Digital marketing is the type of marketing that uses internet and online based technologies like desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services for the potential users.
Advertising delivered through online channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email and mobile apps is the examples of digital marketing. Most organisations uses digital marketing to endorse goods, services and brands. It has changed the way businesses uses the technology for marketing. People do not have to visit shops physically instead they adopted digital marketing. Digital marketing helps you to reach larger audience than you could through traditional methods. This benefit is not limited to the internet channels only but prosper the need of non-internet channels also and the extension to non-internet channels differentiates digital marketing from online advertising.
Digital marketing is also known as ‘online marketing’, ‘web marketing’ or ‘internet marketing’. This particular term of digital marketing has grown in popularity over time as customers finds it more flexible than visiting physical shops.
There are various business models for E-Commerce and some of them are common between e-commerce and digital marketing and they are Business-to-Consumers (B2C), Business-to-Business (B2B). In B2C model, it is used to refer to online retailers who sell products and services to customers through the internet whereas, B2B model supports the supply chain of organisations that involves commerce between a company and its suppliers or other partners.
Digital marketing strategies may include the use of one or more online techniques to increase brand awareness among consumers and these methods/channels include- Search engine optimization (SEO), Social media optimization (SMO), Social media marketing (SMM) content marketing, Email marketing, Pay-per click (PPC), Affiliate marketing.
SEO helps in improving the quality or quantity of website traffic and activity on the search engines like google, bing etc. and basically, it is the process which improves your website’s range and visibility when people search for your products or services related to your business in google, bing and other search engines.
Search engines are increasingly optimizing the suggestions of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. to rank web pages in the search engine result. It combines the total information related to your business and put it on a common website for the users which help you to find exactly what you’re looking for.
SMO involves using social media platforms to grow a company or organisation’s helps in increasing the awareness of products and services or events and connect with the existing customers and attract new ones. Social media optimization is somewhere similar to Search engine optimization in that the aim is to generate web traffic and increase awareness for a website. SMO creates website attractive by adding video clips or digital photos to encourage people to engage with the website.
Most popular social media platforms for the use of digital marketing in today’s world are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat and TikTok.
SMM refers to the use of social media apps and networks to promote company’s products and services. These apps enables brands to connect with their targeted audience to build a brand name and relationship with their audience and ultimately increase revenues.
It has been observed that half of the world’s population uses social network sites for almost three hours each day which resembles that SMM is the best way to interact with the audience.
Content marketing is used to attract key audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, audios, podcasts and other media. Its core purpose is to create and distribute relevant and valuable content to attract and retain its users. To use it appropriately, you’ll need to deliver the right content at each stage of the sales cycle—from purchase to consideration.
Key reasons and benefits of why organisation uses content marketing are increased sales, cost savings, better customer satisfaction.
Email marketing involves sending email to a potential customers or current customers for the purpose of advertisements and request businesses. It is usually a commercial message sent to a group of people and there are two types of email marketing which is operating currently and they are transactional emails and direct emails.
Transactional Emails are usually triggered based customer’s behaviour towards company whereas, Direct Emails involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message.
Pay-per click is an advertising campaign which is used by most of the e-commerce platform where advertiser pays a fee to publisher i.e. search engines when the ad is clicked.
Social networks such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc have also adopted pay-per-click as their advertisement model. PPC advertising model is open to threats through click fraud, although google and others have implemented automated systems to guard against intruders.
Affiliate marketing is an advertising campaign in which a company pays other to promote their products and services that helps them in generating sales. Affiliates(a type of subsidiary company of a holding company) put marketing efforts in exchange of a reward given by the company for each visitor or customer brought by affiliates.