What is Digital Marketing? Definition, Types, and Benefits

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing refers to any marketing efforts carried out using electronic devices and the internet. Digital marketing can be seen in many forms, such as search engines, websites, social media, blogs, emails, and any other methods alike with the goal of reaching out to customers.

Compared to traditional marketing, which is mostly static and often only promotes one-way communication, digital marketing is more dynamic and ever-changing. Most of the time, traditional marketing allows customers to view an ad campaign through billboards, magazines, and newspapers—they only encourage an exchange through radio or tv interviews. However, digital marketing allows two-way communication between the brand and its customers.

The reality for people nowadays is that they're glued to their phones or gadgets and consume significant hours of their days only browsing the internet or social media. Because of this, digital marketing has leveraged this reality and promoted businesses and services all over the internet. Through digital marketing, there is a guarantee that marketing efforts will reach their target customers as it can track where their customers spend a lot of time across various platforms.

The best way to take advantage of digital marketing is to use a multimodal approach. A digital marketing plan combining several strategies, such as search engine optimization, social media marketing, online advertising, and content development, can be the most efficient strategy for companies, especially for start-up businesses, as they have considerable economic benefits and wider reach.

Why is Digital Marketing important?

At this stage, digital marketing is vital for your business and brand awareness. It seems like every other brand has a website. And if they don't, they at least have a social media presence or digital ad strategy. Digital content and marketing are so common that consumers now expect and rely on them as a way to learn about brands. Because digital marketing has so many options and strategies associated with it, you can get creative and experiment with a variety of marketing tactics on a budget.

Any type of marketing can help your business thrive. However, digital marketing has become increasingly important because of how accessible digital channels are. In fact, there were 5 billion internet users globally in April 2022 alone.

From social media to text messages, there are many ways to use digital marketing tactics to communicate with your target audience. Additionally, digital marketing has minimal upfront costs, making it a cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses.

Types of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a broad term that encompasses many different channels for promoting business interests to prospective customers. Depending on the business needs and goals, there are countless ways to conduct digital marketing. It is not a cookie-cutter exercise. 

That being said, there are several common methods for conducting digital marketing, including:

1. Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a method that uses social media to promote a brand, product, or content. It can be done organically, by paying for ads, or both simultaneously. You may publish your content on social media or create ads and pay to reach a particular public. In both cases, the most important thing is to choose the more suitable social network for your persona, brand, product/service, or content.

 Social media marketing goes far beyond simply creating posts for social channels and responding to comments. Statista reports that 88% of industry professionals stated that increased exposure to their company was the leading benefit of social media marketing in 2021. Behind that, 79% of companies claimed an increase in traffic to their website was the largest advantage

To be effective, efforts must be coordinated and consistent rather than an afterthought. To help keep posts consistent, many online tools are available to automate and schedule social media posts. However, marketers only should use automation as a tool, not a “set it and forget it” solution. Users will figure it out quickly if there is no real person behind the posts.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing uses storytelling and information sharing to increase brand awareness. Ultimately, the goal is to have the reader take action toward becoming a customer, such as requesting more information, signing up for an email list, or making a purchase. “Content” can mean blog posts, resources like white papers and e-books, digital videos, podcasts, and much more. In general, it should first and foremost provide value to the consumer, not just advertise the brand or try to make a sale. Content marketing is about building a sustainable, trusting relationship with your customers that can potentially lead to many sales over time, not just making a single transaction.

3. Email Marketing

Even with the emergence of social media, mobile applications, and other channels, email is still one of the most effective marketing techniques. It can be part of a content marketing strategy, providing value to consumers and, over time, converting an audience into customers. Email marketing pros not only know how to create compelling campaigns, but they also understand optimal audience outreach and are skilled at analyzing customer interactions and data, and making strategic decisions based on that data, according to the American Marketing Association.

4. Influencer Marketing

Once we are talking about digital influencers, it is time to explain who they are: specialists in specific subjects with a big audience interested in what they’re saying. Digital influencers may produce specific content for your brand if it fits their voices. They can make public tests of your products and show their public the results, no matter positive or negative. Therefore, they have the power to praise or destroy your brand.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, allows your content to rank in the top positions of search engines. Thereby, your website will be found by someone who is actively searching for what you offer. To apply SEO, you need to know the keywords that the audience you want to reach is searching. Then, you must develop your content around these terms. The goal of SEO is to get a business to rank higher in Google search results, ultimately increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website.

6. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning that once you are no longer paying, the ad no longer exists. Like SEO, PPC is a way to increase search traffic to a business online.

Pay-per-click can refer to the advertisements you see at the top and sides of a page of search results, the ads you see while browsing the web, ads before YouTube videos and in ads in mobile apps.

One of the other things that differentiate pay-per-click from SEO is that you only pay for the results. In a typical PPC model like a Google AdWords campaign, you will pay only when someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website. You can spend just about any amount of money on pay-per-click advertising. Some companies may see results from investing just a few hundred dollars, but plenty of large companies spend tens of thousands a month on pay-per-click.

7. Mobile Marketing

This digital marketing type is focused on reaching your target audience on their smartphone or tablet. Mobile marketing reaches people through text messages, social media, websites, email, and mobile applications. Marketers can tailor offers or special content to a geographic location or time, such as when a customer walks into a store or enters an event.

Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing

Digital marketing and inbound marketing are easily confused, and for a good reason. Digital marketing uses many of the same tools as inbound marketing—email and online content, to name a few. Both exist to capture the attention of prospects through the buyer’s journey and turn them into customers. But the 2 approaches take different views of the relationship between the tool and the goal.

Digital marketing considers how individual tools or digital channels can convert prospects. A brand's digital marketing strategy may use multiple platforms or focus all of its efforts on 1 platform. For example, a company may primarily create content for social media platforms and email marketing campaigns while ignoring other digital marketing avenues.

On the other hand, inbound marketing is a holistic concept. It considers the goal first, then looks at the available tools to determine which will effectively reach target customers, and then at which stage of the sales funnel that should happen.

The most important thing to remember about digital marketing and inbound marketing is that as a marketing professional, you don’t have to choose between the 2. In fact, they work best together. Inbound marketing provides structure and purpose for effective digital marketing to digital marketing efforts, making sure that each digital marketing channel works toward a goal.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

1. Reduced Cost

One of the biggest benefits of online marketing is that it is cost-effective. Digital marketing helps you save money and obtain more leads. With traditional marketing methods, it’s difficult for small-to-mid-size businesses to compete with larger companies. Big businesses have the money to allocate for TV ads, radio spots, and more. This makes it hard for small businesses to compete with these larger companies.

Digital marketing, however, puts businesses on the same playing field. It is an affordable way to market your business to interested consumers. Many digital marketing and advertising methods are budget-friendly.

2. Measurable

When you invest money into a marketing campaign, you want to track the campaign's results. Knowing if a strategy is driving results that help your business grow is important. One of the most significant benefits of a digital marketing strategy is the ability to measure your results.

With digital marketing methods, you can accurately track the results of your campaign. Each type of campaign has a tracking system. From social media to search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll be able to track the results of your campaigns. This includes impressions, clicks, comments, shares, conversions, and more. It makes it easy for you to know how your campaign is performing. Tracking your results leads to campaign improvements. You can see what’s working for your business and what isn’t.

3. Effective Targeting

Even if you don’t have a clear idea of what your target audience is, with digital marketing, you can extract data to see which audiences have worked the best for you and optimize your campaign with the learnings. The targeting limitations of traditional marketing methods will increase your marketing costs overall as the audiences might not be as defined compared to digital marketing methods.

With digital marketing, you’re always on top of which audiences work the best and have the ability to reach the best audiences when you’re creating campaigns to target them. Whether targeting through keywords for search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) or through demographic information on social media, the many options of targeting at your disposal make sure every campaign reaches the wanted audience.

4. Flexible

One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is that you can make changes as you go. This is unique to digital marketing. With traditional methods, you can’t make changes once you’ve committed. Once your flyers or billboards are up, you can’t alter the ad until the end of your campaign.

When you invest in digital marketing, you have the power to make changes whenever. You can update your PPC campaigns, tweak your social media ads, optimize your SEO campaigns, and update your content as you need. This means you can adapt your campaign to drive the best results.

5. Variety of Content Types

A crucial benefit of digital marketing is the ability to use different content types to express your brand online. Producing a cross-platform online campaign utilizing the most relevant content formats that fit your branding is a powerful digital marketing tactic.

6. Increased Engagement

Digital marketing, by default, is a highly engaging medium, whether users share your content on social media, engage with a long-form article, or engage with your website after a paid ad click. As every action by visitors and customers in digital marketing can be measured, it enables you to create even more engaging forms of advertising to boost sales and brand awareness.

If your business has as much coverage online as possible and the interactions with your business are engaging, all of it produces a more wholesome brand online. Brands that effectively use engaging formats in their online strategies have an easier time converting even cold traffic into loyal customers.

Conclusion

Your business will experience the multiple advantages of digital marketing by investing in different strategies, from PPC to SEO. Online marketing is an excellent opportunity for your business to grow and gain more valuable traffic and sales.

Investing in digital marketing services can help your company earn more revenue, leads, and conversions.

If you’re ready to take your business to new heights, contact us online to see how we can help.