What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a form of marketing that involves the use of electronic devices compared to the traditional marketing techniques which consists of print media advertisements.
It is a technique of promoting your services or products on channels such as social media, search engines, emails, mobile applications, games, video streams or SEO. Marketing has historical roots in businesses but digital marketing is relatively a new practice that just started around few years ago on the mainstream.
A successful digital marketing campaign get you loads of inbound leads and sales in return making your business a success.
Definition of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing, also known as online marketing is a marketing practice that involves any digital means of communication. This could be even text messages, multimedia messages, social media pages or emails. Digital marketing is another word for Internet marketing. Both of these are basically the same thing.
Why Digital Marketing Matters
Do you still remember a specific TV advertisement or a billboard from your childhood? Yes everyone does.
Just like that certain advertisement which is still somewhere at the back of your mind, digital marketing creates a similar impact on the audience. The more they see, more likely they are to remember your company or product.
Most of the advertisements are eye catchy and attractive just for the fact that they want your attention, even if its for a second. It has seen that the companies are trying to sell solutions to problems rather than problem and whenever a person sees something the had a problem with, they will obviously look into it and research about it – this is where the advertisement has done its job.
The death of billboards
During your childhood days, have you ever drive past a billboard displaying an advertisement for a fast food restaurant and asked your parents to get you a meal? and the answer was ‘some other time’. Well, that could have happened to most of you. Secondly, billboards have been the most effective way of marketing by brands and companies.
These campaigns are sometimes very interesting as you can see one of them below.
However, billboard advertising is mostly dead now since the revolution of electronic devices. Digital marketing is everywhere where ever the eyeballs are on the devices. With over 4 billion people on earth in possession with electronic devices, do you think any where else would be an effective method of advertising compared to billboard advertisements.
Billboards will completely die out soon. Why? Technology is advancing at exponential speed and digital marketing will be the next innovation of advertisement.
Driverless cars getting more eyeballs day by day will result in billboards and road side advertisements getting 0 focus because the drivers will not have to focus on the roads anymore.
Digital Marketing Assets
Digital marketing assets could be anything that your company or you personally possess digitally. It simply has to be a digital object that you use for digital marketing. You must be in possession of multiple assets without even knowing about them. Let me enlist some of them:
- Social Media Pages such as Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest etc.
- Graphical Branding (logos, icons, media etc.)
- Your Website
- Images and Videos
- Virtual Products or Tools
- Official testimonials or Reviews such as Trustpilot.
- Textual Content (blogs, eBooks, descriptions etc.)
Comparison of Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing
Mostly these both are confused with each other. Digital marketing and inbound marketing both are mostly using the same tools such as emails and publishing online content. The main purpose of both of these is to grab the attention of the prospect and turn them into a customer (sell them their product).
Digital marketing involves multiple tools and the main aim for it to convert the prospects into a customer and build the online presence of their brand. A company’s digital marketing strategy may focus on building the brand reputation on multiple platforms or they might use only 1 platform and have all their focus on it.
Inbound marketing is a global concept. In inbound marketing, the goal is considered at the first place and then the research for tools begin. The tools are looked upon how will they be beneficial to reach effective customers and when shall the sales funnel should be targeted.
As a marketing expert, the most important factor to keep in mind regarding digital marketing and inbound marketing is that you have to keep both of them along with you. They will work best when together. Unity is the key. Inbound marketing is the main structure and purpose of cost friendly digital marketing and makes sure the digital marketing campaign reach its goal.
Digital Marketing and its types
The 2 main piers for digital marketing are online marketing and offline marketing.
Online marketing is divided into a handful of categories. They are the following:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is one of the digital marketing strategy that solely focuses on increasing your website’s visibility in search results on search engines such as Google, Yandex, Yahoo or Bing. SEO is very important in attracting organic traffic from search engines and for this you have to follow different SEO techniques to increase your keyword rankings in search results
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing is similar to SEO with one difference. SEO is only about the organic traffic whereas in SEM, pay-per-click ads are set on certain keywords to get your website as #1 in SERPs.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy and technique of generating valuable, relevant and reader attractive content to acquire a specific audience with the main purpose of getting a profitable customer action which could be a product sale, seminar invite or anything else.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing is another digital marketing technique which is done on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest or any other social media platforms. SMM includes setting up paid ads on each platform and establishing a well managed page with everything about your company on a social page to increase the reach and enable people to search for you.
Pay-per-Click Advertising (PPC)
PPC stands for pay per click. It is a digital marketing technique in which the brands pay every time someone clicks on their ad. It allows the advertisers to bid for an ad placement in the SERPs sponsored links whenever someone is searching for a relevant keyword related to the business.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an online marketing strategy in which a company pays influencers to promote their products and services to generate sales and the promoters get a commission for each sale. Affiliates place ads and promote the product on various platforms such as websites, apps, blogs. Commissions are paid on per sale basis.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a very effective digital marketing technique which is carried out by sending mass emails to prospects, potential leads and customers. It enables brands to convert prospects into customers and previous buyers into loyal long lasting returning clients.
SMS Marketing or Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is a multi functional offline marketing technique that is focused to reach a certain audience directly on their mobile phones or electronic devices. This is mostly done through text messages or calls.
The benefits of digital marketing
Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people, but it offers a number of other advantages as well. These are a few of the benefits.
A broad geographic reach
When an online ad is posted, you can target it all around the world unless you limit it geographically. This enhances your business reach to unlimited locations and gives you a chance to reach out people across the borders without actually going there. Moreover, the digital marketing ads are interest based and only the people who have interest in your filed will be able to see your ad. This is how the algorithms work.
Cost efficiency
Digital marketing is a cost efficient method of advertising compared to the traditional marketing techniques. The costs for billboards, newspaper ads and other television show ad spots can cost higher than digital marketing.
On the other hand, you can not control the interest based audience on traditional marketing techniques but in digital marketing, you have a free hand and can easily adjust the audience that you ad will be visible to.
Hence the traditional marketing strategies give you less control over who can see your ad.
In digital marketing, you can easily change what your audience is looking at. Editing the content of a web page or social media page is just a matter of few clicks. If you don’t know how to edit a website, don’t worry about it and get an expert web development agency for your company.
Therefore, digital marketing gives you a higher flexibility and customer engagement for the amount of money you are spending on ads.
Quantifiable results
Marketing strategies must be economical and cost effective. You must have to know what are the incoming results. How many customers are you getting? Where are the customers coming from and how much revenue are you generating from your campaigns.
The sole purpose of an e-commerce store is to drive sales and generate revenue from your digital marketing campaign.
The most widely used questions for a new customer is “How did you find us?” . You must have came across this multiple times online too. This is only done to quantify the brand’s digital marketing strategy and see what is performing well and what is not.
Unfortunately, the pre chat survey is not done by most companies. This is due to the nature of their business. Therefore they have to use multiple tracking tools in order to track their traffic. One of them is Google Analytics.
Each digital marketing campaign is automatically tracked by their respective platforms. The number of leads obtained, the amount of audience reached and the number of conversions are tracked. Apart from this, user behavior is also tracked like what page was visited by the audience and for how long.
Easier personalization
Offline marketing does not let you gather customer data compared to digital marketing. The data collected through online marketing is also more precise and accurate and related to your relevant niche.
If you are selling a certain product and in your marketing campaign if you only target the interested people or target those people who have already looked at your products. Your results would be unexpectedly outstanding. You will notice a significant amount of increase in revenue. This is because you are targeting an already interested audience in your product.
Now imagine you are selling a service related to website development and you are targeting people with government jobs. I highly doubt anyone from them will be even interested in that. They will just look at the ad while scrolling through there feed. This way you will be loosing a lot on your advertising budget and hence making no sales.
Digital marketing will also inform you whether someone has opened up your email or an ad or not. This is how tracking works. And after all these tracking techniques, the data collected is of high value.
Digital marketing lets you keep all your data at your fingertips and re target them anytime you want.
More connection with customers
Real time communication while advertising is only possible with digital marketing. It also enables the customer to communicate with you.
If your social media is not getting enough engagements on each post or videos, the page will soon die out. Hence you will loose the trust and reputation from your new incoming clients. If a post gets lots of comments and likes, it may become viral resulting in lots of more engagements and become talk of the town.
Increased visibility also results from more engagements thus resulting in more sales. Make sure you interact with your customers and understand their needs to develop brand loyalty and your brand’s positive image.
Easy and convenient conversions
Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope for is a call after someone views your ad. Imagine you are washing dishes and watching TV. Will you be able to contact the company you just saw in the advertisement? I guess NOT. And by the time you are available to call, it will be out of your mind already.
With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the sales funnel right away. They might not make a purchase immediately, but they’ll stay connected with you and give you a chance to interact with them further.
