Promoting any service/product using online channel will be called digital marketing. In order to get the complete picture, let me explain with an example.
Imagine you have a coffee shop in your favorite location. Over the past few months, you are not drawing much of customers to your coffee shop.
What will you do?
Market or promote your coffee shop?
How will you promote your coffee shop, if you have no idea on digital marketing?
- Create Posters on offers/discounts
- Place them on the busiest place, so that you can attract a huge crowd to your coffee shop.
- Place TV / Radio Ads (They are expensive though, still you use them to promote it)
Even the despite several attempts to promote your product, you are failing miserably to draw attention to your coffee shop.
This is where digital marketing comes into the picture. Using digital marketing you would be able to achieve the following
- With a limited time and money, you can run several types of ads. Inviting more number of customers.
- You can understand what does the customer want and What they don’t want. These traits cannot be tracked in offline marketing.
- Reaching the right audience for your promotion, Again this trait will not be available with offline marketing. You are showing ads to a larger crowd.
This is just a few of the advantages of using digital marketing in your business!
Now let’s discuss how can we grow your business using digital marketing?
Digital Marketing uses various techniques to achieve the end goal. There is no necessity in executing each and every known digital marketing techniques to achieve the end goal. It’s totally based on your business needs and end goals.
I will leave it to your intuition on choosing which digital marketing techniques you should use to achieve your end goal or grow your business.
Let’s list the five most widely used digital marketing techniques.
1)SEO – Search Engine Optimization
2)SEM – Search Engine Marketing
3)Analytics
4)Social Media Marketing
5)Email Marketing
What is SEO?
If your business totally depends upon the website you own? Then its something you should look out for. Search Engine Optimization is a technique where we optimize the website to rank over the top in search results page.
When you search for something on google or yahoo, you might have noticed there are several websites listed one after the other in search results page. 
How come Mountain Goat Software has the top listing on the search results? Thats because of the SEO factors influencing the mountaingoatsoftware.com.
What is SEM/Search Engine Marketing?
Have you ever noticed ads on search results page? Placing ads on the search engine is known as search engine marketing.
You have to look out for – Bing Ads (Ad Services Offered by Microsoft) and Adwords (Ad Services Offered by Google)
This is how it works, you will place a bid for a particular keyword or set of keywords for a certain amount. Search Engine providers such as Google and Bing will give the preference to the highest bidder and with other ad value score from your ad account.
Don’t worry about it we will cover the same in our next consecutive chapters going ahead. All you have to know right now is. Search Engine Marketing is nothing but placing ads on search engine result page.
Analytics – Measuring how far your campaigns are working and which ones did not work can be found here. There are several other things such as – who visited your site and who left the site. When did they leave, which page did they leave? That information is measured and studied using analytic tools.
There are several tools for analytics – Facebook pixels, google analytics, Omniture, crazy egg and so on.
Social Media Marketing
Ads on social media, simply as that! Have you seen ads while scrolling your news feed? Well ,thats called as social media ads or social selling.
Each platform has thier own types of ads. Most of the marketers engage in instagram and facebook ads, as they have a large amount of user base.
Email Marketing
Selling someone over the email. Thats email marketing, but wait for a second can someone sell a product or service using an email?
They definitely can, we will drive down every digital marketing techniques ranging from small to advanced.