The act of selling items and services through digital channels such as social media, SEO, email, and mobile apps is known as digital marketing. In a nutshell, digital marketing refers to any type of marketing that uses electronic devices.
It can be done both online and offline, and both are necessary for a comprehensive digital marketing plan.
Online and offline marketing are the two most important foundations of digital marketing. However, because I'll discuss online marketing in a separate guide, I'll merely cover the many aspects of it here for completeness' sake.
Online marketing is divided into 7 major categories :
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Content marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
Affiliate marketing
Email marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO)
The term SEO refers to the process of optimising a website for search engines. SEO is the process of making efforts to improve the ranking of a website or piece of content on Google.
The main distinction between SEO and paid advertising is that SEO involves “organic” ranking, which means you don't have to pay to be in that spot. To put it another way, search engine optimization is the process of improving a piece of online material so that it appears near the top of a search engine's page when someone searches for something.
Look at it this way. When someone types “White sauce Pasta” into Google, they’re likely looking for a recipe, ingredients, and instructions on how to make it. If you wrote an article about making White sauce Pasta, you’d want people to find your recipe. For anyone to find it, you need to rank above all the other websites with recipes for White sauce Pasta. It’s not easy, but that’s what SEO marketing is all about.
Let’s break it down even further: The majority of online searches begin with a search engine like Google. In fact, 75 percent of those searches start on Google.
To better understand how you can rank your content higher in the search engines, you need to first understand how search works.
The ultimate purpose of this article is to help you grasp the basics of search so you can optimise your content to rank better on Google and attract more visitors to your website.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
SEM (search engine marketing) is a digital marketing method for improving a website's presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).
While the phrase used to refer to both organic and paid search operations like search engine optimization (SEO), is now nearly solely refers to paid search advertising.
Paid search and pay per click are other terms for search engine marketing (PPC).
Search engine marketing has become a critical online marketing approach for expanding a company's reach, as an increasing number of people study and shop for products online.
In fact, the vast majority of new visitors to a website arrive from a search engine query.
Advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors in search engine marketing, making it a cost-effective option for a company to spend its marketing budget. As an added advantage, each visitor helps to boost the website's organic search results rankings.
Consumers are in a wonderful frame of mind since they conduct search queries with the purpose of finding commercial information.
Content marketing
Content marketing is defined as follows by the Content Marketing Institute, an online reference for all things content marketing:
Information marketing is a marketing approach for attracting and acquiring a clearly defined audience through the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content with the goal of driving profitable customer action.
The term "valuable" is crucial here. It's what distinguishes this definition from others that might apply to nearly any type of marketing or advertising. You can tell if a piece of material is suitable for a content marketing campaign if consumers actively seek it out and want to consume it rather than avoid it.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
The use of social media platforms and websites to advertise a product or service is known as social media marketing. [1] While e-marketing and digital marketing remain popular in academics, social media marketing is gaining traction among practitioners and scholars.
Most social media platforms have data analytics tools built in, allowing businesses to track ad campaign progress, performance, and engagement. Through social media marketing, businesses communicate with a variety of stakeholders, including present and potential customers, current and potential workers, journalists, bloggers, and the general public.
On a strategic level, social media marketing includes campaign management, governance, scope definition (e.g., more active or passive use), and the building of a company's intended social media "culture" and "tone."
Instead of utilising marketer-prepared advertising copy, companies can utilise social media marketing to allow customers and Internet users to publish user-generated content (e.g., online comments, product reviews, etc.), also known as "earned media."
In online marketing, pay-per-click is a typical advertising technique. Advertisers can publish ads on search engines, social media platforms, and third-party websites and pay a charge every time the ad is clicked.
Google is the most popular PPC service provider. Google Ads, the company's platform, is frequently the first visit for people new to PPC marketing.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the technique of making money (commissions) by promoting and selling a company's products or services. You are only compensated when you make a sale, exactly like a commission-only salesperson.
The product creator and seller, as well as the affiliate marketer, are two sides of the affiliate equation.
As a result, affiliate marketing can be defined as the distribution of product creation and marketing between multiple parties, with each party receiving a cut of the revenue based on their participation.
As an affiliate marketer, you are defined by more than just product creation and promotion.You may be both a creative and a marketer while still benefiting from the fundamental concept of income sharing.
Let's take a closer look at each component of a good affiliate marketing system:
The Merchant: The merchant is also known as the creator, seller, brand, retailer, or vendor. This is the entity in charge of developing the product. It might be a large vacuum cleaner manufacturer, such as Dyson.
The Affiliate: This party is sometimes referred to as the publisher. Affiliates can be anyone from a single person to a whole company. A month's worth of commissions from an affiliate marketing business can range from a few hundred dollars to tens of millions of dollars.
The Consumer:The affiliate system revolves around the customer or consumer. There are no commissions to distribute and no revenue to split if there are no sales.
The Network: Only a few affiliate marketers think about the network aspect of affiliate marketing. However, I feel that an affiliate marketing guide should include networks because a network often acts as a middleman between the affiliate and the merchant.
Email Marketing
The act of sending promotional messages to a large number of people is known as email marketing. Its purpose is usually to produce sales or leads, and it may also include advertising.
Email may be one of the oldest modes of digital communication, but it continues to be the most popular.
Email marketing is one of the most effective tactics, thanks to its simplicity and ability to be automated.
An efficient email marketing campaign involves three important aspects in its most basic form:
1. An email list: You'll need an active email list to run successful email campaigns. This is a list of email addresses that have expressed an interest in getting marketing emails from your company.
2. An Email Service provider: An email service provider (ESP), usually referred to as an email marketing platform, is software that aids in the management of your email list. It also aids in the creation and implementation of automated email marketing campaigns.
Using an ESP allows you to automate activities based on the actions of your target audience. These allow you to customise each connection with them, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.
3. Clearly Defined Goals: Email marketing can help you achieve a variety of business objectives. You can, for example, utilise email marketing to:
Drive sales
Boost brand awareness
Generate and nurture leads
Keep customers engaged
Increase customer loyalty and lifetime value
If you want your restaurant to survive in this extremely competitive business, you can't afford to miss any of these digital marketing strategies.
If all of this seems a little daunting to you and you're not sure where to begin, please don't hesitate to contact us!
All of your social media marketing needs will be handled and met by Espangle. We have worked with a variety of restaurant clients and have accumulated the necessary expertise to perfect your restaurant's social media marketing tactics.