Digital Marketing: Definition

Digital Marketing is the marketing process that encompasses the use of electronic media or the internet to reach the desired audience most effectively and easily. It is a robust combination of marketing and technology that has become inevitable in today’s market due to the daily expanding number of internet users. Simply, Digital Marketing is the process of introducing and convincing digitally present consumers to buy our products or services using digital platforms like social media, search engines, emails, and so on.

Though the term ‘digital marketing’ was popularized in the early 2000s, it has been around since the first radio broadcast in 1896. Yes, the first digital Marketing was performed using a wireless radio signal to sell the show tickets, and people even bought the tickets. Thus, the first digital marketing was successfully implemented right then, and people started using such platforms to market their products and services in a much more effective way.

So, what we can understand from this is that it does not necessarily need the use of the internet for it to be digital marketing, while any electronic devices for the marketing process also come under it.

Types of Digital Marketing

Previously, billboards and newspapers used to be the primary advertising media but now the context has changed, and more eyeballs are on a mobile screen than on roadside billboards and on newspapers. Thus, many ways are observed during the process of digital marketing to connect with customers. Based on the way and medium observed, it can simply be classified into two types: online digital marketing and offline digital marketing.

Online Digital Marketing

Online marketing, also called internet marketing, is a subset of the holistic digital marketing process, which involves the use of the internet to market goods and services online. So simply, marketing done using the internet can be called online digital marketing. Online digital marketing works to optimize effective and on-point online presence.

Use of websites, social media, blogs, and other digital platforms to sell products and services comes under online digital marketing. The various categories of online marketing include:

• Email marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC)
• Content Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Social Media Marketing (SMM)

A brief understanding of the categories of online digital marketing

Email Marketing:

Email marketing is one of the best and most used forms of online marketing, where the email is sent to a group of current or potential customers to deliver information about the services or products. Any form of marketing done through the use of email can simply be noted as email marketing.

Many companies and business organizations also use email to attract customers or recipients by providing various enticing schemes to make one fall for the desired product or service. To tailor the marketing messages and to keep the customers well informed, the use of group email can be the best option for any company or organization while saving time and money for both the sender and the highly specific, well-defined receiver.

To not receive the messages, one always has the option to unsubscribe from such emails. So as a whole, when used in a proper way without bothering the customers or spamming their inboxes, email marketing can be one of the most fruitful marketing media to get connected to the customers and keep them informed.

You can learn in detail about email marketing here. (What Is Email Marketing?)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is simply the process of optimizing your web traffic and performance by ranking it higher in the search results. It is the fundamental task of digital marketing to look over SEO and guide relevant visitors and potential customers to your site or any digital platform. SEO acts as the bridge between search engines and probable visitors/customers. The stronger the connection, the higher the traffic.

The basics of SEO include finding the right keyword /keyphrase to generate quality traffic, building links internally and externally, making the site friendly to search engines, thus assigning a unique, higher index value to the site. Despite the Acronym, SEO is as much about the audience/visitors as it is about the search engines. So, the quality content also plays a major role in SEO to get customers stuck to our content once they land on our site.

How does SEO work? The basics of SEO

The search engines do all the work of serving a visitor with the right and relevant results. During the process, the search bots called crawlers crawl inside every site they find to look for content and save the results. This process of storing and organizing the contents is known as indexing. The indexed contents are shown to the visitors until they find what they are searching for. The higher indexed contents are shown first. So one needs to get indexed higher to get more visitors.

So, to get ranked higher and be in the SERPs(Search Engine Result Pages), at first your site should be crawlable. To know if your pages are crawlable, you can simply go to Google and type ‘site:yourdomain.com’. This will show your respective pages indexed by Google. If not, you should first make the site and page friendlier to such search bots. For more specific results, you can sign up for free here ( Google Search Console ).

Secondly, your content should be genuine with appropriate keywords and key phrases to make your place in SERPs and get organic traffic. To learn more about this process, go to (HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK: CRAWLING, INDEXING, AND RANKING).

Content Marketing

Content being an integral part of digital marketing has always been important, no matter what field we are in. Good Content can be the best way to market anything; it speaks way better than any other medium. It can simply be considered as a way of communication that helps the viewer get informed about products and services, and helps marketers in maintaining viewer/customer retention by understanding their needs and necessities.

For the long-term relationship and engagement with the specified audience, content must be genuine, informative, and profit-yielding. Profit yielding- in the sense that customers get what they are searching for, and marketers get their target audience. The product/service description, informative article, how-to-use instruction, blog, etc, all come under content, and their delivery to the targeted audience is known as content marketing. Mostly online platforms like websites and social media are used as the medium for content marketing.

The rightly placed key phrases and keywords in content also help search engines to find the relevant customers, thus helping in the SEO of that particular content. So, Content Marketing covers everything right from creating detailed information of the product/service or any topic to delivering it to the chosen audience in the easiest way possible using various online platforms. To have a detailed understanding of content marketing, refer to Content Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an online advertising technique where an affiliate gets a commission on sales of a product or service, or on every click that converts. Here, an affiliate refers to any online platform, like a webpage or blog, which provides space on its site/page to other business companies (merchants) for advertising purposes. Such affiliates can choose the type of advertising they want to show on their platforms, as per the commission they get on each conversion. For this, the site should have sufficient traffic, and the content of the site should be relevant to the nature of the product/service to be promoted.

Without the need to handle customer service, affiliate marketing can be a great source of passive income for any digital media handler or site/page manager. The tracking links track the sales generated, and the commission gets calculated easily. Sometimes the merchants also provide some discount codes to hook the customers who come through the particular site. The affiliate’s job is to market the product effectively on digital platforms like social media, blogs, sites, digital billboards, and so on to generate sales and expand revenue. So, as a whole, affiliate marketing involves a transaction between three parties, ie, the merchant, the affiliate, and the customer.

Learn more about affiliate marketing here. (What Is Affiliate Marketing: How to Start in 4 Easy Steps)

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a trending online marketing model where digital platforms like Google Ads and social media are used to advertise anything, which may simply be a page, site, or any other commercial platform, with the intent to drive sales or traffic. It can be a great way for one to land their first traffic using other platforms simply by paying some amount to such mediators or marketers for every click. PPC allows a precise level of marketing as one can target only the potential and pre-specified customers, which is not at all possible using various traditional marketing techniques.

Have you seen Google showing some sites at first in SERPs(Search Engine Result Pages) when we search for some commercial items? Yes, one of the best examples of PPC is the search engine ads, where search engines like Google(Bing) show the specific paid advertisers in SERPs by clearly mentioning them as being sponsored. Now, when one clicks on such ads, the advertisers pay some amount to Google Ads, which simply makes it a pay-per-click advertising.

Role of ‘keyword’ in PPC

‘Keyword’ is simply a word or a phrase that the probable customer may type in search engines, looking for something related to that word with commercial or any other intent. Now, as a commercial site owner, if one wants to advertise something in search engines(Google), they need to find the most relevant keyword and take part in the Ad Auction, which is a bidding system. The keywords with higher searches will have higher rates for advertisement, as the conversion rates will be higher with those keywords being used. So, one must research thoroughly before bidding high on such keywords and should make sure that the keyword is completely relevant to our product, and the conversion rate will be highest with that specific searching category.

What Is PPC (Pay Per Click)? An Introduction to PPC Marketing can be very helpful if you want to learn PPC advertising in detail.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is simply a digital marketing technique that particularly focuses on search engines to market anything online by showing it in SERPs. As we discussed earlier in PPC advertising, keyword plays an important role in such marketing strategies as search engines recommend customers based on that particular keyword. SEM simply uses PPC advertising and works as per the technique used by PPC. It particularly focuses and works on maximizing the visibility of the ad.

Though SEO and SEM seem to be related terms that are used for the same purpose, they are used differently in digital marketing. PPC is the paid advertising method to market things and services, while SEO is a method to increase organic traffic without paying for ads. The brand that is being marketed is charged when any user clicks on that particular ad. Every search engine shows such ads at the top of the SERPs by clearly mentioning them as being sponsored. Thus, we can say that SEM uses the CPC technique to advertise goods/services in an effective way to help every click convert.

To learn more about SEM, reach out to (What Is SEM? A Guide to Paid Search Engine Marketing).

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media is now the most trending platform than any other platform ever can be. The number of social media users is exploding currently, which makes it a major platform to market any products or services by creating content or ads. The heavy traffic that we can receive on social media can easily tempt anyone to use it for any business promotional activities. The major social media platforms of today are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat, with billions of users multiplying day after day. This is the mass that one can never imagine on any other digital platform.

Every technique used on such social media to market goods or services is basically Social Media Marketing(SMM). Either by creating the pages and increasing the number of followers or by creating channels to hook up customers, one can easily advertise things on social media in an organic way. Not only this, but one can also use social media advertising to increase sales or simply generate traffic.

Social media is indeed a boon for today’s business drive and consequently an integral part of digital marketing. The massive presence of an online audience is making everyone rethink traditional marketing techniques, which in no way meet the expectations of today’s generation whole eyeballs continuously rotate on screens than in any other place. As of Jan 2020, 3.8 billion people use social media (source  Digital 2020 reports). Thus, catchy social media marketing can easily flood in sales in no time when targeted a specific audience tactfully. To get the most out of social media, one can also use various social media management tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and so on, which is highly recommended.

So, while we look at all of these online digital marketing categories, we can say that the marketing trend is changing rapidly. So, we should follow the trend at the same pace to make the best out of our businesses or to market our goods and services to the maximum number of audiences. Thus, there is no alternative to online digital marketing for aggressive marketing.

Social Media Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide can be a great platform to learn more about Social Media Marketing.

Offline digital marketing

The other form of digital marketing that doesn’t make use of the internet but is enhanced by using various electronic devices is offline digital marketing. They may seem like traditional ways of advertising, but they are equally important today too. Though the use of such offline media for marketing purposes is declining, they are still of great use. Such offline digital marketing media categories include:

• Radio marketing
• Television marketing
• Digital billboards
• Phone marketing

A brief understanding of categories of offline marketing

Radio Marketing

Radio marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, where Radio signals are used to broadcast marketing campaigns and audio ads. The broadcasting of the audio became popular right after the radio was invented, and ultimately was used to promote goods and services, too. The listening ears kept on increasing till the invention and availability of the television. Though the number of people listening to the radio has decreased, it is still not completely outdated. 85% of US citizens still listen to the radio at least once a week, and daily listeners listen to the radio 2 hours per day on average. (Source: Digital Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide)

So, the proper use of radio can still be fruitful to market commercial businesses and to provide information that necessarily may not be related to digital technologies and their components. Thus, more than 100-year-old electronic media, radio, can’t be completely forgotten and ignored while talking about digital marketing technologies.

Television marketing

Television(TV) changed the whole scenario of marketing when amplification made it practical to use in 1928, and TV started being used commercially. Right from then till now, TV has been continuously used as an integral part of mass marketing. The content started being created in video format to attract the viewers, and it became easier for marketers to reach the masses all at the same time. Unfortunately, today’s marketing platforms are highly specific and can be personalized according to the target market group, which may not be feasible using TV marketing. As a result, TV marketing is losing the race.

Though the popularity of TV is declining and is being replaced by Google’s video platform YouTube, TV is still holding the advertising market strongly. TV commercials still hold the whopping market of $200 billion, which makes it a giant industry that cannot easily be reduced to zero. According to the UK survey by Deloitte, 10% of respondents searched for certain products after they saw the television ad. This means we can still opt out of offline TV marketing as a primary advertising medium whenever we need a mass audience of all categories at the same time, at a low CPV(Cost per View).

Digital billboards

The computer-controlled large LED electronic display systems are fixed in crowded places with the intent to continuously advertise things and services, or to deliver various information in a catchy manner. Digital billboards mostly display static ads of 6 to 8 seconds repeatedly, which contain symbols, content, words, images, or any figures that can regularly be updated using a computer or any other input devices.

Digital billboards are also used as digital signage, combining the nature of traditional billboards with today’s technology to create stunning ads with an attractive mixture of graphics, light, and color. They are kept at a place with high traffic and visibility, and can be very high-yielding if targeted carefully. With the benefit of real-time adjustment, one can easily display things as per the requirement 24/7. The traditional billboards are now completely overtaken by digital ones that reduce the cost and time for printing, pasting, and removing the display, and even with better design flexibility.

To display short messages, discount information, daily sales, or information about special celebrations, digital billboards can be highly impactful. You can learn about various pros and even a few cons of digital billboards here (What Is a Digital Billboard?).

Phone marketing

The delivery of information about various products and services to potential customers using a phone is simply phone marketing. The two primary apps that are used for this purpose are messaging and calling apps.

Cold Calling

Cold calling, a form of telemarketing, is a process where a salesperson or marketer calls any probable customer with no previous contact to sell products/services. Such calls have been used to market things since the telephone was introduced. Though Cold calling did quite well at the beginning, it does not work at the same pace now. Many of the call receivers do not enjoy the process and even feel irritated, mostly when they are busy with other important tasks. But till now, many marketers have used this process to find their prospective customers.

As of now, to make 3 sales per day, marketers need to call an average of 52 customers, which is quite high compared to other forms of marketing. Because of this reason, many marketers now don’t bother to use this marketing medium to find customers until it becomes the final option.

Text Message Marketing

People open 98% of text messages received, out of which 90% are opened within 3 minutes of message arrival. It means text marketing is still one of the trending marketing media that can catch quite a number of eyeballs. As an advertising medium, text messages are used mostly to inform people about various offerings, discounts, and commercial openings within a territory. Such messages are also delivered as a reminder to the customers regarding certain services. So, text message marketing can be a good alternative to email marketing when you have access to the phone numbers of the customers and don’t have access to the internet.

Digital Marketing: The Inference

Here, in this article, we tried to explain digital marketing in brief. Though a detailed explanation of every online and offline digital marketing strategy will be covered in upcoming articles, stay awaited! And don’t confuse yourself with the terms associated with digital marketing, like native marketing, inbound marketing, sponsored content marketing, and so on, which may vary; understand that the core point is almost the same.

So, you may all have the question on your mind:

Is it compulsory to use digital marketing tactics and strategies to reach more audiences and be commercially successful? Or, are there any other ways out?

The answer is simple. Yes, there are other traditional ways of marketing too. But, why would anyone not use such a platform with billions of people and opt out of other traditional ways that struggle to attract even a few hundred numbers of eyeballs?

Hope this question, answers your question!

Now, let’s look at a few point-wise importance that may help you know more about the essentiality of digital marketing:

Cost-effective:

Digital marketing is highly cost-effective compared to other means of advertisement, with awesome ROI (Return On Investment). One can easily opt out of ways according to the size of the company and the availability of the budget. Currently, one has the potential to earn up to $44 for every 1$ spent, giving an ROI of 4400 percent!

The highly targeted audiences engage with digital advertisements at a higher rate, thus ensuring cost-effectiveness with no extra associated cost.

One simple example is that advertising with an attractive digital billboard instead of a traditional printed flex banner can save the money involved in printing, pasting, and removing the banner, thus reducing the time and cost involved.

2. High conversion rate

The conversion rate is comparatively higher when such digital platforms are used for marketing the products and services, as we can be highly specific while targeting the audience. Also, earlier we learned about an average of 4400 times ROI in email marketing, which clearly explains everything about the conversion ratio of digital advertising.

The other strategies with the highest conversion rates are SEO, Social Media Marketing, PPC Advertising, and so on, as they detect and connect probable customers in the most effective way.

3. Real-time data analysis and easy content modification

Using various analytical tools, we can do real-time analysis of our marketing campaign and measure its effectiveness. If we don’t get the expected ROI, we can simply change our strategy and even the content within minutes to attract the most potential customers and save our time and money. This benefit makes digital marketing much easier to work with, compared to other traditional marketing methods.

4. Highest number of audiences

Digital marketing is all about reaching the platforms where people spend most of their time. The Internet is the most used platform, which collects a mass of 4,929,926,187, which is 63.2% of the world population. As the internet is the primary medium for digital marketing, we can easily understand its importance from the given data.

5. Works best for low-budget start-ups to the biggest commercial companies

As we already discussed various digital marketing ways and strategies, we can easily know that we have marketing options for every product we sell.

Whether the company is a simple startup with a very low budget or it is among the aggressively ruling large commercial companies, digital marketing works best for all businesses. It is all up to the marketer to find out the best strategy for the respective businesses according to the size of the budget and the nature of the target audience. We can use various paid/free analytical tools for proper analysis to know the best strategy that one can market through for the best conversions.

6. Easy reach and interaction with the target audience

Digital marketing is the most interactive advertising medium, as real-time audience interaction is possible here. Advertisers can easily satisfy, convince, and answer customers’ confusions in no time using chats, comment boxes, or even emails. Such interactions certainly expand conversion rates, increasing the efficiency of the whole marketing campaign.

Also, one can easily share the contents of one platform with every other, thus increasing audience engagement. For example, we can create a post on Facebook and share it on any other desired platforms, like Twitter or all over the internet, using the respective medium.

7. Best option to reach mobile consumers and expand revenue

Digital marketing is the only medium that Integrates marketing with mobile technology. Currently, more than 3 billion people use smartphones, which is massive and is still increasing. Also, most people use mobile phones to search for the products or services they are interested in. So, we can hyper-customize such audiences’ needs and persuade them to buy our related products using powerful digital platforms.

8. Earn trust to build goodwill and reputation

The online presence of any business not only helps increase audience interaction but also works as a powerful tool to validate your business. People believe your content when they find you authentic, and it is easy to prove your authenticity only when customers find you in many places, mostly on digital platforms. So, using digital platforms, businesses can earn the trust of prospective customers to build goodwill, thus expanding overall revenue.

References:

• Digital Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising: What Is PPC & How Does It Work?
• Social Media Marketing for Businesses
• DIGITAL BILLBOARD ADVERTISING – EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW
• Number of smartphone users from 2016 to 2021
• Internet World Stats
• The Who, What, Why, & How of Digital Marketing