Introduction 

We, humans, are a witness to evolution. Not only did we evolve over time but we have witnessed a progressive change in many things around us. Human behavior, social trends, marketing and technology – all have evolved with time. The way we used to communicate has seen so much change – from writing letters to calling each other over the phone, from whatsapping each other to face timing. 

Similarly, changes in people’s interest have brought a positive evolution in the trend of marketing – it evolved from billboards and fliers to radio and television advertisements to blogging, vlogging and social media marketing, which make up what we now term as Digital Marketing and let us now discuss what digital marketing is.

What Digital Marketing is?

Digital Marketing, in other words Online Marketing, refers to all marketing activities done digitally or online. Digital marketing is the digital promotion of e-commerce business. It is the way of promotion of products or services through online channels such as SEO, Email, mobile apps and Social Media and reaching out to current and prospective customers.

Often, a comparison is drawn between “Digital Marketing” and “Traditional Marketing” for instance direct mail, magazine ads and billboards. Whereas, digital marketing is typically referred to marketing campaigns that pop up in your phone, computer, tablet or other devices. It can have various forms such as display ads, online video, paid social ads, search engine marketing, social media posts and few others.

Digital Marketing – A History

Owing to the easy access to cost-effective smartphones and other devices and with the tremendous growth of the internet, usage of digital content has enhanced significantly among users. In today’s time, can you even imagine a world without the internet? But there was a time when the internet was not an ‘in’ thing. Have you ever pondered over how digital marketing worked in those times? And, who was its inventor? Your search ends here.

The history of Digital Marketing is traced back to the 1890s. The term “Digital Marketing” first came into being in 1990, when the first search engine “Archie” was launched. But according to popular beliefs, the inception of digital marketing dates way back. In 1896, when Guglielmo Marconi invented the radio, he was considered as the world’s first digital marketer. While few others believe that Ray Tomlinson, a celebrated computer engineer,  should be given the credit as he sent the first-ever email in 1971.

In the year 1992, SMS messaging came into light and in 1994, the first online ad was displayed. The Yahoo Search Engine was launched in 1995 and Email Marketing came into the foray in 1996. The term SEO was first introduced in 1997, followed by SEM and the revolutionary creation of Google in 1998. 

The first decade of the 21st century saw even more progress in digital marketing. Google AdWords, PPC, Google mobile advertising were launched in 2000. The next few years saw the introduction of website designing platforms like WordPress, social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, tools like Google Analytics, etc. 

As time progressed, digital marketing kept adding more feathers to its cap by introducing many other digital channels and tools to help marketers in the times ahead. The recognition and demand of digital marketing is proliferating to such an extent that experts believe it may completely outclass traditional marketing methods in a few years time.

How does Digital Marketing work?

Now-a-days, screen time is at a record high for most people. Digital Marketing capitalizes on this fact, advertising services and business products over the internet. Businesses, in this way, ensure that their marketing activities are more feasible to connect with their customers by reaching them where they spend most of their time.

Digital Marketing makes use of a variety of strategies to reach the target customers, either to grow their brand awareness, or to simply engage them with their brands or the aim is to lure them into making a purchase. To utilize digital marketing in full capacity, marketers must immerse themselves into the boundless and complex cross-channel world to plan out strategies that make a lasting effect through engagement marketing.

Engagement marketing is the process of creating significant interactions with prospective and current customers based on the data collected over time. Engaging customers will help build brand awareness, positioning the brand and placing the business at the forefront when the customer is ready to make a purchase.

Inbound Marketing versus Digital Marketing

These two kinds of marketing are distinct in certain ways although their difference can be confusing. The terms are used interchangeably most of the time, but in reality, they refer to different types of marketing, and perform varied activities. So, if you have been thinking what the difference is between digital and inbound marketing, we are going to break it down for you.

Lets understand it in a very simpler form first – 

Digital Marketing = Short-Term Goals + Brand Awareness 

Digital Marketing is the combination of short-term goals and brand awareness. If your business needs to increase brand awareness, and bring back old visitors to the business website, quite a few distinct digital marketing techniques might be of service. These techniques assist in solving short-term goals like bringing more traffic to the website or increasing social media pages’ reach. 

Inbound Marketing = Long-Term Goals + Qualified Leads

If your business is working towards generating leads that convert to genuine, eligible customers, inbound marketing techniques will serve as a better choice. An Inbound Marketing tactic takes each of the digital marketing strategies and combines them into a bigger strategy that brings results from each strategy.

The major thing to remember regarding inbound and digital marketing is that being a marketing professional, you don’t have to pick and choose between the two. They work best when united.

B2B versus B2C Digital Marketing

To understand the difference between B2B and B2C Digital Marketing, first you need to know about both the kinds of marketing separately. If you are a Digital Marketer or working in the marketing industry, you are already familiar with these two terms. However, we can walk you through it once again.

B2B Marketing or Business-to-Business marketing, as the name suggests, refers to the promotion and marketing of services or products to other organizations or businesses. Whereas, B2C Marketing or Business-to-Consumer marketing targets consumers directly.

Now, coming to their difference.

Branding: B2B Marketing focuses more on positioning in terms of branding whereas, in B2C marketing it’s more about relationship building. In B2B marketing, your business’s position in the market defines your personality and assists you in lead generation and brand recognition. Branding is an importa
nt part of B2C marketing as well, just that the best practices differ. The connection between a business and its customers are minimally interactive. Therefore, the business must create a quality experience and lasting impression for the customer to render them coming back to the website.

Decision-making: In B2B marketing, businesses work towards maintaining open communication in the decision-making process. While businesses, in B2C marketing, work towards making the process as easy and fast as possible.

Transactions: B2B digital marketers usually present evidence and logic based B2B transactions. Content for B2C digital marketing is more likely based on emotions and more focused on making the customer satisfied on a purchase.

Why is Digital Marketing Important?

All kinds of marketing assist you in thriving your business. However, with the easy accessibility to different digital channels, digital marketing is becoming more and more important day by day. In order to interact with the target customers, there are an immense number of digital marketing strategies to be used. 

It is also a cost-effective marketing technique for small or medium scale businesses. Moreover, digital marketing is continuing to evolve almost regularly – with all the latest technologies and tools at your disposal, it is becoming easy to engage and retain customers.

Types of Digital Marketing

There are various specializations within Digital Marketing to be utilized for interacting with digital media. Here are a few instances of types of digital marketing strategies – 

Website Marketing

Websites can be considered as the gold standard in the marketing industry, the pretty much all-inclusive shop for all service information and product. It serves as one of the primary methods to reach your customers. It forms the center for all digital marketing activities and is a very influential channel on its own.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO or Search Engine Optimization can be termed more as a marketing tool rather than a digital marketing type. It is referred to as the digital strategy with which you can improve or optimize your website to increase its visibility on the search engine results page (SERP). The more a website is visible on the search pages, the more likely it is for the brand to capture business.

People today rely mostly on organic searches to locate and access online content. Therefore, a formidable SEO strategy is crucial for enhancing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM or Search Engine Marketing, unlike SEO which helps you to bring organic traffic to your website by using some best practices, aids you in promoting your website and products by purchasing ad space in paid search platforms such as Google Ads. It can also be referred to as the paid method to gain quick rankings and visibility on the pages of the search engine.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing helps businesses reach its potential customers by creating and providing relevant and valuable content. It can be defined as the process of attracting, delighting and engaging your target market. It involves creation of content and its distribution across all your digital channels for instance your website, social media or blog. As a result of effective content marketing, businesses can increase their brand awareness, improve conversion rates, get a boost in revenue generation, etc.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

SMM or Social Media Marketing refers to the process of gaining attention and website traffic from all social media platforms likely, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and others. Social Media Marketing has revolutionized the way businesses are able to have an effect on consumer behavior. 

In addition to this, SMM platforms have built-in data analytics tools that help marketers to understand and keep tabs on the success of their efforts and recognize some more ways to engage your audience.

Pay-per-click Marketing (PPC)

PPC or Pay-per-click Marketing or Advertising is a digital marketing strategy where advertisers or businesses pay an amount as charge every time a person clicks on their digital ads. These ads appear alongside your search results. 

Therefore, you only pay for those ads with which individuals engage rather than paying a lump sum amount for constantly running targeted ads. One of the most common kinds of PPC is search engine advertising and Google being the most popular among the lot, businesses use Google Ads.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a type of digital marketing wherein an affiliate or in simpler words, a promoter earns money or commission every time they promote other company’s products or services on their website or social media platforms and increase sales. 

Affiliate marketing is a very effective way to increase sales and produce notable online revenue. This strategy is immensely beneficial for both the business and the affiliate marketers. This kind of marketing is popular among those who want to increase their online income. It serves as a fast and economical way of earning money without the struggle of even selling a product.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing, quite similar to Affiliate Marketing, is one of the prime forms of digital marketing. This type of marketing is a collaboration between influencers and brands. The brands rely on the influencers to promote their products or services online. 

Influencer Marketing is not just restricted to celebrities. Any influential person from any industry can collaborate for influencer marketing, provided he or she has a large follower base on the web and social media. They should have the power to affect the purchasing decision of the customer.

Native Advertising

Native Advertising is a form of Digital Marketing in which the ad is made in a way so as to blend with its surrounding content and doesn’t give the feeling of a blatant advertisement to the customer. This concept came into being as a response to the cynical reaction today’s customers show towards ads.

Native ads can often be seen as a recommended content on websites that appear below or beside articles. They also appear in the news feed of social media channels like Twitter and Facebook as “in feed” ads. The promoted and search listings, appearing at the top of the Google search results or sidebar, are also forms of native ads.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the use of certain softwares to aid in digital marketing campaigns, not just for increasing efficiency but to enhance the customer’s personalized experience. This technology helps in making tasks like social media posting, managing ad campaigns and email marketing quick and seamless. 

Email Marketing

Email Marketing serves as a direct marketing channel that assists businesses to share information regarding their new products or services, ongoing offers and discounts and other updates. A wel
l-designed email marketing strategy helps in building brand awareness along with driving sales.

Mobile Marketing

Another kind of digital marketing is Mobile Marketing tactic that assists you to engage and interact with your desired audience on their mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. In other words, it is an advertising activity to promote your products and services through mobile devices.

Audiences, for mobile marketing, are grouped not by demographics but by user behavior. It is much more affordable than traditional marketing. Mobile marketing is also easily accessible. It is very important to optimize content for mobile devices.

Video Marketing

Businesses use attractive video content to promote their products or services, engage their audiences on their social and digital channels, and educate their customers through a process called Video Marketing.

Video is the second most popular type of content on social media to increase audience engagement. Most people spend hours on their phones watching various kinds of video content be it on YouTube or on other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Hence, businesses, who are ready to excel, are utilizing video marketing.

How to do Digital Marketing?

For beginners, it isn’t a cakewalk to get started with Digital Marketing and produce results for their business. However, setting up an effective and achievable digital marketing strategy can take you places. 

Digital Marketing is not only going to help your business garner increased brand awareness, but will also aid you in increasing audience engagement and eventually increased sales of your products or services. The following few tactics might help you in getting started in your digital marketing journey – 

Set Your Goals – Be SMART

The primary method of doing digital marketing is to set a goal first. For any business, be it small, medium or large, setting up a goal is the primary objective before getting started. You should set an effective goal for your marketing strategy to be on point, likely specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely (SMART).

Recognize your audience

It is always advisable to recognize who your target customers are before initiating any marketing campaign. This understanding will help you identify digital channels which are appropriate to be used and the information required to be presented for creating a successful campaign.

Set up a budget

It is very important to set up a budget early into the strategy making, this will help you avoid overspending on ineffective digitals channels and spend tactically towards your goals. To create a budget consider the goals that you have set for your marketing strategy and the digital channels you have thought of using.  

Select your Digital Marketing Channels

The next step is very crucial, that is to decide which digital marketing channels you will need for your content marketing and PPC campaigns. Your audience, goal and budget that you set will help you decide which channels to choose.

Refine your marketing efforts

Track your efforts by analyzing the marketing campaigns you have run. This will help you identify what went well and what are the areas the campaign can improve upon and will in turn, assist you in designing better campaigns in future.

How Digital Marketing is beneficial?

Digital Marketing has come to prominence largely owing to the wide audience reach. However, there are other benefits as well of using Digital Marketing for your business.

Local & Global Reach

The first and foremost benefit of digital marketing is its local and global reach. Unlike Traditional Marketing, which is restricted by geography, Digital Marketing takes place on the internet. This signifies that the reach you can achieve with it is immense. Reaching an international audience for a small local business has never been easier before. With a global reach easily accessible, it improves the local visibility as well. It will help in targeting nearby customers.

Cost Effectiveness

One of the primary importance of digital marketing is its cost-effectiveness. Digital Marketing brings for you cost-effective solutions, whether you desire to promote your business internationally or locally. A strategically planned and well-suited digital marketing campaign can drive more sales at a much lower cost than traditional marketing processes.  

Enhanced Audience Engagement 

One of the crucial benefits of Digital Marketing is enhanced audience engagement. The more your content is relevant and attractive, the more the audience will engage with it online and the more sales will be. 

Multiple Strategies Available

Another major benefit of digital marketing is the availability of multiple strategies. Different types of businesses can use various digital marketing strategies that are available. A local B2C business will have a completely different strategy than a B2B business trying to acquire international leads. While some companies can achieve results by organic SEO only, others can only benefit from paid marketing methods.

Varied Content Types

Another major benefit of using Digital Marketing is that there are multiple content types available to promote your brands online, unlike any form of Traditional Marketing. You can easily showcase the same content on different platforms by modifying and enhancing it.

Digital Marketing Challenges

Digital Marketing is packed with challenges for its users. Digital channels are plenty in the market and each has its own specialities. To keep up with the growing proliferation of these channels and changing algorithms, digital marketing is in itself poses a big challenge to the purveyors. 

With each passing day, people are developing different interests, their reaction to different ads are changing. Hence, attracting a customer and engaging them with your content is becoming a challenge.

Conclusion

That was the summary on what Digital Marketing is all about. Looking forward, we can always conclude that all businesses should have their Digital Marketing strategy game on point to survive and thrive in the industry and it is here to stay. 

Digital Marketing is making it easy for businesses to maintain a constant connection with their customers and to provide them with personalized user experience. Why every marketer needs to master the strategies of digital marketing is to stay on top of the game.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What digital marketing means?

Digital Marketing is a way of promoting and selling your products through any digital platform. Digital marketing is a continuously changing and dynamic process, unlike traditional marketing.

2. Why is digital marketing important?

Digital Marketing is important as it forms a connection between a business and its customers when they are on the internet. Digital marketing is effective in all industries which makes it even more beneficial.  

3. Why is digital marketing used?

Digital marketing is used for multiple reasons. Digital Marketing is a technique with which, primarily, you will be able to reach a global audience. The other key benefit of digital marketing is – the ability to engage your audience by understanding your customers and their needs better.

4. Which Digital Marketing is best?

Every strategy of Digital Marketing is effective. But it is for you to decide which digital marketing is best suited for your business. Your business goals, budget and choice of digital channel will help you choose which digital marketing is going to provide you with better ROI.

5. What is a Digital Marketing example?

Digital marketing is the marketing and promotion of business, products or services or even a person. Digital marketing is full of examples. One primary example of digital marketing is search engine optimization (SEO). Other examples are social media marketing, pay-per-click marketing, email marketing, and many more.