine Optimization is organic and generates organic or natural traffic, whereas search engine marketing involves paid ads. 

Both these digital marketing techniques, SEO, and SEM are vital for any online marketing strategy. These paid advertisements are not mixed with the organic search results. Rather they are shown separately at the top of the page like ads. 

Ad auction on keywords

To place an ad, it is strategic that as a business owner you target keywords that a user will type in the search engine. You need to conduct a detailed study of keywords and list out the relevant keywords for your business from the user’s point of view. You need to find the search volume, competition or keyword difficulty, negative keywords that you would want to avoid. 

The search intent of the user is something you would want to consider. You may want to have logical ad groups in your ad campaign. The keywords you have bid for in your campaign might appear in a user’s search query, in that case, your ads enter the ad auction. Based on the maximum amount you have bid for a click and the overall quality of your ad, determines if Google will show your ad. This is known as an ad rank.

Content Marketing as Digital marketing techniques for a brand

This is marketing your content online. Content marketing is designed to solve the problem of users of products and services. This technique is used as a marketing strategy by businesses and experts. For example, hypnotherapists, a life coach, or a prominent dietitian might have a website with informative blog articles, images and videos, contact details, pricing of their services, and testimonials. 

All of the above are content. Similarly, an E-commerce website selling a variety of products, like Amazon, has content in the form of product descriptions, reviews, and testimonials.

Big, medium and small businesses do content marketing. Even one-person shops can do content marketing online. The benefit of content marketing is higher visibility, leading to awareness, inquiries, and sales. Information that is given out by companies that are not spam, rather it solves problems. It is relevant and valuable, that is content marketing. 

Content marketing can include storytelling about the brand to create loyalty and customer trust. Quality content is the basis of social media marketing, SEO, PR, PPC, inbound marketing, and content strategy. 

Social Media Marketing is a powerful technique for digital marketing

Most of the younger generation have active social media profiles. They check on updates on social media daily would be an understatement. Even the elder generation, the middle-aged generation have social media profiles, especially in tier I and II cities. Gradual Internet literacy and proficiency to use technology in some rural pockets will further boost digital use.

So to bridge the generation gap or just to keep up with the times and manage essential operations like banking etc., most middle-aged people have increased their use of the internet and social media. Even the retired professionals have social media profiles on Facebook or Instagram to either make themselves heard or to know what the social media fuss is all about.

This makes a large number of people on social media a market for content consumption. Social media like Facebook and Instagram remain evergreen as a marketing strategy. The traditional marketing strategies of yesteryears did not have the same reach in the market, as much as social media has these days. 

Most companies, medium and small businesses in various niches have their social media profiles to reach the new markets. 

While new platforms keep sprouting every other day, these evergreen social media platforms are widely used by people across all age groups.

Facebook 

In India alone, Facebook users are estimated to rise to 400 million in 2021. Using Facebook for marketing strategy helps users identify solutions to problems while they are not consciously looking for solutions. 

Before you begin marketing strategies on Facebook, you need to create a Facebook business page. Create Facebook ads using this business page on Facebook.

This page can be used to post content that drives traffic to your website. You could build followers and communicate with them. Create Facebook ads, get audience insights on your ads and you could communicate with users if there are any issues to be resolved. 

A Facebook business page allows the sales team and customer service representatives to get feedback from customers interested in a brand. Facebook pages are not about being spam but distributing quality, useful content to the audience. 

A call to action button can be added to your Facebook page that tells the visitor to follow, purchase, or connect depending upon what your page is about. You can add a Facebook share button on your website and your website link on the Facebook page.

You could post links to your website, blog articles, YouTube videos, conduct polls, announce new products. Create Facebook ads to get likes and followers for your page. These ads can be quite draining for your budget so one has to consider analytics. 

Facebook ads can be run on a per-click basis. You can choose who sees your ad, set daily limits. Facebook ads are compelling because they are highly targeted, however, they can be draining on the budget. You may get nothing from running Facebook ads.

YouTube 

If you are a small, or medium business owner, YouTube marketing is the best way you can promote your ideas and products. Google owns YouTube, and it is the second most popular search engine after Google. Many companies place their video assets on YouTube to get more brand awareness. 

For example, a small boutique owner designing garments makes videos related to fashion and styling on YouTube. With time she builds subscribers and becomes popular because of her fashion and styling ideas. Soon her brand grows and she gets more orders for garments. 

YouTube has Search Engine Optimization with title description, tags, and overall content quality. YouTube has almost no competition on the internet. However, the volume of videos being uploaded on YouTube daily is tremendous. If the niche is in high demand, you chase the right keywords, and you are consistent in uploading videos then you have nothing to worry about. You could create backlinks for your videos by posting your videos on social media like Facebook, Pinterest, and others. 

You can take the help of a digital marketing agency as well. Placing ads for your videos on Google and YouTube is a great technique. In the ads campaign, you can choose your audience and set your budget. You can select which location, age group, and interest of the audience, should view your videos. You can track your ads and get a report on return on investment.

Instagram Digital Marketing Techniques

It is a great asset for any business to have a presence on Instagram. You can reach your consumer directly and entertainingly showcase your product and services. Your consumers can leave their feedback in the comment section, for you to attend to it as a business owner.

You can create Ads on Instagram while choosing the exact audience that you wish to target according to location, demographics, interest, behaviour, lookalike audience, and automated targeting.

Types of ads on Instagram:

• Story ads
• Photo ads
• Video ads 
• Carousel ads 
• Collection ads 
• Ads in Explorer

With Instagram ads, you can meet your business goals by creating awareness about your product and services with a wider reach of the audience. This leads to better sales and downloads of mobile apps or visitors to your E-Commerce site.

The Twitter digital marketing techniques

Twitter is a great platform to connect with people and share ideas. But It can be used for marketing goals as well. You can announce product launches, influence decision-making for better conversions. 

There are 20 + options in Twitter ads campaigns. Twitter ads are a powerful tool to target your audience. You can analyze the performance of your Twitter ad campaign. You can analyze how your audience connects to your content; this way, you can optimize campaigns for optimum results.

Affiliate Marketing is a digital marketing techniques

It is a source of passive income where you can make money while you are on vacation, sleeping, or doing anything else but working. Promoting other people’s products through a network will fetch you a commission on it when people buy the product, influenced by your marketing techniques.

You could promote your affiliate marketing by making YouTube videos and providing affiliate links in the description box. You can also write blog articles about your product and provide affiliate links within the blog.

Sites for affiliate marketing

• ShareAsale
• Solved
• Amazon associates
• eBay partners
• Shopify affiliate program 
• Clickbank
• Rakuten marketing affiliates
• Commission Junction, and others. 

Email Marketing as digital marketing technique

Sending commercial emails directly to the potential customer to generate curiosity, influence decision making, and create conversions. Email marketing is an effective and powerful digital marketing technique. To make the emails useful and not spam, emails could be customized for the prospective client.

You need to build an email list of potential customers and have crisp email content optimized for a higher click-through rate. You can automate the process of email marketing by using tools for better understanding.

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Conclusion

The list of digital marketing techniques is quite long. In 2021, digital marketing is spreading its wings even further. If you are a digital marketer, specializing in any of the techniques mentioned above, it’s a great time to network and polish your skills.

You have to be agile at learning new techniques on new platforms and adapt to any changes in algorithms. If you are a beginner, exploring what are digital marketing techniques, then 2021 is the right time to dive into the digital marketing arena.