Hamed Wardak, Entrepreneur 

A century ago, anyone that needed to market something could just take out a small space in the daily newspaper. Later on, it became a few minutes of airtime for a TV commercial. A decade ago, marketing turned to websites and keywords. However, just in the past decade, marketing has changed more than in the past century before that combined. Gone are the days of prime time TV and printed ads with the best catchphrases in newspapers. We’re now living in a time of social media, apps and non-stop connectivity. These days, people average about 8.8 hours of their daily time online and practically everyone owns a smartphone. This means that everything that the consumers see is online, and the internet is the way forward for marketing. This is exactly how marketing turned into digital marketing. 

Why is it important? 

Thanks to smartphones, people are connected to the internet even when they’re asleep. From the moment that they open their eyes in the morning to the moment when they go back to bed, it’s the thing that gets most of their attention. One of the fundamental lessons in marketing is to be wherever the target audience is, and in today’s terms, that means being online.

What are the basics?

Websites 

The online real-estate giant is a company’s website. This is the storefront for any brand and business and it’s the main thing to getting more customers. A website needs to be secure, fast, easy to use, SEO optimized, and perhaps most important in recent days, it needs to be mobile-friendly. If a website has all of these things, it’s already a success, and the business can only grow from here. 

Search Engine Marketing 

If people don’t know about the business, aside from visiting the company website, the other way they can learn about it is through a hit on a search engine. This is done in two ways: paid search ads (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO). 

Paid search ads, also known as pay-per-click advertising, is where a company pays for every time someone opens - or clicks on - its advertisement, hence the name. This is often done through social media campaigns, paid search campaigns, YouTube advertisements, and a few other ways. 

Meanwhile, search engine optimization is the process of editing and improving a website’s content and code, so that the website ends up ranking a lot higher in a search engine’s search results. The way that search engines work is through scanning websites to determine what each is about. When they find this information, they return the most relevant data in a search. 

The most important things that search engines focus on is whether a website is secure, mobile-friendly, the length and quality of the content, the speed, the images, and the backlinks, as well as the experience of the users. 

All of this is just the very basics of digital marketing, but it represents key things a business needs to know about in order to become successful.