What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is a widely used term today. A lot of people are speaking about digital marketing.

It’s a buzzword today and everyone wants to do it.

Students want to learn it and make a career in it. Professionals working in a particular field want to learn digital marketing and make a career switch.

Big companies are either setting up in-house digital marketing team or hiring agencies to help them in this. Small business owners have also started understanding it’s importance.

But before even jumping to the way it is done or it’s components, one must understand it. If the base is strong, then things will be easier.

Let us understand digital marketing.

Understanding the term “Digital Marketing”

The term Digital Marketing is made up of two words Digital and Marketing.

Let us understand the literal meaning of these 2 words.

Digital means the signals that are 0’s and 1’s which are used in the digital world.

Marketing means the process of promoting/selling your business services and products.

The Marketing which is performed with the help of digital channels is known as Digital Marketing.

In Digital Marketing, the marketers connect with the customers and potential customers via Social Media Platforms, Websites, Blogs, Emails, etc. Digital Marketing is thus performed over the Internet and also known as Internet Marketing/Online Marketing.

How is Digital Marketing different from Traditional Marketing?

Traditional marketing involves advertising in news papers, radio, TV, billboards, flyers, etc.

Assume that a business gives an advertisement in a leading newspaper. Now, lets understand how much impact will this advertisement create.

Is this advertisement only specific to the target audience?
No, this will cover all the people who read that particular newspaper. This means you are randomly trying to promote your business.

Also, for how many days will your advertisement be active? The advertisement will be printed in the paper only for a day for which the payment is made. This means that readers won’t be able to see your ad next day, unless you pay.

Also in this digital era, how many people actually see advertisements in news paper? The answer is very few.

Now, lets assume that the same business is using digital marketing to promote it’s business. The business made a Facebook page and started putting posts to promote the business there.

How many days will the posts remain there?
Forever, unless you delete the page or post.

Also, the business would be able to target a set of audience while using digital marketing as a channel of marketing. The user reviews, comments and likes on the posts will remain forever.  This is one of the best advantage of having digital assets for your business.

What is a digital asset?

A digital asset is a form of asset which has no physical presence and is present just digitally. Both businesses and individuals can have digital assets.

Various digital assets can be the website, the social media profiles and pages, featured articles, infographics, etc.

Increasing demand of Digital Marketing

With the increase in the number of internet and mobile phone users, the scope for digital marketing is increasing exponentially. There is a huge gap between the demand and supply of digital marketing professionals too. It is expected that by the end of 2020, there would be more than 1,50,000 digital marketing jobs.

A lot of businesses are doing digital marketing as it is a more efficient and effective way of marketing. To know the reasons why should businesses do digital marketing, you can read Why should businesses do Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing Tactics

Digital Marketing comprises of various tactics like:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a process of making a website rank higher on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). A business might have a very good website. But what is the use of having a fabulous website which is not discovered by people?

People usually click on the top 3 links of the search results on the first page of results. Hence, it becomes essential to rank higher on search engine results page to get discovered by people. And, in order to achieve this, SEO is the most critical activity.

There are various types of search engine optimization techniques – Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat. SEO activities are divided in 2 parts – On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

2. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

The marketing which is conducted using social media platforms is known as Social Media Marketing. Social Media is an integral part of our lives and is no more restricted to just connecting with friends and sharing pictures.

Businesses are widely using social media platforms to promote their products and services. Also, Social media platforms are providing a range of services to businesses achieve this. From social media pages to promoted stories and post, there is a diverse range of promotional services available to businesses to promote themselves on social media. Few of the social media platforms used for SMM are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.

As of 2018, India has more than 250 million social media users and the numbers are increasing day by day. Around 53 crore people out of the total 130 crore population has access to internet and the internet services are reaching every nook and corner of the country. This high exposure to internet is increasing social media users and thereby increasing the scope of SMM.

3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Many people get confused between SEO and SEM. Both deals with search engines. SEO activities help in increasing the traffic organically. On the other hand, SEM deals with promotion of websites by paid advertisements.

The ultimate goal is to gain relevant traffic whether organically or inorganically. Businesses want to capture the digital landscape rapidly. SEO is a time consuming process. The results obtained from SEO helps in a long run. SEM is restricted to the time frame when you run paid ad campaigns. But, the amount of leads generated by SEM is very large.

Keywords play a key role in both SEO & SEM. Without a good set of keywords, neither you can do good SEO nor good SEM. Know more about keywords by reading “What are Keywords in Digital Marketing?“

4. Content Marketing

Digital marketing is all about creating good content and promoting it. People use internet and consume a lot of content on Social Media Platforms, By Google Search, YouTube Videos and so on.

Content plays a key role in SEO as Google loves good quality content. The content of your website should describe what the website is about and should engross the visitor to spend more time on the website and explore more about your business.

Content which makes people aware is much more useful than the content which directly appeals people to buy something. Also, most of the people are smart now and have ad blockers. This means many of your digital ads are not reaching them. But, what can really reach them is your CONTENT.

Content can be in the form of text, images, videos, audios, infographics, etc. It is very important to devise a good content marketing strategy and execute it in order to create an impact.

5. Email Marketing

As the name itself speaks, Email Marketing is a marketing technique which uses emails to promote a product or service.

You would think that in the age of automation and chatbots, does email marketing helps? Yes, it helps a lot. As per SmartInsights, Email marketing is still one of the most effective technique in digital marketing.

6. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a form of marketing in which a business pays commission to a website for referral traffic or sales.

Amazon Associates is one of such affiliate marketing program where bloggers promote products sold by Amazon on their website and earn commission if someone clicks and makes a purchase from their website.

There are several other affiliate programs too.

Is digital marketing comprised of just the 6 activities mentioned above? No, it is much more beyond them. The above-mentioned activities are most commonly used.

Besides them, digital marketing consists of Display Advertising, Marketing Automation, Data-Driven Marketing, Infographic Marketing, Video Marketing, e-books, etc