8+ Trendy Pillars of Digital Marketing: 100% Growth (2021)

Are you looking for the pillars of digital marketing? In 2021, digital marketing is trending a lot. Almost every business targets digital marketing to outreach their business. A successful digital marketing strategy friends on the pillars of digital marketing. 

Digital marketing best practice is the combination of the right strategy and execution. Even if you’re running a small business or a corporation, the strategy lies on the pillars of digital marketing. 

Before detailing, I have a small question.

Are you looking for a steady growth in your business?

If your answer is YES, you are at the right place right now. 

If you understand the pillars of digital marketing, you can execute your plans accordingly.

Don’t forget, digital marketing is a performance marketing channel. Right digital marketing strategy is the key to performance. 

Now come to the pillars of digital marketing. 

According to me, the following channels are the pillars of digital marketing. 

1. Niche research
2. Keyword research
3. Content creation
4. SEO
5. Social media
6. SEM
7. Email marketing
8. Content Marketing
9. Website design
10. Analytics

So, let’s disclose how important are the above pillars in digital marketing. 

Niche Research is one of the Primary Pillars of Digital Marketing

As a digital marketing professional, I must say niche research is the foundation. It is one of the primary pillars of digital marketing as well. 

Niche is the topic of your business. It seems to be very easy to find a niche, but actually it is the hardest one. 

You may ask why you need to know your niche well?

I’ve found some important causes behind it. 

1. Understand your industry.
2. Identify your competitors.
3. Know your audience.
4. Make strategy accordingly.

Let me dive into the briefing of the above. 

Niche research is one of the best pillars of digital marketing because it is the foundation of your business.

Understand your industry

Every industry is equal in the terms of business. But the strategy for business development is not the same. 

If you understand your industry well, you can proceed further. 

Here is an example for you. 

Suppose you are running an ecommerce business. You’re dealing with handcrafts. You definitely want to get leads from those people who can buy your product. 

On the other hand, if you are running a digital marketing training, your target is to close admission. Here you’ve to target those who can get admission to your course. 

Apparently both are looking the same. But there is a huge difference between both.

Want an explanation?

For the above ecommerce industry, your buyers are those who love decorating their rooms and offices. So, you need to target those first. 

For digital marketing training, your customers are generally students who want to develop their career. 

Now, hope you can understand the difference between the above. 

Identify your competitors.

Competitor analysis is the most significant part of every business growth. When you can understand your audience, you can definitely know your competitors. 

Identifying your competitor is a bonus obviously. 

Why?

The competitor analysis helps you to understand the strategy for your business growth. Competitor analysis is treated as one of the pillars of digital marketing.

How?

• First, the keywords your competitors are using to promote business. 
• Second, the type of contents they produce. 
• Third, backlink to rank higher organically.
• Fourth, branding strategy they’re using.
• Firth, revenue generation opportunity. 

If you want steady growth, you’ve to identify your competitors’ activity.

Know your audience

Audience is the ultimate. Suppose you’ve created a stunning website, produce the best content, but don’t get traffic, you can convert your endeavour to revenue. 

If you want a steady business growth, you need to know your audience well. 

Audience persona is the best ranking factor in all cases. Even you can only collect user data from various tools. 

While you recognize your audience including their age, gender, location and more, you can target the specific one with ease. 

Remember, the best business comes from the top strategy that comes from the true research. 

Make strategy accordingly

This is the final stage of niche research. After getting all the above, you’ve to plan the strategy. 

As per my personal experience, among other strategies, I always prefer content gap analysis.

Even to reach the right people, I recommend choosing the best channels along with the timing. 

Never think, business strategy means always get business revenue. It is beyond that. 

As per my personal research, I’ll say it is a combination of 

Communication

Outreach

Revenue. 

You can say the best communication helps good outreach and passively helps in increasing revenue. 

Keyword research

Keyword research is one of the most important pillars of digital marketing. Every online business growth is based on the keyword research. 

And even, keyword research is the goldmine of business. 

Now you may ask why keyword research is one of the important pillars of digital marketing?

I’ve penta for you. These are…

1. Identify the search terms.
2. Predict the overall trends.
3. Understand the detailed metrics.
4. Analyse your organic and paid competitor.
5. Develop branding and generate leads

Almost every digital marketing strategy is based on this digital marketing pillar, keyword research. 

Now, let’s disclose how the above smoothen the journey. 

Identify the Search Terms

Keyword is the search term, the combination of word or words or phrases. The best practice is to collect data on the basis of searched terms. 

Generally people search to 

• Know
• Decide
• Buy
• Sell
• Communicate

So, if you can understand the searches within your industry, you can convert the business to the profit easily. 

Through keyword research, the above is possible. 

Predict the overall trends

Very recently I’ve faced a challenge. I’ve picked one keyword for my client, and there were less trends at that time. But later it becomes trendy. My client is happy. 

But it may be reversed. 

Suppose you pick a keyword and it doesn’t have good trending, it may give you a tough competition. 

So, my suggestion is to check the overall trends. 

Disclaimer: You can’t compare seasonal keywords with general one. 

For general keywords, the overall trends indicate good revenue. 

To understand trends, you can use Google Trends. 

Understand the detailed metrics

Gathering keywords is important, but more important is to know the important metrics of your listed keywords. 

Here are the most important metrics. 

1. Search volume
2. CPC
3. Competition or Difficulty
4. Allintitle and allinurl
5. Trending

Search Volume

Search volume is the metrics through which you can understand how popular is the keyword. 

Having a decent search volume is good. So always try to pick those keywords which have a good search volume. 

Here is a twist. 

For head keywords the search volume is higher whereas for long tail keywords, the search volume is moderate. 

If you target the best keyword within your industry, you may get huge 

So, one thing you have to remember and that is a minimum of search volume (min 100-500/month). Though it varies from industry to industry. 

Not only the search volume, the other important parameter of keyword research is CPC.

CPC

CPC stands for cost per click. CPC is important to target paid traffic to your business. 

When you search a keyword, you must check if there is any CPC value. 

You might hear, CPC is not important for organic results. But I don’t think so. 

Rather, CPC opens an opportunity to rank faster. 

Actually CPC measures the marketing expenditure online. So, for lead generation, CPC (of keyword) is still at the top of the list. 

Now come to the point. Try to check if your targeted keyword has a minimum CPC value. 

Why?

If there is a CPC value, the keyword is targeted by advertisers. Thus having a CPC value is an important metric in keyword research. 

Google Ads Keyword Research tool is the best for CPC data.  

Competition or Difficulty

Competition is one of the most important parameters of keyword research. For ranking in SERPs, you’ve to know the competition matrices. It is popularly known as keyword difficulty. 

Competition generally measures how difficult to rank (with your keyword) for a keyword. 

As a digital marketing professional, I’d recommend you to check a minimum competition at least. 

The competition is also a parameter of popularity (popular keyword).

There are lots of keyword research tools available in the market. All have their own algorithm. So, the competition/difficulty they provide varies from tools to tools. 

Keyword difficulty or competition is dependent on the following. 

1. Website domain and page authority.
2. Website age.
3. Number of referring domains.
4. Types of link

In general keyword difficulties are popularly known as 

1. Search difficulty (SD)
2. Paid difficulty (PD)

For organic ranking targets, the search difficulty is the first parameter whereas for paid ranking, definitely the paid difficulty comes first. 

Allintitle and Allinurl

Allintitle and allinurl are the hidden treasures of keyword research. Generally both denotes the popularity of the keyword you target. 

Why hidden treasure?

Allintitle describes how many people use that keyword in their title of page or article. 

Allinurl denotes how many people use the same keyword in their website or webpage URL. 

Both are significant for ranking. 

Trending

Trending of a keyword is not always important, but it is an essential parameter as well. 

Trending of a keyword depicts popularity. 

Every keyword has trends. It may be a seasonal or non seasonal. 

If you find a decent trend of your targeted keyword, you can pick that keyword. 

Now let’s finalize your keywords with all the parameters. 

Hope you can understand why keyword research is the pillars of digital marketing. 

Content Creation as Strongest Pillars of Digital Marketing

Once the legend Bill Gates has said,

“Content is king”

Content is still the king (important) undoubtedly. So, content creation is definitely the strongest pillars of digital marketing. 

When you search anything on the internet, you’ll find various types of content like articles, infographics, video, podcasts, case study and more. 

All are essential according to their purposes. 

Let’s know the important content forms that rule the internet in this era. There are huge, among them I’ve picked the most populars.

1. Listicles
2. Tutorials or ‘how to’ (DIY) type
3. Video tutorial
4. Infographics
5. Social media
6. Case studies/Testimonials
7. Checklists
8. Vlogs (video blogs)
9. Product reviews
10. Podcasts
11. Ebooks
12. Whitepaper

Listicle

Listicle is one of the most popular types of content. We usually scan the lists to get the information. It is popular in blogging, social media and other platforms as well. 

Through the listicles, you can cover various types of topics. 

Even it is good for a content cluster. 

Generally a huge number of traffic like this type of content. 

Tutorial (how to) 

Do you know why tutorials are so important?

Tutorials are great for encouraging and educating your audience. The best way to write ‘how to’ content is to break the whole into smaller parts. 

Actually tutorials or ‘how to’ content is growing because it provides actionable steps. 

Tutorial content is another important weapon of blogging as well. 

Video Tutorial

Video is the most engaging content form in this era. People love to watch videos not only for entertain themselves, but also to educate. 

Video tutorial also helps to develop branding as well as easy to interact. 

If you plan to make a step by step process of anything, create a video tutorial using screencasting. 

Remember, video tutorials attract every type of audience. So, the potentiality is huge here. 

Infographics

Infographics are the most engaging content today. According to a research, infographic brings 60% more traffic to your business. 

Infographics gather valuable information all together. So if you want to educate your audience or wanna sell any product, the infographics help you a lot. 

If content writing is another important pillars of digital marketing, then infographics are the gem of content in this era. 

So, creating infographics is next to important to rank on your business. For creating infographics, you can use Canva. 

Social media

Almost half of the industry is related to social media. Social media content is necessary undoubtedly. Social media content helps in many ways. Some of them are:

Create content according to goals

Share with strategy to make it viral.

Measure the result.

If you want to grow your brand awareness, social media is the first channel. 

Why?

Simply because of the fastest communication possibility. So, social media content is growing day by day. 

Case Studies/Testimonials

Industry specific results come from case studies. Actually case studies are the proof. So you can easily convince your audience with the case study. 

To sell any produce or deal with any service the case study works like magic. 

Today every industry produces case studies to develop their business growth. 

Checklists

Checklists are basically ‘to do’ type of short and effective content type. 

Checklist is also best for providing supporting information. In this era the checklist is very demanding as well. 

Every company and individuals have demanded to produce a checklist to improve business growth. 

Vlogs (video blogs)

Vlog or video blog is truly increasing. The popularity of vlogging is to update blogs into video format. 

Among all other contents, the vlogs are supremely important. The visual and personal connection is definitely a bonus. 

So, vlogging is popular among all, especially the newbies. Even for business promotion, vlogging has no alternatives in this era. 

Product reviews

Product review is one of the most popular content types. The unbiased product review, grows sales. 

The unbiased product review helps the user to decide their buyer journey. It is very important if you’re selling any product or dealing with any services. 

Always remember, product review helps to work for those people who are actually interested in those products. So, you’ve a chance to get prospects. Reviewing your genuine and unbiased product or service you are able to convert the prospect to a customer. 

Podcasts

Podcasts are booming today. Every industry targets traffic through podcasts. Podcasts are the audios. According to my knowledge and experience, it plays a vital role in voice search. 

Podcast is also a written transcription. So, you can embed an uploaded podcast to your blog or website to improve your search result. 

In future, it will be an essential content marketing pillars. So creating podcasts and publishing is the best way to stand alone. Today almost 75% content marketers target podcasts. 

Ebooks

If you want to provide value beyond simply a blog post, obviously you need to focus on ebooks. 

Today ebooks are becoming popular. As a result almost every industry uses this content for many purposes. 

Ebook is a great weapon for lead generation. Apart from it, it helps to establish authority as well.

If you have a plan to giveaway, an ebook is one of the best options irrespective of every business. 

As a result ebook is one of the growing content types mainly after covid-19. 

Whitepaper

In every online journey there are several steps. Whitepaper helps to decide. Whitepapers are the detailed guides that come from in-depth research which helps to solve a problem. 

Whitepaper is a very helpful tool to develop leadership within the industry. It makes you a ‘go-to-expert’ in your industry. 

As per demand there are three types of whitepapers. 

Numbered list – This helps to build a question and answer list including issues (problems) around the niche/product/service. 

Product or service related – This type is very straight forward. It focuses on the product background, key features, and benefit of that product or service.

Buying process – this is the most convincing process that helps a buyer to complete his buying process. This type of whitepaper is called modern whitepaper as well. 

Actually whitepaper helps business growth with the following:

Branding

Trust building

Lead generation

Today whitepaper is very important for all the purposes. 

Not only the above, there are other popular content forms available. Some of them are:

• Press release
• Guest blogging
• Slideshow and
• More.

Always remember, content is the most powerful pillars of digital marketing nowadays. 

SEO as a Leverage Pillars of Digital Marketing

SEO or search engine optimization is the practice to bring organic traffic to your business. In this era mainly after covid-19, almost every business searched for a steady growth. 

The steady business growth is possibly coming after your organic ranking. And the organic ranking comes from SEO. 

Undoubtedly SEO is one of the most significant pillars of digital marketing. Even if you look forward, you’ll see SEO has no alternatives. 

You may know more about SEO.

Here SEO in brief for you. 

Before everything about SEO, always remember, SEO is a time taking process that brings quality results organically. 

So, if you wanna get quality results, you need to concentrate on SEO strategically. 

Let me discuss the wings of search engine optimization. 

Search engine optimization or SEO is of 7 types. 

• On page
• Off page
• Technical
• Local
• Voice search
• Youtube
• eCommerce

The above 7 wings are most significant according to me. 

On Page SEO

On-page SEO is actually the anatomy of every website or web page. Google ranks web pages, not websites. Here on-page SEO helps to rank your web page high in search engines.  Do you know why on-page SEO is also called one of the strongest pillars of digital marketing?

On page SEO helps to bring leverage website traffic to your business with the following parameters.

On page SEO consists of the following:

1. Keyword placement
2. Title optimization
3. URL optimization
4. Meta description
5. Image optimization
6. Heading tags
7. Internal and external linking

Keyword placement

The keyword is the most essential SEO pillar. It is one of the strongest pillars of digital marketing as well. The best SEO practice is to put keywords accordingly. If keyword research is the foundation, then keyword placement is the key of SEO.

The best keyword placement means use keywords at the most important places like 

• Title of the article or page
• URL of the page or article
• At meta description of that page or article.
• Minimum one heading tag
• Image alt tags.

Placement of keywords is the key to SEO success. According to me, if you understand on page SEO and practice accordingly, you can generate the potential business or leads. 

Title Optimization

Title is the primary place where people focus first. So, title helps to increase click through rate (CTR). 

Title optimization is another leverage on page SEO practice. Our on page SEO actionable guide denotes the detail of title optimization. 

In generally, an enticing title must have

Power word

Keyword

Number

Remember, title is the most significant part that helps to rank higher. Title helps searcher to attract.  Title is best for CTR and thus it is one of the most successful pillars of digital marketing and SEO as well.

Meta Description

Meta description is another onpage SEO parameter. Through the meta description you can convince your audience about the context. 

A powerful meta description must have

• Keyword
• Important subject about the page or content

Through the meta description, your audience can communicate with you. The best practice of creating meta description is to focus the subject or the topic of the article or page. 

URL optimization

URL is another important onpage SEO parameter. The best onpage practice is to use short keyword based url for pages and articles. 

The best performing URLs are generally short in size along with the primary keyword.

I’ve seen many make their title as URL. That is the wrong technique. 

Why?

Suppose you use a 60 words title, and you make the whole as URL, it doesn’t help SEO growth. 

Rather use the primary keyword only as your URL. That’s the best performing strategy. 

If you plan to update your content periodically, don’t use date or year in your title. 

Here is an example for you. 

I’ve written an article on an On page SEO actionable guide. 

The title I’ve used is ‘On-Page SEO: 9+ Best Actionable Guide to Rank (Step by Step)’

But the URL I’ve used short and crispy and that is ‘https://bivatechnologies.com/blog/on-page-seo/’

The underlined section is my primary keyword and I’ve used it as a URL. 

I’ve got a good result using this technique. 

Image Optimization

Image is another important section of SEO. Every article must have a good unique and catchy featured image. 

Do you know image ranks?

How?

If you’re familiar with image optimization, you definitely understand well. But if you’re a new one and want to know how to rank, the following section definitely helps you a lot. 

Always optimize image with image alt tags. 

Image alt tags are basically your primary or secondary keywords. 

Best image optimization comes if you fill all the details of your image with important credentials like

Title

Subject

Ratings (if you want)

Tags

Authors

Copyright

I recommend filling all the important fields of your images. The same technique is always performing best wherever you use your image. 

Heading tags

Heading tags or H tags are essential for both readability and SEO. It guides users to understand the topic, sub topics well. 

Heading tags improve readability well. Readability helps to reduce bounce rate and increase dwell time. 

Both the above are important factors of SEO. 

So, focus your heading tags with the followings:

1. Use primary and secondary keywords within your heading tags. 
2. Make proper hierarchy
3. Provide the relevant information under every heading. 

A good article or a page must have multiple heading tags. Another benefit of heading tag is, you can break your article in small parts. Small paragraphs help the user to understand well. 

Internal and external linking

SEO is not about links, but good SEO performs on the linking structure of your page or article. You’ve heard of backlinks. Backlinks are important, but a quality SEO must have good linking structure as well. 

Internal and external links are equally important for an ideal linking structure. 

Internal linking means linking to your important pages or articles within your website. 

External link refers to the authority link to those whom you follow or specifically whom you think as authority to your specific post. 

A good combination of both internal and external helps you rank faster. 

If you trust SEO as a pillars of digital marketing, then on page SEO is the anatomy of your website. 

Off Page SEO

Like onpage SEO, off page SEO is equally important. Off page SEO helps to bring traffic to your website or article. 

Off page SEO means do some activity outside of your website to rank that website. 

Off page SEO best practices are:

1. Brand awareness
2. Link building
3. Social media engagement
4. Content marketing
5. Local SEO
6. Guest blogging
7. Podcasts
8. Press release
9. Videos

The best off page SEO practices help you to bring leverage and quality traffic to your website and rank faster. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is all about passing all hurdles of crawling and indexing. 

Technical SEO is one of the most important parameters today. Night only the onpage or offpage SEO, the technical aspects are equally essential to rank your website in the Search engine. 

The important technical SEO factors are:

1. Site loading speed
2. XML sitemap
3. Robots.txt file
4. Canonicalization
5. Website architecture
6. Keyword mapping and
7. More. 

Local SEO

Local SEO is tremendously growing. Local SEO helps to rank your website to a place (local) easily. 

The best part of local SEO is the targeted traffic. As a result the business develops faster than traditional SEO perspective. 

There are many business directories available today. Among them Google my business, Bing places, 

Almost 99% business intends to rank locally. As a result local SEO is becoming one of the most important and demanding SEO wings. 

As the local SEO focuses the local business, it helps global business growth gradually. Thus local SEO is one of the most significant parts of search engine optimization.

Voice search

Do you know how many people use smartphones today to search? Most of them use voice search instead of typing. Hope you can understand what I mean to say. 

Day by day the trend of using voice search is increasing. As a result voice search SEO is booming. Mainly if you want to make your business growth smarter and futuristic, you need to focus on voice search optimization of your website. 

YouTube SEO

Youtube is one of the most important social media channels and one of the finest platforms for education and entertainment. 

Youtube is one of the growing platforms nowadays. Youtube SEO is very trending today. As a result many business owners concentrate on Youtube SEO more than general search engine optimization. 

eCommerce SEO

E-Commerce is vastly growing today. As a result, the demand for eCommerce SEO is huge. Many ecommerce business owners optimize their online store with leverage SEO activities. 

Ecommerce SEO always helps to bring more revenue. E-Commerce is a dedicated industry today. This is the cause of ecommerce SEO today. 

Social media

In this smartphone era, the social media is one of the best digital marketing pillars. Social media helps business development in many ways. Two of them are:

• Brand awareness
• Communication development

Brand awareness

Whatever the business size of opportunity, the brand awareness is the most essential. 

Among the crowd, only brand value helps you to stand out. 

Brand awareness is easy in social media, because you can connect many people easily. 

If you develop your brand value before your targeted audience, you can easily able to generate good amount of business. 

Communication development

Communication development is truly significance in rapid business growth. Communication the key of potentiality. 

In this era, the communication development is essential because it helps to evaluate your business among other competitors. 

Like brand awareness, the communication development is equally important for long term benefit. 

Suppose you run an e-commerce store, you must communicate with your prospects. Here brand awareness automatically develops. 

Why SEM is one of the Key Pillars of Digital Marketing

Search engine marketing or SEM is always very popular for every type of business. Getting ranked with SEO is a time taking process. Here the SEM works the best. 

Search engine marketing or SEM is the fastest way to rank in search engines. 

On the other hand, SEM strategically brings quality leads even without having a website. 

SEM is a strong digital marketing pillar and the best for fastest business growth. 

In this era, paid traffic is useful to get a good amount of business revenue. Almost every business target SEM for the above. 

Is Email marketing a Pillar of Digital Marketing

Email is the best channel for inbound marketing. Today business growth is mostly dependent on email marketing. Honestly, I must say email marketing is the pillar of digital marketing. 

Email outreach is the best technique to reach those who already like you (eg. website). As a result, the conversation rate is more than 100%. 

Email optin is the best process of email marketing. Through this pillars of digital marketing, you can easily bring your business to the next level. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the best outreach strategy. Content marketing is one of the most successful pillars of digital marketing. 

Writing a content is not all, rather presenting the content to the right audience is the key of digital marketing. 

Content marketing helps every type of business like ecommerce, small business, service, LMS and other. 

It is the best outreach strategy for any type of contents. 

Website design

Stunning website design is another pillars of digital marketing. 

Website design is essential because it showcases your business. At the same time it helps to bring the visitor and help them to stay connected with your business. 

Stunning website is definitely one of the most important parts in digital marketing. Every business is not the same, so website design matters here. 

If you want to establish their online business, you need to make a useful website with all the relevant information pages post design layout and other important parameters that help you to bring the exact revenue. 

Analytics

Every business needs analysis. Analysis is one of the pillars of digital marketing. If you want to gain good revenue through your business, you must justify your business with the analytical data. 

Generally Google and other search engine has its analytics to help every business growth. Analytics not only helps to charge the business growth rather it is beyond that. 

If you you want to know which is you are targeted country or location or who are you targeted customer all the behavior of your customer along with their demographic analytics is a based tool undoubtedly. 

Digital marketing is very important today. Digital marketing is important than analytics is one of the most significant parameters that help you to understand the growth of your business. 

Conclusion

Pillars of digital marketing help you to make your business popular within your industry. It helps you in many ways like lead generation traffic generation conversion and after sales support. In this article I have tried to discuss the most important pillars of digital marketing. If you want to gain more business, you have to understand and use all of the digital marketing pillars of channels accordingly. 

Reference: Wikipedia and Google Search