What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the process of promoting and selling goods and services through websites, apps, mobile phones, social media, search engines, and other digital tools.

Digital marketing uses a lot of the same ideas as traditional marketing, and it’s often seen as an extra way for businesses to reach customers and learn about how they act. A lot of the time, businesses use both traditional and digital marketing tactics together. But there are some problems that come with digital marketing as well. When the internet became famous in the 1990s, digital marketing began to grow in popularity.

How Digital Marketing Works

Marketing uses several methods and media to sell items and services to potential customers and increase market share. Success demands advertising and sales skills. Professional marketers do these responsibilities internally at corporations or outside at multi-client marketing firms.

Companies used print, TV, and radio to market because they had nothing else. Even if such choices still exist, the internet gives firms another means to reach consumers: digital marketing.

The new technologies and trends led corporations to reassess their marketing strategies and expenditures. The email was popular in early digital marketing. Next came search engines like Netscape, which let firms tag and phrase stuff to get recognized. Social media networks like Facebook allow firms to track user data and target certain audiences.

Smartphones and other portable gadgets help companies promote to consumers wherever they are. A 2022 Pew Research Centre research indicated that 76% of American adults made phone-based online transactions.

Digital Marketing Channel Types

In the years since the 1990s, digital marketing platforms have changed, and they still do. These eight sites are the most used right now.

Website Marketing

The main part of a business’s internet marketing efforts is often their own website. The best websites make it easy to understand and remember the brand, its goods and services. These days, a website needs to run quickly, work well on mobile devices, and be simple to use.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) adverts let marketers access audiences on news and other websites and digital platforms. Marketers can run PPC advertisements on Google, Bing, LinkedIn, X (previously Twitter), Pinterest, and Facebook to target customers searching for their products or services.

These advertisements can segment users by age, gender, interests, or location. Google and Facebook are the most popular PPC services.

Content Marketing

The point of content marketing is to get in touch with possible customers through interesting written, visual, or video material. Usually, that information is put on a website and then shared on social media, emailed, optimised for search engines, or even paid-per-click campaigns. While advertising is more obvious, content marketing tries to be more delicate. The sponsor’s product or service may or may not be made the main focus.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to market online, even though a lot of people think of it as junk and delete messages that look like spam. To get people to sign up for their email lists, many digital marketers use their other digital marketing platforms. After that, they use email marketing to try to turn those leads into buyers.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is kind of an old way to market, but the internet has brought it to life again. Companies and people who are “influencers” in the affiliate marketing world promote the goods of another company and get paid a commission every time a sale is made or a new lead is added to their list. Affiliate programmes exist for a lot of well-known companies, like Amazon. These programmes pay affiliates millions of dollars to help sell their goods.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing campaigns aim to increase brand visibility and trust. As you learn social media marketing, you may use it to generate leads and sell directly. Social media marketing includes promoted tweets and postings.

Video Marketing

Many internet users use YouTube to learn how to do something, read a review, or relax before buying. Marketers can launch video marketing campaigns on Facebook Videos, Instagram, and TikTok. Video works best when combined with SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing.

KPIs in Digital Marketing

Similar to traditional marketers, digital marketers use KPIs to track how well their campaigns are doing. With KPIs, they can see how well their marketing campaigns are doing over time and see how they stack up against those of their rivals.

These are some of the most popular KPIs that marketers use to see how well they’re doing:

• Click-Through Rate: This KPI measures online advertising effectiveness by quantifying the number of individuals who clicked on an ad as a percentage of all who saw it.
• Conversion Rate: The conversion rate compares the percentage of people who made a purchase to the overall audience reached by an ad or promotion, going beyond the click-through rate.
• Social Media Traffic: How many individuals visit a company’s profiles. Likes, follows, views, shares, and other actions are counted.
• Website Traffic: This indicator measures a company’s website traffic over time. It can also assist organisations evaluate their marketing efforts to attract customers.

Digital Marketing Challenges

Digital marketing presents unique obstacles. Digital channels are growing rapidly, therefore marketers must learn how to use them. Marketers may struggle to interpret and apply the massive amounts of data these platforms acquire.

Importantly, customers are becoming distracted by digital marketing and other distractions, making it harder to grab their attention.

What Is a Digital Marketing Agency?