Introduction to Digital Marketing

 

In this article, we will be discussing the following points –

·         What is Digital Marketing?

·         History of Digital Marketing

·         Why Digital Marketing?

·         Primary Goals of Digital Marketing

·         The types of Digital Marketing

·         How to perform Digital Marketing?

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing, also referred to as online marketing, is the promotion of products and services of different 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 marketing tools. In simple words, the use of internet to market your products and services for business is called Digital Marketing. Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves the use of electronic medium or digital media, it's treated as digital marketing.

History of Digital Marketing

    Digital Marketing is not very old.  Right? But trust me, the term “Digital Marketing” was first coined in the 1990's, i.e. almost 3 decades back. It all started with the coming of the internet and the development of the Web 1.0 platform. The Web 1.0 platform allowed users to find the information they wanted but did not allow them to share information over the web. In 1993, the first clickable banner went live, after which HotWired purchased a few banner ads for their advertising. This marked the beginning of the digital era of marketing. Because of this gradual shift, the year 1994 saw new technologies entering into the digital marketplace.

    In the 2000's, with increasing numbers of Internet users and the birth of iPhone, customers began searching products and making decisions about their needs online first, instead of consulting a salesperson, which created a new problem for the traditional marketing department of a company.

Why digital marketing?

    Digital marketing is probably the best option for most, if you compare between digital marketing and traditional marketing. If you want to reach a particular group of people, wherever they may be, while keeping costs low, go with digital marketing. It will also allow you to collect important information on your audience immediately so that you can create even more effective marketing campaigns. Irrespective of size and industry, digital marketing offers businesses of all sectors an affordable and efficient way to obtain leads that rivals traditional marketing methods.

    It is very easy to track the results of your marketing campaign in the form of measuring views, clicks, likes, comments, shares, and conversions. These performance metrics give you an opportunity to make better decisions about your business.

    Unlike traditional marketing, where you couldn’t alter a poster or flyer once it was up, digital marketing enables you to modify your ads as many times as you want. Thus, digital marketing offers you to yield the best possible results.

Primary Goals

ð Understand Your Customers: Know your customers better because only they can help you get more leads and more sales. Understanding customers is the key to giving them good services. No one really cares how much good your product or service is, the simple truth is that no-one will buy it if they don't want it or believe that they don't need it. And you won't persuade anyone that they want or need to buy what you're offering unless you clearly understand what your customers really want. Thus, it is very important to understand the customers.

ð Reach Out To Them Online: To reach your customers online you have many social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Also you can list your products and services in popular ecommerce websites like Amazon, Flipkart, Ebay, etc. or you can even build your own website to showcase your products and services.

 

Some numbers that will blow your mind

è Users generate about 4 million likes every minute on Facebook

è Every minute the total number of the websites grew approximately by 380. This means that every 24 hours we get 547200 increase in the total number of websites worldwide! 

è In 2019, Amazon made $141.25 billion in retail product sales. This comes out to an average of $385 million each day.

 

    Now think there are uncountable numbers of ecommerce websites in this world. How many sales are made online per minute? Not possible to imagine right? But this really occurs every minute in this globe with the help of our digital media.  

The types of Digital Marketing: 

    Below is the list of all possible types of digital marketing strategies.

ð Content Marketing: It is a type of digital marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services. Most popular type of content marketing is “Un-boxing” and “Reviewing” products and services on different platforms.

ð PPC or CPC: Pay-per-click (PPC) is an online advertising model in which an advertiser pays a publisher every time an advertisement link is “clicked” on. PPC is alternatively known as the cost-per-click (CPC) model. Pay-per-click is commonly associated with first-tier search engines (such as Google Ads, Amazon Advertising, and Microsoft Advertising formerly Bing Ads).These advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to, above, or beneath organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site. Few examples of PPC (see the red coloured boxes)are given below –

Examples of Online Ads (PPC, CPC)

ð SEO: An SEO strategy (also referred to as “SEO approach” or “search engine optimisation strategy”) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. So, SEO is absolutely free. It can be defined as the process of planning, outlining and implementing steps designed to improve search engine rankings. It helps in getting more and more organic traffic to your site.

ð SEM: Search engine marketing is a form of digital marketing strategy that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages. Normally, SEM is used to refer to paid search ad campaigns, like Google Ads. But, it also includes all marketing actions that take place within a search engine, whether or not they are paid. You can think like this, SEM is the combination of SEO and PPC or CPC, where SEO will give you organic results and PPC or CPC will give paid results. Now, if you have a limited budget then you can go for SEO but if you want to bring your products and services at the top of the search engine results page immediately then you have to go for PPC or CPC. Both have different characteristics and both are important in this field.

ð Social Media Marketing: It is the type of internet marketing strategy which involves the use of social media platform to promote products and services. Social media marketing is an un-avoidable approach for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. People are already interacting with different brands all over the world through social media. This marketing approach involves publishing great content on our social media profiles, listening to and engaging our followers, analysing our results and running social media advertisements. The popular social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.

ð Automated Marketing: Marketing Automation refers to the software that serves to automate some of your marketing operations. Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, lead generation and even ad campaigns -- not just for the sake of operational efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalised experience for their customers and grow revenue faster. Here we can introduce the Artificial Intelligence technology in Digital Marketing. AI allows marketers to scale the amount of personalised ad campaigns, without having to worry about defining which campaign to send to which customers. AI models are smart enough to instantly identify all available campaigns for each customer and determine the next-best-action for them, optimising the marketing automation. AI also helps in analysis of previous results of the campaigns and provides better results in future.

ð Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s or company’s products and services. The affiliates are free to promote which ever product they like and earn a piece of the profit from each sale they make. The sales made by an affiliate are tracked via affiliate links from one website to another. For example, the people who reviews different gadgets in their YouTube channel, leaves a link in the description box, those are affiliate links. By clicking on those links you will be directed to the product page of popular ecommerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart. If you made the purchase then the channel owner earns a small commission.

ð Public Relations: Public Relation is the most effective strategy to communicate and relate to the market. It is one of the most cost-effective methods of all promotional activities in digital marketing. Public Relation (PR) means sending the right messages to the right people, to create company’s reputation. Here, public relation is more about defining and strengthening a company’s brand image with the help of consumers, other brands, influencers, etc. Let us take an example to understand this strategy. Suppose you have a shampoo making company and want to sell your products online. Now there is thousands of shampoo making brands available in this world, why people would buy your shampoo? Here, public relations come into play. You have to make the people aware that what makes your product different from others. Like Head and Shoulder Shampoo, we know that it is a shampoo that prevents dandruff or Sunsilk makes your hair long and silky. Thus, public relation helps in building brand trust resulting increase in sales and boosts your website traffic.

    It doesn’t end over here. There are lot more things to know about each one of these above mentioned strategies. We have just discussed only the concept. But don’t worry; I will soon make separate content and video for each one of these. In return you know what to do right? Our contents and videos are absolutely free for all, you just need to subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell icon, so that you get the notification of our future videos on digital marketing as soon as we upload. And don’t forget to share this content with your friends. 

How to perform Digital Marketing?

    Digital Marketing involves a lot of things. There are different types of digital marketing strategies that we have already discussed. Every strategy has different approaches. But to generalize this issue, I have made a simple algorithm which you can follow to perform digital marketing of your products and services –

1. Select the product or service
2. Identify the purpose of  marketing digitally
3. Identify the group of people for whom your product or service is for
4. Select the Digital Marketing Strategies to implement
5. Select the suitable platforms to use
6. Implement the strategy on respective platform
7. Analyse the result
8. Make necessary improvements or changes
9. Go to step 6

Conclusion

    We live in a decade where we use the Internet for everything, such as paying all kinds of bills, buying groceries, planning a vacation, ordering foods, plenty of things are there. We are just logging into our laptops, smartphones, tablets or home computers to visit our favourite sites, where anything can be purchased with a convenient click of a mouse or a single touch.

    This growing popularity of the internet has brought a whole new market. Digital marketing became the reason behind every successful business online. If you are not involved in this, your business will not grow in the future. This Internet has created a huge opportunity for companies to expand their business online. It can lead to exposure and more sales. After all, your goal as a business owner is to increase your profit. If you want to see improvements in your business or increase your revenue, you have to get your hands into digital marketing. The rising trend of digitising businesses has also created an enormous demand for a new kind of professionals who possess the knowledge of Digital Marketing. 

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Content by - Dwaipayan Bhoumick

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