Digital Marketing Introduction

Digital marketing refers to advertising of products and services by using Internet technologies and other digital platforms such as SMS, TV and Radios.

What is covered in Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing (DM) includes a combination of different channels such as Search Engines, Social media, Web applications, Mobile applications, Email, SMS and other digital channels.

Sometimes Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing and Online Marketing terms are used interchangeably. However, Digital Marketing is a broader term as it includes other digital channels (FM, TV as well) in addition to Internet-based channels.

Digital Marketing - Types
Digital Marketing – Channels

We can divide Digital Marketing mainly into four subsets:

1) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website in a search engine’s organic result listing.

SEO Example: When you work on your website title, headings, content etc so that Google and other search engines rank your website pages higher without any paid advertisement.

SEO is not directly related to the advertisement but it set the foundation for the other marketing techniques. Most of the new businesses do paid marketing to help search engines natural visibility. When you get a lot of traffic on your website (via paid marketing), it helps organic results as well.

It is important to optimize your page for search engines using SEO so that your website can keep growing with or without paid marketing.


2) Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a way to promote products and services using Social Media & Social Networking platforms.

In Free techniques it includes profile creation on different social media websites and sharing content with your followers.

Free SMM Example: When you share your product and services via Facebook Posts or Tweets.

Social Media Marketing also includes paid marketing techniques via Campaign creation for promotions. The most popular social media marketing platforms are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Pinterest.

Paid SMM Example: When you create paid Facebook or Twitter Ads campaigns to promote your post, product or services


3) Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing refers to the promotion of websites in search engine results pages (SERP) mainly using paid advertising. This is also called Pay Per Click (PPC) where you buy and pay for advertisements per user click basis.

SMM Example: When you use Paid Google Ads to advertise your website on Search engines listing.

SMM is an important subset of Digital Marketing because it mainly focuses on advertisement techniques. This form of marketing also provide options for display and other kinds of paid advertisements on search engine partnered websites.


4) Other digital channels:

Affiliate marketing: In this type of marketing affiliate (a person or organization) earns a commission by promoting someone’s products.

Example: In various YouTube Unboxing video’s description, you can find affiliate links. When you use those links to buy some product, the affiliate gets some commission. Similar in many websites which provide a list of top software also contains affiliate links for that software.

Email Marketing: Email marketing is another effective marketing technique to send promotional emails to a group of people of customers.

Example: We often get commercial emails related to different products and services sometimes in the form of offers and discounts.

Mobile phone (SMS): Bulk SMS, Promotional SMS, Transactional SMS can also be treated as digital channels in marketing.

TV, Radios, FM: Digital marketing channels may include these channels to deliver your advertisement. These channels are part of Traditional Marketing as well.

Analytic Tools: There are many analytics tools available which help us to track our users and marketing strategies. Using them, we can see which kind of platform or advertisement is effective for our promotion. The example includes Google Analytics, Search Console, Mailchimp, Sendinblue etc.

Automation Tools: There are a lot of Social Media Automation tools which can help us to automatically post content of different social media websites. Examples are Buffer, Hootsuite etc.


Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing:

Traditional marketing uses newspapers, magazines, phones, street banners, pamphlets for advertisement. While Digital Marketing mainly focuses on Digital and Internet-based channels.

In the following table we will see various advantages of using Digital Marketing as compared to Traditional Marketing.

Traditional MarketingDigital Marketing
It is difficult to target a relevant audience for the advertisement.You can target a selected audience based on location, interest, gender, age and other factors.
Advertisement in Newspaper, Magazine, Pamphlets or Street banners includes design, print and distribution effort.Digital Marketing advertisement does not require printing and it is easy to distribute or display ads to online users.
This form of marketing takes time to deliver ads.You can quickly promote your existing Post, service or product in a few minutes.
Traditional Marketing is costly along with the higher minimum cost for any type of ads.Digital Marketing can be started at a very less price and less costly overall.
You can not track easily how much users saw or responded to your ads.You can easily track interaction and engagements with your campaigns.
Once a big marketing campaign starts, you cannot easily stop it if something goes wrong.You can easily pause and resume your marketing campaigns at any time.
Traditional Marketing has less audience and numbers are not growing as compared to Digital platforms.Social Media and Online users are growing rapidly, therefore a huge user base available for marketing.

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