The 7 Important Digital Marketing Pillars For Success

Last updated on November 9th, 2022 at 11:05 pm

Digital marketing is a rapidly expanding field that has many aspects and strategies. As such, it can be overwhelming for people to know where to even start with their digital marketing strategy. 

Someone might start with content writing or someone with a social media campaign. Digital marketing is a combined effort of digital marketing platforms, tools, strategy and planning, execution, and all that, in a very diverse surrounding.

This blog post will focus on the seven important pillars of digital marketing campaigns. And how they work together in unison to help your business succeed online. We’ll go over what each pillar does, and why it’s important. And how you can implement digital marketing guidelines through your own business.

The Main Components of the Digital Era

Digital Marketing is a rapidly emerging form of advertising that has seen exponential growth over the past few years. 

Gone are the days of traditional advertising when you could buy an advertisement on TV or in the newspaper. Today, your campaign needs to be digital if you want to stay competitive. 

There are different types of marketing platforms like Mailchimp. HubSpot, Trell, Google Analytics and Hootsuite, etc for your assistance in different aspects of digital marketing.

The best marketers use analytics and targeting for precise tracking. So it’s easy to see where all the money through ad spend can go. There isn’t any guesswork involved with monitoring KPIs such as conversion rates. 

They’re always right at our fingertips. All thanks to specific marketing resources that provide us with the conversion information. For example total revenue generated by each ad click during its life span.

Because digital marketing is a complex, multi-faceted system of tools and systems. It can be tough to know where to begin. 

The problem with most digital marketing strategies is that they’re built on a shaky foundation.

When you’re looking to create an effective digital marketing strategy, many businesses miss a fundamental step which is market research. You need to know your customers before you can sell them anything. 

If you don’t have this knowledge in place, then your advertising campaigns will be based on guesses, not facts. 

So with all that in mind let’s take a look at what it takes to create the foundational pillars of digital marketing.

1. Search-Based Marketing

The first pillar of digital marketing is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO helps you increase your web presence by making it easy for people to find out about your business through the search results pages. 

This is done by using keywords in page titles, descriptions, and throughout your content, as well as optimizing images with metadata that contain relevant keywords throughout your website.

All these things help search engines like Google to better understand what your business is about so that you rank higher on the search engine.

Even if people don’t click on your listing right away, SEO will help build brand recognition. That is just as important when it comes to getting new customers interested in buying from you. 

For an even greater depth into your search performance, there are plenty of SEO tools out there to help you gain that advantage. These digital marketing platforms help you evangelize your data as a goldmine and target the right audience for your business.

Also under this digital marketing pillar is search engine marketing (SEM). SEM is an umbrella term that refers to the many ways you can promote your business on search engines. This includes pay-per-click (PPC) ads and many other forms of paid advertising.

Paid adverts might be annoying to some but they’re a great way to get more people to visit your site. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that search advertising is the only way to increase your business’s web presence. 

SEO and SEM can be used together, but it’s important not to forget about the rest of the items on this list. Those items also help you grow an engaged user base, generate leads, and ultimately drive sales!

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of those essential content-based services you need for your business. It should form the building block of your overall marketing strategy. 

The content should be valuable and relevant to your customers. This can help them solve their problems which will result in a win-win situation. 

There are many content marketing platforms like Exploding Topics, BuzzSumo, and Outbrain that can help you in making smart content strategies.

When you provide value, people are more likely to come back because they know that they can find the information that fulfills their needs.

At the same time, content marketing can help improve search engine rankings since the content is a ranking factor for Google’s algorithm. 

The more relevant content your website has the more it will attract organic traffic from users who are searching for keywords related to your business or service.

3. Relationship Building and Outreach

In today’s world where companies are trying to reach as many people and create relationships, it’s important that they make a good first impression. 

This way an outsourced set of online connections can strengthen your company’s presence. This also helps you to get valuable backlinks or mentions from these bloggers and journalists when posting content on their social media channels which can create a huge impact and improve SEO results.

Email outreach is a powerful way to start relationship-building and share valuable content with the right people. In return, they will do some outreach for your company as well. 

This can be used as an opportunity where you can create real relationships with other professionals in the industry that may lead to other business opportunities later on down the line.

4. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) is an incredible way to create brand awareness. For example, if you want to get more social traffic visits, you can create an Instagram profile and post carousels or posts that are hot topics within your industry.

To be successful at SMM you need to know your target audience and hang out on the same social media platforms that they do. 

Social Media Marketing is a great way to get your brand name out there and the key is offering people valuable content. The more social media engagement you have, the better is your chance of brand recognition. With that, they’re intrigued enough to click over to your website to learn more about you and your business offering. 

Building brand awareness and marking yourself as an expert in your niche starts by answering people’s questions. This can be through forums such as Reddit or Quora. 

When you reply to someone’s question, you can leave a link back to your website or a relevant post for more information on the subject. 

It’s also important to engage with the people you follow on social media as well. It will improve your social authority.

When you have an excellent online presence, it goes beyond just being found in search engine results for certain keywords. It means having an extensive network of followers, fans, and customers.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is great for lead generation and a way to increase sales. It all starts by building email lists through sales funnels, then nurturing the list members with newsletters, offering value through your email content, and letting them know when you have something new to offer. 

This will help build trust in your brand as an expert because people appreciate receiving helpful email newsletters with actionable items that they can use in their own businesses for a quick win.

When emailing your list, you can send broadcasts to announce new products or services, provide coupons and discounts, offer limited-time-only promotions that will expire soon (this can result in an increase in sales), and links to shareable content on social media like blog posts that have tips related to the email newsletter topic which will also increase website traffic.

But, you don’t want to overdo it. 

It is important to not just be sending product offers in every email. This will push them away from wanting to do business with you and may cause them to mark you as spam or worse still, unsubscribe from the email list altogether. Remember marketing automation is quite a sophisticated process. Handle that with extra care.

And once they have unsubscribed there’s no way for you to email them again. This is why it’s important to follow up with other email marketing strategies like blogging, social media, and having a strong call to action.

6. Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is an integral part of digital marketing. As we all know, Mobile Marketing helps businesses reach online audiences via their mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers to deliver promotional messages or information. 

This includes things like SMS marketing (AKA text message marketing) and messaging through MMS (multimedia messaging service).

In our ever-connected world, location is an important factor when it comes to marketing. If you take the example of local advertising and how customizing your message for different regions can make all the difference between success and failure. 

This personal touch actually works quite well. Since most people are constantly connected with their mobile devices in one way shape or form these days.

7. Analytics

Statistics can be overwhelming, but the numbers don’t lie. They show how your digital marketing strategy is performing and where improvements need to be made. 

For conversion rate optimization (CRO) to succeed with analytics, you need conversion tracking in place on all of the platforms where you advertise. There are many paid tools that convert well for analyzing data. 

However, Google Analytics and Google Search Console are what I recommend. Google Search Console gives a clearer picture of each customer’s journey directly from the biggest search engine itself. It has conversion tracking capabilities. With GSC, you can track what happens after a customer clicks on your ad or link (such as sales, downloads, and website visits). 

Both Google tools are free if you use the web version, however, it does cost money for businesses to get access to data through other channels like Adwords. 

Conclusion

The digital marketing industry is ever-changing and growing with each new trend. In order to keep up, you need to always be ahead of the game with your marketing campaign. If you focus on the different tactics and strategies we have discussed, your business will thrive in the market.  

But don’t lose sight of the customer experience. Engage and be transparent with your users, and provide them with a better service than your competitors. By doing those small steps it will allow you to leave your competition and their websites behind. (Preferably on page two of the Google search results). 

Finally, take these seven pillars of digital marketing, and test out what will work best for your company and consumers. Have fun experimenting with the different marketing channels available. Who knows, you might find that the one you least expected to perform could turn out to bring in the most potential customers. 

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Author Bio

Chris Bournelis is a writer and web developer. With 5+ years of digital marketing experience, he’s passionate about leveraging the right strategic partnerships, content, and software to scale digital growth. Chris lives in Australia and writes about how to blog like a business on his own website, ChrisBournelis.com.