What is digital marketing?

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a form of marketing that exists online. It’s a reality that people spend two times more time online than they used to, 15 years ago. The way people shop or buy products has changed drastically. Nowadays, before buying any commodity, people check its price and reviews online. So, it has become obvious that your business can gain success more swiftly if you promote your products on a digital platform.

Marketing is nothing but meeting people and telling about your products and services. In digital marketing, you simply connect with your audience on the internet, where they are already spending a lot of time. Digital marketing contains a huge spectrum of tactics and assets under its umbrella, in the form of online and offline marketing efforts that are carried out with the help of electronic devices. What are these assets and tactics? Your website, blog posts, social media handles, online brochures, E-books, etc. are an asset for marketing. We can employ tactics like inbound marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), social media marketing, etc. in digital marketing.

Online marketing and offline marketing are the backbones of digital marketing. There are still many types of online and offline marketing. We’ll discuss them one by one.

Online marketing

As can be inferred from the name, online marketing is essentially promoting a business online. The internet is transforming the way people buy products and services. A majority of people are promoting their business online in a variety of areas like video, blogs, e-mail, social media and many more. The standard marketing strategies have taken a backseat to its online counterpart. Some tactics of online marketing are-

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – SEM is basically buying traffic through paid search activities like search ads, shopping ads, display and banner ads, in-app ads, social media ads, mobile ads, etc.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO is a set of rules followed by website owners to reform their websites for search engines, thereby improving search engine rankings. It helps in driving traffic to your website through unpaid or free listings.
3. Content Marketing – It is a marketing strategy which involves the creation, publishing, and sharing of content such as blogs, videos, and social media posts.
4. Social Media Marketing (SMM) – SMM is a technique that targets the social networking sites to reach customers and audience to publicise a product or services.
5. Pay per click (PPC) advertisement – PPC is a strategy that empowers business owners to place their ads on a website in exchange for a fee each time a user clicks on it.
6. Affiliate Marketing – In affiliate marketing, you can do publicity of a product that you feel has quality and value and in return, earn revenue for it.
7. Email marketing – Sending an attractive mail to your e-mail list members to promote your website or product, is email marketing.

Offline marketing

You must be wondering how can offline marketing be digital. Any kind of marketing which involves electronic devices comes from digital marketing or digital offline marketing. Hence, promotion or marketing outside the internet that involves digital platform is digital offline marketing. Offline marketing strategies utilize offline media to create awareness of their brand. Some strategies for offline marketing are enlisted below –

1. Radio marketing– Sometimes, we listen to the radio on our phone or on car’s music system and once we start listening to it, it’s like an addiction. Song after song, joke after joke, we want to listen more. Apart from songs and joke, we also hear advertisements. Those are the advertisements which are meant to promote brands and products. Since people are interested in listening radio, they listen to it carefully, because of which advertisements gain more attention.
2. TV marketing – No matter how smarter our phone gets, it can never replace television. People of all age groups watch TV. TV commercials direct more audience towards the products than any other media. Remember watching a cricket match and not changing channels in the break to never miss a ball?
3. Calling and texting – Brand owners call and text people about their products and services to gain customers. Even if people ignore phone calls, a text message is a guaranteed read. This is also a form of digital marketing.

These were some online and offline marketing tactics which are effective in promoting and publicizing brands, products, services, etc. via electronic media.

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