Digital Marketing Basics – Where Should You Concentrate On it?

Trustmary teamTrustmary team
Last edited: March 4th, 2024

Getting a quick overview of digital marketing basics is crucial for anyone just starting their business. It might be even more central for existing businesses that have so far utilized rather traditional marketing tactics.

Defining Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is one aspect of marketing that has become quite central in recent years.

Nowadays, digital marketing is, to some people, almost a futile term, because effective marketing usually includes at least some of the digital marketing toolkit.

Digital Marketing Strategy Should Include

  1. Website
  2. Search engine optimization SEO and content marketing
  3. Keyword Advertising
  4. Social media marketing
  5. Social media paid advertising
  6. Banner / display advertising
  7. Video Advertising (youtube)
  8. Review marketing

These categories give you a pretty good idea of ​​the whole digital marketing landscape. The website acts as a kind of hub that is redirected to from different channels. Search engines bring their own traffic to a website both organically and through paid ads. Same through social media.. And besides that, there is Banner Advertising all over the web, as well as video ads on YouTube for example.

Let’s start dismantling the different sections one by one.

1. Website

Your web pages serve as the foundation of digital marketing, on which everything else is built.

Websites generate leads and sales. They are usually the critical step between first contact on some channel and conversion to a purchase. In other words, all digital marketing strategies eventually connect with your website.

When it comes to website development, conversion optimization is one of the most important things that is constantly being talked about.

Conversion optimization is about getting your website to generate leads or trade as effectively as possible. So optimize visitor traffic to conversions.

Testimonials is one of the critical factors in website conversion optimization. (Need more testimonials for your business? Try the free version of our software!)

2. Search engine optimization and content marketing

Search engine optimization and content marketing often overlap, but there is much more to content marketing than SEO. However, in this context, it is useful to place these in the same category for the sake of clarity.

The purpose of content marketing is to produce content that attracts potential customers. For digital channels, this often means writing content that is optimized to get as high as possible on Google rankings.

In practice, this means doing a keyword research and searching for search terms that will potential customers search in Google and write content for those search terms.

3. Keyword Advertising

Keyword advertising means targeting specific search queries. That is, when a person googles “website for a business” for example, you can place your ads on Google Ads, above the free results.

Of course, keyword advertising can also be done outside of Google. Bing also has its own tool to actually export campaigns directly from Google Ads. However, Google accounts for most of the search traffic. Sometimes, though, it may be possible to get small amounts of easy wins from Bing for quite cheap prices.

If you don’t know where to start with keyword advertising, you can work with Google Ads specialists.

4. Organic social media

Organic presence on social media means that your business posts will appear on social media for free. Someone has followed your business and will see your post. Or you use #hashtag and the person will follow that hashtag and see the post.

Organic visibility is still a big deal on some social media, but especially on Facebook and Instagram, owned by the same company, the trend in organic visibility has been declining rapidly.

5. Paid advertising on social media

Paid social media advertising is about targeting advertising across different social media platforms. One of the factors behind the effectiveness of social media paid advertising is the fact that various platforms have a tremendous amount of data about their users and their behavior.

This, in turn, typically allows for exceptionally effective advertising, especially if you share data from your website about your current and potential customers.

6. Banner / display advertising

Banner advertising is simply a variety of image ads all over the internet. The largest network is certainly Google’s own display network, but there are also competing networks. The biggest competitive advantage of the Google Network is targeting, because Google happens to know a fair amount about their users.

Banner advertising is most commonly used for remarketing, but in some cases it can also work for completely cold audiences. One of the challenges of banner advertising is that banner ads often distract people so that they can sometimes be negative.

7. Video advertising, especially Youtube

There are many different forms of video advertising. You can publish your business videos to YouTube and strive to gain free exposure or purchase paid exposure through the Google Ads platform.

The most familiar ad format on YouTube are preroll ads that can be skipped in 5 seconds. On YouTube, you can target advertising by video category, by people’s search behavior, or by demographics. There are plenty of options.

If you wish to gain organic audiences, you should take a look at the latest Youtube trends to have a better chance at succeeding.

8. Review Marketing

Review marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase your brand’s credibility and trust. It works, because people don’t trust you – they trust other people.

Typically, review marketing is divided into two “phases”:

1. Collecting reviews. It’s important to actively do this, and ask for reviews from your customers. They will rarely do so just because.

2. Utilizing reviews. Once you have collected reviews, don’t just let them sit there! Add them to your website, social media, and possibly other marketing materials.

This can sound tiring, and it might be if you have a large customer base and you try to do everything manually.

Luckily, there are tools like Trustmary that help you automize the whole process, from collection to displaying.

An easy way to get started with review marketing is to add your existing third-party reviews to your website right now!

In summary about digital marketing

Through these areas, you will be able to outline the whole of digital marketing and be able to structure what to focus on.

Often, everything starts with a website, and this is where content marketing and search engine discovery are built over the long term.

In a short, keyword advertising is often most effective if you only have big enough search volumes in your industry. Social media work especially with products purchased impulsively, but also more broadly through a variety of funnels.

Youtube is the world’s second largest search engine and quite a popular place to spend time. And the display acts as a tactical element around the network.

Generic instructions are difficult to give, but this blog may have been helpful in outlining the whole.


Trustmary team
Trustmary team


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