Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a direction of marketing that involves the promotion of services and goods with digital technologies used at all stages of interaction with consumers. Content creation and distribution in digital marketing occurs through digital media platforms such as websites, social media, email, and mobile applications. In addition, this concept includes the promotion of content through various strategies, including search engines.
What is Digital Marketing
Digital technologies are all around us, that is why a digital marketing concerns almost every aspect of business, having a huge impact on how companies communicate with customers and create profitable offers.
As the Internet has become one of the available and widespread traditional instruments of influencing the customer (along with newspapers, television and radio), modern marketing professionals are working on ways to get the client through the analysis of his behavior using digital technologies. These specialists face one of the most common challenges of how to stand out in a world that is oversaturated with digital marketing ads. In many cases, brand promotion through the use of digital communication channels is handled by a digital marketing agency.
Nowadays, successful marketing strategy of the company contains the traditional marketing principles, however, the main focus is on modern digital technologies anyway. Digital marketing strategies help companies to set goals, identify a target audience, and develop a marketing plan, allowing the company to reach and engage this audience and, as the result, to increase its market share.
With the advent and development of any digital technology, the focus is shifted from the old technology to the new one. For example, the relevance of such marketing tools as email and search engines have gradually been replaced by social networks like Facebook, which allow companies to obtain more accurate data about the needs of a particular client. It is clear that changes in the way people consume media should be taken into account by companies to increase profits and attract new clients. A targeting of specific segments of the customer base is often achieved by interactive marketing.
A smartphone has become a helpful tool in company sales. Cisco reports that the share of mobile traffic is growing rapidly. According to Google latest research, more than 51% of users find a product or service through their smartphones. People prefer to make purchase decisions using their digital devices, at the same time, they do not think for a long time, that is good for companies. Therefore, in order not to lose customers, companies adapt content for mobile devices.
Internet marketing Vs. Digital Marketing
Internet marketing is not a synonym for digital marketing, but only a part of it. Digital marketing may include promotion methods that do not involve the transmission of information via the Internet, such as sending SMS messages or advertising in mobile applications.
Channels of Digital Marketing
As mentioned above, digital marketing differs from traditional marketing by the platforms on which promotion takes place. If traditional marketing uses radio, TV, billboards and other physical media, then digital marketing involves interacting with the audience through a computer, phone, tablet and other digital equipment.
Interaction with network users is carried out through the following channels:
Website marketing. The official website is the most important tool for creating and maintaining the image of the company and its products. It helps to increase the degree of brand awareness. The site should provide an exhaustive amount of information about the company, its scope of activities, goods and services.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This is a payment model in online advertising, where the advertiser pays for a click on an ad. A click is considered a transition of the user to the landing page. Companies use PPC advertising in order to increase brand awareness, because when users click on a link, they can see the name of the company or brand. PPC campaigns attract targeted users who have become interested in the product, and their further actions have already being analyzed in another context (not interested in the assortment, too high prices, incomprehensible working conditions, etc.). Such campaigns can divide consumers based on their demographic characteristics, in this case, advertising is more effective.
Content marketing. It is a process of publishing relevant content that audiences want to consume in order to reach, engage, and convert new clients. Content marketing allows a company to personalize communication with potential customers and buyers. The better the content is optimized for the receiver, the more likely it is to attract, intrigue and hold the attention of a person. In practice, this is working with the company's website, maintaining pages in social networks, interacting with the media. Blogs, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, webinars are important instruments of content marketing.
Email marketing. This channel of digital marketing involves collecting customer data at various stages, researching the interests and preferences of potential clients, and finally getting permission to add them to the email list. A pivotal factor for this type of marketing is choosing the appropriate regularity for mailings. Besides, the content of the letters should be relevant and fascinating for a particular client. Only then, email marketing will be effective for company, and allows it to work with different audience segments.
Social media marketing. Through tweets and posts, social platforms can use as channels to promote the brand, increase the target audience, drive traffic to the site and increase sales. SMM does not have an immediate effect, but gives a long-term result. Its main advantage is the low cost of investments compared to the possible effect of the activities carried out.
Affiliate marketing. It is the process when a business seeks help from partners to sell their products or services in exchange for a reward. Typically, companies encourage affiliates to promote their product by giving them a percentage of the sales that come from their personal affiliate link, just like in other reward programs. Amazon is one of the largest and most famous use cases of affiliate marketing, although they have gone through many changes.
Video marketing. It is a process of transmission of marketing information via video. Video is a working way to attract the attention of potential customers. The most popular video platform is YouTube, which is used by people around the world. In many cases, people make purchasing decisions using this platform, that is why it is so important.
SMS marketing. To send information about their latest promotions or provide opportunities to customers, companies also use SMS or text messages. SMS is a guarantee that advertising will be seen and read.
SEO in Digital Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy that allows a company to plan the content of the site in such a way that it appears in the search results more often and higher, driving traffic to the content. For high SEO performance, keywords and page optimization are indispensable.
Applying SEO to digital marketing strategies helps companies make their names and websites more visible to more consumers.
Digital Marketing problems
Despite the fact that digital marketing is spreading and constantly improving, there are some challenges of it.
One of the biggest digital marketing concerns for businesses is how to stand out against bigger competitors without a commensurate digital marketing budget. The difficulty of attracting the attention of potential customers due to the huge flow of competing advertising is another challenge of digital marketing.
Besides, the analysis of the huge amount of data that is regularly collected and used requires more and more marketing efforts. Fortunately, today there are enough tools for conducting qualitative research, along with this there is a problem of the analytical teams lack in many companies.
