Marketing is the buzzword used frequently. But have you ever wondered or tried to guess the definition of the word ‘marketing’? The most common definition of marketing is connecting with the right audience at the right time with the right message. There are various forms of marketing available, but generally, we categorize marketing into offline and online marketing, and many business owners ask which is the best form of marketing. In practice, we cannot compare both because their effectiveness can vary from business to business. In this blog, we will discuss exclusively digital marketing, brief history, the importance of digital marketing, digital marketing strategy, its types, the role of a digital marketer, and the future of online marketing.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is the form of marketing with the help of online platforms and digital mediums. It uses the online medium to run advertising campaigns and hence is also called online marketing. The platforms which are included in running digital advertising are search engines, emails, social media, mobile or desktop applications, websites, and any new digital channel. Digital marketing has many goals, but the most common among them is to drive traffic & conversions, generate leads, build brand awareness, etc. Digital marketing services have various options like email marketing, content marketing, guest posting, etc. It can be paid campaigns which are called pay-per-click (PPC services), and free campaigns, which are search engine optimization (SEO services). Social media marketing is also a very popular and useful part of digital marketing, which helps to achieve business goals with the help of social media platforms. To achieve this, you can also hire any digital marketing agency for better results or optimize using your knowledge and skills.
A brief history and evolution of digital marketing
The invention of the radio in 1895 by Guglielmo Marconi marked the beginning of the digital advertising era. Nearly ten years after the invention, the first live broadcast happened, which positively impacted the audience. Digital marketing popularized in the early 2000s when users’ interest increased in online marketing. Then with search engines and social media sites, it became a crucial part of advertising. Yahoo was launched in 1994 and received one million hits within a year of its launching. It did not take long for the experts to understand that digital marketing is the future of advertising. Then in 1998, Google was launched, Microsoft launched MSN, and Yahoo launched web search to compete with them. Apart from these, many small search engines were already introduced in the market, evidencing the transition phase of traditional marketing shifting to online marketing.
In the year 2004, the importance of digital marketing was not a secret and slowly started to take over the traditional form of marketing. This was the same year a social media giant; Facebook, was launched. Facebook plays a huge role in social media marketing and helps advertisers to get in touch with a wide audience. Facebook Ads have reached over 2.18 billion people and are attracting more advertisers to run ads on the largest social media platform. The importance of digital marketing can be understood by the fact that by the end of 2004, the digital advertising market had grown to $2.9 billion alone in the US.
Why is digital marketing important?
- Access to a large audience base – Marketing campaigns are created and run to increase brand visibility and awareness by displaying them to a large audience, and this is the feature digital marketing holds. With the advancement in internet technology, digital marketing has become so popular as it has a huge user base. The whole population of the world is 7.8 billion, out of which 4.9 billion are actively using the internet, which is almost 63%. Also, for social media, there are 4.55 billion active users globally. It is easy to predict the opportunities in the digital marketing industry. Undoubtedly, online marketing has a much larger user base than traditional forms of marketing.
- Easily find and target potential customers – The above stats clearly states that online marketing provides a wide audience base for advertisers to target. With a proper SEO plan & strategy, you can find relevant audiences for your business. You can easily target your business’s potential customers based on location, age, gender, work, behavior, etc. This means you can show your ads to only those audiences which you have specified and have the maximum potential to convert into a business’s regular customers. With proper strategic planning, the marketers can determine the relevant audience that has a high chance of taking the intended action on the landing page. You need to focus on increasing the users’ trust by providing them with products or services that sync with the latest marketing trends.
- Cost-effective – Specifying your advertising budget and spending accordingly can prove to be a profitable strategy for your business. Still, at the same time, it is also crucial to avoid any expenditure that goes beyond the budget specified. PPC services are paid and have a variety of options to save your money while running ads. With PPC ads, maximum businesses are getting $2 returns in spending of $1, which is a 200% return, significantly huge and helpful! But suppose you are investing in online advertising with the proper knowledge or hiring a digital marketing agency. In that case, you can accomplish these tasks because it has access to a large audience on a very low budget, while SEO is a free organic traffic provider, which is extremely useful.
- Measure your insights – The major problem with offline ads or traditional advertising is measuring the performance of SEO or PPC campaigns in real-time. If you cannot measure the performance of your campaigns, then it becomes tough to determine which metrics need to be optimized. This is where digital marketing comes in handy, providing real-time solutions to marketers. For this, it becomes essential to track every metric of your paid or organic campaigns, such as returns on investment (ROI), website traffic, conversion rate, engagement rate, number of visitors, cost per click, etc., to run your campaigns effectively. This is the game of numbers; the one with more data and the ability to analyze & implement it, the better they can achieve the desired marketing goals.
- Quickly implement any change – Suppose you are running an offline ad campaign in a specific location. You invested a good amount of money in putting banners, billboards & hoardings across the city, but after some time, you realized that this campaign is not providing a good ROI or you want to implement some changes. But the problem is you can’t do anything because you already invested in it, and even if you do it again, it will incur a considerable amount. On the other hand, in digital marketing, you can do everything with the campaign, like making any changes, optimizing, or terminating the campaign, and it will cost you accordingly. With digital marketing, it is easy to make changes, regularly optimize and stop campaigns whenever needed. The billing of the campaign will also be immediately stopped. There are numerous tools and features available using which you can cut down the advertising cost.
- Personalized marketing – It is not wrong to say that more and more personalized ads and recommendations are becoming the core part of digital marketing strategy. Every customer or user has its own unique choices. Showing them advertisements that do not match their interest cannot help you in customer acquisition and retention; Google is also focusing on a personalized advertising strategy in which only those ads are shown to users who are relevant to them or interested in them. To serve your customers with personalized recommendations, you must analyze users’ search behavior, history, interests, etc. This technique is becoming popular and helpful for getting more clicks/views and then conversion by spending less amount of money.
- Equal opportunity for all – Small business owners always worry that they cannot compete or match with the prominent players in their field, and this can be true in offline advertising. This is because those with more resources, budget, and qualified teams can generally win the bid for advertising places. But the best part of digital marketing is that all have equal opportunities to rank across the SERPs as search engines or social media platforms don’t care about more prominent brands. They only provide ranking to the websites or ads that are the most relevant to the user’s searched query and have a high-quality score. This is one of the many reasons why a huge population is shifting to online advertising.
The top 7 digital marketing strategies
- Set your business goals – Business goals are the objectives or purpose of the business. Business goals can differ from company to company; some focus on increasing sales, some on brand awareness, driving traffic, etc. thus, identifying the business goals is critical. Before creating a digital marketing strategy, you should have a clear idea of what you want to achieve by running the advertising campaign.
- Identify target audience – A target audience is a group of people specified on some common characteristics that have the most potential to convert into regular business customers. If you have identified the business target audience, you have more clarity on framing and executing your digital marketing strategy.
- Specify your advertising budget – The advertising budget is the overall amount you are willing to spend on your marketing campaigns. Running advertising campaigns is essential for businesses to gain visibility. But this does not mean that you spend your whole capital on it, and you are out of money to spend the amount on your core business. Customer satisfaction is vital, which will only be achieved with the core business. Thus you need to specify the budget so that you have a proper idea about where and how to invest to maximize ROI.
- Maintain a balance between PPC and SEO campaigns – Any digital marketing strategy cannot be considered complete without balancing the SEO and PPC campaigns. Almost all bigger brands invest their resources in both and then comes SMO as part of the social media marketing. However, if you want to start from scratch, our cost-effective SEO services and PPC services can help you in building successful campaigns.
- Conduct proper keyword research – Finding the keywords that best match your business audience’s search queries and using them frequently in the meta tags, title tags, content, headlines, etc., is one of the most helpful practices that rank your website across search engine results pages. Before creating any type of content, conducting keyword research with the help of tools like Google keyword planner or other SEO tools is undoubtedly critical for effective campaign optimization.
- Create and share engaging content – The primary goal of search engines is to provide the most relevant and accurate search results to their users. You have to research for suitable and useful content for your audience and answer their question so they can interact with it. You can write articles, blogs, paragraphs, create a list of FAQs, etc., as a part of your content marketing strategy and share them via digital platforms to drive users to the business website.
- Focus on insights for effective campaign optimization – To become a digital marketing expert or run a successful campaign, you need to know how marketing strategies can be applied to the campaign to gain maximum results. As we discussed above, one of the main benefits of digital marketing over traditional marketing is that you have access to numbers that describe your marketing campaign’s performance. For any services related to online advertising, you must have the knowledge to analyze the stats collected from your marketing tools. As a digital marketing agency, we already have these services like digital analytics services, reporting services, SEO services for auditing, consulting services, and many more for your influential conversion rate optimization.
The different types of digital marketing
Digital marketing is an umbrella term that is used to cover all the possible modes of marketing that uses digital channels or mediums; it can cover various methods in which, some of which are listed below:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – As its name indicates, it is the process or practice of getting organic traffic to websites; you only have to follow proper SEO guidelines to gain a high ranking across SERPs. It is a free method and the most useful one for increasing the conversions to the websites. Our team of digital marketing experts provides best-in-class SEO services, including copywriting services, SEO plan & strategy services, link-building services, etc.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) – PPC services are paid in which you have to pay your publisher a fixed amount of money every time your ad is clicked. It is one of the best and most useful methods to gain website visibility, generate leads, increase brand awareness, and conversion rate optimization. Social media paid campaigns are also available that fuels your digital marketing strategy.
- Social media marketing – Social media marketing is the term used for advertising with the help of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc., to boost the engagement of the audience with your business. It has a huge user base; thus, marketing through it proves to be a profitable decision. Nowadays, it is used on a great level to create viral campaigns that can rapidly increase the users’ engagement rate with your business. The contribution of social media to total digital ad spending for the year 2022 is 33%.
- Content marketing – Content marketing is the creation and promotion of content in order to gain engagement, traffic, valuable backlinks, leads, etc., for the expansion of the business. This content can be in the form of articles, blogs, audio, video, podcasts, images & infographics, and also long-form content like whitepaper and ebooks.
- Affiliate marketing – Affiliate marketing is the act of commission-based marketing in which a business owner pays a reward to one or more of its affiliates when they bring up sales, customers, or leads for the company with their marketing technique. Referrals programs run by various brands are one of the most common examples of affiliate marketing.
- Native advertising – Native advertising is the sponsored or paid ads that match the format, design, and function of the media platform upon which it appears. It is so consistent with the platform that the visitors feel like the ad is part of it; however, the ad is specified or marked as sponsored.
- Email marketing – One of the most successful digital marketing services is Email marketing, in which a brand or business sends commercial messages to its potential or current customers in order to promote its business products or services.
- Inbound marketing – Inbound marketing is creating valuable, high-quality content and spreading it through various online platforms, so potential customers are attracted to your business and opt for the services if they need them.
Apart from these, digital marketing services are not over yet; there are many like online PR, sponsored content, instant messaging marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), etc., and any digital method you choose for advertising can be counted in online marketing.
What is the work of a digital marketer?
If you created a website, but it is not appearing for the search terms for which it is optimized, then you lost the competition of the digital world at the very first step. Here arrives the role of the digital marketer or digital marketing agency, which takes all the responsibilities related to your SEO campaigns and search engine marketing campaigns.
A digital marketer is a digital marketing expert that handles all tasks related to the marketing campaigns like web design and development, driving traffic to the websites, keyword research, content optimization, enhancing user experience, increasing brand awareness, lead generation, link-building, providing the suggestions based on the complete analysis of reports, etc. Also, running paid advertising campaigns in combination and focusing on each of its metrics like decreasing click-through rate (CTR), cost per acquisition, enhancing landing page experience, better quality score, ad relevancy, etc., would maximize your business growth and revenue. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency that would provide complete digital marketing services under one roof, then we are here to assist you. Our effective and cost-efficient SEO and PPC services will take your business to the next level.
The future of digital marketing
What is the future of digital marketing? Before exploring this question, look at the stats: digital marketing has become a significant part of information technology, worth $460 billion out of the $5 trillion IT industry. It is projected to reach $786.2 billion by 2026. The projected compound annual growth rate is 9% from 2020-2026. This world is sometimes called the world of advertising. It is true because the importance of digital marketing in technological advancements cannot be neglected. According to digital marketing experts, with the introduction of technologies like AI, IoT, metaverse, machine learning, web 3.0, etc. online advertising industry will see drastic growth like never before. The new techniques and methods may be introduced, but their significance never goes down. One of the main reasons for this is better customer service which is possible to this extent only with the help of enhanced digital marketing services.
Conclusion
With the help of this blog, we dived into the world of digital marketing, but it is a very vast term that covers numerous services. The possible reason for it to take over traditional marketing is that it includes almost all features of traditional advertising along with opening a gate to new innovations and possibilities. Whether you choose it as a profession, opt for its services or features, or become a service provider, digital marketing is a pool of opportunity. You can get in touch with us for any news, services, updates, and assistance in the field of digital marketing.