In every era, marketing has evolved based on what the customer is using. If you go back in history, you can see that at times when customers used Radio, it gave birth to radio advertising and marketing. Next, we got the boom of televisions, it is one of the widely used device globally, which allowed the companies to reach a mass audience with TV ads. Even today TV advertising is one of the most used advertising strategies for companies. Since the boom of the Internet, more customers started using the Internet, which gave birth to a new era of marketing originally called Internet marketing, which is now called Digital Marketing.

Now a days, we frequently hear the term Digital marketing we all think that we reasonably understand what actually it is. This thinking sometimes limits the scope and opportunity that the complete Digital marketing landscape will actually offer, which is why, when it involves nailing it down, we either turn dumbfounded or get stuck. To come out of such scenarios, it is important to know different types of Digital marketing opportunities that are available to your business. According to Salesforce, 75th of Total marketing Budget will head to Digital marketing.

Digital marketing depends upon the kinds of audience interactions. It revolves around managing and harnessing of various types of Digital marketing Channels and many varieties of Digital marketing services.

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels like search engines, social media, email, and their websites to connect with current and prospective customers.

Why companies use digital marketing?

1. Internet Users: As per the internet usage stats, 40% of the world population is using the internet.
2. Mobile Phones: Most of the users globally today use mobile phones for communication. As per a report 4.77 billion mobiles phone users globally, which will increase to 5.07 billion by 2019.
3. Targeting the Audience: In traditional marketing strategies, it is very difficult to advertise to the target audience with specific demographics & details. Today with digital marketing we have so many customised & personalised methods to target the audience exclusively.
4. Low Cost and High ROI: Most of the small and medium scale companies rely mostly on digital marketing strategies due to its low cost and high return on investment.

Digital Marketing Types

1. Search Engine Optimisation: SEO is the process of optimising your website to "rank" higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include Website, Blogs or Info-graphics.
2. Content Marketing: CM denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers. The channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy include Blogs posts, Ebooks and whitepaper, info-graphics, online brochures and look-books.
3. Social Media Marketing: SMM promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business. The channels you can use in social media marketing include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, linked In, Snap-chat, or google+.
4. Pay-Per-Click: PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google AdWords, which allows you to pay for top slots on Google's search engine results pages at a price "per click" of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC include Paid ads on Facebook, Promoted Tweets on Twitter.
5. Email Marketing: Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business's website.

Digital Marketing Strategies

Here is a list of five simple digital marketing strategies that any business owner can implement to help their business grow:

1. Setting a goal: Digital marketing is a great way for small businesses to prosper, but going into the method blindly can leave you with a jumbled mess. A lot of strategy and precision goes into digital marketing and having a goal helps you recognise what to focus on.
2. Creating a Marketing Funnel: The most successful businesses have a good marketing funnel in place. A marketing funnel is when you map out a customer’s journey from when a customer is a complete stranger to once they become a lead, then put certain methods in place that may encourage them to move through this funnel. Things like lead magnets, calls to action, opt-ins and offers are all effective pieces of a funnel. You’ll consider a marketing funnel in four parts: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
3. Developing a call-to-action: A call-to-action (CTA) is a picture or text that prompts visitors to take action, like subscribe to a newsletter, read a webinar or request a product demo. CTAs should direct people to landing pages, wherever you'll collect visitors’ contact info in exchange for a valuable marketing offer. In that sense, an effective CTA results in more leads and conversions for your web site. This path, from a click on a CTA to a landing page, illustrates a lot of desired process of lead generation.
4. Creating an Effective Lead magnet: The idea behind a lead magnet is to trade information. You supply something like a free download of a white paper, but in order to complete the download the individual has to fill out a form that will provide you with more information about them. You’ll use the information you gather to interact with them more as they progress through your funnel.
5. Driving Traffic: There a variety of ways you can drive traffic to your website.

• Quality Content: Use content like blog posts, press releases and articles on authority websites. Insert links to various places on your web site inside this content to create your brand name through exposure and drive traffic to your website.
• Keyword Strategy: Inserting related keywords into content will help your content and website show up in more search results, this leads to higher volumes of web traffic.
• Website Optimisation: Ensuring that your website is optimised and functioning at its best is essential. People don’t want to visit a website that doesn’t work properly.
• Social Media: Use engaging social media posts to attract more traffic to your site. Using pictures, video, and other relevant media will help your posts get more engagement.

We have many different specialisations so you will have different options to start your career.

1. Digital marketing strategist
2. Digital marketing executive
3. SEO analyst
4. Social media specialist
5. Google AdWords specialist
6. Email marketing specialist
7. Web Analyst
8. Online reputation manager

The importance of extracting information from the web is becoming increasingly loud and clear. Every few weeks, I realize myself in a situation where we need to extract information from the web to create a machine learning model. We have to pull or extract a large amount of information from websites and we would like to do it as quickly as possible. How would we do it without manually going to every web site and getting the data? Web Scraping simply makes this job easier and faster.

Why is web scraping needed?

Web scraping is used to collect large information from websites. But why does someone have to collect such large data from websites? Let’s look at the applications of web scraping: 

1. Price Comparison: Services such as ParseHub use web scraping to collect data from online shopping websites and use it to compare the prices of products.
2. Social Media Scraping: Web scraping is used to collect data from Social Media websites such as Twitter to find out what’s trending.
3. Email address gathering: Many companies that use email as a medium for marketing, use web scraping to collect email ID and then send bulk emails.
4. Research and Development: Web scraping is used to collect a large set of data (Statistics, General Information, Temperature, etc.) from websites, which are analyzed and used to carry out Surveys or for R&D.
5. Job listings: Details regarding job openings, interviews are collected from different websites and then listed in one place so that it is easily accessible to the user.

Web scraping is an automated method used to extract large amounts of data from websites. The data on the websites are unstructured. Web scraping helps collect these unstructured data and store it in a structured form. There are different ways to scrape websites such as online Services, APIs or writing your own code.

Why Python is best for Web Scraping

Features of Python which makes it more suitable for web scraping:

1. Ease of Use: Python is simple to code. You do not have to add semi-colons “;” or curly-braces “{}” anywhere. This makes it less messy and easy to use.
2. Large Collection of Libraries: Python has a huge collection of libraries such as Numpy, Matlplotlib, Pandas etc., which provides methods and services for various purposes. Hence, it is suitable for web scraping and for further manipulation of extracted data.
3. Dynamically typed: In Python, you don’t have to define datatypes for variables, you can directly use the variables wherever required. This saves time and makes your job faster.
4. Easily Understandable Syntax: Python syntax is easily understandable mainly because reading a Python code is very similar to reading a statement in English. It is expressive and easily readable, and the indentation used in Python also helps the user to differentiate between different scope/blocks in the code.
5. Small code, large task: Web scraping is used to save time. But what’s the use if you spend more time writing the code? Well, you don’t have to. In Python, you can write small codes to do large tasks. Hence, you save time even while writing the code.
6. Community: What if you get stuck while writing the code? You don’t have to worry. Python community has one of the biggest and most active communities, where you can seek help from.

How does web scraping work

To extract data using web scraping with python, you need to follow these basic steps:

1. Find the URL that you want to scrape
2. Inspecting the Page
3. Find the data you want to extract
4. Write the code
5. Run the code and extract the data
6. Store the data in the required format

Example: Scraping a website to get product details

Pre-requisite:

• Python 2.x or Python 3.x
• Selenium Library
• BeautifulSoup Library
• Pandas Library

1. We are going scrape online shopping website to extract the Price, Name, and rating of products, go to products URL
2. The data is usually nested in tags. So, we inspect the page to examine, under which tag the information we would like to scrape is nested. To inspect the page, just right click on the element and click on “Inspect”. When you click on the “Inspect” tab, you will see a “Browser Inspector Box” open.
3. Let’s extract the Price, Name, and Rating which is nested in the “div” tag respectively.
4. Write code:

#Let us import all the necessary libraries

from selenium import webdriver

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

import pandas as pd

driver = webdriver.Chrome("/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromedriver")

products=[] #List to store name of the product

prices=[] #List to store price of the product

ratings=[] #List to store rating of the product

driver.get("Product_URL")

content = driver.page_source

soup = BeautifulSoup(content)

for a in soup.findAll('a',href=True, attrs={'class':'.…'}):

name=a.find('div', attrs={'class': '….'})

price=a.find('div', attrs={'class':'….'})

rating=a.find('div', attrs={'class':'….'})

products.append(name.text)

ratings.append(rating.text)

df = pd.DataFrame({'Product Name':products,'Price':prices,'Rating':ratings})

df.to_csv('products.csv', index=False, encoding='utf-8')

To run the code, a file name “products.csv” is created and this file contains the extracted data.

If you’re a good marketer, and you’ve done your marketing planning, you recognize your content creation gets a little easier. To be a decent marketer, you actually do need to go through your business goals and objectives, realize your target market, and have a decent idea of a content strategy, with themes like lifestyles, products, and news. You’ll even build a monthly schedule with general concepts for what you’ll be posting about to best engage your follower.

If you are a marketer and in charge of running a company Facebook Page for a small startup or a large multinational corporation, one thing is just about the same, you can almost be sure that you can find your target audience on Facebook.

Why we need best content for Facebook? Well, Facebook has over 2.75 billion people that log in every month is reason enough. However, while your target audience is surely out there, reaching them is easier said than done, because not only do you have to keep an eye on things like trends and algorithm changes, but you also need to pay attention to the quality of the content you post on your company page.

Tips:

1. Follow relevant industry blog: Finding inspiration on industry specific blogs is one of the most effective things you can do your company Facebook Page from a promoting standpoint. First, you'll be ready to find content that is both useful to your audience and relevant to what your company is doing. Second, those blogs are usually updated on an everyday basis with all the latest developments and news, which means that you can never miss out on anything important, and neither will your followers.
2. Make use of customer feedback: Customer feedback is not only a great way to connect along with your audience and improve your customer service and the quality of your products, however it may also serve as a valuable source of inspiration. This involves reading about what your audience is talking regarding in the comment section on your Facebook Page, as well as their posts, checking your email on regular basis, and monitoring all the mentions your company has received on social media.
3. Post a variety of content: On your Facebook page, you’ll want to share a variety of content like Blog post, Photos, Press Release and videos.
4. Choose profile and cover images which are recognizable: Make sure that your cover image and profile picture are recognizable. As far as your profile picture is concerned, it will not only be displayed on your profile, but it will also be visible inside Facebook Search, and right next to each post and comment you make on Facebook.
5. Get inspired by your competitors: Getting inspired by your competition without copying them and then doing it better than them is the best-case scenario. If your competitors are posting high-quality pictures of their product, you can improve upon that and post a picture featuring several of your products, and then invite your followers to interact by asking a specific question.
6. Try selecting a monthly topic: One idea in makes an attempt to stay follower engaged is to select a unique topic for every month. Talk about and post links to sites that cover that topic. Having a different topic, you address every month demonstrates that you have a continuous online presence, making you appear much more interesting.
7. Offer value: Your Facebook page is a great venue for updates on your business, but don’t get carried away. People don’t want or need an in-depth report on your latest company feature. Try including a regular weekly or monthly feature, such as a “discount of the week” with a special offer on a product or service. Let everyone know this is an ongoing feature, so they’ll come back next time as well.
8. Avoid lengthy posts: You might realize each aspect of your business fascinating, but a long, rambling posts can never get likes, shares and comments you’re looking for. If you would like everyone read your posts, keep them short and sweet, usually between 100-250 characters.

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