What is Digital Marketing?

Being a widespread term, ‘digital marketing’ has more than millions of searches on Google a day. Google also delivers about 3.62 billion results in less than a minute for this search term. Out of which, more than 300 results are about the meanings and definitions of this term. Yet after hundreds of definitions, the meaning of digital marketing is highly confusing!

Confusion doesn’t necessarily exist in the term, rather it has been created around it. For example, Neil Patel, suggests, ‘digital marketing can be done offline or online’ or he writes ‘digital marketing is any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic devices’.

Let’s look at another example. This is a common type that prevails everywhere. It happens that most of the website designers and software developers believe that they are also digital marketers. More than 85% website development companies also mention the term ‘digital marketing’ in their service pages to extend their service list.

Confusing definitions of digital marketing also come from the statements of self-styled marketing gurus. You can frequently find them through their Facebook advertisements or YouTube video. They repeatedly advertise that they can teach you digital marketing just within few weeks. They further advertise that in order to learn this, you don’t require any backgound in marketing.

The statements that we have just discussed, all those blur the meaning of digital marketing. Let’s see how the meaning of digital marketing has been misinterpreted (or rather ill-interpreted) by the bloggers, web designers and the self claimed gurus..

First, while Neil Patel tells that digital marketing can be offline and online, he completely ignore that synonym of ‘digital marketing’ is also ‘online marketing’. When he emphasizes on electronic devices, he further ignore that not all electronic devices use digital technology.

Second, web developers can contribute to digital marketing, but can’t be digital marketer without learning marketing. Although web technology is an integral part of digital marketing, all web developers are not digital marketers and vice versa. There are also some other aspects. When we talk about marketing, creativity and strategy are prominent. Marketing at first sight is only marketing. Then it can be digital or something else. Hence, strategy is at the first place. Technology can’t replace it.

Third, marketing is a profession that requires a set of predefined skills and proficiency. Anyone having no background can’t perform effective marketing, whether it may be digital or conventional. A short training of few weeks only can add few additional expertise to the base, but can’t train in the base skill sets.

Then, what’s digital marketing? Simply, it’s marketing that’s executed digitally. Both the words in the term have their inherent significance. Marketers are great performing professionals in the market. Rapidly growing digital technology continuously adding wings to their performing ability.

Let’s proceed further. The following sections will help you in comprehending what digital marketing really is.

Digital Marketing Meaning

So, what is digital marketing in real sense?

Simply, digital marketing is not only about posting on social media or advertising on Google or collecting backlinks. It’s all about strong strategical actions on adequate information through the opportunities available by online platforms. Hence, digital marketing is a strategic marketing technique that is empowered by the internet and digital technology to effectively disseminate marketing messages online. In other words, digital marketing is an online marketing strategy that uses the latest digital technology to help businesses and brands gaining better opportunities in marketing.

Whether it’s traditional or digital, marketing is a complex task. You’ve to do adequate research, you’ve to build strategy, you’ve to plan, you’ve to work hard to implement and you need to be flexible enough for periodical reviews.

Digital technology enables immense amounts of data to be compressed on small storage devices which can be easily preserved, transported and analyzed. The changes made by digital technology are fast and enormous. The technology has amazingly transformed how people communicate, learn, and work. And most importantly, the abundant data and analysis through the digital ways have enormously empowered the marketers in putting in right marketing strategies and getting the result as desired.

Can we separate digital marketing from marketing on electronic media like television and radio? Yes, we can. The difference is in the technology that proceed and analyze the data, not in operation, production and distribution. In digital marketing, the data plays a decisive role. It help in precise target. In a television advertisement, it has not yet been possible.

Data is the real superpower in digital marketing. It enables the marketer in reaching at a specific target, but not at the mass as a whole. Digital data can tell many specific thing to marketers like –

• Who particularly should be the audience
• How to reach at the target audience,
• What was the effect of a certain message
• How much was the degree of the effect,
• which strategy is required to reap the desired  effect.

Digital technology is the data concentric technology that helps in disseminating a intended message to millions of clearly chosen individuals within seconds. Such data is the primary strength of digital marketing. Therefore, digital marketing is primarily a data based marketing method.

Like any other marketing methods, digital marketing also involves strategic complexity in terms of techniques and implementations. The field of digital marketing requires adequate involvements in terms of concept development, background research, strategy building, execution planning, pilot project, delivery review and strategic adjustment.

Digital Marketing Elements

Digital marketing is an umbrella of marketing techniques that contains more than a dozen of interrelated components. All these components can be grouped in three main categories, namely –

• Digital Strategy
• Digital Assets
• Digital Actions

Digital Strategy

Digital strategy can be defined as the master plan of digital marketing that determines how digital assets will be developed and how digital actions will be taken in order to effectively and successfully complete a marketing campaign.

Digital strategy is the central component of any digital marketing activity. It is the axis around which entire digital marketing processes revolve. If the strategy goes wrong, the whole process fails.

In any marketing method, strategy plays a central role that decides how other components will function. A clear and well-defined strategy helps all other components play their roles in bringing effective results. Strategy in digital marketing is generally not different from that of traditional methods of marketing. The only difference is that the digital strategy is formulated digitally.

Creation of an effective digital strategy involves a number of steps. Most important steps are:

1. Deciding goals and objectives
2. Finalizing the KPI
3. Researching to know the market
4. Planning to develop assets and to take actions
5. Fine-tuning the strategy through pilot project and evaluation

Digital Assets

In digital marketing, digital assets are the resources that enables you to successfully implement a marketing campaign or to perform any digital marketing activity. In order to able to execute digital marketing for your business, you need to have all required digital assets. Digital assets those are required in most of the digital campaign are as follow:

• Base asset: your website
• Branding assets: business name, domain name, tagline, logo, trademark, base theme etc.
• Channel assets: blogs, social media accounts, forum profiles, branded email accounts etc.
• Content assets: blog posts, e-books, white papers, info-graphs, look-books, images, slides, podcasts, video etc.
• Earned assets: testimonials, reviews, recommendations, online followers, brand reputation etc.

Base Asset: In digital marketing, the first and primary asset you require that is a very good website. It is also known as the base asset of digital marketing. The better your website is, the higher will be marketing effects. Be ensured that your website is dynamic and interactive. Quality website with quality content is highly recommended.

Branding assets, such as, business name, logo etc. have also prominent roles in effectiveness of any marketing campaign. If you already have brand reputation, you can do better marketing. Those are common assets for both online and offline marketing.

Channel assets: Digital channels, such as, social media accounts are the platforms that enables you to carry on marketing activities.

Content Assets: In any marketing campaign, content play the role of a king. In digital marketing, content is everything. Better the content, higher will be the result.

Earned Assets: For a business, earned assets are always priceless. As they grow, good brands continuously earn some assets. Good will from the customers is the primary earned asset that can further help you in getting more assets. Clients’ testimonials, customers’ reviews, social media followers, user generated content through forums are the assets that help any marketer to perform better.

Digital Actions

Digital actions are the activities that you carry out in order to achieve certain marketing goals. These actions constitute the main part of any digital marketing campaign. Each digital action is a separate type of digital marketing. Along with the digital strategy, these actions are considered as the main digital marketing components. A well drafted digital strategy defines which actions need to be carried out in order to reach a certain marketing goal. Starting from strategy building and A/B testing to reviewing a campaign and fine tuning, everything comes under digital marketing actions.

Digital Marketing Types

The major types of digital marketing are:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing
• Pay per click (PPC) marketing
• Social media optimization (SMO) and social media marketing (SMM)
• Influencer marketing
• Viral marketing
• Affiliate marketing and referral marketing
• Inbound marketing
• Email marketing
• App marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to your efforts in improving the rank of your webpages in searches on Google or on other search engines. SEO is an organic process that means you don’t need to pay any search engine for ranking your webpages or website. However, you need to work towards improving the quality of your website and its content in accordance to certain search engine criteria so that search engines will rank it higher. The better your attempt in fulfilling the criteria, the higher will be the rank of your website on search engine result pages.

Higher search engine rank is directly proportional to better visibility of a webpage in search engine results for relevant search query. Obviously it’ll be resulted in higher amount of traffic to your website.

Let’s understand the above concept with an example. Look at the following screenshot.

You can observe from the above screenshot that Google found about 1,70,000 results for a search query ‘small business website cost in India’. The search engine displayed the result with link to the relevant webpages one after another. You may wonder that why a particular result is displayed at the first postion and why not any other result. This is because the webpage for which the link appears in the first position in a Google search for the relevant query ranks higher than any other webpsages for the same query. Similarly, the subsequent results are in accordance to their respective ranks. We don’t need to repeat that the rank is determined by the amount of SEO efforts by the webmaster of the website.

Competition for better SEO ranking is undoubtedly very high. Hence, adequate investment in terms of time and efforts is highly recommended for SEO activities. People generally tend to visit the pages those appear at the top of search results for their query. Hence, your website can’t get good amount of traffic if your webpages don’t rank within top ten for intended search queries.

Content Marketing

Since the early days of advertising and marketing, content has been enjoying the position of the king. Whether it’s a story or a piece of information or an image, good content plays the role of stimulator in disseminating and spreading a marketing message. In digital marketing, content has immense role. Therefore, it’s widely known as the king.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing method that use interesting and useful content for stimulating the interest of the audience in brands and products. It’s an indirect marketing approach that doesn’t directly promote a product or a service. Rather it helps in increasing the interest for it through creating and sharing relevant digital content like blog posts, videos, images and info-graphics. It’s a highly strategic marketing technique that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and reliable content to attract and maintain a clearly defined audience and to drive profitable customer action. The purpose of content marketing is to help brands or businesses to create sustainable brand loyalty and provide valuable information to consumers, as well as to create a willingness among potential customers to purchase products or services in the future.

In order to build strategy, to create strategic content, to distribute the content and to achieve desired result, a lot of expertise and experiences is required in content marketing.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing

Pay per click (PPC) is a form of paid advertising service, in which you have to pay a certain amount to the service provider if someone clicks on your ad. Unless the ad is clicked, you don’t need to pay. So PPC marketing is cost effective and easily manageable. The popular Google Ads is an example of PPC marketing.

PPC ads can be divided into three broad categories

• Search Engines Marketing (SEM),
• Display Network Marketing (DNM) and
• Video Ads.

SEM is a marketing method where your ad with link to the desired landing page will be placed on a search engine like Google search. If someone click on the ad, you need to pay for the click. SEM ads are text based ads with available extensions. Unlike SEM ads, DNM ads are mainly based on visuals like images. You can add images and other visual to your ad copy. DNM ads are placed on websites over the internet on the basis of relevance. You can also add video to your PPC ads. Google places all video ads on YouTube video channels.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media bring enormous opportunities for marketers to promote their brands and products. Social media platforms are the right places, where brands can be in reciprocal long lasting relationship with customers. Brand engagements with users in social media is as high as 53%. If we talk about marketing effectiveness, more than 48% conversions are happen only on social media.

Business promotion on social media can be both generic (unpaid) and paid. In generic attempt, you can have your brand presence through social media profiles. In order to gain better expose to audiences, you need to optimize your account and posting. This is known as social media optimization (SMO). In addition to SMO, you can also use your social media platforms for paid marketing. It’s known as social media marketing (SMM). Although SMM is similar to PPC, the earlier is less complex than the latter. You can do social media marketing yourself for your business and brand. Normally, you don’t need a professional marketer to do it for you.

Almost all social media offer many wonderful tools that helps easily interacting with the audiences and keeping them active and engaged. It doesn’t matter whether you are using social media for free brand awareness or paying the platform for promotional activities, you can enjoy ample freedom on social media to be connected with your customers. You can get active audience engagement naturally on popular social media like Facebook or Instagram, if your posting are creative, interesting and valuable to the users. However, it’s wise to invest in social media marketing as those are highly cost effective. Best thing about SSM is that you can fully control your budget and marketing campaign.

Influencer Marketing

Both influencer marketing and viral marketing are two popular forms of social media marketing and both can be used interchangeably with each other. Although in most of the time both the forms of marketing goes hand in hand, often viral marketing can be implemented separately.

The term ‘influencer marketing’ refers to those affected by the brand’s cooperation to promote products or services. An affected person can be defined as an individual or organization, which has a substantial influence on other people based on charisma, popularity, status, knowledge or expertise, etc. The role of the affected is to support products or services in exchange for money so that their followers will buy.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is the digital strategy that encourages consumers to share information about a company’s products or services through the existing online social networks. It simply refers how online information speedily transform from one person to another just like the viruses do. It’s one of the toughest but highly effective marketing methods. Brands, sometimes, approach social media influencers to initiate the process of viral marketing. Since influencers enjoy immense followers, they can help a piece of information go viral. Besides business, also in politics and social activities, viral marketing plays an important role.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a mechanism that involves referring online products and services on online publications and being rewarded on the basis of performance. Online publications refers to blogs, social media posts, video channels, email newsletters or something alike. Performance refers to the completion of a task like bringing a new customer or helping in making a sale. In the terminology of affiliating marketing, the affiliate is termed as ‘publisher’ and the brand is ‘advertiser’. The reward amount is determined by the agreement signed by both the publisher and advertiser.

Referral marketing is another term that is mostly confused with affiliate marketing. Although in both the cases, referring an online product and service for performance based reward is involved, both the forms of online marketing have different meanings. In referral marketing, there is no requirement of a professional blogger or an influencer or a social media marketer. In this type of marketing, brands persuade common users of products or services to refer those to their friends and relatives. For a successful sale or a customer acquisition, they reward the referrer in terms of coupons or reward points.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is a mixed digital strategy that is designed to ensure that brands won’t come to the customers, rather customers will come to the brands. In this strategy, SEO, SMO, content marketing and digital branding is simultaneously used so that strangers will be attracted toward brands and converted to customer within a short phase. In opposition to the outbound marketing approaches, inbound strategies create necessary conditions so that undefined individuals from different segments will approach the brand. In other words, the result of inbound marketing is seen as the inward flows of unrelated customers. In this type of marketing, there is no necessity to approach the customers.

Most of the traditional modes of marketing are outbound in nature. It means, there is little scope in traditional marketing that customers will approach a brand to make a purchase. In such cases, the concept of lead generation and lead nurturing, predominate the entire marketing processes. In comparison to this expensive and complex mode of marketing, inbound marketing strategies ensure easy conversion.

Engagement, action and conversion are the three basic formulas of inbound marketing. Data analytics and artificial intelligence empower inbound marketing to the extent that right message can be delivered to the right customer.

E-mail Marketing

The term ’email marketing’ simply refer to the marketing method that directly deliver powerful content at the inbox of the intended customers. It’s one of the oldest but yet powerful form of digital marketing. The content deliverable in email marketing can be both commercial (offer or new arrival etc.) and non-commercial (content of engaging nature etc.).

The important processes of email marketing are:

1. Getting consent or intention of the receivers of the email
2. Creating automated mailer lists of the recipients by using a email marketing tool
3. Designing branded email template
4. Developing quality content for the email newsletter
5. Ensuring the delivery of the emails directly in the intended recipients’ inboxes.

Mailer list of real recipients and engaging value added content are two basic requirement for each successful email marketing campaign. Be ensured that the email ids in the mailer list belongs to real people and are active. Additionally, make it sure that the content in the emails can add value to the recipients. We also recommend you to use an automated email marketing tool to collect mail ids and send bulk mails. Never purchase mail ids from third party vendors. They can sell you spammy email ids.

App Marketing

App marketing refers to the advertising and promotional activities that is carried out through free mobile apps. Although app marketing requires heavy investment, it’s very effective. Since people love to have useful but free mobile apps installed in their smartphones for various handy purposes, you can have great opportunities to effectively promote your products or services by developing an useful mobile app. You can also hire mobile apps developed by third party marketers for your promotional and marketing requirements. However, be ensured that the mobile app through which you want to do marketing should be actually amazing. No one will love to have an average app.

Local SEO

Local SEO is a highly effective digital strategy that helps local businesses with physical locations to be found on search engine maps and business listing. Google My Business is the most popular local SEO tool that help millions of businesses to be placed on Google Map and to be visible for local searches. Bing Business also provide similar opportunities. Recently, Facebook has also started similar type of services through social media search and location marking. Like SEO, here also in the case of local SEO, you don’t need to pay the platform for providing the space.

Local SEO is very easy to implement and also very much beneficial. You also don’t need to have a website of your own for local SEO activities. However, having a website can help you gaining better ranking on Google map and location. You can also have a ready made Google website for this purpose. Regular activities on your Google My Business account, good SEO practice for your website, and local directory optimization for your business can help your business in getting better visibility on Google Map and Google Location.

Digital Marketing Importance

This would certainly be a silly question, if one asks why digital marketing is so important to a business. Everyone knows it well – marketing is the lifeline of businesses. And at the primary level, digital marketing does the same for any business. Offline or online, businesses cannot grow further without promoting themselves online through the Internet. Beyond this primary function, digital marketing can bring many other benefits that traditional marketing can never do. Let’s see – there are over a dozen such reasons that digital marketing is important for every business.

1. Digital marketing is highly cost-effective

The best feature of digital marketing is that it’s very cost effective. Additionally, return on investment in promotion through digital marketing is also many times higher than that through traditional methods. Unlike the traditional modes, you don’t need a huge budgetary provision for doing marketing in the digital way. Just with few hundred dollars you can start your digital journey. A good quality website, some optimized social media accounts, few SEO tools, some service platforms, product specific content and your own creativity can be sufficient to start a journey in digital marketing. You can gradually add more budget as your profit grows. What is more important that everything have to be well planed, strategic, creative as well as result oriented. You definitely don’t need to spend a lot in term of money, but you should invest adequately in terms of time and work for research, analysis, planning, creating content and finalizing strategy.

2. Access to digital marketing is unrestricted and it’s cheap

Throat cut competition and massive financial investment is associated with all forms of offline marketing. Small businesses can’t afford many things like television advertisement, noticeable electronic billboards, event sponsoring, magazine coverage etc. But while it’s about going digital, both competition and financial investment are very small things. Small businesses can have the equal share with the big fishes. If your strategy is well planned, your advertisement and promotional content will appear side by side with the big brand. You can easily access all the SEO tool or social media to promote your business or brand. There is no restriction for you. Lack of fund, infrastructure and man power is not a hindrance for digital marketing. You can run your marketing office from your home with a desktop computer, some software and a good speed internet connection. For, promoting your business on the internet, you don’t need anyone’s permission. No NOC is required if you are doing your business legally. Restriction to enter the digital arena is about zero.

3. It’s widespread and reachable in real time

Almost 76% of world’s adult population is living in a digital world. This statistic is also increasing rapidly. The use of the internet and digital devices is growing. People worldwide are searching almost everything on the internet. Customers are already there. The online world is dominating their decision making processes.

The internet provides you ample scope to reach your target audience at any corner of the world in real time. Depending upon the nature of your business, you can carefully choose the audiences as your potential customer from any geographical region, from any demographic, cultural and social background. Digital Marketing brings the unlimited sky for you.

4. Digital marketing is data concentric and audience specific

Digital platforms can help you in accessing lots of data on audience behavior and varied specifications. So you can set your strategy accordingly. All sorts of data such as demographic, geographical, sociological and behavioral distribution of potential audiences (without entering anyone’s privacy) can be drawn together with few mouse clicks and the same can be analyzed with many convenient tools provided by search engines and other digital platforms. Once you become aware of your audiences, their passion or hate, their like and dislike, you can easily set your target. Through few interactive automatic tools and management systems, your message and content will be delivered only to the specific those who likely to be your customers. Everything is based on data and the data is precisely error free because of the defined algorithm of digital technology. Obviously, this will lead to more engagement and more conversion ultimately.

5. It’s highly result oriented

I don’t need to repeat it again and again that most of the digital marketing practices are, technically, specific to the end results. It happens because of the involvements of the mechanism of knowing the audiences precisely. This is the reason why the target is well defined and the result will be delivered in complete inbound condition. As you act, you’ll yield. Your own engagement and strategies will bring the result. You just need to follow some thumb rules.

6. Digital marketing can bring high Rate of Conversion

Conversion rate through digital marketing is many times more than the same through traditional marketing. This is because of the fact that digital marketing can help businesses in targeting audience with greater precision. If you can once decide who should be your target audience, reaching accurately at them through digital marketing isn’t a difficult task. Digital technology offers a lot of tool those helps marketers finding their prospects and targeting them accurately.

In offline marketing, a considerable percentage of ad amount get wasted as the target isn’t precise. Such situation further can be resulted in low rate of conversion. But such situation rarely comes in digital marketing.