What is Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a phrase everyone uses and few define. Here is what it actually covers — including the offline half most people forget.

Digital Marketing is a fancy keyword we all used to sound brainy and brilliant in any meeting, whether it's corporate or personal. Is it an absolute deal, or a real fact?

The important question is — what is digital marketing?

The term 'digital marketing' gained popularity in the 2000s, but it actually came into existence many years before. Years before means around 100 years.

The very first digital marketer

His full name: Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi. He was the first person to establish a public transmission of wireless signals, in the year 1896. He also invented the radio.

In England, Morse signals were broadcast soon after his establishment, across open water. As radio would require another 10 years to arrive with the common public, it was clear to the founders that they could use it to trade different things.

The first-ever live broadcast was an opera performance at the Met. Imagine how the public reacted — people purchased tickets for the show. Digital marketing was born.

Note that nothing there involved Facebook campaigns, ads, mobile phones or apps. The reason is that digital marketing is not concerned only with the internet.

So what does digital marketing mean?

Digital marketing means the transfer of advertising through various digital pathways. Pathways here means email, Facebook, websites, search engines and mobile applications.

Or, in easier terms: digital marketing is the trading of different types of goods and services through electronic devices. Because electronics have been around for a long time, it does not relate only to internet marketing, social media and content marketing.

Digital marketing is further divided into online and offline marketing. Both are a crucial part of an excellent digital marketing strategy.

Why digital marketing matters

Remember billboards? While travelling you see many billboards passing behind. Big brands compete through billboard wars — there was a famous rivalry between automobile brands in 2015, and a great deal of money was spent on it. It is no longer as alive.

Consider it this way: Facebook and Google generate high revenue compared to more orthodox companies, because they capture more attention. That is why digital marketing is necessary — it is the place where the attention is.

On each day, Americans spend more than 11 hours on electronic devices. The portion of individuals spending extra time on electronic devices only rises from here.

The seven branches of online marketing

• Search Engine Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Content Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• PPC Advertising
• Email Marketing

1. Enhanced offline marketing

What is the difference between a billboard in the Arizona desert and one in New York City's Times Square? Three letters: LED.

In Times Square all the billboards are electronic. In a place like the Arizona desert there is nobody competing with you for people's attention — you only need a billboard and the game is in your hand. In Times Square an average of 330,000 people cross daily, and attention is the scarce resource. Some of those billboards are interactive and display live feeds and images of customers.

Product trials are another form of enhanced offline marketing. Walk into an Apple store and people are trying iPhones and MacBooks. For any electronic product, a product trial is a necessary part of the digital marketing strategy.

The same logic produced demo discs bundled with games and magazines — product samples in digital format.

2. Radio marketing

More than 100 years have passed since that opera performance at the Met, and radio is still here.

• Radio has a weekly reach of 85% of the US population
• On average, the audience listens for two hours
• Approximately 40% of radio advertising comes directly from the US

Internet radio has made excellent progress. Podcasts advertise at the start of the show. If you anchor an event on a specific topic, you can connect products in right before the start and at the end of an event.

It is not difficult to find local radio stations, arrange an event, or discuss a deal with them.

3. TV marketing

TV marketing is very large, and a lot of money is spent on it every year. But from the time Google Video became YouTube, the performance of TV fell rapidly.

Americans watch TV for an average of four hours a day, yet TV ads are undefined. In the era of search engines, email marketing, social media and retargeting, we are used to marketing for products we already care about, and we neglect everything that is not relevant to us.

Through TV it is impossible to know who you are going to reach — only how many views you get. A Super Bowl commercial costs several million dollars for sixty seconds, and roughly 10% of all TV commercial shares on social media come from the Super Bowl. Retention for those specific spots is very high.

Companies worldwide spend enormous sums yearly on TV commercials, while streaming continues to take the audience.

4. Phone marketing

Smartphones are the trend. Approximately 80% of internet users use a smartphone, and 2014 was the turning point where most individuals preferred to use the internet through their mobile phone rather than a laptop or PC.

In phones, smart or not, two applications are always underrated: calling and messaging.

Cold calling means calling someone with the objective of selling them something. It does not have the adaptability of social media or email, but it is still a valid approach — and it works better in B2B, where relationships close the deal, than in B2C.

Text message marketing works well. A text message is mostly an assured read, online or offline, and you can bring value in 160 characters or less. Consent must obviously be obtained first.

Offers, coupons and discounts are excellent methods for hotels and restaurants to attract more customers. Rental services have run outstanding campaigns asking customers to text a keyword for a discount. Retailers use text reminders when a package is ready. Around 98% of text messages are opened, and almost 90% are opened within three minutes.

One part of mobile marketing to skip: QR codes. They appeared everywhere for a few years, needed a dedicated scanner app, and opened data that was often not optimised for mobile. Spend your time and money elsewhere.

Conclusion

That is the story of digital marketing. The internet is not the only area where a marketer can achieve success. Nobody can afford to lose the opportunity of the internet, and ultimately every marketer will need to be an online marketing expert.

But the offline and online worlds are colliding. Traditional appliances like fridges and billboards are being renewed to carry digital media too.

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Published by SSK Business Services — We innovate today's existence to assure future destiny. Questions about anything in this article? Email info@sskservices.co.uk.