DIGITAL MARKETING INSTITUTE IN BANGALORE

DIGITAL MARKETING – AN OVERVIEW

 

We all have heard about marketing, right? In a common man’s language, we can define marketing as a company’s any action to attract people who are interested in that company’s product or service. We all know that till few years back marketing was mostly through directed mails, printed medias like newspapers and magazines, broadcast medias like television and radio channels. Nowadays, we are mostly hearing about digital marketing. In this blog, I am going to share an overview of what is digital marketing? Benefits of digital marketing, types of digital marketing, and future of digital marketing in India.

 

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is component of marketing. As words say, it is the marketing efforts using internet and other forms of digital communication to promote products and services. It is also called internet marketing or online marketing. We can say that if digital communication is used for a marketing campaign, it is digital marketing.

There are so many benefits using digital marketing like low cost, return on investment is high, measuring of a campaign is easy, can easily adjust the campaign, brand awareness, sharing is easy, can target specific customer, reach is global, can do segmentation from specific customers, engagement rate is great, 24x7 approach.

Different types of digital marketing are there. Examples are search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing (SMM), email marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing etc.

 

Benefits of digital marketing

           Low cost

For every business, money they are spending for marketing and advertising will be a huge portion of their budget. For small businesses, it will be very tough to spend a huge amount of money for marketing. Here, digital marketing will be a good help to them because digital platforms have affordable alternatives to the traditional methods. Marketing through digital platforms give impact as much as traditional method but costing less.

For example, with less amount of money, we can subscribe to an email marketing provider and send emails to thousands of customers in our mailing list.

Measurable and real time

In digital marketing, we can easily calculate the success of a campaign which is running. But in traditional marketing, we have to wait for weeks some time even for months to know whether our campaign is a success or not. In digital marketing, we know the results of the campaign in real time. For example, if we are sending mails through email marketing provider, we will get the reports like how many people opened our mail, how many people clicked on the links in the mail etc on its dashboard. If we are doing campaign through social media platform like Facebook, we can know the campaign has reached how many people and how many people clicked on the link we provided in the campaign etc. Using google analytics, we can know that how many people have visited our website, which page they have visited, how much time they spent etc.

High return on investment(ROI)

A high return on investment with small amount of is possible in digital marketing. In traditional marketing, huge amount of money is needed while running social media campaigns and email marketing needed costing less.

24x7 marketing approach

Digital marketing is a 24x7 approach. But in traditional marketing this not possible. We can take an example like if we are delivering leaflets for our product promotion, we cannot deliver it night time. But if we are using digital platforms like social medias, we can run the campaigns 24 x 7 and we can reach people anytime.

Global customer reach

Via digitalization, the world has turned into global village. Through digital marketing, ad campaigns are visible to any part of the world. Because of this, small start-ups are getting opportunity to reach globally. Nowadays, we are hearing stories of so many start-ups which has become successful within a short period of time. These all are due to the opportunities they got to go globally via digital platforms.

 

Precise targeting

In traditional marketing method, ads run over a platform which has considerable reach hoping that people will see, hear or read and make a favorable decision. In digital marketing, we can do targeted campaigns that means ad is presented to the people according to their preferences, interests etc. Social media platforms have algorithm to study and collect the user preferences. So that a specific ad campaign will only be shown to the users who have that specific preference or interest.

Brand Awareness

Using digital platforms, businesses can build their brand. With a well-developed website or with a blog containing useful and quality content or with highly interactive social media platforms, businesses can build their brand.

 

Types of digital marketing

  Search engine optimization(SEO)

  Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing the number and                             quality     of visitors to a website by improving rankings in the algorithmic search            engine results. Three types of SEO are there: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and                  technical SEO.

  On-page SEO relates to the content on your website. Eg: Adding H1 tag in the                  content.

  Technical SEO relates to the non-content elements of your website. Eg: page speed.

  Off-page SEO techniques help strengthen the influence and relationship your website       with other websites. Eg: backlinks.      

    Search engine marketing (SME)

 In SEO, organic ranking is through keywords. In SEM, through paid ads, the increased visibility of the website in search page results is achieving. SEM gives instant results compared to SEM as SEM will take time to rank a website in search engine results. SEM is source of constant traffic to website. Flexibility is there for running ads as we can run the ad whenever we want. Hyper targeting is possible. We can target specific place, gender, age etc to run ad campaign, but requires skill to run ad to beat competitors.

Social media marketing (SMM)

Getting traffic to website through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Mostly paid campaigns run on social media like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, linked in ads. These ads are very powerful as we customize and target people according to their interest, demographics, location, etc. in this marketing content understanding is important means we should have an understanding of which content is trending, which content we should use, which type of content and at what time it has to be used etc. content calendar is a must in social media marketing. Advertising skills are required. For a business only, will have different objectives for different period of time. We can create and run campaign for each objective separately. Power of retargeting can be utilized using social media marketing.

Email marketing

Email marketing is the process of promoting products or service using email sending of commercial emails. There are different email marketing tools that can automate email marketing campaigns. Mail chimp, Aweber, SendInBlue, Active Campaigns are examples of email marketing tools.

Advantages of email marketing are very cost effective, helps to build relationship with customers, helps to establish brand recognition, through a call-to-action button in a mail can bring customers to the website, emails are still relevant to B2B and B2C marketing.

Emails can be collected through a form on your website, link to a form in your signature, form on your social media pages, lead magnets, Facebook ads.

Content marketing

Content marketing is integral part of marketing. Definition of content marketing is “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately to drive profitable customer action.” Types of content are blogs articles, videos, podcasts, emails, webinars, infographics, etc. Content marketing is important for business because through content, can spread the awareness of a brand. To make sales, brand awareness is important even if the company has reputation and huge profit with high quality products. Content marketing helps to save the cost. If the content marketing is very strong, the organic traffic to the website increases. Through content marketing, a strong relationship between business and customer can be built.

Affiliate marketing

It is the process of earning a commission by promoting others or company’s products. There are 3 components of affiliate marketing: vendors, affiliating network, affiliates. Affiliating network is the medium between vendors and affiliates.

Affiliate networks and standalone are there. Examples of affiliate marketing companies in India are Flipkart affiliate, Amazon associate, BIGROCK affiliate, vCommission and outside India are click bank and CJ.

 

Influencer marketing

Social media users with a large number of followers are called influencers. Influencer marketing is the process that promotes or advertise a product, service, website or brand by using the reach and mass appeal of influential individuals. Benefits of influential marketing are unaffected by any ad blocker technologies (Eg: if we are giving a banner ad in a website and a user is accessing that website through a web browser which has ad blocker, then that ad will not be presented to him and we may lose a customer), highly targeted traffic, does not appear pushy as we are approaching the influencer in our same niche, followers genuinely care about what the influencer promotes, marketing can be done globally as well as locally.

Future of digital marketing in India

Future of digital marketing in India is very bright because people are getting aware of digital marketing and power of digital marketing in India. Government is also taking initiative by introducing and promoting “Digital India”. Institutions and universities recognised the power of digital marketing and is working on the course for the same. In India, internet has reached remote location also and number of internet users are increasing day by day. Businesses equipped with digital marketing is generating enormous amount of revenue. All type of industries need digital marketing professionals, so the need of skilled digital marketers is increasing. These all lead to a point that in coming years, the future of digital marketing in India is very bright.

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