What Is Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the use of digital technology to deliver your marketing message and allow your customers to interact with your business.

Traditionally marketing has been about pushing your messages to your customer. With technology, now you can enter into a dialogue with your customers and deliver what they actually want and not want you to think they want. Often there's fairly a niche and digital advertising is what means that you can talk one to 1 along with your prospects and on a mass scale.

So what areas do digital marketing cover?

For me, Digital Marketing includes:

Web Sites which includes:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Getting found on Google etc

Pay Per Click (PPC) - Paying for somebody to find you on Google, etc

Banner Adverts - Paying for banners to get visitors to your site

Ecommerce - The means to purchase and promote merchandise, providers, and knowledge over the Internet.

Consumer Reviews - Consumer critiques are a strong approach to get shoppers on to your eCommerce web site as they make the buying choice simpler because the critiques are by shoppers who have purchased the product. While businesses are built around this concept such as TripAdvisor.

Blogs. Personal web sites with stories, expert opinion, etc that you believe will help your readers, customers, and stakeholders.

Social Media - Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Google+, Ushi, Xing, etc. These are web-based systems that allow you to connect and share information such as ideas, links, photos, videos with like-minded people. They can also generate income for your business and so can be routed to the market for your business. They can be great ways to connect with people who you may not be able to get to by any other means. Twitter can be a great source of publicly available real-time information and has reported major global events ahead of the world's press.

Social Media News. Mashable is by far the biggest social media news site.

Webinars/Events - Webinars are one too many seminars distributed across the Internet. This allows you to present to a large number of people independent of location. Events are traditional meetings or workshops but are marketed through Social networks such as LinkedIn.

Email Marketing - The sending out of bulk emails which you believe are relevant to the people you are sending the message to.

Lead Nurturing - This is where a prospect gives you their email address in exchange for something free. This is usually an eBook (in pdf format), video, course of emails on how to do something.

Viral Marketing - The sending out of a message which is so compelling that people forward it on to other people unknown to you. A great way to send out a message if you get it right.

Video - An increasingly popular method of sharing ideas, passing on information, and selling on the web. Great for selling more complex products or services. YouTube is the most popular at the present but the video is becoming embedded into more digital media.

Music/Podcasts - Spotify is turning into the most well-liked authorized file-sharing system because it offers you entry to a wide variety of music.  Podcasts are voice recordings about a particular subject. They can be download for listening to on a computer or MP3 players at a later date. Great for relaxation or for learning about a new subject whilst traveling.

Chat/Instant Messaging/Skype - Chat and Instant Messaging are systems for conversations using a keyboard which is done in real-time. I.e. one person types something and the other response. Both need to be present and online for this to work. Users of Facebook, Bebo, etc use this, especially the younger generation. Skype is an internet-based video and phone system that allows Skype users to call each other for free or at lot low cost and is becoming increasingly popular for business use and will grow now that the video version is available on Facebook.

Cloud-based storage/File Sharing - The Cloud is for most purposes another name for the Internet. So Cloud-based storage is the ability to store information on the internet including backups and sending large files to customers and suppliers. Drop Box and Yousendit are examples of systems for sharing large files between unrelated users. There is a wide range of suppliers of remote backup systems now with most corporate including them in their backup strategies. Personal File sharing is also available for two or more computers to be linked together to share information including music and videos. Personal File Sharing is generally not a business tool for larger corporate.

Cloud-based systems - These are systems that allow you to work anywhere. Google has Google Docs, Microsoft has Office 365. A lot of third-party software providers are moving their systems onto the Cloud so that customers can access them from anywhere and don't have to worry about their own IT infrastructure. Companies are moving their IT infrastructure on to the Cloud in order to reduce costs as all the infrastructure is managed by a third party.

In an age where systems are everywhere, businesses need to understand how to exploit Digital Marketing as it is a means to improving the service to your customers, driving down costs and making your organization more agile.

All organizations large and small need to understand Digital Marketing and have a strategy of how they are going to exploit the opportunities that Digital Marketing has to offer.

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