Seven key areas of online marketing explained

Online Marketing is the method to deliver promotional content through the internet to the
people’s browser or email. Online Marketing can be done by text ads, image ads, video ads,
native content or from Apps like Facebook or Twitter and many more. Online Marketing allows
you to reach people you may not reach with offline marketing campaigns.
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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic
using various strategies, techniques and tactics to obtain high ranking in organic [Unpaid]
search results. In other words, SEO is a process of making web pages attractive to the search
engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.
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SEO can be done by editing on-site and off-site elements of the website to improve the chances
of showing up higher in Search Engines Results Page (SERP) for important keywords.
According to Hootsuite, Google holds 76% of the total Search Engine market share while 93%
of people click on the search results in the first page of Google.
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Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM refers to paid search marketing in the search results. We can define SEM as serving an advertisement to a user using a search engine based in their query. For example, for a user who searches for a query, we can bid on certain keywords which match algorithmically to the user query and serve a text ad to them.

Search engine ​marketing has grown exponentially over the past decade. Google AdWords is the most popular paid search platform used by search marketers followed by Bing.​
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Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing is a method to increase traffic and promote your content, product or
service using social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter or other
social media apps. We can term Social Media Marketing as the process of using the potential
of social media to leverage the value of your business.

Source: Slideshare

Out of 4 billion internet users, 3 billion people use social media. So, the power to networking
and publishing through social media is high.
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Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is a model of online marketing in which advertisers pay a fee
each time one of their ads is clicked.

Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to 'earn' those visits
organically. The advertiser pays publishers every time a visitor clicks their ad, hence the model
is known as pay-per-click, as advertisers only pay when the visitor clicks their ad. If a visitor
sees an ad but doesn’t click it, the advertiser is made aware of the impression but doesn’t have
to pay as no click took place.
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Content marketing

Content Marketing is promoting free or additional value to your targeted audience or users
that you already have. Good content either should provide information [that the user is
looking for to solve the problem], inspiration [So people can get inspired to buy or use the
product service to solve the problem.] or entertaining so that user will stick to the content for
better click through rates.

​Writing a blog, making video contents, creating a podcast can be few examples of Content
Marketing.
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Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is monetisation of word-of-mouth marketing. It is a way of getting a
commission in exchange for referring a product or service to another customer. Affiliate
marketing has evolved over the past decade as the internet has evolved and a number of
channels such as social or email etc. Basically, it is influencers that are recommending products
and services that are not their own, but people go to them to get the information.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a workhorse of digital marketing as you can deliver a highly personalised
experience, multiple times on a scale through email. The main advantage of an email marketing
is that you precisely know how many emails have been delivered, opened or clicked upon.
Tying up these numbers with revenue metrics, the numbers will have a big meaning to your
email marketing campaigns.

Example of email marketing can be sending promotional emails, email with offers or discount or
thanking customers or users for using the product or can be used to provide inspirations to try
your product or services. Some of the popular automated email marketing tools are MailChimp,
Constant Contact, drip and convert Kit.