If you are curious about digital marketing then you have come to the right place. In this article, we explain different concepts, explain different strategies, give tips, and how different digital channels can be used.
In this beginner’s guide to digital marketing, we give you detailed information about what it is, how to use it, and how it works.
Contents
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing means that you can market services and products in digital channels such as Google, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and many more. The goal is to reach an audience with your message and communicate with your target audience. And to reach your audience, you need to have content to communicate with.
You can market your message with eg. text, image and video and gain visibility through two main principles, paid and organic reach. When others respond to your content, the content can have a viral effect.
What does digital marketing include?
Digital Marketing, as some say, is exactly the same as digital marketing.
In terms of digital marketing, this is simply described; analyzes such as target group analysis, objectives that will lead to digital marketing strategies, tactical planning overproduction of content, and publication in various digital channels. In addition, there will be monitoring and analysis of the outcome.
How does digital marketing work?
People’s behavior in digital channels affects what content they will see. Each digital channel has algorithms that analyze what topics you like, how old you are, where you are, etc.
What digital channels are there?
The number of digital channels continuously grows even if it does not occur at an extremely high pace. The digital channels can be slightly simplified into search engines and social media, then there are a slew of different ones that can be categorized as others.
The search engines are, of course, strongest at presenting content when searching for something, while social media is best at exposing content based on interest.
Several digital channels can be difficult to categorize, for example, Facebook also has a search function but it does not make it a search engine. Facebook’s main focus is to present content without having to search and to make it easy to interact with the content and others.
In addition to search engines and social media, there are podcasts, email, messenger (which some categorize as social media) websites, and mobile apps.
We browse the Internet with several different devices such as a computer, smartphone, smart tablet (ex iPad), smartwatches, smart TV, voice devices (ex Google Home) and more.
We use different devices at different times depending on where we are and what we want to do. The number of connected units is increasing significantly in our homes and more machines are being connected.
Touchpoints in digital marketing are a term for a point where one can reach an individual through a device (smartphone, computer, tablet, smartwatch, etc.) and in a digital channel (Facebook, Google, YouTube, website, etc.), for example when a person uses the mobile version of Facebook.
It can generally be said that the more touchpoints a potential customer can reach, the greater the chance is to influence the person to convert, for example, to a purchase.
Social media algorithms
All digital channels such as Facebook, Google, and YouTube consist of our own developed algorithms that read the behavior of the visitors and try to interpret and present as relevant content as possible.
At Google, the search engine wants to present such relevant search results to the searcher so that they can immediately find what they are looking for. Google’s organic search algorithm is updated several times a day and has been developed for almost 20 years to quickly provide what you are looking for.
Facebook has its own algorithm that interprets what you like, what you read, watch and click, who you interact with, who you follow, and where you are. The algorithm collects data about your behavior and presents content that it believes is relevant to you. The Facebook algorithm is constantly updated to ensure that the content is interesting.
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has an increasingly important role in the digital channels’ algorithms nowadays and they will have more in the future.
The algorithms interpret the data that we leave when we watch a video for a certain amount of time, click, or stop in our scrolling via our mobile or other devices somewhere in a geographical location. In other words, the algorithms study our user behavior.
AI helps to interpret the data by training it to process large amounts of data to find patterns and then act on presenting content. With the help of AI, the content becomes more relevant the more data it has to manage and interpret.
What is organic reach?
All digital channels contain information from their users that is exposed to you either by searching for it or getting it presented because the digital channels believe it interests you.
We can all, both as a private person and as a company publish content and which becomes visible organically without having to pay for it to appear. Organic content is something that the digital channels show without requiring a financial consideration, ie it is free to publish.
Reach means reaching people with your content, that is, you are able to reach people with the content you share, organically without having to pay to reach people. When you mention organic reach, it means that so many people have been reached by the message without the sender having to pay. Reach does not mean that someone has clicked on your content, but only that they have seen it.
What is paid reach?
Paid reach is simply advertising that you pay for. With paid reach, it is much easier to reach the target audience that you want to reach because it is possible to control the advertising as opposed to organic reach where you do not know who sees the content before publishing.
With paid reach, you can often determine geographic orientation, age, gender, interest, language skills, and many other parameters.
You may also, in certain channels, target your ads to individuals who have interacted with your content, such as seen a video you previously posted, who clicked on your social media content, or visited a web page on your website or used your mobile app.
