If you are in today’s world as a company owner, you might have come across the term “digital marketing” especially when you want to improve your visibility. So, what is digital marketing? This is very broad in the sense that it covers the use of electronic means to achieve marketing objectives. This is including the use of internet, computer, social media, website, emails etc.
How Digital Marketing Evolved
over a few decades ago, what is known as digital marketing started with email marketing. Companies sent emails to their target audience to introduce to them their products and persuaded them to buy. The marketing unit would make it a plan to send a series of emails per week or month talking about the great benefits of the product or service in a bid to convince the lead to patronize their company. From there on to the use of social media when mobile phones started to be produced. The usage of mobile phones promoted the ease of text messaging apps and then social media apps. This has made digital marketing to become a need, rather than a choice or an option to companies.
Key Components of Digital Marketing
Like I explained earlier that digital marketing is broad; it has a lot of components which I will be sharing below. Every component has its uniqueness and accomplishes marketing goals. Take a look below:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is the aspect of digital marketing that deals with organic traffic through website optimization. These traffic is mostly from search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. People search for information on these search engines using keywords. As a marketer, your goal is to optimize your website contents with those keywords used by your target audience so that your website can start ranking for those keywords when people are using them to search online.
Content Marketing: this refers to the use of write-ups, graphics, videos, ebooks in trying to market a service, or a product. Such platforms like the social media pages and blogs are used to display these carefully curated contents aimed at marketing and by extension to sell.
Social Media Marketing: All the marketing activities carried out on a social media platform in a bid to an audience to a product or a service is known as social media marketing. The top social media platforms include: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly twitter), LinkedIn and Tiktok.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: It works according to its name. Businesses places ads on platforms like Google search, Social media platforms. When targeted audience are using these platforms, the ads will pop up. If you click on the ads, it will lead you to the landing page of the advertiser (business). The advertiser is charged a certain amount for the click by the potential customer.
Email Marketing: You see those emails you receive from various businesses that introduces themselves and their products and then start trying to persuade you to patronise them or fix a call or physical appointment with you, are known as email marketers. They are marketing through emails.
Affiliate Marketing: this is an arrangement where businesses partner with affiliates to promote their products. When a sale is made, the affiliate is paid a commission. The affiliate does not keep inventory or incur any upfront cost. His job is to promote a link a buyer to the seller and then collect his commission on sale.
Mobile Marketing: Mobile devices are portable and truly mobile such as mobile telephones, the apps on the mobile phones such as SMS, mobile apps, websites etc. Marketing activities carried out on these mobile platforms is referred to as mobile marketing.
Analytics and Data Analysis: One of the top selling point of digital marketing is the fact that there is data to analyse at the end of every campaign which helps in better decision making for future campaigns. The data helps to measure the performance and analyse the human responses or behaviour.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
Here are some of the reasons:
Global Reach: Digital marketing allows for a global reach. For instance, am advert placed on Instagram will easily been seen by audience from all countries. But can that same ad be seen by audience in all countries if it was placed in a newspaper or TV in a particular place?
Cost-Effectiveness: Unlike the Television or Newspaper ads where you need to churn out a large sum of money for a publishing, the social media for instance is free to publish your ads. Even the sponsored ads are not expensive to start with. For every penny spent, there is a corresponding click or view.
Targeted Advertising: With digital marketing, you can select the particular audience you want to market to. Facebook ads for instance, let you select the gender, age bracket, location and profession of the audience you want to market to.
Measurable Results: You are not just shooting blanks and guessing. There is metrics at the end of every campaign that shows the performance. You are able to know how many views, who viewed, how many clicks, cost of each views and clicks etc. When you advertise on newspaper, you cannot tell how many people read the paper.
Direct Engagement and Interaction: For instance, target audience can reach out to the social media handle of the company they want to buy from directly to make enquires thereby increasing trust and credibility.
Challenges in Digital Marketing
I am sure you are not surprised to see a heading reserved for talking about the challenges of digital marketing. As you already know nothing is 100% perfect. We only have more perfect than other but none is completely perfect. The nature of digital marketing is very dynamic with rapidly changing technologies and as a result makes it hard to keep up with current trends, and stand out. However, businesses with clear strategy and continuous learning will continue to standout and achieve overwhelming results.
The Future of Digital Marketing
Before talking about the future, let’s talk about the present which is Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the help of AI, one can plan a campaign calendar from January to December in few seconds. Now, let’s begin to imagine how the future will be like. Another article is going to be dedicated to talking about the future of digital marketing. Stay tuned.
Conclusion
So again, what is digital marketing? I’m sure you are no longer a novice and you can actually lecture someone else on what it is about. You can bookmark this page to read it up again as many times as possible. Thank you for following this far.
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