In the modern world, digital marketing has overtaken traditional forms of marketing. In order to establish a foothold among their customers, most businesses are turning to digital marketing to promote their products and services. When used correctly, digital marketing can take your business to unbelievable heights but when underutilized, your business will be overtaken by other tech savvy businesses. To avoid this, you must familiarize yourself with the five pillars of digital marketing which are as follows:

1. Content Marketing
Buyers no longer have tolerance for straight sales messages, especially on the internet. With thousands of businesses out there offering the same product or service as you, you will need more than a website to attract any customers. As such, it is important to have good content to provide customers with valuable information related to your line of business. The content should be aimed at educating, entertaining, or enlightening your target audience so that you build trust with them and establish yourself as an authority in the field.

Content can be delivered in various formats such as blogs, ebooks, slideshows, videos, press releases, white papers, among others. To come up with great content, businesses must use creative thinking and production skills with a good comprehension of analytics. By distributing good content, you can show potential customers what you’re all about while expanding your online presence.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the bread and butter of digital marketing. SEO is the art of working with a search engine algorithm to get your business to rank high in organic search results. When used well, SEO can be a very cost-effective tool to bring in lots of new clients.

A good SEO strategy is the key to improving the online visibility of your business. An SEO expert uses various strategies to optimize your website’s landing pages to make them more visible to Google and other leading search engines. Although it might take some time to show results, SEO is more beneficial in the long run and the best part is, it’s absolutely free to use.

3. Pay Per Click advertising

While SEO helps your website rank organically, PPC is where you pay a certain amount to search engines to appear on top of search engine results.

Search engines usually offer a targeting system for PPC where you may choose who will be shown the ad based on their location, language, among other things.

Every time anyone clicks on your ad, you pay the search engine a small fee. Compared to SEO, this may seem quite expensive but PPC guarantees that your website will gain instant visibility, and every dollar spent will translate to actual visitors to your site.

Many businesses combine PPC with SEO to get the best of both worlds. The PPC ad can boost your site to page one of the search results as you wait for the SEO to take you to the top.

4. Social Media Marketing

Anyone who owns a smartphone or computer and has internet access probably has a social media account. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and many others are some of the most powerful and popular media channels in the world.

Social media marketing is the use of such platforms to promote products and services. It largely involves building and maintaining a strong relationship with your existing and prospective clients using cleverly-curated social media posts.

With social media, you can create a community where you can share information about your business and get instant feedback from customers, particularly because people are more willing to share their views on such platforms.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is the act of sending commercial messages to a group of people via email. The message could be about anything related to your business; information on products or services, information on offers and discounts, or any other messages you’d want potential customers to know about your business.
Email marketing is still considered to be the best digital marketing strategy. According to 2018 data on the most effective digital marketing channels, email marketing was ranked higher than SEO and Social media marketing. When used correctly, email marketing can help you turn prospects into customers and one-time customers into loyal, raving fans.