What is Digital Marketing? Learn about its History and Strategies

To level up your business and brand your company, Digital Marketing is all you need.  Digital Marketing is a way to connect with people and influence them to use your product through online platforms. Basically, Digital marketing is all about advertising your business on an online platform.

As the world goes digital so does your company needs to be, not only digital but also to be known digitally. Also, we spend almost half of our time on the internet for work, entertainment, study, or any other task. Therefore, it’s important to brand your business on digital platforms.

Digital Marketing lets more and more people know about your business and what it serves. You can reach a wider audience and generate leads from it through digital marketing. Furthermore, people will gradually start trusting your business over time.

Digital marketing can brand About your company more effectively than any other marketing channel. With the increase in the use of technology, the prevalence of digital marketing has increased these days.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is marketing with the internet or any other digital platforms to promote your product or business service. It is not limited to online platforms but also works on some digital platforms without the internet like televisions, SMS, and caller tunes. Basically, Digital Marketing is any form of marketing that involves digital platforms. 

Digital Marketing is the most cost-efficient marking of all. It ensures that you get the most out of each and every penny spent. If you know your target audience then you can use digital marketing easily irrespective of wherever your target audience is.

Digital Marketing lets you measure your marketing success on daily basis. You need to think about your business and identify your target audience first. Once you are clear about that, digital marketing can help you reach your target audience easily and more effectively unlike traditional methods.

Digital Marketing can be carried out through emails, calls, search engines, and most importantly through your social media as well. You can create various campaigns for digital marketing in your business.

What are the types of Digital Marketing? 

Every business requires its unique marketing strategy to gain the attention of its customers. Digital marketing has got your back here. It can be completely personalized and can be used the way you want depending on the vision and mission of your business.

As digital marketing has become vital over the past decade, understanding it thoroughly is important to brand your business. It consists of a variety of different strategies, tactics, and different types of software.

Narrowing it down, Digital Marketing encompasses six different modes including:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Pay-Per-Click
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another topic in talk along with Digital marketing is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is a process to gain organic (unpaid) traffic by optimizing your website to rank it higher on the search engine result page(SERP).

There are various types of SEO like on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO deals with the content on your webpage, trying to make the content clear for users and search engines. Off-page SEO deals with actions outside your webpage(eg. backlinks) that affect your ranking.

SEO is used as it would direct a lot of unpaid traffic to your website. The higher your website ranks on the search engine result page(SERP), the higher traffic you get. Blogging and others mostly use SEO, which is usually low on budget, and wants to gain some organic traffic.

SEO considers factors like how search engines work, their algorithms, keyword search, which search engines are preferred by their target audience, and others. Therefore, it requires knowledge to understand these factors and optimize your webpage accordingly. You can either do SEO by yourself or can even hire professionals for it.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing often known as SMM involves creating and sharing content related to your business to connect with your customers and achieve your marketing goals. Basically, it’s marketing done on social media platforms. Instead of printing leaflets and flyers for advertising your product, you post digital content on these social media.

The main advantage of social media marketing is that it creates a bond of trust between your business and customers. Social interaction has increased over the internet. Therefore, you can create your brand image easily over these social media platforms. On the other hand, your business’s flaws would also be open to all. 

Any small or large business can use digital marketing. For small businesses, it would help them gain trust in their business and for large businesses, it would help them to reach a wider audience. Social Media Marketing is fit for all kinds of businesses from a blogger to multinational companies, helping them build their brand name.

Social Media Marketing can be stated as a modern marketing technique. Some of the renowned social media platforms are Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.

Content Marketing

The indirect way of gaining customer attention is through content marketing. It lets your audience understand your business more deeply so that your customers can decide what they actually want. Content Marketing is designing content specific to your business to build your brand image and increase sales through it.

Content Marketing can drive you a lot of traffic without actually keeping a constant eye on it. You first need to create detailed content about your business and then find a platform to publish it, that’s it, there are no extra efforts on it later on.  You can publish your content on blogs, videos, podcasts, or any other online platform. Furthermore, you can even optimize your content based on SEO so that you can rank higher on the search engine and attract more traffic to your content. 

Almost 86% of businesses use content marketing these days as it’s the most effortless to gain leads through a detailed explanation of what actually your business is. Content marketing is required by any business with a small or large customer base. Websites are the best platform to perform content marketing. 

Looking at marketing strategies, there are no goals that can be reached without content. Content is the core of any marketing strategy or tactic. Plus, you can even expand your thoughts and be creative with your content, gaining more customer attention.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a paid advertising technique to drive traffic where the publisher is paid based on clicks by the advertiser whenever the ad is clicked. Furthermore, we can say that PPC is a strategy to buy traffic for your website rather than gaining it organically.

PPC basically works on the keywords. When a particular keyword related to a product or service is searched, an ad related to that keyword is displayed. Therefore, in search engines, keywords are bid by the advertisers for publishing their ads and they pay when their ads are clicked. On the contrary, a fixed price system is used by content websites instead of the bidding system.

The most popular example of pay-per-click marketing is search engine advertisements like google ads. Plus, PCC is also adopted by social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

With the right planning and designing of a PPC campaign, you can gain a lot of traffic to your website which eventually results in profits. PPC is very much effective if you choose your content to be promoted to be well structured, error-free, and catchy for your audience. Paid advertising can actually get you more quality leads and give you an edge over your competition.

Email Marketing

Before Social Media Marketing Management and even after it, Email Marketing has always been a great way to interact with your customers and influence them for your business. Email Marketing is sending emails to your leads and describing your product or service on point. Emails are often used to aware your customers of discounts, new products, and events or drive them towards your website organically.

Emails can be customized according to target leads to convert them into customers. With a highly customized email for a particular person the chances of them being a customer increases. Email Marketing software helps your business to achieve trust, loyalty, and even brand awareness.

You can ask your visitors to sign up for your newsletter and build up your leads this way. You can then send them regular updates about your business once they sign up for your newsletter. Flipkart, Myntra and there are lots of other businesses that use email as a medium to keep their customers updated about their businesses.

Compared to other marketing strategies, email marketing is an inexpensive way to advertise your company and gain customers. Email marketing might be the oldest form of marketing strategy but is still an effective one. Hard to believe but people actually prefer email and pay attention to them before going for any particular business. 

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing can be thought of as a system where a business rewards its affiliates based on each customer they receive through those affiliates. An affiliate is a person that helps a business to sell a product for them and charges a small amount for that. Basically, it’s earning a commission on the products you sell to people who seamlessly trust you.

Affiliate Marketing can even be called a form of passive income. If you save time from your business and wish to earn more bucks by utilizing that time, then you can help other businesses gain customers and get paid for that. If you have a product to be sold then you can hire affiliates for that.

Online shopping platforms like Flipkart are great examples of affiliate marketing. They connect dealers with customers and charge dealers a small amount every time the dealer receives a customer through their platforms. Furthermore, They even support sponsored ads for dealers to promote their products. 

Affiliate Marketing runs on the trust built by the affiliates from its audience. The audience trusts their affiliate and therefore agrees to use what they suggest. Affiliate Marketing is a win-win form of marketing where the affiliate, customer, and dealer, all benefit. The customer benefits by receiving the product they paid for, the dealer benefits by gaining a customer, and the affiliate benefits by receiving the commission. 

History of Digital Marketing

In the 1980s, the storage capacity of computers increased allowing them to store a lot of customer data and companies started using database marketing. The term digital marketing was first coined in the 1990s. Also after the popularity of personal computers, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) became more significant in marketing.

Finally, the Internet was introduced and soon after that, the first clickable banner ad was live in 1994. This was the transition to the digital marketing era. With the increase in the number of Internet users in 2000, people started looking for products online rather than consulting a salesperson to reach their needs. This forced the marketing team to think about some new way of marketing that might include digital technology.

Between 2000-2010, as the devices that could access digital media grew, digital marketing became more sophisticated. Social Media also came into the limelight in this phase which increased user interaction over the web. This helped digital marketing to keep growing.

Digital Marketing is in a constant state of flux even today. Over time Digital Marketing was even referred to as Internet Marketing, Online Marketing, or web marketing.

Advantages of Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is more helpful and effective than traditional marketing methods. It benefits any type of small or large business by letting them approach a larger mass. Plus, it’s cost-effective and totally personalized, unlike traditional marketing methods.

The main advantage of digital marketing is that it lets you reach your target audience directly saving on your budget. Furthermore, it lets you measure your marketing campaign’s success. Let’s have a look at all the other advantages of Digital Marketing.

Personalizes your Communication

Digital Marketing through personalized communication is a way of marketing based on your recorded data from various customer data platforms. Through it, you can approach your customers on the basis of their likes or experiences.

Personalized communication is way more appealing than a normal interaction. Plus, it helps you gain customers’ trust in your product or service. Therefore, by personalizing your communication you can increase the chances of converting leads into customers.

You can collect the user details of the users visiting your website and then greet them with their names whenever they visit your website. Amazon, Flipkart, and other online websites are good examples of digital marketing that uses personalized communication. It collects your data and on the basis of that shows you products that you might like. 

This way of personalizing your communication for your customers benefits you to influence them more quickly and even help them find what they are looking for instantly.

Low Cost with High Returns

Marketing your product or service is very essential in this age where there is competition at every step. You need to make people know and understand your business. Plus, you need to build your brand image as well. All of these can be done by marketing your business in the right way.

Moreover, we know that marketing requires a lot of budgets but that’s not the case with digital marketing. The best advantage of digital marketing is that it’s cost-effective. Digital Marketing would help you to directly reach your target audience more effectively. This would result in gaining potential customers quickly and hence covering up the amount spent on marketing.

Say for example you spent ₹500 on digital marketing and you get a couple of customers through it and you even make a profit from it. This would help you spend more on marketing and gain target customers.

If you are small busses then the marketing budget would be less but building a brand image is a must. Digital marketing would help you a lot then as it’s low on cost and gives high returns.

Provides Better Customer Service

Digital marketing allows you to know your customers better with the help of clear communication channels with customers. With the help of it, you can meet your customer requirements resulting in satisfied and more loyal customers. Such customers become long-term customers for your business.

As digital marketing helps you to personalize communication with your customers, it results in better customer service. Digital marketing covers all the aspects of your customers and helps you with improved customer service.

You can greet your customers when they sign up with you or send a thank you email when they shop from you. These little gestures are like brownie points for improved customer service. 

Customer is the core of any business, without customer a company is nothing. Therefore digital marketing helps you out with your customer’s service.

Build Brand Reputation and Customer Trust Quickly

Digital Marketing creates an image of your brand to your target customers. It builds up the brand reputation that’s unique to you. Plus, your brand would be recognized by a wider audience globally.

Customer trust is very much important to make your customers shop again and again from you. It helps your customers to hold onto you. You can create a transparent relationship with your customers through digital marketing.

You can stay connected to your customers through social media marketing (a form of digital marketing) and help them out with any queries regarding your business. This way you can gain your customers’ trust and build up a good brand reputation.

It’s hard to gain customer trust and create a brand image but can be lost in seconds so proper attention should be given to this. Brand reputation displays the level of trust that your customers have in you.

Rank Higher in Search Engine

The best way to increase traffic to your website is by ranking higher on the search engine. And the best way to level up your rank on the search engine is through Digital Marketing via paid or unpaid techniques. A higher rank can drive a lot of traffic to your website, which can later be converted into customers.

Ranking higher even attracts people first towards your business among all other similar businesses. It gives you a chance to influence people and make them understand your product or service. The first impression impacts a lot and therefore it’s crucial to influence the customer on the first go.

Paid SEO tools and pay-per-click are the strategies that help you rank your website higher in the search engine. Through SEO you can gain traffic organically and you need to set a budget and pay for a pay-per-click digital marketing strategy. Any other paid or unpaid marketing strategies can help you rank higher in the search engines. 

Websites have been very important for any business over time and even with passing time their importance is increasing. Therefore, it’s crucial to rank higher on the search engine results pages(SERPs). You can achieve this with various digital marketing strategies. 

Target a Specific Audience

The most effective advantage of digital marketing over traditional marketing is the target audience. You only brand your product to a specified group of people that might be genuinely interested in your business. This genuine group of audience is known as the target audience of the business.

If you directly aim at your target audience for marketing your business then the chances of gaining customers from that double up. Digital marketing lets you filter on a wide range of people and target the group of people that meets your requirements. This way you can reach people who would be interested in your product and then you can brand your product according to them.

Social Media Marketing is a good way to reach your target audience via digital marketing. If you know who your target audience is then there are lots of digital marketing strategies that help you to reach your target audience. It helps you to research who can be your target audience.

This way digital marketing helps you to save on your budget and utilize it elsewhere in the improvement of your business. Directly aiming at your target audience also helps you to put more effort and focus on them, improving their customer service.

Measure Marketing Campaign Results

Digital marketing is transparent and therefore helps you to measure your marketing campaign results on daily basis. Through it, you can keep track of your success rates and can even make changes in the marketing campaigns if needed at any time.

Digital marketing via marketing campaigns keeps you updated with any marketing campaigns that are going on and generates a lot of data. This data includes how effectively the campaign is working or what is not working well and needs to be changed. You can easily analyze what works for your business and what doesn’t.

As you can measure the marketing campaign results, you can even decide on how long you want to keep up the campaign. Some campaigns might not work well in the beginning but with improvements, they would be good to go over time.

This can only be done through digital marketing as it provides the wisdom to measure the results of a marketing campaign. With digital marketing, you have complete control over your marketing strategies and personalize them in accordance with your audience.

Disadvantages of Digital Marketing

For all of its advantages, Digital Marketing is something of a double-ended sword. Along with its advantages, there are some disadvantages as well. Negative feedback, competition, and many other factors affect digital marketing. Let’s have a deeper look at those.

Global Competition

Digital Marketing lets you reach customers not only locally but globally also. Furthermore, as you shit to global level competitors along with the customer increases. Therefore it is very important to stand out from the crowd and have your unique identity.

When you market your business globally your target customers might also be the target customers with some other business. You need to be proficient and gain your customer’s attention.

You need to properly analyze your target audience and note down their requirements, likes, or budget and then market your product or service accordingly. If you reach all of their needs then that target customer is more likely to be your customer than any other business. Plus, if you provide better customer service even after the purchase then the customer might become your loyal and long-term customer.

Therefore always be updated with your customer’s needs, requirements, and the current trends in the market. This would help you to shine out even at the global level and help you deal with global competition.

Security and Privacy Issues

Digital Marketing is done mostly over the web and hence to protect customer security and data there are various rules and regulations set up. Be careful about those and design your marketing campaigns accordingly.

Various legal acts should be kept in mind otherwise your digital marketing campaign might be spammed. For example, while email marketing, if you included data or any actions that are not legal then your email would directly go into the spam section and your target customers won’t even see it.

Your digital marketing campaign success rate decreases this way resulting in the demand for more efforts from your side. Therefore always comply with the privacy and data protection rules.

Brand Reputation damaged by negative feedback

Digital Marketing is transparent, it lets you and your customers interact seamlessly. This would help you gain your customer’s trust. On the contrary, would also display any negative feedback or criticism about your business to your audience through various social media.

If your customer is not satisfied with you then this transparency of digital marketing wouldn’t be in your favor. Such customers would leave negative feedback for your business which would harm your business reputation. This needs to be taken care of as even one negative feedback might damage your business reputation.

As digital media has become completely interactive over time, your customers can easily reach you and sort out their queries but it would even be a disadvantage as a non-satisfied customer would leave you a negative review which might harm your brand reputation.

To maintain your business reputation you need to eliminate these negative feedbacks by providing the best customer service to your customers. Use any form of digital marketing that’s convenient for you and build up your brand reputation well.

Requires a lot of patience

Nothing happens overnight. You need to have a lot of patience to design the perfect marketing ad or campaign to gain all that brand awareness, customers, or profit. No doubt digital marketing is the best platform for marketing but it yields the best result when everything is properly planned.

You even need to optimize your online advertising campaigns to get the best of your budget spent on them. Choose your keywords very precisely for your advertisement as that would bring you your traffic. This would take a lot of time but would yield good results.

If you randomly generate your content without spending proper time on it then it might not bring you success instantly and slowly reach your target. If you spend more time first when creating your content then you’ll instantly get success in it. Therefore, anyways, you’ll have to give time and have a lot of patience for digital marketing.

The right content for your target audience can earn you a lot. Therefore, have patience and focus on your customers and design the most suitable content for your business.

Future of Digital Marketing

Voice Search

People always look for the most convenient way to gain any piece of information. As technology has advanced, Voice Search these days is the most convenient way to gain information over the web. Voice Search can easily be done by anyone having a smart device. 

Voice searching is basically a method allowing you to search using spoken commands which can be done with voice input on any device. It is even interactive when a particular phrase is not interpreted properly and asks for clarification.

To increase the searchability of content, Digital marketers need to optimize their content to voice-friendly terms which would be easy to interpret. Use natural language as much as possible in your content and try to provide concise answers to questions. This would improve your content and make it more compatible with voice search.

Voice search is increasing day by day as it’s very easy to access by anyone. As the voice search will increase, your content also needs to be compatible with voice search to rank higher in the search engine results pages(SERPs). 

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is wide-field and almost used in any kind of business or service and has a wide scope. It’s already helping a lot of industries to evolve their business strategies to gain more success. It also improves digital marketing by changing the way digital marketers connect business with their target audience.

Artificial Intelligence in digital marketing is helping brands to improve their service and generate greater revenue by accomplishing tasks themselves that once required human intelligence. It understands the situations and passes a decision on the basis of the data collected by them. Basically, they make data-driven decisions and reduce a lot of effort on human labor.

AI can even help you personalize website content for individual users based on their past website interaction history. They would suggest your customer products, they might be interested in. Therefore, a lot of customer time would be saved and they would shop quickly from you and can even be your regular customer. A greater section of Amazon and Spotify is carried out by artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence in digital marketing is already of great help to businesses to generate revenue and save on their budget. With the passing of time, it would become more powerful and help businesses to a larger extent.

Social Media

Social Media is already an important part of digital marketing and with passing time it’s developing day by day resulting in being more convenient for digital marketing. As the number of people on social media grows, your chances to reach a higher audience increase. Plus, it would help you generate more potential leads.

It’s important to take your business branding to social media as it’s today’s way of connecting to people. And with passing years it would even grow. So why not take your business on social media and connect to your audience the way they like connecting to other people?

Social Media is already very much improved as compared to the past decade but it still keeps on improving. With the advancements in social media until now you can accomplish a lot of tasks and gain a reasonable awareness of your business. Furthermore, it doesn’t stop here, social media is a continuously improving field.

With future advancements, there might be more clarity in reaching your target audience. You can even be more transparent with your audience and gain their trust easily through social media.

Influencer marketing

Influencer Marketing is a new generating trend that includes marketing your business through influencers. Influencers are people who have a social fan base and are experts in their niche. Moreover, people also prefer things experienced and reviewed by someone they know.

Influencer marketing is a part of social media marketing only. The key difference is that in influencer marketing a person reviews your product, and shares all the pros and cons of your product to the world instead of you in charge of some money or a barter system.

The main benefit of Influencer marketing is that it helps your customers to trust you quickly. Influencers have gained their following through a lot of effort and trust and therefore, their followers even believe what they say. Hearing about your product or service from their favorite influencer will let them trust you easily.

As said people trust someone they know rather than brands, gaining positive feedback or information from such people can be more effective than the business itself. Therefore, the recent business has started adapting influencer marketing quickly.

Chatbots

Chatbots in digital marketing can be of great help, rather it is greeting a new visitor or solving doubts of your visitor. It almost solves all of the basic customer queries and even connects you with them for a complex customer query. Chatbots try to understand your customer’s concerns and try to clear them. 

Chatbots basically work on artificial intelligence and improve them automatically over time learning from past records. It helps you to personalize your content for your visitors according to their likes and interaction with your website.

Chatbots cover the initial part of communication with the visitors and then direct the live chat toward a real person. This would save you time on common issues and frequently asked questions. Apart from these, there are various other aspects like sales, customer service, and marketing where chatbots can be of great help.

There are various third-party services available online for you to create a chatbot for your company easily without coding. Chatbots might become the future of marketing but it is always good to keep in mind that it basically is non-human thing and therefore has their limitations at a certain point in time.

Digital Marketing – Final Summary

Finally, you would have had a deeper knowledge of what actually digital marketing is along with its pros and cons. Digital Marketing is just an update to traditional marketing methods. As everything in this world updates over time so did traditional marketing. 

Digital Marketing has become an essential part of any business today. It would help you stand out from the crowd and build up your brand reputation globally. Without digital marketing, your business wouldn’t gain popularity and would be lost in no time. 

Therefore, this entire content was an in-depth explanation of digital marketing so that you can get started applying it to your business. Be consistent and have patience, and you’ll surely reach your goal.

More from Smashitbuck: Do check out my article on Digital Nomad, building customer loyalty, and youtube monetization strategies to improve your work life.

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