(1) Search Engine Optimization

SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization which is one of the branch of Search Engine Marketing, is a process of increasing the visibility and traffic of a company’s site through organic search results. When you search for something on a search engine and it shows 100+ pages of search results, have you ever wondered why the first-page results are on the first page?

Well, on every search engine, there are bots that go out there to crawl pages and gather information from site to site. These bots then come back and put everything into an index. After that, the algorithm analyzes the pages and ranks the data and factors to decide the page sequence in regards to a given query. There are actually many factors that would affect the sequence and I am not going to get into the advanced science here. But in general, a website’s content quality, keyword search, crawlability, and mobile-friendliness are some major factors that have a significant impact on its search engine ranking.

Keep in mind that SEO is tremendously important because you always want your company to appear at everyone’s first sight when they search for something. According to current statistics, approximately 93% of web traffics is from search engines and most people’s online process starts from there. With SEO, you ensure your company stays at the top of the rank before your competitors.

(2) Pay-Per-Click

PPC, or commonly known as Pay-per-click, is another model that falls under the category of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Pay-per-click, just as it’s named, means that the advertisers are paying a fee every time their links are being clicked. Unlike SEO, it is rather inorganic because you are basically buying an audience to visit your website. However, PPC is still one of the most adopted strategies in the business world for a reason.

PPC strategies can be implemented on different online platforms. For example, one of the most popular platforms is the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Let’s say when you search for something on Google, what you’ll realize is that the first couple of websites shown on the first page usually have the word “Ad” next to them. That is because those companies invested in Google Ads and made sure that when people type a certain keyword, their websites show up first. Besides search engines, businesses can also carry out PPC strategies on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Although PPC is seen as less organic, it doesn’t mean it’s useless. Pay-per-click is, in fact, a pretty helpful shortcut for companies when they want to engage with a specific group of people quickly. On search engines, paid ads are like an assurance of visibility to the audience who are typing a specific keyword. Similarly, companies paying ads on Facebook also have the ability to reach the right audience by choosing certain demographics, locations, and behaviors of users. In general, PPC is an effective tool to boost brand awareness, generate leads, and increase site traffic.

(3) Content Marketing

Besides SEM, Content Marketing is also of paramount importance to digital marketing. Content Marketing is an approach that focuses on building and delivering valuable and relevant content to the audience. The idea of content marketing is that, instead of being pushy and displaying all the products or services you have, you focus on providing consistent and proper content that helps build a trustworthy relationship with your prospective and existed audience. Companies can be creative when developing their content: infographics, original images, ebooks, blogs, or even case studies are some good examples of content marketing.

Remember, content marketing and SEO are interrelated and are almost complementary. To achieve SEO, you have to provide great content and resources on your website; correspondingly, when your website has high visibility on search engines, you want to make sure every visitor can obtain a valuable message and a positive experience from your website, thus brings a chance to turn them from prospects into customers.

(4) Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is something that should not be missed at all because… who doesn’t go on social media nowadays? Generally speaking, Social Media Marketing can be defined as any marketing actions a company takes on any social media platform. According to a Hubspot study, the number one platform for digital marketers is Facebook. Not only did Facebook have 2.6 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2020, but it also embodies over 80 million small businesses that use its free business tools for marketing purposes. What about Instagram? The same study states that Instagram is a social platform with the 2nd highest ROI (Return of Investment) and that by 2023, Instagram expects itself to reach a total of 120.3 million monthly active users (just in the United States). Depending on the purpose, different marketers go active on different platforms. For B2B (Business-to-Business) marketers, LinkedIn is the 2nd most popular platform for them to connect with people.

Social Media Marketing is a great strategy because of the tremendous amount of active users on social media. Furthermore, social media allows businesses to create both original content and paid advertisements, which gives businesses flexibility on budgets and marketing goals.

(5) Email Marketing

Email Marketing is the process of sending direct mail to the targeted audiences in order to communicate the business promotions and various offerings. It is one of the widely used forms of marketing and has been in play for many years. Today email marketing has become an important strategy of digital marketing as it induces more personalization with the targeted audience. There are many email marketing service providers online today through which any marketer can automate their email campaign according to their requirements. Some of the email marketing service providers like Mail Chimp, Aweber are mostly used by many digital marketers these days.