In the past times, digital marketing has grown and keeps on growing tremendously on a constant basis. The era of the advent of digital marketing eased several ways in which marketing, advertising, and promotions took place.
Several brands and companies understood the importance of digital marketing and made efforts to implement it in their marketing strategies. Not only this, digital marketing today has changed the face of what marketing looked like 20 years ago.
The inception of the internet came to an average person as a drastic change in the technological sector. People never imagined how connection and connectivity would become so easier and more convenient. It all started in the 1960s when the public sector and other governmental departments started sharing important and confidential information via internet mediums.
Back in the 1960s, computers did not look the way they are now. Back then, computers were huge and they had big CPUs that were connected to various hundred wires that were difficult to move and replace. Moroever, computers and the internet took time to process and operation. Both were not as fast and convenient as they are to us today.
The internet actually was celebrated in the early 1980s when it actually took its shape and meaning. During this era of the development of the internet, computers could actually connect and communicate with various other computer devices.
Here, sharing and exchanging of information becomes highly easier and fasters. With time and expansion, with several people using the internet and several working on developing something via the internet and virtual connections, the birth of web 1.0 took place. Here, the platform would assist people who were seeking information and knowledge regarding their subject easily. Several people would use the platform to gain and share information.
Soon after this, in the early 1990s, the first ever clickable advertisement banner was introduced, and here is exactly where digital marketing comes into the picture. Soon enough, Yahoo was launched and other developments started to take place.
Keeping this overview in mind, let us first dive into the fundamentals of digital marketing before moving on to how many main pillars of digital marketing are there today!
This article is all about the main pillars of digital marketing. We will be discussing what is digital marketing before moving on to how many main pillars of digital marketing are present today.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, at its simplest, is defined as any advertisement or promotion of any goods and services done online or by making use of the internet. Moreover to this, the use of several digital tools and strategies are utilized by several reputed brands and startup businesses in order to reach out to their targeted audiences and global audiences. Again, this is where digital marketing came into play. The way businesses interact with their clients has changed as a result of the development of the internet. This kind of marketing is used on websites, social media, search engines, apps, and many other platforms.
Today, for everyone who has the access to the internet, digital marketing has evolved into a prerequisite for companies and other small company owners. All reputable brand owners and business owners are now using digital marketing to engage their audiences in captivating ways. It is quite difficult for you to develop as a marketer or as a brand without the use of digital marketing. Long gone are the days when the old traditional ways of marketing and advertising took place. It’s a new era of new techniques, it’s a virtual era of DIGITAL MARKETING.
Furthermore, digital marketers are outpacing a number of other professions in terms of job prospects and high compensation, oftentimes while working from home. Whether you should advertise offline or online totally relies on the industry you are in and the methods that might be highly successful.
One needs to be aware of what digital marketing is and what it has to offer in order to thrive in this fiercely competitive digital industry. Hence, let us learn a few top benefits of digital marketing.
Top 3 Benefits of Digital Marketing
✔ Higher Reach
This benefit of digital marketing goes without saying. With the utilization of digital marketing and digital marketing strategies, a brand or an individual increases its reach of audiences and exposure.
In reality, more than 4 billion people are using the internet. Out of those, at least 2.5 billion people are regularly checking their social media accounts and coming across several digital marketing strategies or advertisements and promotions done by reputed brands on a daily basis.
Due to so many people present on the internet and on social media networking sites on a constant basis, higher reach is one of the best and top benefits of digital marketing.
✔ Tracking And Monitoring
For brands and businesses to interact with their customers and clients, digital marketing and digital marketing tools enable you to monitor their behaviour and give your clients and customers what they want at the very right time. This is a crucial component of digital marketing since, as a business owner, one must undoubtedly wish to monitor your results, customers’ digital whereabouts, expenses, and return on investment.
Before your clients and customers make a move, you may keep track of the advertising and content types they have viewed. This provides you with information and data on the best marketing tactics, enabling you to adjust and improve your approach. This is also where digital marketing offers flexibility towards its strategy.
✔ Precise Targeting
The capacity to more effectively target your clients and customers more at the very right time they are looking for it is another best and top benefit of digital marketing. Being able to sell your goods or services to potential customers directly is the best thing a marketer or a producer would wish for.
Through digital marketing, businesses and companies can get in touch with leads who are curious about its products and services immediately. Segmenting audiences is now simpler than ever thanks to a number of digital marketing tools that let you target a certain demographic. Digital marketing has indeed eased the way marketing took place in the past. This is also a benefit for customers and clients as they don’t physically have to go out there in the market to hunt down the best product or service.
Every information regarding every business and company is now available on the internet with their products and services. One, as a customer or client and easily compare and choose what best suits them and their requirements.
Reading and understanding the overview and fundamentals of digital marketing itself would leave anybody in awe. Well, it is yet not over! Let us now finally dive into the crucial side of this article – how many main pillars of digital marketing we have today! Let’s explore.
The Six Main Pillars of Digital Marketing
There are 6 main pillars of digital marketing you must know before entering into the digital marketing industry, or you are already existing in the same industry.
Pillar 1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It all starts just with search engine optimization, commonly called SEO. Search engine optimization is often linked with search engine management, that is SEM (which we will understand in the coming pillars). Search engine optimization is often seen as online advertisements and promotions that are unpaid or organic results.
Search engine optimization is all about the process of making changes to your website in order to make it more visible when users search for goods or services associated with your company on search engines like Google and Bing. There are mainly three types of SEO – local SEO, eCommerce SEO, and publishing SEO.
SEO works through bots. In order to increase organic traffic to your website and rank higher on SERPS, it is crucial for anybody, be it businesses or companies to add relevant keywords and focus on optimizing and improving their website user experience as much as possible. Bots here visit and crawl to several various websites and put them into the index. An algorithm, which is another crucial factor in SEO, is responsible to to analyze these pages in the index and considering several ranking factors.
Search and search engines are the primary source of traffic and visitors one can ever obtain. Anybody who utilizes digital marketing and takes digital marketing strategies into consideration first starts with optimization of their website for better user experience and developing their sites to be SEO-friendly.
Doing SEO is far more important today them merely having a social media account. Even your Instagram and other social media handles rank up at the SERPs. Appointing an experienced SEO expert will definitely give you results and increase your growth and visibility over the period of time.
Benefits of SEO
A few benefits of SEO –
- The Entire Marketing Funnel is Targeted by SEO
- The Secret to Search Visibility is SEO
- SEO Improves PPC Results
- Improved Credibility & Trust through SEO
- Organic Exposure & Website Traffic Rise Due To SEO
- SEO Provides an Amazing ROI
Below is an example of how SEO works when searching for the best digital marketing course –
Pillar 2. Email Marketing
We all know might have an idea of what email marketing looks like and what email marketing is all about. Simply said, email marketing is the practice of businesses and companies sending their consumers and clients emails with newsletters, brand updates and whereabouts, and other essential announcements and occasions that will/might take place in the future. Use of email marketing is one of the most popular and effective ways to advertise products or services. One of the ways customers and clients can be notified and updated without arranging an actual meeting can be done by email marketing.
One of the most important digital marketing strategies to date for development and expansion is email marketing. Nearly, most advertisers and promoters today make use of email marketing in order to maintain their customer retention and brand loyalty. Email marketing is always taken into consideration when developing and planning a digital marketing strategy. Email marketing has been embraced and used by brands and businesses for a very long time.
Email Newsletters, Acquisition Emails, Retention Emails, and Promotional Emails are the few most used types of emails and email marketing. Every time a brand or business sends you an email, considering that fact you are immediately exposed to the information that they want you to know. Several well-known businesses send out a number of emails urging their consumers and customers to test out their services. Most of such emails are the ones mentioned above. Brands and companies cleverly create emails by using precise and concise messages, adding the best and most eye-catchy subject line, persuasive message, and of course, a call-to-action or CTA button to redirect you to their intended website/place.
Benefits of Email Marketing
A few benefits of Email Marketing –
- Increase sales
- Develops your brand.
- Amplifies brand awareness
- Increased credibility
- Develops more effective customer interactions
- Increases website traffic
- Improves your connections with consumers
- Emails reach audiences with any device
Pillar 3. Content Marketing
We all must have come across the phrase called – ‘Content is the King’. Just like email marketing, content marketing has been going on around for many years in the past. Even this article goes without saying is a perfect example of what content marketing is all about in today’s time. Content marketing did actually adapt and evolve over time as the internet expanded and new digital devices were introduced to the market.
Content marketing can be defined as the spread of knowledge or information to your numerous audiences via the use of creative content, articles, and other cutting-edge digital communication media is what content writing is all about.
Firms and companies may use content to continually engage their customers and clients and build solid relationships with them in the present and in the future. With content, your targeted viewers will have an easier time understanding what your business and offers are all about with content.
The readers and information-seeking will be able to understand the idea and message that you as company owners are attempting to convey. It can be conveyed to to them in several forms available today like audio, video, or text. Content will undoubtedly help you differentiate yourself from your rivals and increase your competitiveness. Content marketing is very necessary and important today as there are several clients and customers seeking queries, information, and data. Most of these clients and customers start their search with words like ‘what, why, where, and how’. While creating content and developing a content marketing strategy, one has to keep their audiences in mind and see their businesses through the eyes of their clients and customers.
Benefits of Content Marketing
A few benefits of content marketing –
- Establish knowledge, credibility, and trust.
- Develops your brand awareness
- Increased lead generation
- increases in conversion rates
- Increase your visitors and SEO
- Make a connection with your audience through different learning forms
- Encourage your viewers to convert by providing them with support.
- Increase brand affinities and adherence
Pillar 4. Search Engine Optimization (SEM)
Search engine management is another main pillar of digital marketing. In simple terms, SEM is done and executed as a form of digital marketing strategy to get your business or your customer on the first page of search engine results. The whole reason why businesses and companies focus on Search engine management and search engine optimization is because the search engines are the very first place your clients and customers will get to know about your products and services.
Once your search engine management is done right, it will surely increase the amount of visitors and traffic to your website. After there are several visitors and a great number of traffic on your website, converting them to customers becomes an easy task. For most of the sales, the primary aim is to get them to your website and know about your offering and possessions. SEM offers a variety of tools and possibilities to do this. All the tools are used in search engine marketing to increase the exposure of websites and website pages in Google and other various search engines available today.
There are typically two types of advertisements that pop up in the SERPs –
> Paid advertisements
Paid advertisements will always have “(Ad)” before the title. In paid advertisements, the under had to paid an amount of money in order to rank up his or her advertisement in the SERPs.
> Organic Advertisements
In contrast to paid advertisements, organic advertisements are when the user does not pay to rank up in the SERPs but focuses upon improve the overall website’s user experience and creating a website SEO-friendly. Hence SEO and SEM are usually intertwined.
Benefits of Search Engine Management
A few benefits of Search engine management –
- Faster reactions and outcomes
- It Works For Mobile Marketing
- keeps you at the top of the SERPs
- It’s inexpensive
- Creates and improves visibility
- It supports and offers crucial analytics.
Pillar 5. Social Media Marketing
Well, we all know what social media marketing really is. Social media marketing is known as the process and the act of promoting goods and services, increasing brand awareness, growing the brand’s credibility, and retaining clients and customers on social media networking sites. These social media networking sites include Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Whatsapp. Social media networking sites have been a huge benefit for brands and companies. Nowadays, before creating and focusing on websites, these businesses and companies look up to their social media handles and focus on creating eye-catchy and creative content.
Since the creation of these social media networking platforms, brands and businesses have had the ability to connect with millions of fans and followers and engage with a larger range of individuals. The while point of advertising and promoting on social media networking sites is that the masses get to know about who you really are as a brand and company. Another modern phenomenon that goes under digital marketing is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing has taken many different shapes up to this point.
To date, customers and clients agree to the fact that their decisions are impacted by influencers over 80% of the time. Wow! These influencers today have taken over the term that was previously known to us as brand ambassadors. Nowadays, reputed brand owners and respectable companies do not seek highly famous actors to advertise and promote their goods and services. But rather, these owners reach out to the influencers. Any influencer with a significant number of followers can become a renowned influencer on Instagram and start earning through promotions and sponsors. An influencer is considered the best for a brand considering the niche he or she is into. For example, if an influencer on Instagram influences people towards fitness and overall physical well-being, brands and companies that sell fitness products like protein shakes and fitness equipment will reach out to the influencer for promotions.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing
A few benefits of social media marketing –
- Aids in locating and connecting with prospective business partners
- Encourages Discussion About Your Brand
- Encourages Visitors to Your Website
- Contributes to fostering customer loyalty
- Assists in delivering responsive customer service
- Helps You Understand the Interests of Your Target Customers
- Aids in Data Collection Regarding Your Audience
Pillar 6. Affiliate Marketing
Most of you might be aware of what affiliate marketing really is, but you all have definitely come By 2022, Statistica projects that expenditure on affiliate marketing will total $8.2 billion in the United States alone.
across this several times. Simply put, affiliate marketing is a kind of advertisement and promotion in which a business pays several third parties to direct traffic or leads to its products and services. These third-party publishers are often called affiliate marketers who engage in affiliate marketing. Third-party publishers, known as affiliates, are compensated with a commission for developing fresh ways to advertise a business. The amount of the commission varies from business to business in this commission-based industry. Furthermore, affiliate marketing is sometimes referred to as a pay-for-performance marketing strategy.
Affiliate marketing contains three main aspects –
Advertiser:
A brand or a business that wants to use affiliate marketing to promote their goods and services or their brand as a whole.
Publisher:
Bloggers or content creators that promote an advertiser’s goods in exchange for commission (as stated above)
Consumer:
We are all consumers. Anybody to attains the goods and services after clicking the hyper click created by the affiliate marketing completes the chain of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing indeed is helpful and beneficial for reputed brands and also for small companies and startups as it indirectly helps them advertise and promote their goods and services. Brands and businesses should always welcome variations whenever it comes to advertising. Simply doing it on social media or with paid advertisements won’t always work. In order to gain a higher rate of return and gain higher traffic and sales, affiliate marketing is a must-go option. Furthermore, affiliate marketing is among the best and main pillars of digital marketing.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
A few benefits of affiliate marketing –
- High ROI
- Low recurring expenses
- Low startup costs
- Focused traffic
- Flexibility
Conclusion
We hope you have now understood how many main pillars of digital marketing are present today with us. As emphasized already, Digital marketing has expanded significantly throughout the years and is still expanding now. The period of introduction of digital marketing made it easier to conduct marketing, advertising, and promotions in a number of methods.
Digital marketing is currently being used by every respected brand and business owner to captivate their customers. Without using digital marketing, it is quite difficult for you to grow as a marketer or as a brand. The era of the outdated, conventional forms of marketing and advertising has long since passed. Years ago, marketing looked very different from how it does today
Many brands and businesses recognized the value of digital marketing and worked to include it in their marketing plans. Today, digital marketing is a must for businesses and other small business owners for anybody with an internet connection.
We hope this article has been beneficial for you as our reader, what do you think about the current evolved digital marketing sector that we use? Do let us know in the comments section below.
A virtual high-five to you! 🙌
