Digital Marketing Strategy Basics - What You Need to Know

Digital marketing, whether in the Philippines or in the other parts of the world, is undeniably growing and is becoming particularly relevant to businesses. More so, many brands are now investing in it to better increase brand awareness across their target audiences. While some may have succeeded in this field, some still struggle to get by. Digital marketing strategy basics need to be understood and applied before you start seeing ROI from your efforts. And this is what Tristan Chua covers in this first of a series of guest posts by the IT specialist.

Digital Marketing Strategy Basics

The common reason why some fail in digital marketing is the lack of deeper knowledge of the basics of the niche. Yes, you may know that this is digital marketing, and that is SEO – but how well do you understand them?

If you’re one of those who is having a hard time understanding and doing digital marketing, well here’s a brief overview of the key digital marketing strategy basics to help you.

Before you even dive in into the different trends and techniques of digital marketing, you have to understand first the basic building blocks that make it. 

• Search Engine Optimization
• Content Creation
• Social Media Marketing

While you may have been familiar with these three factors, it’s still important to understand and know how they contribute to a successful digital marketing strategy. In the first place, understanding their significance and uses is what enables experts to play with them and create better strategies to further accelerate market penetration via the Web.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is what digital marketers use to create and rank a particular site in search engines according to a given keyword.

Why is this important?

According to statistics, pages that rank first in search results, whether that is Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, get the most visits, from approximately about 95% of the users.

How does it work?

Basically, what most SEO experts do in order to efficiently rank their pages is to select relevant keywords that would best fit their content, alongside providing useful content for users.

However, as SEO progresses, so do the algorithms among search engines. Algorithm updates help eliminate those who manipulate SEO to their advantage, an example of which is when these people use irrelevant keywords just to rank. This, then, makes it hard for the users find the information they needed. This is actually what makes SEO challenging, as updates can affect rankings if you weren’t able to incorporate the changes in your SEO.

With regards to the recent algorithm update on Google named Fred, experts say that this update has targeted low-quality content that aims for revenue over helping users.

This only proves that in order to rank in SEO organically, you should bear in mind to incorporate: relevant keywords, quality content, organic shares, optimized website loading speed, quality images and other media, and backlinks from reputable and quality websites.

In SEO, “Content is King.” As mentioned above, it’s important to create quality, useful content for users. This is justified with search engines’ purpose in the Web, which is to help users find useful, relevant, and as much as possible, accurate content that they can rely on. It’s often neglected, yet is a vital ingredient in the digital marketing strategy basics recipe.

How do you write content effectively? 

Content can vary from blog posts, podcasts, webinars, tutorial videos, and even guest posts. All of which helps a website rank organically in search engines given that they are useful, relevant, and at times, interactive for the users.

However, content marketing isn’t all about creation, but also on how you market it in the Web. Often times, experts use guest posts to market their links to reputable websites, further extending content awareness in the Web.

Aside from guest posts, content can also be disseminated through social media, which is the next x-factor that we will be discussing below.

Social media is a digital medium that digital marketers use to amplify their content and the site itself. Hence, it can be concluded that it is beneficial to both of the first two factors we’ve discussed above.

Basically, the number of shares in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, among others, contribute to the rankings of the site. But, of course, in order to gain that many shares, you should ensure people that you’re providing quality content. As research has found, people are more likely to share a content as shared by someone they know. Hence, a single share can help a lot in your traffic.

How do you do social media marketing the right way? 

A million followers will not help in your conversions if you do not interact with them. Hence, remind yourself to follow these tips:

• When they ask questions, answer as quickly as possible and make them feel that they are genuinely being attended to
• With regards to customer concerns, make sure that your responses are personalized, useful, and positive even in the event that you cannot attend to their needs
• Negative feedback is unavoidable in social media, hence practice handling these situations in a positive and professional manner
• Do not post content just for the sake of posting it regularly, always make sure that it is still beneficial to your followers
• Lastly, remind yourself that social media is composed of humans. They don’t need promotional content, what they need is stories that they can relate to, interact with, and share with their loved ones

Digital Marketing Strategy Basics Key Takeaway

Digital marketing isn’t just about creating, sharing, and ranking your content, it needs deeper understanding for you to be able to get the gist of how to strategically implement its best practices in your business.

Once you get how to use and practice the core factors of digital marketing, then you can safely experiment with the trends and techniques that experts use in order to successfully implement digital marketing in boosting brand awareness and increase conversions.

(This post was written for Comms Axis by Tristan Chua, and was published on our blog here.)