Over the past few years, marketing has had to constantly adapt and keep up according to the progress in the technological field. In the 21st century where the Internet is prominent, the necessity and feasibility of digital marketing have become very clear. But what is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing isn’t just a platform that people can use to promote their product(s). It is much more than that. In fact, it encloses all marketing efforts that promote your products using electronic platforms such as the internet. It grasps marketing tactics like search engine marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing in order to connect the producers to the customers. 

In simple words, Digital Marketing is internet marketing or any type of marketing that uses the digital stage as its propagating medium. The ads you see while playing your favorite mobile games, or browsing through internet pages, are all part of someone’s Digital Marketing strategies. 

History of digital marketing:

Digital marketing was first used in the early 1970s. Basically, Ray Tomlinson, an American programmer found out that you can communicate through machines and electronics by sending the first email in 1971. 

After the discovery of the internet and the increment in the number of its users, the landscape wasn’t just limited to emails. It evolved from emails to search engines, e-commerce sites like Amazon, and even social media. However, the term Digital Marketing was first used in the 1990s with the launch of the search engine Archie. 

Likewise in 1993, the first clickable web advertisement banner was observed. After the launch of Yahoo the following year, the initiation of the digital era of marketing took place. Yahoo was the first e-commerce transaction over-net market. In 1998, Yahoo launched its web search engine. Simultaneously, Google and MSN were launched in the same year as well. 

In the year 2001, the first mobile marketing campaign took place. Likewise, with the release of WordPress in 2003, the most powerful Content Management System (CMS) that exists today. WordPress paved the way for easy website development. In 2004, Gmail was launched alongside Facebook. These are the bases that helped digital marketing to evolve over the years. 

Elements of Digital Marketing

We have already discussed what digital marketing is about. But to make the most of it, you should also learn what digital marketing consists of. The following are the key elements that play a part and make a difference in your digital marketing strategy.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimizing content and reach of certain web content so that the content page appears in the highest possible order of a search engine. The result is based on the input of specific keywords by the user.

The basic purpose of SEO is to pull maximum clicks to one’s websites when users search for the products related to one’s business.

Paid Search or Pay Per Click (PPC) 

It is also common to pay for one’s online presence. In this type of Digital Marketing or Pay Per Click, you basically ask for search engine platforms or websites to display your advertisement in their content. You pay them in accordance with the number of clicks your banner gets. Google, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc. are the platforms where PPC is most feasible. 

Mobile Marketing:

Mobile Marketing is an approach used to reach your target market in their smartphone, tablets and similar devices through apps, websites, social media platforms, emails, SMS and more. It’s a medium that the producer communicates to its probable customer through mobile phones. 

With mobile phones being an integral part of the human lifestyle now, the evolution of mobile marketing is rapid. Using mobile to spread awareness about your campaign, product or service is much easy. The nature of this marketing can be one-way or two-way with users being allowed to text back or contribute to your campaign(s).

Email Marketing:

Email Marketing is similar to Mobile marketing except for the part where communication is done through e-mails. Likewise, this is the oldest form of digital marketing and people hail this method as the initiator of the platform itself. 

Today, there are many types of email campaigns you can use and many diverse platforms that you can use to send emails and keep track of the progress. In this digitized age, you can see a detailed report regarding who got the email, at what time, if they have opened or not, at what time and, last but not the least, their responses or reactions.

Content Marketing:

Content marketing refers to the creation and promotion of content assets for your website, social media, blogs, etc. to generate brand awareness, promotions, traffic growth, and customer engagements.

We now know that Content is king in digital marketing and if done right, can boost your business even tenfold in terms of its brand reputation, its sales, and customer relations. But for this, content marketing should be optimized to get the required engagements, generate actions or reactions, and gain leads. 

On the other hand, based on your content, you can also rank higher in search engine websites like Google, Baidu, Yahoo, Bing. A part of content marketing requires the right use of keywords or keyphrases.

Search engine crawlers seek these keywords and based on your use, they rank your websites/ webpages higher or lower in search engine result pages.

You can also use ad features in search engine websites to rank and make your websites visible. And for all, you will have to optimize your content and your content marketing strategies.

Who Benefits from Digital Marketing? 

Digital Marketing is beneficial for all sectors, be it multinational companies, SMEs, government organizations, startups and more. It especially proves to be a great aid to new entrepreneurs or businesses looking to create that identity for themselves in the market.

It works wonders for already established businesses to maintain their presence in the market as well. The barrier of entry to too low becasue the invesment of money isn’t a concern here.

Furthermore, the businesses that are looking for sales leads can also capitalize on digital marketing tools as it gets easier to generate higher leads, conversions, and ultimately sales. Digital marketing tools are a cheaper means of marketing and advertising, the investment can get lower if you know whom to target and how. 

As digital marketing tools are equipped with analytics, it gets easier to collect the numbers, study their trends and effectiveness as well as divert the marketing strategies based on the collected data. 

Importance of Digital Marketing

Low Cost

Operating digital marketing is at a comparatively lower cost to traditional marketing. Bearing the cost of marketing and advertisement can be a nightmare for businesses. Thus, it helps these businesses to gain more customers at relatively low costs.

Specify Target

Digital marketing helps businesses target specific customers. Social media platforms today allow businesses and digital marketers with the option to access their user data and send their ads and information to a selected group of people.

Majorly, the categorization is based on demographics of gender, age, sex, location. The further categorization comes as a choice to choose groups of people who have liked certain pages, visited places or even searched for certain something.

Ease in Measurement

People can measure the effectiveness of Digital Marketing through analytics tools for websites and social media. Hence, through this, they can know about the reach their banner got and how many probable customers have shown interest in their respective products. 

Global Scale

Advertising in the digital space allows businesses and digital marketers to get the opportunity to run their ads on a global scale. Categorizing and approaching people with similar likes and common demographics under one ad also is can be easy if done right. This gives businesses an opportunity to go global thanks to the immense exposure provided. 

Digital marketing is the most effective, affordable and go-to marketing solution of the 21st century. It is as easy as it is essential for any business to get into. Businesses of all levels and kinds have felt the need for digital marketing, with more and more businesses investing their time, effort and money for awareness, promotion, engagement, and (sale) leads. 

If you are not using digital marketing yet then, it is high time that you adopt this approach too, at the very least, show your presence and engage with your customers. The benefits exceed your expectations.