What is Digital Marketing – Meaning, Scope & Importance

WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING?

All you people out there, thinking how can you get your content reach millions with lesser effort, time and money? Then we’ve got the best solution for you!

You wouldn’t believe that with internet being so accessible to today, the number of people who go online is still increasing every day. According to a research the usage of internet amongst adults increased by 5% in last 3 years.

Marketing means targeting the right customer at the right place. In todays era, it means targeting the customers where they spend the most time at: Internet. Thus, came the introduction of introducing and promoting your products or services via the internet that is: websites, social media, blogs, emails or advertisements. This is known as Digital Marketing.

Digital marketing helps in generating organic and non-organic traffic to your products and services.

Today’s brands have endless possibilities of reaching out to the customers through various mediums including emails, videos, blogging, advertisements, websites, social media. Digital marketing has become a vital part of business and brand awareness.

Almost all brands have their own websites and if not have at least a social media presence. This helps in reaching out to millions which was earlier difficult, time consuming and costlier.

The best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overarching goals. And depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through the free and paid channels at their disposal.

Because digital marketing has so many options and strategies associated with it, you can get creative and experiment with a variety of marketing tactics on a budget. With digital marketing, you can also use tools like analytics dashboards to monitor the success and ROI of your campaigns more than you could with a traditional promotional content — such as a billboard or print ad.

IMPORTANCE OF DIGITAL MARKETING:

1. Reach to a larger number of people
2. Helps small business to compete with others
3. Generate demand of the products or services
4. It is hyper personalized
5. Advanced analytics
6. Easy to learn and adapt
7. Best ROI

HOW TO MARKET AND REACH THE RIGHT AUDIENCE

There are a number of ways you can use digital marketing to segment and target the right audience. You must first know how to identify the right set of customers according to your product and services and then target them.

For example: You own a sports shoe brand: You need to target what your audience will be. There are various parameters which are to be rated like Gender, age, spending capacity, color preferences etc.  After you know your audience, you are ready to use different techniques of digital marketing, which are as follows:

• SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION:

It is the process of getting your website to ran higher in the search engines in order to increase the organic traffic. This can be done by making use of specific keywords which can be determined from Google keyword planner. There are various ways to approach  SEO in order to generate traffic to your website:

1. On page SEO: Focusing on the content that exists on the page when looking for a website,
2. Off page SEO: This includes uses of links on others website, networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites which are linked back to your own website.
3. Technical SEO: Image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all forms of technical SEO

• CONTENT MARKETING

This means creating and promoting the content for brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation. This includes

1. Blog posts
2. eBooks
3. Infographics

• SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

This is making the use of all social media channles to promote your content. The various social media channels are:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. LinkedIn
4. Instagram
5. Snapchat

• AFFILIATE MAREKTING

This is a type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website. Affiliate marketing channels include:

1. Hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program.
2. Posting affiliate links from your social media accounts.

• PAY PER CLICK (PPC)

It is a way of driving traffic to your website through publishing your ads and paying every time when someone clicks it. These includes”:

1. Paid ads on Facebook
2. Twitter ad campaigns
3. Sponsored messages on Instagram or LinkedIn