Digital Marketing is any and all marketing efforts that rely on electronic devices, and in extension, the internet.
It’s the group of activities that a company (or individual) performs online to attract new business opportunities, creating relationships and developing a brand identity. It is very diverse and versatile.The sheer amount of tools, data and channels available on the internet creates opportunities for marketers to deliver effective content to specific people, through personalization.
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. .
“Digital is at the core of everything in marketing today—it has gone from ‘one of the things marketing does’ to ‘THE thing that marketing does.” – Sanjay Dholakia, Former Chief Marketing Officer, Marketo
The online world allows brands to communicate with all of their clients and possible clients. You don’t even need to be in the same country to find and engage your public. And the technology turned simple phones, designed to make calls, in true computers with all the access the user needs to connect with other people. Apps, emails and websites are literally in the palm of their hands. Smartphones are incredibly popular, especially among Millennials and Generation Z.
With applications like Instagram, Facebook, and Snap-chat taking up hours in their days, companies have very much found a direct link to their lives. Facebook is a very famous social media site that has over 2 billion users and is a popular choice among companies to market their products. Ads play before videos on Facebook, and it also has sponsored posts that appear on everyone’s news feed. Instagram is another incredibly famous and popular social media site that companies use to market to a wide age group. Although Instagram is mostly a photo and video sharing platform, companies are still able to make use and take advantage of it. The best part about websites like Instagram and Facebook is that they all have a very wide and massive age demographic.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
1. The most measurable form of marketing – Digital Marketing analytics takes away the guessing games related to traditional forms of marketing. Through these analytics, you can measure in real-time how many people are looking at your posts or ads, as well as how many users have opened your posts, along with all of the people that have replied, liked, or shared your post.
2. The most cost-effective marketing technique – While there was once a paywall between major companies and smaller ones in terms of advertising and exposure, that is no longer the case. Nowadays, smaller companies can get the attention of people that they otherwise could not. This is something that they can cover with the help of Digital Marketing, as they can reach an audience of their choice with minimal effort.
3. Allows you to choose any audience – Speaking of choosing your audience, another great benefit of Digital Marketing is that it can be as specific or broad as you want. You can find specific groups or forums on social media websites like Instagram or Reddit to market to a very niche audience.Moreover, getting a respected figure in the community you are tapping into can grow trust for your brand.
4. Everyone is already there – With billions of people using the internet and social media daily, the question is no longer will anyone see it, but rather when. No matter how big the network might be, there is a cap on just how many people a traditional marketing strategy can connect to. On the other hand, Digital Marketing strategies have no peak of exposure and can grow along with the company itself.
5. Customers start their buying journey from the internet – Customers depend on the internet for everything, including their buying options and choices. The term “Google it” has become such a common part of our language, the first instinct of most people is to search for something on the internet.
6. The message can be customized – Another big advantage of Digital Marketing is that this strategy allows you to customize your message to the public. Advertising today is different from the old days. Back then, when you wanted to talk to you public, you needed a generic message, that could be used in mass medias such as billboards, TV broadcast, flyers etc. Now, you can target groups by their similarities, customizing the message and making it more real and directed to them. Email marketing, online advertising, niche marketing: all of these strategies can be customized to reach the audience that you want.
Components of Digital Marketing
Paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, typically refers to the sponsored result on the top or side of a search engine results page (SERP). These ads charge you for every click and they can be tailored to appear when certain search terms are entered, so your ads are being targeted to audiences seeking something in particular. These ads can be extremely effective, as they rely on data gleaned from individuals’ online behavior and are used to boost website traffic by delivering relevant ads to the right people at the right time.
Search engine optimization (SEO) – SEO is the process of optimizing the content, technical setup, and reach of your website, so that your pages appear at the top of a search engine result for a specific set of keyword terms. By using keywords and phrases, you can use SEO to massively increase visibility and begin a lasting customer relationship. SEO is defined as increasing a website’s rank in online search results, and thus its organic site traffic, by using popular keywords and phrases. Strong SEO strategies are hugely influential in digital marketing campaigns since visibility is the first step to a lasting customer relationship.
Content marketing – When you offer content that is relevant to your audience, it can secure you as a thought leader and a trustworthy source of information, making it less likely that your other marketing efforts will be lost in the static. In the age of the self-directed buyer, content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising, so it’s well worth the additional effort.
Social media marketing – The key to effective social media marketing goes far beyond simply having active social media accounts. The more your audience is inspired to engage with your content, the more likely they are to share it, potentially inspiring their peers to become customers as well.
Email marketing – After more than two decades, email is still the quickest and most direct way to reach customers with critical information.To succeed, your marketing emails should satisfy five core attributes. They must be trustworthy, relevant, conversational, coordinated across channels, and strategic.
Mobile marketing – Mobile devices are kept in our pockets, sit next to our beds, and are checked constantly throughout the day. SMS, MMS, and in-app marketing are all options to reach your customers on their devices.
Marketing automation – Marketing automation is an integral platform that ties all of your digital marketing together. Without it, your campaigns will look like an unfinished puzzle with a crucial missing piece Marketing automation can help you gain valuable insight into which programs are working and which aren’t, and it will provide metrics to allow you to speak to digital marketing’s efforts on your company’s bottom line.
A key digital marketing objective is engaging customers and allowing them to interact with the brand through servicing and delivery of digital media. This is achieved by designing digital media in such a way that it requires some type of end user action to view or receive the motive behind that media’s creation.
Digital marketing campaign
A digital marketing campaign involves the execution of a marketing strategy across all the digital channels where consumers engage with a brand, usually for the purpose of improving a company’s conversion rate. To start a campaign, marketers need to understand who their customer is and where to reach them and anticipate what action the customer will take next.
Customers approach brands though an omnichannel lens. So to effectively reach a customer, marketers should connect digital marketing campaigns across all channels.Digital marketing campaigns can be less expensive than other marketing campaigns and can engage with customer behavior in real time. Companies can use a digital campaign for a variety of uses, from raising brand awareness to telling loyal customers about a new product.
How will digital marketing campaigns change in the future?
There’s great promise with artificial intelligence and machine learning, which take out some of the guesswork and can streamline operations. Something, like figuring out the best offer to send to a consumer, that once took weeks to do might take minutes or even seconds. But as technology improves, there should always be an element of human interaction to make course corrections, to make informed decisions and to avoid losing sight of that human element in experiences. Other opportunities could arise where companies get better at using the context of an engagement. That could look like delivering the right offer at the right time because a brand knows exactly where somebody is and they know exactly the time and day of the week in which they’re engaging because they’re on their mobile device. This concept of location-based marketing has existed for a while, but it’s starting to mature and become more incorporated in larger omnichannel strategies.
Track2Training 
You must be logged in to post a comment.