“We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people”
Pierre Omidyar
What is Digital Marketing ?
Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.
Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it’s digital marketing.
At a high level, digital marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. Using these online media channels, digital marketing is the method by which companies endorse goods, services, and brands. Consumers heavily rely on digital means to research products.
While modern day digital marketing is an enormous system of channels to which marketers simply must onboard their brands, advertising online is much more complex than the channels alone. In order to achieve the true potential of digital marketing, marketers have to dig deep into today’s vast and intricate cross-channel world to discover strategies that make an impact through engagement marketing. Engagement marketing is the method of forming meaningful interactions with potential and returning customers based on the data you collect over time. By engaging customers in a digital landscape, you build brand awareness, set yourself as an industry thought leader, and place your business at the forefront when the customer is ready to buy.
Understanding Digital Marketing
Digital marketing targets a specific segment of the customer base and is interactive. Digital marketing is on the rise and includes search result ads, email ads, and promoted tweets anything that incorporates marketing with customer feedback or a two-way interaction between the company and customer.
Internet marketing differs from digital marketing. Internet marketing is advertising that is solely on the Internet, whereas digital marketing can take place through mobile devices, on a subway platform, in a video game, or via a smartphone.
In the parlance of digital marketing, advertisers are commonly referred to as sources, while members of the targeted ads are commonly called receivers. Sources frequently target highly specific, well-defined receivers.
For example, after extending the late-night hours of many of its locations, McDonald’s needed to get the word out. It targeted shift workers and travelers with digital ads because the company knew that these people made up a large segment of its late-night business. McDonald’s encouraged them to download a new Restaurant Finder app, targeting them with ads placed at ATMs and gas stations, as well as on websites that it knew its customers frequented at night.
Types of digital marketing
1.Website Marketing
A website is the centerpiece of all digital marketing activities. Alone, it is a very powerful channel, but it’s also the medium needed to execute a variety of online marketing campaigns. A website should represent a brand, product, and service in a clear and memorable way. It should be fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to use.
2.Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay-per-click, or PPC, is posting an ad on a platform and paying every time someone clicks on it.
PPC advertising enables marketers to reach Internet users on a number of digital platforms through paid ads. Marketers can set up PPC campaigns on Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, or Meta (formerly Facebook) and show their ads to people searching for terms related to the products or services. PPC campaigns can segment users based on their demographic characteristics (such as by age or gender), or even target their particular interests or location. The most popular PPC platforms are Google Ads and Google Ad sense.
Each PPC campaign has 1 or more target actions that viewers are meant to complete after clicking an ad. These actions are known as conversions, and they can be transactional or non-transactional. Making a purchase is a conversion, but so is a newsletter signup or a call made to your home office.
3.Content Marketing
The goal of content marketing is to reach potential customers through the use of content. Content is usually published on a website and then promoted through social media, email marketing, SEO, or even PPC campaigns. The tools of content marketing include blogs, ebooks, online courses, infographics, podcasts, and webinars.
4.Email Marketing
Email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Many people confuse email marketing with spam email messages, but that’s not what email marketing is all about. Email marketing is the medium to get in touch with your potential customers or the people interested in your brand. Many digital marketers use all other digital marketing channels to add leads to their email lists and then, through email marketing, they create customer acquisition funnels to turn those leads into customers.
Email marketing is a proven, effective technique all on its own: 89% of surveyed professionals named it as their most effective lead generator.
4.Social Media Marketing
The primary goal of a social media marketing campaign is brand awareness and establishing social trust. As you go deeper into social media marketing, you can use it to get leads or even as a direct sales channel.
Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in discussion online. The most popular platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind.
5Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing, and the Internet has brought new life to this old standby. With affiliate marketing, influencers promote other people’s products and get a commission every time a sale is made or a lead is introduced. Many well known companies like Amazon have affiliate programs that pay out millions of dollars per month to websites that sell their products.
It works using a revenue sharing model. If you’re the affiliate, you get a commission every time someone purchases the item that you promote. If you’re the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.
6.Video Marketing
YouTube has become the second most popular search engine and a lot of users are turning to YouTube before they make a buying decision, to learn something, read a review, or just to relax. There are several video marketing platforms, including Facebook Videos, Instagram, or even Tik Tok to use to run a video marketing campaign. Companies find the most success with video by integrating it with SEO, content marketing, and broader social media marketing campaigns.
7.SMS Messaging
Companies and nonprofit organizations also use SMS or text messages to send information about their latest promotions or giving opportunities to willing customers. Political candidates running for office also use SMS message campaigns to spread positive information about their own platforms. As technology has advanced, many text-to-give campaigns also allow customers to directly pay or give via a simple text message.
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.
1.A broad geographic reach
When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (provided you haven’t limited your ad geographically). This makes it easy to grow your business’s market reach.
2.Cost efficiency
Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also carries a lower cost. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television spots, and other traditional marketing opportunities can be high. They also give you less control over whether your target audiences will see those messages in the first place.
With digital marketing, you can create just 1 content piece that draws visitors to your blog as long as it’s active. You can create an email marketing campaign that delivers messages to targeted customer lists on a schedule, and it’s easy to change that schedule or the content if you need to do so.
When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you much more flexibility and customer contact for your ad spend.
3.Quantifiable results
To know whether your marketing strategy works, you have to find out how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it ultimately drives. But how do you do that with a non-digital marketing strategy?
There’s always the traditional option of asking each customer, “How did you find us?”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work in all industries. Many companies don’t get to have one-on-one conversations with their customers, and surveys don’t always get complete results.
With digital marketing, results monitoring is simple. Digital marketing software and platforms automatically track the number of desired conversions that you get, whether that means email open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases.
4.Easier personalization
Digital marketing allows you to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can’t. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise and specific.
Imagine you offer financial services and want to send out special offers to people who have looked at your products. You know you’ll get better results if you target the offer to the person’s interest, so you decide to prepare 2 campaigns. One is for young families who have looked at your life insurance products, and the other is for millennial entrepreneurs who have considered your retirement plans.
How do you gather all of that data without automated tracking? How many phone records would you have to go through? How many customer profiles? And how do you know who has or hasn’t read the brochure you sent out?
With digital marketing, all of this information is already at your fingertips.
5.More connection with customers
Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real-time. More importantly, it lets them communicate with you.
Think about your social media strategy. It’s great when your target audience sees your latest post, but it’s even better when they comment on it or share it. It means more buzz surrounding your product or service, as well as increased visibility every time someone joins the conversation.
Interactivity benefits your customers as well. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand’s story. That sense of ownership can create a strong sense of brand loyalty.
6.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 phone call shortly after someone views your ad, But how often does someone have the time to reach out to a company while they’re doing the dishes, driving down the highway, or updating records at work?
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.
Digital marketing creates growth
Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business’s overall marketing strategy. Never before has there been a way to stay in such consistent contact with your customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalization that digital data can provide. The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you’ll be able to realize your company’s growth potential.
Digital Marketing Challenges
Digital marketing poses special challenges for its purveyors. Digital channels are proliferating rapidly, and digital marketers have to keep up with how these channels work, how they’re used by receivers, and how to use these channels to effectively market their products or services.
In addition, it’s becoming more difficult to capture receivers’ attention, because receivers are increasingly inundated with competing ads.
Digital marketers also find it difficult to analyze the large amount of data they capture and then use that information in new marketing efforts.
The challenge of capturing and using data effectively emphasizes that digital marketing requires an approach to marketing based on a deep understanding of consumer behavior.
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