What & Why Digital Marketing?

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is advertising delivered through digital channels such as social media, mobile applications, email, web applications, search engines, websites, or any new digital channel to reach consumers. It also includes text messaging, instant messaging, video, apps, podcasts, electronic billboards, digital television and radio channels, etc.

Or put it simple, digital marketing is any form of marketing or promotion of brand, products or services that involves electronic devices or the internet.

What Is The 2 Main Pillars Of Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing can be done both online and offline, both kinds matter for a well-rounded digital marketing strategy. Many companies focus on online (or digital) channels over offline marketing tactics because it allows them to reach their ideal target audience where they’re already spending most of their time: online.

Digital online marketing:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
2. Search engine marketing (SEM)
3. Content marketing
4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
5. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
6. Affiliate marketing
7. Email marketing

Digital offline marketing:

1. Enhanced offline marketing
   1. Electronic billboards
   2. Digital product demos
   3. Digital product samples
2. Radio marketing
   1. Radio commercials
   2. Show sponsoring
3. TV marketing
   1. TV commercials
   2. Tele-shopping
   3. Super Bowl commercials
4. Phone marketing
   1. Cold calling
   2. Text message marketing (giveaways, coupons, loyalty programs)
   3. QR codes

Why Digital Marketing Matters?

There’s endless reasons why digital marketing makes an excellent solution for so many businesses, but if you’re just getting started, here’s the 3 that will have the biggest impact on the way you market and sell to your customers.

1. The share of people spending more time using electronic devices is only going up from here.
2. Reach the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
3. Get measurable results to inform your strategy.

How to Identify Your Digital Marketing Channels & Assets?

It’s helpful to break down your digital marketing channels & assets to owned, earned and paid framework to avoid becoming overwhelmed by all the tools you have at your disposal.

1. Owned digital marketing channels & assets include:
   1. Your website
   2. Your business’s social media profiles
   3. Email marketing
   4. Online branding assets (logos, images, etc.)
   5. Your blog
   6. Online brochures
   7. Other written content (such as ebooks and digital white papers)
2. Earned digital marketing channels & assets include:
   1. Media coverage of your products, services, oronline content
   2. Socialmedia posts from others that share your content, or reference your company
   3. Online reviews and ratings
   4. Articles your business contributes to other sites
3. Paid digital marketing channels & assets include:
   1. Digital advertising (banner, display, etc.)
   2. Native advertising (learn more about that here)
   3. Pay-per-click (PPC)
   4. Boosted social media posts

How Do I Get Started?

The good news is, getting started with digital marketing is fairly easy. Regardless of which strategies you choose to use, here are 4 questions you need to answer before you get started with digital marketing:

1. How Much Do You Need to Make?
2. Who Are You Marketing To?
3. What are Your Customers Worth?
4. How Much Do You Need to Spend to Reach Your Goals?

Today’s Digital Marketing

Today’s marketers face new challenges in the digital marketplace but they also have the opportunity to create personalized, relevant communications and content to develop deep relationships with customers based on ongoing interactions.

They uses multiple channels and technologies that allow an organization to analyze campaigns, content and strategy to understand what’s working and what isn’t – typically in real time. Some marketing experts consider digital marketing to be an entirely new endeavor that requires a new way of approaching customers and new ways of understanding how customers behave compared to traditional marketing.

But, employing offline marketing tactics can help you to not put all of your eggs into one basket and diversify your lead generation beyond social media, content marketing and the like. Plus the offline and online world is colliding. Traditional devices such as billboards will all be modernized to leverage digital media.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is more than Google & Facebook ads and social media posting. Today’s marketers can track the results of digital marketing efforts with incredible accuracy, which means it is easy to see which strategies are producing profitable results and which ones need some work. No doubt digital marketing the marketing of the future.