What Digital Marketing Is?
You hear about it! Your organization uses it! But, do you really know what digital marketing is? Digital marketing is the modern-day advertising strategy that utilizes digital technology and continues to be widely adopted across many businesses.
The simplest way to define digital marketing is that it is a form of marketing that is basically conducted online or over the internet using electronic devices. The applicable electronic devices include desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, and other gadgets that
can be connected to the internet.
Digital marketing is a term that is used to describe the process of promoting products or services using digital technologies, such as social media, search engines, and display advertising. Digital marketing is a marketing strategy that uses digital channels to reach audiences. It is an umbrella term that includes social media, search engine optimization (SEO), email, and other related tactics. Digital marketing has grown from a niche segment into a mainstream marketing strategy.
The first step in digital marketing is to identify the target audience. The next step is to create an online presence for your business on the internet by developing an effective website and social media profiles. The third step would be to advertise your company’s products or services on search engines like Google and Bing and on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Technically, digital marketing could be considered the direct opposite of traditional marketing, which involves advertising products/services on traditional media such as television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and yellow pages.
Check out this amazing video that explains what digital marketing is and is not:
Aspects of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing can be conducted in various ways, and some of these aspects of digital marketing are highlighted below:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO helps businesses to improve their ranking on search engines.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): SEM is sometimes used along with SEO to make websites have higher or better visibility. SEM is a paid, online advertisement.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC): The principle behind PPC is that a business is only required to pay for its ads when a person clicks on them.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM): SMM entails that businesses can use social media to promote their products and services. In certain practices, businesses can hire social media influencers—those with a large following on social media platforms—to help them promote their products and services.
- Email Marketing: This advertising method makes it possible for businesses to send direct, promotional content to their prospective customers’ email addresses. Nowadays, many businesses have newsletters they periodically send to their customers to promote their existing or future products.
- Affiliate Marketing: This is a network of marketers that are rewarded based on their performance in line with previously agreed upon Per-Per-Scale (PPS) compensation. If they are able to promote an advertiser’s products and sales are made, the affiliate marketers will receive their promised compensation.
- Content Marketing: Businesses can connect with their current and prospective customers by publishing and distributing content such as text, videos, and audio to them. The essence of doing this is constantly updating them about the business’s products and services.
- Native Advertising: This is an attempt to blend an important message or content with the related advertisement. Take, for instance, when you are reading something online, you may bump into “sponsored content” between the lines, that is, a native ad. A native ad can be in the form of a banner, text, or graphic.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
Outlined below are some great advantages digital marketing has over traditional marketing:
- Global reach: It affords businesses the unique opportunity to reach a global audience in a jiffy.
- Affordable: You don’t necessarily need to break the bank to digitally advertise your products or services.
- Return on investment (ROI): One of the good attributes of digital marketing is that it gives businesses the chance to measure their return on investment (ROI) on the go!
- Build a quick relationship: Haven’t you seen two people who are total strangers to each other conversing on social media as if they have been friends for years? Digital marketing lets businesses build quick relationships with their customers.
- Better targeting: With digital marketing, you can directly target those you think will be interested in your products or services.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is the new approach to traditional marketing. It is important for businesses large or small because it is a low-cost alternative to traditional marketing.
The digital world has opened up a whole new world of opportunities for marketers that have never existed before. Digital marketing has also changed the way people consume content and this has major implications on how we need to approach our content strategy.