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Digital marketing has become a necessity for any business attempting to survive in this day and age. It's been said that the most important thing is not the amount of money you spend on digital marketing but the way you spend it. What does this mean? Well, certain categories within digital marketing will give you more benefits than others, depending on your company's size and goals.
Digital Marketing is constantly changing, but there are some foundational categories of digital marketing you need to have a strong grasp of to thrive in the digital ecosystem. To learn more about the top digital marketing disciplines and the software tools for digital marketing. we asked the experts and here's what they shared.
Top Categories for Digital Marketing
If there is a universal truth in digital marketing, every marketing executive has their own ideas of how marketing should be done and even how many marketing categories there are. Working in such a rapidly evolving industry means that new marketing categories can crop up all the time.
Even in the past ten years, there has been a huge jump in how digital marketing is understood. However, like Kate Adams, SVP of Marketing at Boston, MA-based Validity, said, "while marketing categories aid in creating brand awareness, recognition and trust, what a lot of marketers don't realize is that the success of their digital campaigns is highly contingent on the health of their data."
To understand more about each category, let's take a closer look at some of the most popular digital marketing categories.
Related Article: 6 Best Practices That Will Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy
SEO
For some marketers, SEO is the pillar of their campaigns. This is because SEO is applicable to the other digital marketing categories. For instance, you'd have to use relevant SEO keywords in your drip campaigns and content marketing to make them effective and engaging, which is why SEO and research are fundamental for digital marketing.
SEO Tools
"When it comes to doing SEO, our go-to tools would be SEMrush and Ahrefs. We find using SEMrush helpful as it allows us to quantify our website's estimated reach and also determine our site's domain and/or resource authority," shares Maya Levi, Marketing Manager at Tel Aviv, Israel-based ReturnGO.
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SEM
Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to the practice of leveraging paid advertising that appears on the search engine results pages (or SERPs). In search engine marketing, companies place bids on keywords that Google visitors might use when looking for certain products or services, which gives the company the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.
SEM Tools
According to Christopher Moore Chief Marketing Officer at Mooresville, NC.-based Quiet Light, "The best tool for pay-per-click advertising is Google Ads Editor as it allows you to create and edit different ad campaigns across different Google accounts making it far easier to manage your various campaigns and edit ads as the campaign goes along to make them more SEO friendly."
Content Marketing
Content can take many forms, from blog posts to voice instructions delivered through IoT devices. Since it can takes many forms, it is often seen as the lifeblood of marketing campaigns. Due to its flexibility, content marketing has a central and all-encompassing role in every marketing strategy and can be tailored to fit customer needs before, during and after the buying process.
Content Marketing Tools
There are many content tools out there to help improve your content marketing. They can help build, grammar, content suggestions and SEO best practices. Examples include Grammarly, Ink and Jarvis.ai. Most of these are artificial intelligence-based apps that helps marketers overcome writer's block and create content more consistently across niches, and ensure SEO is baked-in to the process.
Email Marketing
Getting into inboxes and engaging recipients through email marketing has become more challenging than ever before, with inbox volume nearly doubling year-over-year. Email marketing tools can help simplify email marketing campaigns and provide crucial insights to help increase engagement and improve execution.
Email Marketing Tools
A good piece of advice is that you should always start with an ESP (email service provider) that fits your budget and your brand. "Flodesk is a great option for paid with no tiered plans, but if you want to start with free, MailerLite is another popular one with a generous amount of free subscribers before you need to upgrade your plan," shares Abby Sherman, Director of Strategy at Minneapolis, MN.-based Snap Agency.
Data Analytics
Without data, marketing is nothing but guesswork. On the other hand, the inappropriate use of data can definitely cripple even the best-laid plans. "Marketing and sales teams waste up to 50% of their time dealing with data quality issues," confesses Adams. "From duplicate records to outdated contact information. If companies aren't reaching the right audience, their marketing efforts (and money) are going to waste," she continued.
Data Analytics Tools
"To gather data and insights, we supplement our usage of SEMrush with Google Analytics (GA)," said Levi. "Google Analytics is easy to set up, and it allows us to stay on top of our social networking profiles and website's performances. Through the data that we get from GA, we can resolve marketing roadblocks that we encounter along the way strategically," she shared.
All in all, to make it easier for you to meet the demands of digital marketing, it's best if you choose and invest in the right software that will make the research, execution, and optimization of these efforts much easier for you. Some of these helpful apps include CRM tools, automation software, and collaboration tools that, with the help of personalization and a human touch, will help you create relevant and effective marketing campaigns.
