Digital Marketing Areas And Segments

Digital marketing is a vast field with a variety of areas and segments such as Social media, Content writing, Email marketing, SEO/SEM, Data Analysis, Designing, and more.

To get into Digital Marketing, you need to identify your interests and strengths in order to make a right decision to specialize in a particular area of Digital Marketing. Here you can take a look at the most of the segments of the digital marketing.

1. Brand Management

After understanding need of your brand, the agency should make a complete marketing strategy for your company and provide custom brand management services.

The work also includes creation of brand value by online mediums, corporate kit, product kit, and media kit in multimedia formats highlighting your brand strengths.

2. Web Content

Revamp website content with the latest options such as Responsive Web Design (RWD), unique and high quality content, valuable information, providing a smooth access to users on different front-end devices.

The content on your website should always be fresh and informative. Corporate and brand content creation and regular update of your website and blog should be the responsibility of the agency that you hire.

3. Social Media Management

Although social media communication is a tricky ballgame, you should at least build your brand presence on popular social media sites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube.

Regular brand messaging on these sites can help you attract consumers for enhanced brand recall. Difficult job. But don’t ignore it.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimizing web pages on the search engine for business gain by making web pages rank on the top of the search engine for the business queries. As contemporary Web search technologies respect content, insist on content-based SEO services, which are more effective than conventional SEO techniques.

5. Web Analytics

There is a slew of Web analytics services – including Google Analytics, Google webmaster tool (Google search console), Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and others – that promise to provide you data on different parameters about the interaction on your site.

However, your digital agency should be able to cut through the clutter and give you a qualitative analysis on the user interaction with your site to help you refine the company’s marketing strategies. The analysis will cover your company’s website as well as interaction with your pages on social media sites.

6. Digital Public Relations

While public relations (PR) is an important brand promotion activity, traditional and old-style PR approach does not work in the new media universe.

Your digital agency must understand the finer nuances of PR and digital media channels to provide complete PR services including content creation and communications to promote your brand in the local as well as international markets.

7. Mobile Marketing

Today, mobile marketing is mainly limited to SMS, and mobile is still not a reliable medium for brand messaging because of various factors such as m-spam, geographical limitations, device form factor, and so on. However, your agency can provide selective and ethical mobile marketing services if it understands all aspects of mobile content and communications.

8. Competition Tracking

An important marketing need is to know what your competing companies are doing. Web monitoring can help you do that. But Web is like an information ocean. It’s not easy to track your competition’s activities.

Your agency should have sufficient knowledge of advanced digital tracking software tools to fetch information about your competition and give you a qualitative analysis of the collected data. It can help you fine-tune your marketing plans.

9. Advertising Support

Online ad landscape is undergoing a seismic shift where most digital adoptions are increasingly being challenged. So, it’s not advisable to go in for paid online advertisements, particularly in the initial period of your digital marketing exercise.

However, depending on your brand requirement, your agency should be able to handle the complete advertisement work, including ad creation, selection of online media properties, ad delivery, payments, etc.

10. Campaign Management

Instead of spending money on individual, one-off ads, it’s always recommended to carry out sustained digital promotional campaigns. Although these campaigns are expensive, they are extremely useful for consumer engagement and for higher levels of brand recall.

Your agency should be able to conceptualize and do Web- and social media-based advertising and marketing campaigns. In most cases, these campaigns are supported by field activities.

11. Event Management

All of us know that physical participation in local and international exhibitions can cost you an arm and a leg, as traveling and display costs are very high.

Your digital agency should give you options to participate in virtual events that use digital platforms. Virtual exhibitions are not only cost-effective, but they also have the far greater impact on your potential buyers and other business partners.

12. E-Commerce

Depending on the category of your products, the agency should be able to create exclusive e-commerce stores for you or use other established e-commerce platforms for you to actually sell your products in different parts of the world.

Initially, it will not be easy for you to attract consumer traffic to your e-commerce sites. However, if your agency has sufficient content creation skills, it can create relevant content to ensure consumer engagement which can be translated into sales.

13. Impact Analysis

Unlike traditional media, the biggest advantage of digital media is the impact measurement. You can measure – or at least estimate – the impact of your digital marketing efforts. It can help you calculate the return on investment (ROI) that you make on digital marketing.

However, the standard quantitative tools to measure impact may not be sufficient to give you the real level of impact. Your agency must generate quantitative and qualitative impact measurement reports for different digital brand promotion activities.

14. Training

In today’s information-driven world, digital marketing can’t be a secondary activity for your company. Rather, you should adopt it as a complete and exclusive business process for which you need to usher in an enterprise-wide cultural change.

To help you achieve this goal, the agency should provide digital marketing training to your select staff so that they could become an effective interface between the digital agency and your company.

But if you want to seriously leverage digital marketing, you can’t ignore any of these areas. The best implementation model will be a combination of in-house skills, consulting support, and digital marketing services.

Predictions on the Future of Digital Marketing

1. Customized Websites for Unique Customers

Customization has become an integral part of quality marketing. Soon, website owners will set up their pages in a way that will be specifically tailored to particular users. These fully personalized websites may completely change how people interact with the internet.

These websites will be monitoring several factors about a visitor, like the previous web pages a visitor has been to, cookies, and time spent on such pages. All these factors will be used to make the visitor find the exact thing he/she is looking for. Websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Google are already using personalization, so this prediction isn’t too far off.

2. Cost Increases

Current digital marketing costs are fairly low compared to other forms of traditional marketing like TV ads, which can cost you several thousand dollars if you’re lucky. But with social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, digital marketing costs are closer to free than anything else.

All this is set to change in the future as more and more business are beginning to embrace the concept of digital marketing. A big percentage of Millennials, around 84 percent, claim that they don’t trust traditional advertising and this may be the shift businesses need to turn to digital marketing, which will ultimately drive up the costs.

3. More Video

Most online digital marketing platforms have embraced video ads to increase the efficacy of online advertising campaigns. This trend will likely increase as a video is expected to completely dominate the marketing world in a few short years.

While video has become an integral part of marketing strategies across the country, the future is going to be a video paradise, filled with moving advertisements that are interactive, short, and incredibly entertaining.

4. Location Based Marketing

The rise of location-based advertising has been an exciting ride for startups. Almost every app that is downloaded asks for location permissions and this for a noble reason. Many more businesses and brands are beginning to improve the power of their advertising efforts and location-focused campaigns are next on the list.

Future digital marketing is going to certainly turn to be location based as technology improves and allows companies to use beacons to really engage their customers on the go.

5. Going Mobile

The number of people using smartphones to purchase and engage has increased tremendously over the past few years. Digital marketers, in their quest to reach as many people as possible, will craft ways of specifically targeting users of these devices. From mobile optimization to on-the-go apps designed for mobile, the smartphone revolution will hit digital marketing more than any other field.

Digital Marketing In 2020: A Glimpse Into The Future

Marketers are expected to take full control of the customer experience in the coming years

Key Channels

a) Social Media

b) Web

c) Mobile Apps

d) Mobile Web

e) Email

f) Direct Mail

g) Television

h) Print

Tips To Make Career In Digital Marketing

1. Read a lot on Digital Marketing:

Just search for digital marketing or blog posts on digital marketing on Google, I am sure you will come across several useful blog post and articles explaining what digital marketing is all about. Through these, you will learn the basics, the strategies, techniques and various aspects of digital marketing.

Read blog posts from Hubspot, Seomoz, Web Marketing Academy, SEORoundtable, SearchEngineLand, Google, Unbounce, and so on to understand the world of marketing you are getting into. These blogs are very rich in information and content.

2. Attend Webinars/Events related to Digital Marketing, whenever possible:

Another way to learn more about Digital Marketing is by attending conferences, webinars and all those events which are related to Digital Marketing. Quite often major cities have meet-ups, where digital experts share their knowledge with people who are new to this arena. At such events, you also get the opportunity to meet like-minded people.

3. Choose your Specialization:

Though a general knowledge of all the areas of Digital Marketing is useful, once you have decided to get into Digital Marketing, you need to specialize. Are you passionate about writing articles or doing data analysis? OR Are you interested in SEO or Web Designing?

Getting into a specific area of Digital Marketing will help you in getting more job offers than just having a basic knowledge. Companies are looking for experts in SEO, SEM, Email marketing, Web analysis and so on. And gradually, you can add other stuff to your knowledge bank!

4. Get Set Go!

Once you have decided your career path in Digital Marketing, just start working towards it. You can begin by writing a blog post, or creating a website or a web banner ad or improve your social presence, or doing traffic analysis. Initial few months, you will face technical issues in dealing with these aspects, however gradually, you will master the concepts and gain more confidence.

Whether you are a blogger, an SEO Specialist or a Web Analyst, what you need is a lot of passion and creativity, as marketing itself requires constant innovation and ‘out of the box’ thinking. Working smart, keeping yourself updated with the latest information, excellent communication skills, are key to success.

5. Focus On Business!

Whatever marketing strategy you may follow, at the end of the day it should be business-oriented and should take the business a step ahead. All your technical knowledge is of no use if it is not driving the business. So, as a digital marketer, try to acquire the business acumen needed to implement the best marketing strategy.

Digital Marketing Job Opportunities

• Digital Marketing Manager
• Google Campaign Manager
• PPC Expert
• Search Engine Optimizer
• SEO Executives
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Media Optimizer
• Social MediaExpert/Specialists
• ContentMarketing Manager
• Content Writers
• Copywriter
• Search Engine Marketer
• Inbound Marketing Manager
• Conversion Rate Optimizer