What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is the component of marketing that uses the internet and other forms of digital communication to promote products and services. One of the key objectives of modern digital marketing is to increase brand awareness among consumers using numerous digital marketing channels such Search Engines, Social Media, Web-based Advertising, Mobile Apps, Email, Text messaging, Digital Billboards. In-short, if a marketing campaign is using any of the online media channels or involves any electronic devices to promote products and services, it is digital marketing.

Do you want to learn more about Digital Marketing?

In this guide we will cover all the information you need to require to become familiar with digital marketing.

While there are several approaches to digital marketing, but remember that every type of digital marketing has its own advantages and disadvantages. Before deciding which types of digital marketing you want to invest in and what platforms to utilize for yourself and your business, consider the larger picture of yourself and your business. It would be best if you started modestly with your web marketing approach and expanded as your business became used to other sectors.

In past years, many businesses have benefited greatly from digital marketing since it enables them to expand their audiences as far as their budget permits. On the other hand, digital marketing allows businesses to narrow their marketing circle to the correct audience. To put it another way, a company can reach its ideal targeted demographic on a local, national, or worldwide level while keeping within budget. So, to run a successful digital marketing campaign, you must consider a few points:

• Firstly, Set your business goals.
• Discover and make a strategy to reach your targeted audience.
• Create a budget for your Digital Marketing campaigns and sort them.
• Develop a healthy balance between paid and unpaid internet marketing tactics.
• Create interesting content.
• Make your digital campaigns mobile-friendly.
• Run keyword research campaigns.
• Iterate depending on the data you’ve gathered.

Let’s take a look at the brief history behind digital marketing, given that we have a fundamental understanding of what digital marketing is and how it has evolved through time.

The digital era began with the introduction of the Internet and the Web 1.0 infrastructure, which allowed users to locate information but did not allow them to share it. They are static. Marketers were hesitant to use the digital platform for marketing during those times since the Internet was not widely used.

With the introduction of the server model and the widespread use of personal computers in the 1990s, the phrase “digital marketing” was established. The Archie Search Engine, which indexes FTP sites, was created around this time.
Since the 1980s, computer storage capacity has enhanced to accommodate large amounts of data, and businesses began to use database marketing and other internet approaches.

Some claim that “Marconi” must be acknowledged as the father of digital marketing because he delivered the very first radio signal. In contrast, others believe that Ray Tomlinson should be credited as the father of digital marketing because he sent the very first email around 1971. Others believe that Philip Kotler is the man who started it all and has a more in-depth understanding of the issue than anybody else.

Notable Achievements During Digital Era

• The first use of the term ‘Digital Marketing’ | 1990
• Launch of the First Search Engine: Archie | 1990
• Birth of Google | 1998
• Launch of Microsoft’s Web Search Engine | 1998
• Launch of LinkedIn | 2003
• Launch of WordPress | 2003
• Google becomes publicly listed; Gmail is launched | 2004
• Launch of Facebook | 2004
• Launch of YouTube | 2005
• Launch of Twitter | 2006
• Launch of iPhone | 2007
• Launch of Google’s real-time search engine results | 2009
• Launch of WhatsApp | 2009
• Launch of Instagram | 2010
• Web-use overtakes percentage of TV viewership among the youth demographic | 2011
• Launch of Snapchat | 2011
• 64% of advertisers expect to increase their social media budget | 2013
• Amazon dominates e-commerce | 2013
• Mobile usage surpasses desktop browser traffic | 2014
• Rise of content marketing | 2015
(Source: Web Central)

Internet marketing is using internet resources to promote businesses, companies, and organizations’ goods or services to generate leads, drive more traffic, and increase sales.

To put it another way, Internet Marketing is the activities that are conducted primarily over the Internet. It involves marketing activities that are aimed at driving visitors to websites where customers can buy the advertiser’s commodities. Internet marketing is a fast-growing industry because more individuals use the Internet on a daily basis, and it is rapidly expanding.

It’s also growing quickly because more people buy online products and services. It promotes visitors to a specific website or web page, and marketers use a variety of online advertisements. Internet marketing techniques include email marketing, banner adverts, PPC (pay per click), social media marketing, and much more. It’s a rapidly growing business.

For many businesses, the way they connect with their customers has changed. Such that many companies stepped away from traditional marketing and allowed a new phase of business marketing into consideration.

The need for improvement and efforts to make it happen have pushed many things differently. However, not all traditional marketing methods have disappeared; advertising experts’ current approaches are significantly more common than we used to know.

The Internet has created an entirely new and effective marketplace for both corporations and consumers. Digital Marketing has become the fundamental marketing strategy for a successful company; if you’re not utilizing it, your firm will suffer in the long run.

Digital marketing is essential because it connects a business with its clients wherever they are on the Internet and works for any business field. It links companies with their potential consumers on different search engines (like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) via SEO, PPC, social media platforms via social media marketing (SMM), and also through email via email marketing.

Digital marketing can be beneficial to businesses in a variety of ways. It can boost the visibility and profitability of your company. After all, as a company owner, your primary purpose is to maximize your business revenues.

If you want to see success in your company, boost your profits, and increase your sales, then your firm definitely needs to get engaged with digital marketing. Every company needs digital marketing. You must understand the importance of digital marketing first, which includes:

1: Your Customers Are Already Online

In today’s world, your customers mainly rely on the Internet for almost everything they want to know, including their shopping choices and places where to travel. As per Statista, more than 4.65 Billion people are online. With this increasing number of consumers, the purchasing process of every customer or a buyer begins with research and a proper understanding of the product and services.
What better way to learn more about something for researching than to look it up online? Several people’s initial response is to look for anything on the Internet now that the phrase is called “Google it” has become so widespread in the day-to-day conversation.
According to a report released by BazaarVoice in 2018, 82% of smartphone users check the Internet before making a purchase. It is the purpose of a good Digital Marketing strategy: to be the solution for businesses seeking potential customers online. Don’t postpone your success; start from today.

2: Cost-Effective / Affordable

Traditional marketing is much more expensive than digital marketing. You can’t afford to spend money on conventional marketing methods if you’re a small firm with limited resources and budgets. Even the need for printed pamphlets for your business is expensive, time-consuming, and ineffective.
Therefore, digital marketing helps you track your marketing campaigns regularly while lowering the amount of money you spend on a platform that doesn’t give you a positive result. This same statement cannot be true for the conventional mediums of marketing.

Nowadays, it really doesn’t matter how well your billboard works; its conversions are costly and have low ROI. Furthermore, with digital marketing, businesses get complete control over where and how they spend all their money? Instead of spending huge bucks on PPC ads, you can spend your money on content production and designing/developing tools to create high-converting and engaging content. A strategic digital marketing plan ensures you never spend your money on unproductive and ineffective platforms.

Digital marketing also assists businesses of all sizes by increasing their market visibility and awareness. In today’s digital world, it is fair to conclude that internet marketing has risen to greater levels. Many peoples, however, are still unsure if digital marketing is cost-efficient or not. Digital marketing is indeed a low-cost marketing option than traditional marketing. There’s no reason to be concerned! We’re going to highlight a few points which will help you see how digital marketing can save you money for your business.

• Retargeting Ads helps you manage your Advertisement budget
• Use Of Social Media Platforms is mostly FREE, and you get high-quality organic results
• Email Marketing generates quality leads
• Website / Web Pages SEO needs good content to generate huge traffic and get organic results
• Track And Adjust Your Campaigns Success
• Customer Engagement With Low-Cost Content

3: Brand Awareness / Recognition

Brand awareness is just another marketing term that refers to how well customers recognize a company’s name. Brand recognition is an important stage for advertising any new product or renewing an existing one. In an ideal world, brand recognition includes the traits that set the business apart from its competitors.

Brand recognition is so important that it was a higher priority for 37% of marketers in 2019. The next question is, “How can you develop your brand awareness?” Now that you understand how important brand awareness would be to your business, the next question you should ask is, “How can you create brand awareness?”

One primary method to achieve this is to make effective use of several digital marketing platforms available to you. One of the most important aspects of any successful marketing campaign is creating awareness of a company’s goods and services. Many marketing techniques focus on making a brand recognized and unforgettable because it is a key factor in building brand reputation and, ultimately, sales.

4: Flexibility / Scalability

Businesses during difficult times may not be able to afford a comprehensive and strategic digital marketing campaign. However, limiting marketing activities would result in the inability to reach customers at all. When it comes to digital marketing, businesses can increase or decrease their marketing efforts when required.

Google AdWords, for example, enables companies to select monthly spending. It means whenever circumstances are difficult, you can reduce your budget; and whenever times are better, increase it. The most admirable aspect of this scalability is how rapidly it can be accomplished. For example, Facebook and Google Ads may be ramped up or down fairly instantaneously. An advertisement campaign could be paused at any moment.
Because of this flexibility, you may use digital marketing to whatever extent that suits your needs at any moment. You are not bound to a digital marketing strategy that is unexpectedly too pricey during uncertain times. You may reduce your efforts without completely removing them in order to sustain your company and still be visible to your clients.

5: Customizable
Since digital marketing is so customizable, it promotes your right product or services to the right clients at the right price. It can be used to precisely oversee & monitor marketing expenditures, ensuring that your funds are used wisely and effectively. Furthermore, having a thorough track of marketing will assist your brand in adapting to client needs as requested. The flexibility and customization of digital marketing may also be shown in targeting the correct customer base with the best quality and using customer input to improve offerings.

It aids in developing the brand in a much more effective manner by providing a suitable brand story and efficiently answering client demands. As a result, customers are invited to actively participate in creating the brand story, which increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. Internet marketing also aids in comprehending various media channels and client demographics, ensuring that with marketing, your product should reach the right part of the customer in the most effective manner possible to maximize the profit.

6: It Provides Convenience As Well As Fast Service

Our world moves at a breakneck speed. People expect rapid and easy access to information. Time is valuable, and no one wants to waste it. The Internet allows people to browse information and make purchases easily and quickly. One of the merits of Internet marketing for customers is that it allows them to save time and money.

Whenever your audience needs assistance, they will receive it quickly and easily. Whenever you promote your product or services to customers, they view your promoted content at their convenience. They will see your advertisement whenever it’s convenient for them, whether the ad pops up in their social media feed, on Google search ads, or in your email.
Your website is always promoting your company. Another benefit of Internet marketing is that customers can visit your website whenever they want. If anybody wants a product or service, they may conveniently and effortlessly purchase it online. Checkout procedures also have improved to enable rapid transactions taking no more than a few minutes. It’s faster than going to a shop, finding what you’re looking for, checking out, and then heading back home. This is a simple method for your viewers to make purchases. They can buy things at their own leisure and also in a fast and efficient manner.

Furthermore, the Internet allows your audience easy accessibility to your company’s customer care for any guidance, complaint, or feedback. Many businesses have online chatting (Chat Bot), direct toll numbers, or email services that enable customers to reach the company whenever they need assistance. It’s one of the benefits of Internet marketing for clients because it allows them to contact the company whenever it’s convenient for them.

7: Get Competition With Big Giants In Your Field

The most challenging aspect of running a company is facing competition. For small companies and startups, it isn’t easy to compete with big businesses in your field like Amazon, Flipkart, Walmart, and more if you’re in an eCommerce market, Zomato, UberEats, FoodPanda, and more if you’re in a food chain market, and several other different fields. They already are a well-known brand, which leads to more people automatically willing to trust on these businesses.

When you have a competitive edge against bigger corporations, digital marketing is essential to your success. Your company can use the same methodologies as a bigger company to reach your potential customers.

Techniques such as website designing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, and many other helps to level up your playing field. With SEO strategies, your website will rise to the top of the search results depending on how valuable it is? A corporation cannot buy its direction to the top of the corporate ladder. They must optimize their webpage the same way a bigger business does.

When you employ pay-per-click advertising, Google also ranks your advertisements depending on how suitable they are for the user? With that, you can outrank your competitors. Even if your competitor’s business spends twice as much as you do for each click for the same keywords and key phrases that your company is targeting, it is not certain that they will be placed in the top position. They won’t be able to buy a top-ranking ad spot; because the ad’s ranking is determined by the relevancy of your advert. This allows SME and mid-sized companies to compete with their bigger businesses.

If you can produce more relevant information to the chosen keywords than your business rivals, then no money can help them get a higher rank than you. Digital marketing provides an excellent chance for your company to compete with larger corporations for more relevant and successful leads.

According to research conducted by Deloitte, 72% of marketers believe that the concept of marketing has become more critical during the pandemic year(s) and still growing exponentially. As a result of a variety of changes in consumer behavior over the last 2 years, digital marketing has become an effective tool for engaging with new and current clients. People have been forced to live differently due to numerous constraints placed on our day-to-day lives; as a direct consequence of this, people are shopping in other places and spending their time in new ways.
Changing consumer behavior is causing digital marketers to adjust their tactics as it becomes more difficult to meet client expectations and retain a competitive advantage while staying current with the newest technology. It’s no surprise that digital marketing is going through a time of transformation, with challenges such as:

1: Never Getting Less Traffic Volume
The digital world is constantly growing, and practically every company has moved its products/services online to reach a wider audience. We are limited to certain areas with traditional marketing, and the same niche people outnumber us. But with digital marketing, we can get several people of the same niche from overseas with the same Interest and mindset.

2: Get A Targeted Audience
With traditional marketing, we get a diverse niche of audiences with inappropriate leads. But with designed digital marketing campaigns, you can filter out your targeted audiences and generate potentially high-quality leads. It might be challenging to understand your targeted audience and their business expectations (particularly online). Moreover, like no two users are alike, no two users have the same needs or expectations. Understanding how your targeted audience interacts, where and how they hang out online, and how they like to be contacted are essential to any digital marketing campaign.

3: Generating Quality Leads
Traditional Marketing faced many challenges in generating few leads, but in the case of digital marketing, we can generate several potential leads globally. It takes time and effort to generate high-quality leads. Therefore, with the implementation of automated marketing processes and a CRM, the process may not be that difficult. You’ll have a better time generating leads if your objectives are explicit and your target audience requirements are clear.

4: Optimized ROI And Marketing Budget
In traditional marketing, we have to pay extra bucks and have to cross our marketing budget to advertise our products or services. But with digital marketing, we can optimize our marketing budget every day, week, or month. With the rise of digital platforms and powerful analytics technologies, marketers must optimize marketing expenditures and ROI to best meet the organization’s demands.

5: Created Relationships With Many Influencers And Businesses
With digital marketing, many small businesses and entrepreneurs have created relationships with many influencers and business owners. Earlier, there were many creators and celebrities who didn’t care about small businesses and worked with big giants, but with social media, there are several well-known influencers who think about small firms and want to work with us.

6: Lessen The Marketing Cost
In the earlier days of marketing, it was so costly to advertise our services or products, and there wasn’t any analytical report for optimizing our campaigns. But with the transformation of digital marketing, advertisement became so much cheaper and more effective. We can also optimize our campaign and budget.

1: Outreach Globally And Locally

Traditional marketing is demographically and geographically restricted, and launching a worldwide marketing campaign can be challenging, expensive, and time-consuming. However, since digital marketing is on the Internet, the possible reach is immense globally and locally. Even a small local business may attract and reach a worldwide audience with an internet shop. It would never be achieved with traditional marketing and will be extremely expensive. Businesses can now take full advantage of various new development prospects because of worldwide internet accessibility. Every firm can benefit from the network of global outreach and visibility.

Digital marketing has a worldwide reach. It boosts your localized visibility, which is critical if your company primarily depends on local customers like restaurants, barbers, doctors, etc. Local SEO or locally tailored advertisements will be advantageous for local businesses looking to attract nearby localized customers. Consider the reach your business can get with digital marketing vs. the reach you would have by printing and distributing flyers around your community.

2: Niche Targeting

Niche targeting involves approaching only those specific persons who meet your criteria. It may be accomplished via the use of a proper digital marketing plan. You may filter out all your audiences on your online platforms based on the traits that fit your targeted demographic, and afterward, you can run advertisements to get high-quality leads. There are several ways to narrow down your searches, such as whether you want to focus on men or women, their ages range, what is your targeted country, and you can narrow it down further. For example, you want only females in the age range of 25-40 only from America. And that’s how comprehensive niche targeting can go. As a result, it is the most appealing feature of digital marketing.

3: Measurable and Trackable Results

In our view, every company plan, is a waste of effort if you can’t track your results. This simply implies making attempts in the darkness. Compiling a solid plan and putting it into action is just half the fight. Your ultimate purpose is to keep track of your performance and progress, measure overall success/failure, and take remedial action. You can monitor the effectiveness of any of your digital marketing campaigns from start to finish using tools like Google Analytics, Aweber, Google Search Console, and many others. This is how you figure out what works the best for both you and your business and stick with it.

4: Build Customer Loyalty By Communicating With Them

As you may be aware, attracting and converting prospective customers is more expensive than retaining current clients. Customer loyalty is hard to gain, but it is well worth your time, investment, and effort. It’s wonderful to close a deal with your consumers, but it’s even better to keep them once the deal is over. A satisfied customer is more likely to make future purchases and refer your company to others, leading to increased revenue. Recurring customers account for 40% of all online sales in the United States, although they only account for 8% of all website visitors. Keep in touch with clients to maintain them, and digital marketing makes this simpler than ever. The following are some tried and tested strategies:

Customized Email Offers: You know your customer better than anyone. It is best to send your clients personalized offers with a decent discount. Or even you can provide them the early access to your upcoming product or service. With this gesture, your customer feels special; not only that, but it also rouses them to buy from you again.

Social Media Engagement: Notify your customers to follow you and your business on social networking sites. When they do, you’ll be able to see them regularly whenever they navigate through their social media feeds. Provide your customers with helpful, relevant information or materials that encourage and fascinate them to keep themselves engaged in your content. If customers need your products or services again, they’ll be more willing to buy from you.

5: Obtain And Enhance Better Conversion Rate

Online advertising platforms are far less costly than several traditional advertising methods, such as those seen on television, radio, or in print media. You may also quickly and easily boost your advertisement conversion rate more than it is with traditional marketing. Conversion rates are difficult to measure because everything occurs offline using traditional marketing methods. How can you know whether somebody saw your ad in the newspaper or pamphlet and came into your store afterward? How could you improve your ads if you can’t monitor their performance?

Digital advertising simplifies this process because every engagement can be monitored, tracked, and optimized. You can see how many visitors are seeing your advertisement and what activities they are doing right afterward.

Several online advertising platforms feature monitoring tools that you may use to perfect your ad targeting, content, and appearance. Enhancing the conversion rate is one of the foremost noteworthy advantages of digital marketing.

You can enhance your conversion rate by investing in CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) digital marketing tactics. With this, you can target more targeted leads. Concentrating on consumers who are more likely to be interested in your organization will increase your odds of conversion. Your company will see an increase in sales, which will help it grow.

6: Earns Brand Reputation

The Internet is the best place for any company to build a reputation rapidly and in a way that can be recognized and valued also maintained over time. Content marketing research demonstrates that digitally active businesses generally end up having the maximum trustworthiness. Through informative content, a firm can answer almost every customer’s issues, explain crucial ideas, and knows what drives the market.

Useful and entertaining content enables a company to acquire the confidence of its consumers, and that of industry professionals. It can be beneficial to the point when competitors start to reference it likewise in their articles.

But how can you tell whether your brand’s reputation has improved? You must keep an eye on the organic search engine results position (SERP). For example, if you have a high Google ranking, you are considered a reference in the industry. This draws additional stakeholders to your firm and increases trust in what you are doing. After all, it’s reasonable to depend on specialists who are already industry leaders, right?

Blogging is one method by which you may demonstrate your expertise. Consumers are searching for high-quality material that solves their concerns and queries. Your business’s subject matter specialists offer valuable insights which should be shared with your targeted audience. According to HubSpot, firms who has blog get 67% more leads, and customers determine brands after 5-7 impressions.

7: Cost-Effectiveness

Digital marketing is a low-cost business strategy. Digital marketing is a low-cost business strategy. Executing digital marketing tactics to advertise your company, either locally, worldwide, small, or huge, is a cost-effective way to grow your business. You may reduce the total expenditure of your digital marketing campaign by modifying that each result is analyzed.

Even the smallest of businesses can utilize highly targeted techniques to begin developing their company to compete against bigger corporations whose advertising campaigns may be greater than that of the small businesses themselves. The outcomes of digital marketing are what really make it cost-effective.

Some tactics, such as SEO, SMM, email marketing, and content marketing, are indeed free, to begin with. Not every kind of internet marketing is appropriate for every company. Other approaches are more expensive than others, but digital marketing may provide adequate answers for any business.

Online marketing, on the whole, provides a better return on investment than other ways of marketing. For example, a medium-sized business wants to create a local campaign to advertise its new website, but its competition appears to have completely saturated the local market with conventional media. Even on a shoestring budget, businesses may target the nearest and most relevant customers to be engaged locally, yet digitally, to boost sales at a cheaper cost than their competitors.

Marketing is a commercial activity that promotes the sale of company items or their usage in various areas of services. Marketing is about more than simply selling and promoting; it is also about supplying customers with products and services that they want and need. As consumers, marketing enables us to be influenced by demonstrating a quality of life that can be attained or by providing possibilities to live in a specific manner.

It is crucial to acknowledge that we live in an era in which the internet and social media have a significant impact on local as well as global enterprises, economies, and markets. 5G wireless technology is on the horizon, and new advanced technologies are being introduced on a daily basis. Companies and brands are supplying their services and goods to targeted people all over the globe more smoothly and economically than ever before, thanks to this technological wave. The internet world is packed with digital marketing possibilities, and they are transforming the world around us.

Some stats which tell us the impact of digital marketing on our daily lives:

• There are more than 100,000 Google Searches every second.
• As of 2019, there were more than 4 billion email accounts that have a staggering event were 293. 6 billion emails were sent each day.
• There are more than 3.2 Billion Social Media Users.
• An average of 142 minutes is spent on Social Media every day.
  … and much more

Digital marketing has a significant influence in today’s environment of tech-savvy consumers.

It Keeps Clients Updated.

The world is rapidly developing with the introduction of various trends, services, concerns, and requirements. Customers are kept up to date on the most recent industry developments via the use of the many digital marketing possibilities. Every new product or service that are introduced is instantaneously available to the consumer as a source of rapid information.

Empowering Customers

Isn’t it true that we constantly read Amazon’s review section prior to making an order? The goal of digital marketing is to improve the user experience. As a result of the widespread availability of websites and mobile applications, customers may now provide feedback on products and services. This assists prospective clients in making an educated purchasing choice.

Ease Of Use And Fast Service

Time is a valuable assets in today’s environment. Customers may receive product information and make rapid purchase selections with the press of a button. Customers can now shop without leaving the convenience of their homes, saving them the time and energy that they would have spent traveling to a store, searching for the goods, and making the purchase.

Relationships Are Strengthened.

As the Internet has grown in popularity, reliable information about the brand experience has been widely available to customers. Customers can develop confidence in a business by benefitting from the numerous digital marketing opportunities available. Digital marketing has made it possible for companies to give their clients top-notch customer service, which leads them to strengthen their relationships.

24/7 Accessibility.

On the Internet, users can access your business information 24 hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of what times of day it is. They can create opinions about businesses at any time of the day. Customers may now shop for a product or service whenever they want, no matter the time of day.

Businesses and individuals are doing whatever they can to keep up with modern technologies’ changing and evolving nature. The capability of a company to attract and convert their intended internet audiences into leads or sales distinguishes a successful one from a failing one. Different Digital Marketing tools and approaches provide you with the greatest opportunity to succeed, sustain, and even grow your business.

In digital marketing, big data plays a crucial role. Each day, the amount of information transmitted digitally grows substantially. “Data is gold” in this digital world is crucial to every organization and business’s digital marketing efforts. Advertisers may use big data to examine every action taken by a customer. It helps marketers build more precise and sophisticated marketing plans by providing better actionable marketing insights.

Because of their objectives, big data and online marketing are inextricably linked. Big data is used to increase traffic by focusing on the appropriate people. It also aids in the planning of marketing for the intended audience in order for them to visit and stay. The same is true for digital marketing. The primary purpose of digital marketing is to increase profit as well as the number of customers by implementing cutting-edge marketing approaches and processes. There is a connection between the two because of their shared goal of reaching as many customers as possible with their messages.

The following are some of the reasons why big data is crucial for digital marketers:

• • Customer insights in real-time
  • Personalization for advertising
  • Boosting sales
  • Enhances a promotional campaign’s effectiveness
  • Optimization of the budget
  • Increasing the accuracy of campaign results measurement