What is Digital Marketing
What is Digital Marketing
Digital marketing generally refers to marketing done through digital channels like social media, email, video, websites, and mobile apps. Digital marketing normally involves electronic devices through which products and services can be promoted online.
Digital marketing is very wide and can be in many forms, like online video, display ads, paid social ads, social media posts, or search engine marketing. Digital marketing is constantly compared to “traditional marketing” but both are different because traditional channels involve billboards and print media.
In the present time, people spend more time using electronic devices which is continuously rising, while other print advertising is declining.
The biggest reason that most companies are using online marketing is that Google and Facebook generate more revenue than any other traditional media company.
Another reason for choosing online marketing over traditional marketing is that online marketing is measurable.
Did you know that 4.3 billion people use Google in their daily lives, and these people belong to different regions of the world. This is because people trust Google over other search engines and they use it daily to get information from the internet.
Importance of digital marketing
Digital marketing helps an organization to grab a much wide targeted audience than traditional marketing methods because the internet has a worldwide reach.
This marketing method additionally helps organizations to target clients who are probably going to purchase their products and services. For example, a company can advertise clothing sales by emailing their old customers list or by sharing an update of deals on social media.
In the present time, Organizations have various different online methods they can use to reach potential clients, including Whatsapp messages, social media, emails, and display ads.
Top 5 important reasons you need to know
Reaches
Today people are more active on social media like Facebook and Instagram and on search engines like google and are continuously searching for better products and services at low cost, so this gives an organization a wide area where they can sell their products and services with the help of Online marketing. The reach on the internet is worldwide as compared to the local market.
For example, Advertising your clothing brand on billboards in the city area will reach just a few people in the city. But if you want to reach worldwide then online marketing could be a better option because there are 4.9 billion active internet users worldwide.
It can be in any form like paid campaigns of your clothing brand on Facebook or any other platform. Additionally, you can go viral and reach millions organically with short-form videos like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and more.
More Targeted
Marketing done with a traditional method has no options for targeting, while online marketing helps the organization to target the potential customers who will ultimately buy their products and service when they see their product on the internet.
For example, Let’s take search advertising aka, also known as PPC (pay per click) which allows you to position yourself close to the highest point of searches. With search advertising, you can target people very specifically by their profession, education level, buying behavior, income, age, sex, and much more. I think you will not get this targeting option in traditional marketing.
Automation & Personalization
Automation & Personalization are other reasons to choose digital marketing because there are many options available to automate your paid campaigns.
For Example, If you use email marketing for advertising your e-commerce business, you may use automation for whether to send the same email with men’s clothing which he has seen before or to change with men’s shoes, it depends on how the individual person responds to the emails, all are automated with an email and using a service provider like MailChimp‘s and more
Additionally, 80% of people who get an email are personalized based on past purchases. You may have noticed that.
Like getting an email from myntra for a similar product you just added to your cart but didn’t purchase
But personalization and automation aren’t something that just anyone can do on their own. They need to be experts to run email campaigns.
Levels of Business
Likewise, with any marketing, there’s an underlying investment needed to get traffic easily flow.
But the significance of online advertising to small businesses is clear when they see how easy it is to develop your business.
For example, You can run social media campaigns and search ads campaigns with a daily budget because you know exactly how much that campaign will cost you.
Now after getting the results from your ads there is no need to negotiate with anyone like in the case of traditional marketing you need to communicate with a person.
But In online marketing, you can continue your ads uninterrupted. If you continue to get results from the traffic you just need to increase your daily spending and get revenues with it.
So small businesses can also use digital marketing to make growth gradually.
Easy to Measure
One of the important reasons for choosing digital marketing is that it is measurable while traditional marketing can’t be measured.
For Example, Advertising through search campaigns can be measured in terms of ROI i.e individuals can measure how much they spend on ads and how much they get in return.
Paid marketing can generate more than 4X leads i.e more than traditional marketing.
Additionally, you can generate $4 in revenue for every $1 you spend. It has been seen that about 20% of companies are seeing an ROI of $7 to $1 spent.
Every dollar you spend matters. You need to know it’s going to provide you with an ROI. So that is why measuring your spending on ads is important
Different types of digital marketing
Online marketing involves many specializations because there are different ways a user can interact with digital media. Different types of digital marketing are given as follows:
Search engine optimization
SEO can be defined as the process of improving your website’s visibility on search engine pages such as google or bing. Here the main goal is to get more organic traffic on your website by providing quality content to the users.
Additionally, SEO helps you to improve the quality and quantity of traffic on your website.
For Example, You can see the below Image for a keyword search engine optimization and results can be seen the best optimized site are ranking in top five organic rank.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) is the process in which organizations use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest to connect with the target audience and update their potential customers about new deals, as well as building good social trust.
SMM is all about communicating through social media networks to market a company’s products and services and drive engagement on your post, page, and video to promote your business for growth.
Did you know that people spend an average of close to 2½ hours per day using social media.
Search advertising
Search advertising aka Pay-Per-Click or PPC is a form of digital marketing in which an advertiser has to pay a certain fee each time when someone clicks on your digital ads.
Additionally, You can check ads by searching a keyword on google or bing, and you will see ads on the search engine result page.
Businesses use PPC ads to drive sales or inquiries from their target audience.
PPC ads have In-depth targeting options which means that you can display your ads only to those who you want to target.
For Instance, You want to target someone who lives in Cambridge and is looking for a digital marketing company at an affordable price. This can’t be done in the case of traditional marketing.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing involves working with an influencer i.e an individual who has a large number of fan followers, like a celebrity, or content creator in exchange for a certain amount. In several cases, Influencers will recommend your business product or services to their followers on some social media channels and accounts.
Influencer marketing works well for any scale of business to reach a new audience. But it is important to choose a reputed Influencer because they will represent your brand. Influencers with a bad image can ruin your brand value and the trust of consumers.
Email marketing
Reaching out to your prospective customers through personalized emails with the goal of promoting your business sales or events can be termed email marketing.
The concept of email marketing is not as simple as it looks. Just sending a simple promotional email to the individual and expecting him to click doesn’t work, the execution is much more complex.
Email marketing requires automation, like Integrating both transactional and promotional emails, your campaign must offer a valued service, not just a promotion.
Additionally, 80% of people who get an email are personalized based on past purchases. You may have noticed that.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
Global and local reach: Businesses can reach their customers with the same ad across the globe, while you can also target your local customers with locally targeted ads. This helps businesses to improve their visibility in the global and local markets.
Specific audience targeting: In digital marketing, there are a lot of options to target, you can target an audience on the basis of their age, gender, income, and much more. All the targeting options are available on different social media platforms where organizations can communicate the latest offer with their customers.
Cost-benefit: Digital marketing is less expensive than traditional forms of marketing. Imagine the cost of five billboards in the main city area, and you can not calculate ROI for the same because of proper data.
Customized channels: Digital marketing has many channels of marketing like email marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, and many more that can be used by organizations that suit their marketing strategy and modify those methods to make sales.
Disadvantages of digital marketing
Time-consuming: Creating the perfect content for an audience and optimizing campaigns continually take time, which is needed to get good results.
Competition: In the present market every company wants to promote their product and services digitally which has created huge competition online, So it is challenging for a brand to stand out and grab customers.
Data privacy: When you are using online platforms there is a huge risk of data loss and data privacy, so you should understand how to handle that data and follow data privacy laws.
Technology: In online marketing technology acts as the main touchpoint, so digital marketers should ensure the best use of tech and automation so that the customer journey can quickly lead to the purchase of product and services.