12 pillars of Digital Marketing

We are living in the age of a “digital-first economy.” It implies a landscape where the primary forces driving the country’s economy are digital tools, technologies, and platforms. Digital Marketing uses a combination of these platforms, channels, and technologies to help organizations promote their products and services. Thus, it becomes imperative for companies to understand the core elements of digital marketing in order to devise a successful marketing strategy.

Digital Marketing has 12 pillars that form the backbone of any effective marketing campaign. In this blog, we try to further understand these 12 Digital Marketing pillars in detail.   

The 12 Digital Marketing pillars

They are the cornerstones of a successful digital marketing strategy. They work together to help accomplish organizational goals. The 12 Digital Marketing pillars are detailed below for your better understanding:

1. Affiliate Marketing

As the name suggests, affiliate marketing refers to entering into a partnership with affiliates to promote your brand’s products or services. Revenue is shared between the organization and the affiliates, in this case, based on commissions. Affiliate marketing also operates on a performance-based marketing model, where the business needs to pay only for measurable results achieved. It is a more cost-effective approach and, thus, one of the core components of digital marketing plans.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO and digital marketing often work hand in hand to achieve common organizational goals. In this element of digital marketing, the company’s website is optimized for search engines like Google to improve its organic visibility.

The 3 key elements of SEO are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. While on-page SEO focuses on optimizing individual website pages to improve rankings on search engines, off-page SEO comprises optimization activities outside the website. They are targeted at improving the reputation and authority of the website among its users through building backlinks, guest posts, and brand awareness.

Technical SEO works to ensure that the website meets its technical requirements to enable crawling and indexing by search engines. Some of the potent tools used in SEO tasks are Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and SEMrush.

3. Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Yet another of the core components of digital marketing is managing the reputation of the company online. One of the key purposes of online brand marketing is to help maintain a positive brand image of the target organization. This can be achieved by handling ratings, reviews, and public relations crises for the brand. All of these help maintain the trustworthiness of the brand in the eyes of its customers. 

4. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a crucial part of SEO and digital marketing efforts. Helpful and engaging user content plays a valuable role in attracting and retaining traffic to the website. Some of the popular types of content used for marketing purposes online include videos, case studies, testimonials, blogs and articles, whitepapers, and infographics. All of these aim to convey helpful information to the reader while attracting and hooking them on to the company product or service.

5. Analytics and Data-Driven Marketing

This is yet another of the core components of digital marketing that is based on tracking and evaluating the performance of the website using tools such as Google Analytics. These tools help marketers derive valued insights to fine-tune their strategies and, in turn, improve the return on investment in marketing.

6. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Apart from SEO and digital marketing, SMM is fast gaining popularity in today’s digital age, thanks to the emergence of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. If they know the social media marketing basics, businesses are better able to leverage the potential of these platforms for building their brand presence. These platforms also provide the right opportunity for companies to engage with their current and target audience, understand their needs, and fill the gap with their products and services.

7. Web Design and Development

Designing user-friendly websites plays a key role in digital marketing. If the website has a user-friendly layout and design, it is likely to get high traffic and users also tend to stay longer on the site. This helps lower the bounce rate, which is in turn helpful for rank improvement.

A user-friendly website should also have a mobile-responsive design, enabling comfortable viewing of the page on mobile phones too. In addition, the site should provide a good User Experience (UX) overall and have a high page download speed to retain the user for longer. All of these components together facilitate effective digital marketing.

8. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

This is yet another crucial element of digital marketing plans. PPC is aimed at driving the brand’s target audience to its website via paid advertisements. These are published on social media platforms and search engines like Google and Bing. Google Ads is a classic example of PPC advertising. It is also an important part of social media marketing basics to drive immediate traffic. Targeting the audience for running the ad and optimizing the budget for ads are crucial factors to bear in mind in PPC advertising. 

9. Video Marketing

When talking of social media marketing basics for digital marketing, videos play a prominent role. The emergence and dominance of platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram reels, and the like, have succeeded in driving video marketing efforts for organizations like never before. Companies leverage these platforms to put out a variety of video content targeted at their audience.

A few examples include product demos, testimonials, tutorials, and live streams. All of these speak to a different audience and are aimed at generating brand awareness. 

10. Email Marketing

Email marketing strategies are another popular means of product and service promotion employed by many businesses. Companies engage their target audiences with personalized email campaigns. Email marketing tools such as HubSpot and Mailchimp are used to automate messages and reach a wider audience, engage leads, and convert them into potential customers.

Subscriber segmentation is one of the important email marketing strategies. Herein, email subscribers of the company are broken down into smaller targeted segments according to specific parameters. These include user behavior, past interactions with the brand, demographics, and user preferences.

11. Mobile Marketing

In addition to email marketing strategies, mobile marketing has gained popularity in the recent past. It refers to reaching the target audience through mobile-optimized apps that deliver the desired content for brand promotion. The content delivered as such is designed to be mobile-friendly and responsive to be viewed and enjoyed via a mobile device. The UX of the app holds prime importance here to retain user attention for longer. Some of the key elements of mobile marketing are push notifications and SMS marketing. 

12. Influencer Marketing

The last but not the least of the 12 pillars of digital marketing is influencer marketing. It is a rather latest trend; however, has gained immense popularity among social media users. This type of digital marketing strategy employs collaboration between the brand and influencers or individuals with a large social media following. This helps the business to build trust with the target audience who follows the influencer and is likely to be affected by their thoughts and opinions of the brand. Social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are perfect for influencer marketing campaigns.

How do these pillars work together?

The 12 digital marketing pillars work in coherence to create a unified, effective strategy that works toward increasing user engagement, boosting brand visibility, and maximizing conversions. Here’s an example of how Nike has effectively used these multiple pillars to create a successful marketing campaign for its products:

• The company’s website uses search engine-optimized keywords such as sportswear or running shoes, which helps improve the site’s organic search engine rankings.
• The brand leverages social media marketing strategies for endorsing athletes, storytelling, and creating awareness around the launch of new products.
• Influencer marketing is a very important part of Nike’s digital marketing plan. The brand partners with several fitness influencers and athletes to increase audience reach.

Likewise, several companies can employ all or a mix of the 12 pillars of digital marketing to enhance brand awareness, trust, and credibility.

Why mastering these pillars are essential?

In today’s highly competitive digital landscape, mastering these 12 pillars of digital marketing is crucial to gaining a competitive edge in the marketplace. It helps your brand stand out from the crowd. Additionally, knowledge of these key pillars and using them to achieve your marketing goals enables you to quickly adapt to the new emerging tools, technologies, and trends in the market. 

Conclusion

We learned that the 12 pillars of digital marketing help organizations build a sustainable digital marketing strategy. Together, they can enable brands to achieve their marketing goals seamlessly. For a more comprehensive understanding of these pillars and other concepts of digital marketing, pursue an online MBA in Digital Marketing on the Online Manipal portal. The course is offered by Manipal University Jaipur (MUJ) for 2 years to aspiring learners in 100% online mode. Learn the fundamental digital marketing concepts with the MBA degree program from MUJ and use your knowledge to help brands meet their objectives.