The Father of Modern Marketing, Philip Kotler once said “The most important thing is to predict where clients are going and stop right in front of them”. Likewise, It is important to understand that businesses today are moving from traditional methods to digital marketing services, It is important to know what suits your business, and where your target audience lies. With digital marketing, you reach bigger audiences thus, bigger number of potential clients. Yet, building the right axis around which all your communications revolve, is still the most important aspect. Therefore, we bring to you a comprehensive guide to understand the basics of the most used digital marketing services. This detailed guide will help you build a proper marketing strategy suitable for your business. 1.Social Media Marketing Social media networks are like a cocktail party where all the attendees are dressed and suited up. Assume that you reach the party filled with a lot of people (these are your potential leads). To engage with them, you wouldn’t directly pounce on them and ask them to buy your products. You try to blend in and try to strike up a relevant conversation. You analyze their points and suggest them remedies to get over their problems. That is how you gradually build a rapport and eventually lead them. That is the same way you go about with Social Media Marketing. You slowly build conversations, you gain customer loyalty and then you gain long-term customers. It is a slow process but an effective one. Popular social media sites include – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, etc. Built-in analytics tools within the social media channels enable businesses/brands to track the effectiveness of their campaigns. Through social media marketing, businesses will be able to tap into a bigger market. This is very much impossible with traditional marketing. Social media marketing can garner a lot of organic traffic through activities like posting text, images, videos, and other content that drives engagement with the audience, while also promoting the images with paid advertising. (Via GIPHY) There are various tools that can be used to assist your social media campaigns. Tools like Buffer help you schedule your posts in advance and plan your social media calendars. Employing such tools with the digital marketing services for your business helps you conduct marketing efficiently. 2. Search Engine Optimization If you’re taking your business online, even though it is just through the use of digital marketing services, it is a must to have a website. But having a website for the namesake is of no use, unless and until you can direct traffic to it. And this is possible by increasing the rank of your website on the search engines– Google, etc. This process is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Google, the most prominent search engine works through layers of algorithms known as crawlers and spiders. These algorithms are responsible for locating the most relevant results for any search query on Google’s search box. For example, if you search “digital marketing services”, these algorithms will scroll through the internet to locate wherever these keywords have been used, basically web pages, blogs, links, etc. Further, there are more than 400 metrics that define the rank of any particular search on Google’s results page. (Via GIPHY) By now, it must be clear that if your website is not SEO optimized, it won’t rank higher or might not even rank anywhere on the search results. But how do you optimize your web pages? Locate keywords using the Google Analytics tool that are relevant for your business. For example, for a mobile phone seller, Google would suggest keywords like “buy mobiles online” or “buy smartphone online”, etc. Use these keywords on your web pages in the relevant areas and design your content around them. Google also ranks website according to the confidence created by them. This confidence means the number of times a user visits a website or technically the number of sessions on a website. It is also created with internal and external links associated with the content. You might find websites creating blogs and sharing them on their social media channels. This is done for the same purpose– to enhance the link building process and direct traffic to the website through social media. Greater the number of sessions on a website, the greater the confidence it possesses. The user experience (UX) on your website is a very important aspect that most businesses usually ignore. If your website garners a good average session duration (i.e. average time spent by users on your website), it helps your Google search rank. It must be understood that a user would only spend time on your website if he/she is amused by the look and feel of it. If the information is not relevant or the interface is non-user-friendly, they would hop-off. Thus, decreasing the average session time, in turn, decreasing your Google rank. Therefore, place engaging pieces of content like images, videos, etc, and use animations that amaze the user on scrolling through your website. You can also run paid ads on Google using Google AdSense/ Google AdWords tools. These ads will appear whenever a user searches through the keywords selected for the campaign, by you. Set a definite budget according to your needs and these ad campaigns will help you gain potential customers inorganically. Search engines are the most important way of increasing traffic. Therefore, SEO becomes the soul of digital marketing services. 3. Email Marketing Email is the one way through which you can communicate directly with your customers, rather than calling them directly. It is a peer-to-peer conversation between two people, even though you might be sending it on behalf of an organization. It goes the same way while using emails as a digital marketing service. Businesses tend to inform their customers about product updates, solve their issues, register requests, etc. It is a great means to keep your customers interested in your brand by getting into their inboxes directly. You can create