Fundamentals of Digital Marketing – SEO, SEM, Social Media, Content Writing

Fundamentals Of Digital Marketing
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Fundamentals of Digital Marketing – SEO, SEM, Social Media, Content Writing

I know there are hundreds of articles, E-Books, Posts out there that talk about the fundamentals of Digital Marketing. The problem I found with most–If not all–of them is that they focus on different fields within Digital Marketing instead of focusing on the absolute basics of Digital Marketing itself first.

In this post, I am going to try to solve that issue. I’ll cover the basics of Digital Marketing and also tell you what all you need to learn before you start to learn Digital Marketing. Only then will I be talking about different aspects & fields within Digital Marketing.

Here is the Table of Content if you want to jump to any part of the post directly.

Table Of Content

In today’s time, Every company small or big is trying to leverage the potential of Digital. The only problem these companies face is that there are not a lot of individuals who are well versed in that; Blame the depth and diversity of Digital Marketing.

There is a huge demand for Digital Marketing professionals but on the flip side there is a huge competition from pseudo Digital Marketers as well. So, how do you become an actual Digital Marketer from being a pseudo Digital Marketer? Well, the first thing I would do is get a strong hold of Fundamentals of Digital Marketing and that is what this post is all about.

Let me answer some basic questions and we can get it over with and jump on to the good part. You don’t have to read this part unless you are completely new to the concept of Digital Marketing.

What Exactly Is Digital Marketing?

I don’t know what the bookish definition of Digital Marketing is but if you ask me, Digital Marketing is any of kind of marketing done using or on digital technologies. Like showing ads on mobiles, tablets; Sending promotional Emails; Sending SMS’s etc.… all of these come under Digital Marketing.

What Should I Do To Become A Digital Marketer?

First thing would be to finish reading this post and actually understanding it. Once you are done with that you can either join a course(Check out my list of Best Digital Marketing Institutes in Bangalore) or learn it on your own using the materials available online. I’ll link to some materials at the end of this post.

Practice a lot, Learning and Understanding the theoretical aspects of Digital Marketing is one thing; Applying all that theory is another game all together.

You won’t learn just by reading. You need to apply what you learn. Create a word press or blog spot blog (Because they are free and easy to set up) and apply everything you learn on those.

What Should You Know or Learn Before You Start Studying Digital Marketing?

This one has always been a hard question to answer. I learnt Digital marketing on my own and I knew nothing before I dove into it except basic English. So, I think it’s safe to say that even if you don’t know much of the things except basic English, you can still get into Digital marketing and learn everything on the way.

But, here are some things that would give you an edge if you know them beforehand. I wish I knew these things before I got into Digital marketing. It would have made my life & work so much easier.

  • Basics of Marketing

    If you know how Marketing works and a tad bit about how Marketing funnels work, digital Marketing is almost similar. The only difference is you will put that marketing knowledge into use on digital platforms.

  • English

    This one is of utmost importance. You will be writing content, doing copywriting and loads of other stuff where you need to know how to get your way using words. Being able to write good one liners, draft great emails and ad copies can take you a long way.

  • Drafting Mails

    This is one of the most underrated skills. It’s very often ignored by every institute & Digital Marketing training blog. If you know how to draft mails and know your way through words to convince people through your emails, trust me, that skill will come handy when you start working on SEO. I will talk about why it’s important while discussing Fundamentals of SEO.

  • Analytical Skills

    This one; You can learn it while doing Digital marketing but if you have an analytical mind by default and know how to do basic levels of Data Analysis, that is gonna take you a long way and make your job a lot easier.

  • Microsoft Excel

    Well, what is data analysis without excel right? Lots of things that has to do with Digital Marketing needs to be done on excel. Specially the analysis part of it. So, if you don’t know how to use excel; my first suggestion would be learn it.

    There are so many courses that offers excel training or if you are anything like me; there are a boatload of videos on YouTube and even more blog posts on how to use excel. Start reading them and start learning. I will add some links to some courses which might help you out.

  • Basic Level Coding(Optional):

    Coding or say programming has become kind of integral part of almost everything today. When I mention coding here, it’s not just for Web Developments or Databases. I am talking about coding for the Analytical aspect of Digital Marketing.

    There are so many different languages which will help you with so many different aspects of Digital marketing.For Example knowing R or Python would help you in Data Analysis. Knowing HTML, CSS, Java Script would help you with Technical as well as On Page SEO ( We’ll talk about it in detail later). But that does not mean you have to know the programming languages in and out. Even if you know the basics of it, that would reduce the dependency by a lot and help you work faster. All that being said, Knowing how to code might give you an edge over others but that does not mean you have to learn it to be a Digital Marketer. It’s optional but it’s helpful.

  • Basic Graphic Design(Optional):

    This one is same as the coding part. It’s optional but would give you an edge and reduce dependencies while you are working on Social Media and Display Ads. I am sure there will be professional Graphic Designers to help you out with; But, if you know how it works, may be you can get better work out of the one’s that are helping you with Graphics, Pictures, Infographics or whatever else they are working on.

Now that you know what all you should know before you start learning Digital Marketing, let’s get onto the good and actual part of the post. Shall we have a look at various verticals/aspects/fields of Digital marketing?

Then, we will talk briefly about the How part of it, but there will also be a whole post on How to become a Digital Marketer in near future. If there is a link to it, then it’s ready; if there’s no link, you need to wait for it.

What All Does Digital Marketing Constitute Of? Or What are Different Fields of Digital Marketing?

In a nutshell, every technique or strategy you use to target your customer on any of the Digital Platforms – Computers, Mobiles, Tablets etc.. – is a part of Digital Marketing. That being said, here are the exact verticals that come together to form Digital Marketing.

  • SEO aka Search Engine Optimization
  • SEM aka Search Engine Marketing
  • SMM aka Social Media Marketing
  • Content Writing
  • Content Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Analytics

We’ll see the details of each of these verticals one by one. I’ll try to put in as much details as I can about each of these so that you can get a good understanding.

Note: I’ll write detailed individual posts about each of these, so you might want to bookmark this page or follow me on social medias so that you’ll know when I upload the new posts.

Fundamentals Of SEO

SEO aka Search Engine Optimization is the one that’s most widely used  compared to all the other Digital Marketing fields. Did you know that approximately $72.02 Billion was spent on Search Engine Optimization in 2018 and it’s expected to rise to a whopping $79.27 Billion by 2020.

That’s not it, around 67,000 searches are performed in just 1 second; if you rank on 1st – Pages that ranks at first position gets around 25-30% clicks – for all of those keywords(I know it’s a stretch, all I am trying to do here is give a perspective about the importance of SEO) then you would drive a traffic of somewhere around 17,420 users per second. Isn’t that amazing?

Search Engine Optimization is in itself a deep ocean of different techniques & strategies. The field is huge in its width, breadth and depth. There are various types in it and various strategies to it along with various concepts which you need to learn about to become a good Search Engine Optimization Expert. Let’s dive into this ocean of SEO and explore the surface for now.

What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is a culmination of various techniques to improve the rankings of a website on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). You can actually think of it as a very complex dish where you can’t mess up with even the tiniest ingredient in both its quality & quantity. Along with improving rankings, SEO also deals with improving the user experience.

To sum it up, you use SEO to give user a very good experience on your website and also make Search Engines like your website so much so that it ranks you in the top of SERP’s.

There are two; well, actually 3 kinds in SEO.

  1. On-Page SEO
  2. OFF Page SEO
  3. Technical SEO

On-Page SEO:

On-page SEO as the name suggests deals with the SEO activities you perform on your website. May it be making the content SEO Compliant; adding the title, description tags; structuring your content using Heading tags or adding alt tags to the images on your website.

Basically, what you do in On-Page is you audit a website and see how you can make it easier for user to navigate through your site and help the user have a very good experience – This is where the structure of content, Title comes in. All this is from the user perspective.

Once that is done, the next thing you are going to do is figure out how you are going to make the search engines like your website and make it easier for the search engine bots to crawl through your site and index it.

Not just that, you also need to make sure that the search engine understands what a website or a page is about and how does it help solve a user’s query – This is where xml sitemaps, heading tags, Image alt tags, structure of the website, quality of your content and everything else comes in play.. The better you do it, the better you rank.

Off Page SEO:

There are loads of Digital Marketers who would associate Off Page SEO with Link Building. Well, I would not say they are completely wrong but they are not completely right either. Off Page SEO is so much more than that.

Off Page is about putting your website out there, building trust & authority to your website, promoting your content so that it can reach a wider audience and of course building backlinks.

There are some SEO’s who might also say that Building links is no more an important ranking factor.

But Hey, There is no way for google to determine a website’s authority without them is. As a matter fact a recent research from Rand Fishkin (Who I would love to call the king of SEO), Links are still the 2nd most important ranking factor.

Just because links are important does not mean you start building them from every nook and corner of Internet. You have to set up strategies so that you get relevant & quality backlinks to your website. Because, if you get backlinks that are not good enough or from spam websites Google will either ignore them or penalize your website. We don’t want that to happen to our website do we?

Off Page SEO is where your “Drafting Email” skills come into play. One of the strategies you can use to build backlinks is reach out to websites that are likely to give you backlinks. That is why I said, Drafting Emails is a skill that might come handy while doing Digital Marketing, Specially while doing Off Page SEO.

Apart from building backlinks, off page is also about getting brand mentions, building a social media following and getting google to trust your website so that it can rank your website on top of the SERP’s.

Technical SEO:

This one comes after On Page and before Off Page. Remember how we talked about user experience while talking about On Page, well, Technical SEO plays a major role in improving user experience of your website.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO deals with improving user experience & helping Search Engine bots simplify the process of crawling & indexing. Technical SEO majorly deals with Page Load speed, Website Security, Sitemaps, Website Structure & other technical aspects of SEO such as Canonical URLs, Internal Links as well as proper redirections.

You also use technical SEO to give Search Engine bots proper signals of which pages should be crawled, followed and which pages need to be indexed and which ones should not be indexed. Previously people used to use robots.txt file for this but since Google has stopped supporting that; you can now use robots tag instead in each of your website’s pages.

Well, that’s all about SEO for now, keep a lookout for a detailed post on the fundamentals of SEO where you can understand in detail of how exactly to do SEO, what are all the steps involved in it and what are the different strategies, techniques you can use to rank your website on the top of the SERPs.

Let’s move on to the second most widely used vertical of Digital Marketing i.e. Search Engine Marketing.

Fundamentals of SEM (Search Engine Marketing):

While SEO, if done correctly can fetch you great results and great ROI(Return on Investments), It’s a long-term process. SEO is unpredictable in so many ways. There are so many constraints that are not in our control. Once you start doing SEO, it might take anywhere from 1 week to more than 6 months to see the results depending on the competition & loads of other factors. This is where Search Engine Marketing comes to rescue.

Search Engine Marketing is one way of getting instant results. You start a campaign in morning and results will start pouring in within an hour max. That is why so many businesses that wants instant results turn to SEM while they do SEO to sustain the business in a long term.

In a way, SEM is the one-night stand whereas SEO is the Girlfriend. The only difference here is you can have both of them at the same and in real life you cannot cheat on your girlfriend.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

To be precise, Search Engine Marketing is a way of buying yourself into the top of SERPs. Well, In SEO you go through all that trouble to make your page rank on the first page of Google. In SEM you pay Google or other search engine to rank your desired page on the top of SERPs when a user searches for the keywords that you want your page to be shown for and you pay a certain amount to Search Engine for click you get or impression depending on what your bidding strategy.

Simple, Ain’t it?

Not exactly, there is so much that goes into SEM as well and there are so many things to take care of so that you won’t waste your money.

Before we move onto the steps and details of SEM, let’s cover the basic nomenclatures first.

  • Impressions: Impression means the number of times your ad has been shown to a user when he/she searches for a keyword. For example, If one person sees your ad then that means one impression.
  • Conversion: Conversion is an event that happen on your website. Some people call it lead and some call it acquisition. If a person reaches your website and completes a goal(By Filling up contact form, subscribing to your newsletter or whatever goal you have set); that counts as a conversion.
  • CPC: Cost Per Click or CPC is in a way self explanatory. When you start running a campaign, you setup some keywords in that campaign and when someone searches for that keyword; sees your ad and clicks on the ad; Search Engine charges you a certain amount depending on various variables. The amount you incur for each click you get is called as CPC or Cost Per Click.
  • CPI: CPI or Cost per Impression is same as Cost Per Click except the fact that it’s the cost you incur for each impression you get.
  • CPA: Again, same as Cost per Click, but you will be charged by Search Engines for each conversions that happens on your website through the ads you are running.
  • CTR: CTR aka Click Through Rate is the percentage of people who clicks on your ad. For example, if your ad is shown to 100 people and 4 people click on that ad, then your CTR will be 4%.The formula for CTR is (Total Click/Total Impression)*100.
  • Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the percentage of users who has completed goals on your website. If 100 users clicks on the ad and reaches your website and if 4 of those users convert on your website, then your conversion rate would be 4%. The formula for the conversion rate is (Total Conversions/Total Clicks)*100.

Let’s look into steps involved in SEM one by one.

  • Keyword Research
  • Campaign Building
  • Campaign Analysis & Optimization

Keyword Research:

Keyword research is THE 2nd most important aspect of both Search Engine Optimization as well as Search Engine Marketing; 1st one is figuring out who your target audience is. If this goes wrong, there are chances that all of your campaigns might go wrong. So, be really careful while doing this.

Don’t be afraid though, I did not mean to scare you.

If you follow the process I am gonna tell, it might not ruin your campaigns.

  • First off, brainstorm a list of keywords that you want to use in your campaigns. The keywords that your target audience is most likely to use.
  • Once you have a list of around 10 to 15 to 50 (how much ever you managed to scribble down) put them in a Keyword Research tool. I personally use Google keyword planner or Ubersuggest. There are loads of other tools you can use.
  • Once you feed the tool with seed keywords from your brainstormed list, You will get a huge list of keywords. All you need to do now is to shortlist all the relevant keywords and get rid of the ones that are not so relevant.

That’s all, see, not that tough.

Campaign Building:

If you thought Keyword research is tough, well, that is just the tip of the tip of Iceberg. There is still the tip of iceberg and the whole iceberg itself to tackle.

Once you have that list of Keywords, Now you will create campaigns with the help of those keywords. A Campaign is composed of several ad groups in it and ad groups are composed of several Ads & the list of keywords in it.

Before we see how to create a campaign, let’s first cover up different types of Campaigns on AdWords. I won’t go into detail for this one.

Search: In this type, your ads will be shown on the search engine itself i.e. on SERP’s & search partners if you select that option. Have a look at the image below and you will understand.

Screen Shot Example of Search Ads

Display Campaign: When you run a display campaign, your ads will be shown on Google partner websites with the image you have added during the creation of campaign.

Here is an example of Display Ad.

Video Ads: These are the ads you see on YouTube before the actual video begins.

Shopping Ads: Have you observed that when you search for a product a list of products from Amazon/Flipkart shows up with price in a box; Well, these are shopping ads.

Here is how you create a Campaign On AdWords:

  • Once you log into your AdWords account click on campaigns and click on the “+” symbol and then on “New Campaign”
  • Select the goal in the next screen. Once you select the goal it will ask you to select a type of campaign. Once you select the type you will be asked to select the Goals. Select whichever you find good for your Business.
  • Next up, fill up all the details like Campaign Name, Location, Language, Audiences, Budget & Bidding.
  • The next step is to create Ad groups. I personally like to create Ad groups based on the theme of keywords. For example if I am targeting keywords like MBA Colleges & MBA Courses; I will create two ad groups. One to target all the keywords related to MBA Colleges and other to target all the keywords related to MBA Courses. Once you have created the ad groups and added all the keywords hit save and continue.

While uploading your keywords, you need to make sure what type of keyword match you are going to use.

Yes, there are different types of matches as well.

    • Broad Match: When you use a broad match, your ad will be triggered when someone searches for the exact phrase, similar phrase, related searches and other relevant variations of the keyword you are using.
    • Phrase Match: When you use phrase match, your ad will be triggered when the user searches with a keyword which has the exact phrase included in it. For Example if you are targeting a keyword like “Black Shoes” an ad will be triggered when user searches for “Buy Black Shoes” but won’t be triggered for “Buy Shoes”.
    • Exact Match: In this one, your ad is triggered when the user’s search query matches the exact keyword you are targeting. For example, if you targeting the keyword “Buy Shoes” the ad will be triggered only when someone searches for “Buy Shoes” but not when some one searches for “Buy Black Shoes” or “Black Shoes” or any other permutation or combination of the keyword.
  • Next up is creating the ads. This one might take a little bit of time. Make sure you use the space given for each Headline & each Description very carefully. Craft your Headlines & Descriptions in a way that the user would be tempted to click on the ad when it’s shown to him/her.
  • VOILA!! You have got yourself an ad campaign there.

Campaign Analysis & Optimization:

Creating Campaign is one thing and Optimizing it is yet another level.

Trust Me!

Building campaigns is so much easier than optimizing them unless you get that perfect campaign at the first go which is less likely to happen.

Basically what you do in campaign optimization is that you check how everything’s working out and try to make everything better than it already is. That might involve adding more keywords, creating new ad copies, adding negative keywords etc.…

I just mentioned negative keywords, if you don’t know what a negative keywords, don’t worry; I was just gonna explain that. Let me explain it with an example. Say I am targeting a keyword “Best Digital Marketing Institute”, what happens is when some one searches for Best Digital Marketing Institute my ad will show up but also when someone searches for Free Best Digital Marketing Institute my ad might still show up(Unless you are using exact match keywords) which I don’t want since it says free. So I add “Free” in the list negative keywords. Once I add the negative keyword, my ad won’t show up for  any of the keywords that has the word “Free” in it.

Adding more keywords, creating new ad copies and Landing page optimization does not really need an explanation since they are kind of self explanatory.

Cool, So now we are done with Fundamentals of SEO & Fundamentals Of SEM which covers almost half of Digital Marketing. The remaining one’s does not need as much explanations as the previous two. So, I’ll try to keep it brief.

Fundamentals of SMM (Social Media Marketing):

You might have observed that some of the posts in your Facebook feed says sponsored or are just random ads(You might think they are random, but no ads are ever random) and on twitter some of the tweets say promoted. That is actually someone doing social Media Marketing.

Social Media Marketing is like Search Engine Marketing but on Social Media Platforms.

Since Social Media is more of visual and less text , the techniques vary quite a bit here. Also, since Social Medias know so much about each individual (which is scary), you’ll get better targeting options.

The goal here varies from business to business. Some businesses run social media ads for Brand awareness where as some run it to get customers. The choice of which platform to use depends on kind of business you are running. If you have a B2B business model, LinkedIn & Twitter are great platforms to run your ads on since most of your target audience would be active there. If it’s B2C then Facebook, Instagram & Twitter would be a great place to run your ads.

The advantage you get in Social Media Marketing over Search Engine Marketing is that you get to pin point your target audience with locations, their interests and a lot more of other factors.

Content Writing:

I hate saying this since this phrase has been said so many times but hey, It’s cent percent true and makes a strong point. Behold, the phrase is… drum-rolls…..”Content Is King”.

Everything we do in Digital Marketing centers around content. May it be Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing or Social Media Marketing. When you are doing SEO, you need content for your blogs, for link building campaigns etc. When you are doing SEM, you need ad copies which in a way is also a piece of content. While doing Social Media Marketing, you create ads there with images & text, you can’t say that is not content either.

Content is an integral part of all of these. I am not going to explain how to write content in this post, I already have written a whole post about it & linked it here as well, go read that.

If you know content writing, it will give you so much of an edge over everything else. Because being the person who is running all those campaigns, there is no better person to know what you want to put out Infront of the audience.

Here are some pointers for writing great content.

  • Keep it informative & trendy.
  • Make it interesting(Unlike this post :P).
  • Research over interesting topics to write about that would entice your audience.
  • Keep the posts, ad copies as simple & interesting as possible.

And, here are some pointers to improve your content writing

  • Write as much as possible, try to at least write around 500 words per day. That aught to improve your writing skills.
  • Read as much as you can. Reading improves your writing skills in so many ways.
  • While you are reading, observe how the author has written a piece, his/her style of writing, grammar everything and try to incorporate it in your writing.
  • Find a voice of your own. Every writer has it, all you need to do is find it. How; You ask? Well, write more, you will figure it out eventually.
  • Try to introduce humor in your articles ( I am kind of pretty bad with this one, still working on it).
  • Improve your vocabulary, try to learn and use at least 2 new words every day.

For more, check out the post I was talking about 226 words earlier.

Content Marketing:

You write a piece of content for your blog, you spend days if not weeks doing research for that post, you write it, edit it and publish it on your blog. How would you feel if no one actually read it? Pretty bad right? Well, this why content marketing is important. It’s as important as writing content itself.

You need to put out that piece of content In-front of audience who would be interested in reading it. But, how do you do it? Well, there are loads of ways to do it right. One of those is guest posting, the other one is leveraging Social Media, Oh, there’s email marketing as well.

Guest Posting: Guest Posting is when you put out your article on some one else’s website for a backlink or referral link in return. The technique here is once you have published an article on your blog, you write another one on the same topic. You have already done your research and you already know about the concept, all you have to do is write a very brief article about the same concept as that of your blog post. Once your brief article is ready you reach out to relevant blog owners to publish your piece on their blog and request them to give you a backlink, So that when people read that brief article they could come to your blog post to read more about the concept.

Social media Posting: I think we already know how it works out, so not much of explanation is needed here. But make sure you use the right hashtags so that it reaches to more people.

Email Marketing: This one is also pretty simple. You create a brief email about the blog post you have written. The goal here is to tease your audience and not give away the whole post in the email itself. How you want to tease them depends on you. You can put it in a nice news letter format or just pure text with a link to your blog post. Keep in mind that Text based emails have more chances of getting into users inbox compared to the one’s filled with images and links. But for you to do all this, you need to build a subscribers list. One way of doing that is putting up a subscribe form on your blog post.

Analytics:

This is one part that excites & scares me the most. You already know how the field of data analytics is booming now a days. This is like a miniature version of it. For you to optimize your campaigns, may it be SEO or SEM, you need to analyze the data you are getting and understand your user’s behavior.

You need to understand what a user is liking on your website and what he/she is not. You can go through Google Analytics to get all the data you want. Google has made it pretty simple and user friendly.

Though Analytics gives you most of the things you want to know from number of sessions, User’s device, Operating System, Bounce Rates, User Behavior and a lot more, there is one more aspect of Analysis that you need to aware of. That is what I would like to call the technical analysis of your website.

While you are trying to understand what a user is doing on your website using Google Analytics, you also need to make sure that the website is up and running without any issues. There is a tool for this as well, It’s called Google Search Console( Previously known as Google Webmasters tool).

Search Console gives you insights about crawl errors, manual actions(Google Penalties), security of your website and details of all the backlinks you have gained over a period of time. With all of that, this tool will also let you know how your website is performing from SEO perspective. If gives a list of keywords that you are ranking along with positions of rankings and details like CTR, Number of Clicks from each keyword search, Impressions and a lot more. You have to see it to believe it.

Conclusion:

Digital Marketing is all about understanding your audiences and catering to their needs with the use of digital technology. It’s not that different from traditional Marketing. But, everyone prefers Digital Marketing since we can track the progress, analyze it and then optimize it.

It’s all about analysis & optimizations.

Well, that’s all about the fundamentals of Digital Marketing. I believe I have covered everything I could. If you think I have missed out on anything, please do let me know and I’ll try to update it. Any suggestions are welcome. Also, if you want to get in touch, hit me up on social medias or fill up the contact form in the contact us page.

Sayonara, Bye Bye!! Happy Learning.

The post Fundamentals of Digital Marketing – SEO, SEM, Social Media, Content Writing appeared first on DMarketer Tayeeb – Digital Marketing Expert in Bangalore | SEO, SEM & SMM Expert.