What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the practice of promoting products or services with the help of digital devices and technology.

In simple words, digital marketing is any form of marketing that occurs online with the help of mobile, laptop, internet, etc. In addition to digital signage and technology that may not be connected to the internet. It can range from anything as complex as automated email marketing initiatives all the way down to the content choices on your website’s blog.

Now, you know what is digital marketing, so let's proceed and know the types of digital marketing.

Types of Digital Marketing

If you have a computer or a smartphone, as many of us do, you’ve experienced digital marketing. It could be an email in your inbox, a search result when using Google, an ad on Facebook, a text message sent to your phone, or a post by an influencer on Instagram. As you can see, internet marketing is an expansive field with many areas of specialization. The core forms of digital marketing, however, are:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Put, SEO consists of carefully structuring and optimizing your website’s pages to achieve the best position possible on search engine result pages (SERPs) when internet users perform a search on an engine like Google that’s related to your business.

2. Paid Social and Paid Search Advertising

Ads that appear on social media are paid social ads, and all that seems on SERPs when you enter a query are paid search ads. Advertisers create these paid ads and compete with others for positions on their chosen social platform or the SERP for their selected search engine.

3. Email Marketing

Any marketing that occurs through email is known as email marketing, and it’s not just for newsletters and coupons. All marketing-related interaction over email fits into this category.

4. Content Marketing

Every effort to market through online content is considered content marketing (and often employs SEO, paid search, and paid social advertising). For example, all these content types (and more) are grouped under the content marketing category:

• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Videos
• eBooks
• White papers 

5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing in which companies reach out to third party websites to advertise their products and services. These are also known as referrals. The target audience of the affiliate website becomes important in this aspect of digital marketing. Some of the ways that affiliates are incentivized are based on:

• Registrations
• Email sign-ups
• Sales and
• Subscriptions

6. Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing is a type of digital marketing focused on reaching the target audience via mobile devices. We all are excessive users of mobile devices and there is a good chance of tapping on to their attention by following simple marketing strategies. Push notifications, emailers, social media posts, MMS, SMS, newsletters are a part of Mobile Marketing. 

7. Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a practice that increases brand awareness, and helps brands achieve their marketing objectives. A wide range of content buckets are available for social media marketing like videos, memes, static posts, trending posts, testimonials, stories, reels, etc.. If you perform SMM properly, there is a high chance that your conversion rates will increase, you will be able to build a good top-funnel traffic, and your paid marketing cost will go down. 

Other types of digital marketing include marketing automation, design, apps, and SMS, web analytics, and growth hacking.

Digital Marketing Challenges

The practitioners of digital marketing face unique difficulties. As more and more channels become available in the digital realm, it becomes increasingly important for marketers to understand how their customers are using those channels. Marketers require expertise in using these platforms to promote their wares successfully.

Receivers are being overwhelmed with more and more advertisements, making it harder to stand out from the crowd. It's not easy for digital marketers to make use of the massive amounts of data they collect due to a lack of suitable tools for doing so.

The difficulty of collecting and analyzing data underscores the fact that a consumer-centric strategy is essential for success in digital marketing. To better understand the customer journey and emerging patterns of consumer behavior, a business may need to implement innovative strategies such as the use of website heatmaps.

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Why is Digital Marketing Important?

• It reaches a broad spectrum of internet users who spend their time and money online.
• It pins small businesses in top-ranking positions over brick-and-mortar firms with a meagre advertising budget.
• It provides businesses with laser-focused control to ensure target audiences read their messages.
• It allows personal-level marketing to provide comfort and security for customers to subscribe to the messages and purchase. 
• It enables tracking ads and communicating with the target audience. 
• It provides scaling and adaptability for growing businesses to get instant results and optimize accordingly, reducing lost revenues and wasted ad spend.
• It influences the purchase decisions of internet users who look for services, products, or anything they desire online. 
• It allows businesses to market to people by various means that show individual respect. 

The Bottom Line

Traditional methods were used to carry out some of the largest advertising campaigns ever. People still remember Wendy's "Where's the beef?" slogan, and the Marlboro Man was a media darling.

The media industry had to adapt to the shifting preferences of consumers. It's safe to say that digital marketing has become as big as, if not bigger than, more conventional forms of promotion.

Like any other industry, digital marketing is not immune to the effects of implicit prejudice. The most important thing to remember is that, as technology advances, so will digital marketing.