If I ask you what digital marketing is, I am sure 99% of you will tell me about marketing through emails or social media channels, running ad campaigns. Am I right?
But I would like to correct you here. The Internet is just one tool that we use for digital marketing. Think of digital marketing as a huge umbrella that covers electronic media as well!
Broadly, digital marketing includes spreading the word about your brand through
- Television
- Radio
- Electronic Billboards
- Phone applications
- Podcasts
People use the internet for advertising. Some examples include
Social media marketing
- Snapchat
- Tumblr
Email marketing
Display advertising
Banner ads
PPC
Content marketing
Although digital marketing is a broad term, we have narrowed down our search to the above. The above-listed means point to online marketing, and it is just a portion of digital marketing.
Whatever mode you follow, online marketing or offline marketing, with tools, it is very easy to track the progress of both.
Now, only the marketing that is done with the help of the internet is digital marketing and all other channels are offline marketing. This brings me to another topic of inbound marketing and outbound marketing.
The basic difference lies in the strategies that are followed. Billboards, TV ads, radio advertisements attempt to push themselves in front of the customers, technically called outbound marketing. They fall into the group of offline marketing.
Whereas in the advertisements that are shown on social media like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn try to connect with the RELEVANT AUDIENCE who might be interested in those services or products, technically known as inbound marketing. They fall into the group of online marketing.
Attracting the right customers to our business rather than approaching everyone and trying to figure out ‘who can be our probable customer’- this is the goal of inbound marketing.
But there is still a minor difference between inbound marketing and digital marketing, although both have the same tactics when you refer to it you have, to attract the customer rather than going to the customer.
Digital marketing uses tools to convert prospects into customers to reach the goal, whereas inbound marketing keeps in mind the goal of reaching the customers first and then finds suitable tools to do it.
Inbound marketing uses digital marketing as a tool to reach the goal.
If you know a little about digital marketing, then you might know about Neil Patel, Brian Dean, Moz, or Ahrefs. In case you are new to the field of digital marketing, let me tell you that these are the top renowned digital marketers who try digital marketing through all channels. You can visit their website to know more, but all of them do digital marketing through:
- Helping clients in doing digital marketing
- Tools to help digital marketing
- Blogs to enrich knowledge about digital marketing
- Videos on YouTube to help in digital marketing
- Podcasts to help the listeners with digital marketing
- Publishing books about digital marketing.
- Having a presence on digital marketing platforms.
YEP! That leaves no stone unturned. Although I can quote many brilliant examples of digital marketing, my personal favourite is Neil Patel.
This is because he has a unique style for presenting blogs, uses cartoons, images and many creatives to keep his fans engaged. Check it out for yourself!!!!
Although it might seem to you that their content is like other forms of content that you have, when you refer to it, then you will find how deep they go in a particular subject. It is through spreading knowledge and expressing their authority that they get new clients. It is a sort of inbound marketing.
Although these people are on the TOP, there is simply no reason to feel small in front of them. We can always try to learn new things and try to be on the top.
Just to give you another example of an INDIAN GUY who has made it to the top, RJ Vashishth, has 1.11 million subscribers. He had few subscribers when he started his channel with a series titled ‘Lafzo ke moti’.
What he did was, he did not have any content to post, but he has got a calming voice. He asked for short poems from the public and after uttering them on his YouTube channel, expressed emotions attached to it in his way! The idea worked perfectly well!!!
Some other aspiring digital marketers from India are:
Sorav Jain
Deepak Kanakaraju
Himanshu Arora
Jitendra Vaswani
Nidhi Singh
Digital Vidya
By now you are having a slight idea about digital marketing. But how do we market? And where do we market?
This brings me to our next question.
Just mention in the comment section how you find my blog/website? I am sure you entered some text in Google or Bing and came across my website, isn’t it?
We optimize content for the search engines but remember we design/write the content keeping the reader or the consumer in view. When you do marketing with the help of search engines, it is search engine marketing.
So what are the streams through which digital marketing operates? This brings me to a new question.
As said earlier, digital marketing uses the internet for marketing.
As of today, there are almost 13 digital marketing channels and they may increase with passaging time.
People often confuse channels with the types of digital marketing, but both are different. Channels refer to the source, whereas types refer to the categories.
Some of the ‘channels’ have the same names as the ‘types’, creating confusion.
Broadly, the following are the channels of digital marketing according to Wikipedia.
It refers to promoting somebody’s goods or services online and earning a small commission for doing the same.
Prabhu, Sandeep & Satpathy, Tanmay. (2015). Affiliate Marketing’s Future in India. In the “Indian Journal of Science and Technology.” quote,
“What exactly is affiliate marketing? It is a type of online marketing technique where an affiliate/publisher promotes a business through an advertisement on their website and in return that business rewards the affiliate with the commission each time a visitor, customer, generates sales. Affiliate marketing is also referred to as performance marketing and associate marketing. Affiliate marketing core comprises 3 parties:-
Advertiser, Publisher, and Consumer.
An Advertiser can be any company selling products like electronics, books, clothing, and air tickets online or could be an insurance company selling policies, etc.
A Publisher is the one who promotes the advertiser’s products or services through its website or blog.
A Consumer is the final and important part of this cycle who sees the advertisement and then makes an action (click) which takes him from the publisher’s website to advertise’s website and after making a purchase it is called a conversion.
In the Indian online market, according to IAMAI, the digital commerce market has seen growth by 33% to Rs 62,967 crore last year as against Rs 47,349 crore. And it is predicted that this online market will touch $50-$70 billion by 2020 for the increasing popularity of online shopping and increase in internet penetration.
Online retailers like Flipkart, Amazon, and Yatra.com have already started affiliate marketing in India and the technique is gaining popularity in the digital market. This article aims to analyze the adaptability of affiliate marketing in Indian businesses and the future potential of it.”
It is a graphic display of images, text or audio using the internet on clients’ websites, social media, banners, etc. The primary aim is to promote the brand.
Display advertising uses different types of advertisements like:
Text ads – which consist of the texts.
Image ads – Image ads can be simple images or images with text
Rich Media ads – These are the latest trends in advertising that involve user interaction.
Video ads – Advertisements can also be placed on various channels. Among them, YouTube is the most popular channel.
Dynamic Remarketing ads – These are the targeted ads for specific customers.
Gmail Sponsored ads – Sometimes you might see ads in your ‘promotions tab’ in your inbox. This is referred to as Gmail sponsored ads.
Native ads – These ads adjust themselves to the website they are displayed on. This helps them to show their ‘belongingness’ to a particular website and psychologically trick the visitor.
You should be very clear about who your prospects are and where they can be found for display advertising to be effective.
Email marketing is a tedious task but despite being an old tool it still fetches results if it is used properly. The best part about emails is that it allows personalization.
Writing emails is not child’s play because you need to write catchy email subject lines. Unless you write catchy subject lines, people won’t bother to open your emails.
There are many CRM software that can trace whether the recipient has read your emails and to go a step further, it also notes how many times a particular email was opened. This is particularly important for testing your subject lines, technically it is called A/B testing.
Emails help to build brands and trust in the minds of the prospects. With the software programs that are meant for email marketing, the task has become even easier. Programs like Click Funnel and SamCart make the job of repeated follow-ups very easy.
The basic purpose of marketing is to create brand awareness and make people aware of the product. With so many social media channels around us, it has become very easy to use them for marketing.
There are different social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr to name a few. They also allow paid marketing.
One thing is common among all the social media channels and that is – all of them want to make money through advertisements. So social media acts as a connecting link between the ultimate consumer and the business.
Through social media, we can set budgets and target our ads to a specific audience. The main aim for posting on any social media is to share knowledge, spread awareness and build authority.
Search Engine Marketing comprises SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and PPC(Pay per click). SEO refers to ranking your site organically on different search engines whereas PPC refers to paid advertising.
SEO is a continuous activity and you need to make efforts every day to stay on the top. SEO itself suggests that you need to optimize the content for the search engines but make it interesting and informative for all those who are going to consume the content.
SEO activities consist of Off-page activities, On-page activities and Technical SEO. On-page activities refer to optimizing keywords in the content.
Off-page activities refer to building the backlinks by listing profiles, creating avatars, creating backlinks, submitting business listings, submitting PPT’s etc.
PPC refers to paid advertising. As said earlier ad can be in different formats and targeted according to the need. There are different types of PPC ads.
Types of PPC ads
This is one of the most used ad campaigns that are used. Google ads, Bing ads, Yahoo ads can be used to target specific visitors. To go into a little more detail, when you do paid search marketing you need to choose keywords. Keywords are very crucial to the ads because only they can bring leads for you.
Accordingly, the keywords can be divided into 3 broad categories.
They are the keywords that reach the widest audience. Google or any search engine uses these keywords for a learning phase. Such keywords do not need to follow a particular order in the search query.
In the case of Phrase keywords, you need to choose certain key phrases that customers use to search for your products. Google understands the phrases and shows them to the relevant audience.
For example, if you input the phrase, ‘lawn mowing services’ it will be shown to people who search for the price, lawn mowing near me. It will also match the synonym and show it to someone who is interested in lawn cutting service near me.
They are the most restrictive types of keywords. Unless the exact words match, Google won’t show the ad. For example, if your exact keyword is ‘Black school shoes’ then it won’t show your ad to someone who searches for ‘shoes’ or ‘school shoes’.
You can see display ads everywhere when you visit any website. They appear in the form of banner ads, text ads or image ads and are quite useful to create brand awareness.
Whenever you visit websites, it asks you for cookies, right? When you click on ‘yes’ then it means that you are interested in that product.
Depending on the cookies, new products are recommended to you in which you might be interested. This is called retargeting in PPC.
This brings me to the last topic and that is:
Compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing has a wider reach because whenever someone searches on a search engine, there is an opportunity for your business to be displayed. This increases the chances of conversion.
A geographical area isn’t a limitation in digital marketing.
With traditional marketing, you need to ask the customer as to how did he come to know about your business whereas in the case of digital marketing with the help of ‘analytics’ you can know even the minute details of your customer like his/her age, sex, location, interests etc.
Digital marketing uses analytics and CRM that can go a long way in helping you to personalize the customer experience. For example, you can prepare separate ad campaigns for selling shoes to school children and a different one for the ones that you wish to sell for yoga.
When you post something on social media regularly, your customers stay informed and sometimes they also comment on your social media. This way you can build a rapport with your customers.
With traditional marketing in spite of your best efforts, there is a delay for conversions because the customer needs to visit your shop or call you for the purchase but in digital marketing, he can directly order the things online.
What you read is just a glimpse of what digital marketing can do for you. It is much more detailed than that. The best thing about digital marketing is that it reaches the audience for whom it is meant and offers instant results/conversions.
The analytics portion which digital marketing offers cannot be matched with any other channel. It is only through analytics that you can personalize the customer experience.
If you want to explore digital marketing opportunities for your business, get in touch with us. We handle many national and international clients and do social media marketing, SEO, PPC, content writing, and Graphic designing.
So when are you planning to go digital?
