What is Digital Marketing?

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the use of digital devices to promote a brand or its products.?

It includes both online and offline channels such as TV, podcasts, billboards, commercial ads, text messaging, and many more.?

Online marketing is a big part of digital marketing. When you think about?Search Engine Marketing?(SEM),?content marketing, and?email marketing, that is all part of digital marketing as a whole.

Offline Digital Marketing

Offline digital marketing is often dismissed as traditional or ineffective.?

However, some of the biggest brands today, such as Coca-Cola and McDonalds, still spend millions on billboard and prime-time TV ads each year, and for a good reason.?

Offline digital marketing channels can be highly effective when used properly.?

Examples include:

• Online radio ads and radio show promotions (radio)
• LED billboards in high-traffic areas (enhanced offline advertising)
• Cable TV commercials and streaming services such as Netflix (TV)
• Phone marketing through cold-calling, texting, and in-app ads (Phone marketing)

These tactics are often highly effective, but they can be expensive. That is why many startups and small businesses opt for online marketing instead.

Online Digital Marketing

Online marketing revolves around any kind of digital marketing that runs off the internet.?

There are many categories of online marketing, but we will only cover the 6 most important ones.

• Search Engine Marketing
• The use of paid strategies to increase the visibility of websites and brands online. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one tool used in SEM.
• Content Marketing
• The use of online content such as blogs and videos to promote a brand or product indirectly. It is a huge part of?Inbound Marketing.
• Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC)
• Involves advertising on platforms such as Google and paying each time someone clicks on the ad or makes an impression (e.g., downloads a guide, buys a product, or signs up for a demo).
• Email Marketing
• The art of sending promotional emails to prospects; it is a big part of Outbound Marketing.
• Affiliate Marketing
• This is when brands pay third parties a commission when they sell their products. Influencers, bloggers, and resellers are all big parts of affiliate marketing.
• Social Media Marketing
• Digital marketing through social channels, as we will see in more detail in the next section.

Key Benefits of Digital Marketing

As a whole, digital marketing gets the attention of more people than any other form.?

As of 2021,?85% of Americans own a smartphone?as well as a range of other online devices. This gives digital marketing some incredible advantages:

Broad Reach

Digital marketing has the potential to have a global reach. As marketers, we can use anything from local radio stations to Google Ads to control the size of the audience we want to reach.?

Cost-Effectiveness

A well-executed digital marketing strategy will cost significantly less than traditional marketing methods. It does this while giving access to a much wider audience.

Accessibility and Versatility

More brands can use digital platforms for marketing than with any other traditional channel.?

Today, tonnes of small businesses built on platforms such as Amazon and Shopify can advertise their niche products and services effectively and efficiently using online channels.

Quantifiable Conversions

Digital marketing is highly measurable.?

Brands can often accurately approximate new numbers of customers gained by monitoring various marketing campaigns and metrics such as email open rates, home page visits, and direct purchases.?

Targeting and Personalization

Modern technology makes it very easy to personalize marketing campaigns based on the target audience.?

By using?customer data, it is possible to create highly specific marketing content based on customer profiles.?