What is Digital Marketing explain with examples

Digital marketing is one big phrase that can encompass the whole of the internet and still have room for more. The definition of digital marketing can be summed up as every marketing form that uses digital ways, primarily the internet. You can understand the prime importance of digital marketing from the fact that every brand either has an online marketing manager in the house or outsource this work to a digital marketing agency in Gurgaon. Digital marketing has come a long way in a very short time, primarily due to the changes by Google and its out-of-world algorithm. In this article, we will answer all questions about digital marketing.

What is Digital Marketing?

In simple words – digital marketing is promotion through digital ways.

Any marketing effort that uses the internet and online digital techniques are called digital or online marketing. Since human interaction has reduced drastically, marketing agencies play a key role in the business's success. You can understand the importance of digital marketing for small businesses from the fact that every one of them has a social media page and a decent-looking website. They might not be spending big, but they know how important online businesses s for them.

Advantages of Digital Marketing in India

The advantages are huge, as shown below, which makes it one of the must-do things for every brand. Compared to traditional marketing, online marketing offers many advantages that you might have been missing. A good marketing strategy has a 360-degree approach and includes all digital channels. You can identify the best digital marketing agency by its kind of digital arsenal and how much 360-degree coverage it can do.

Ways Digital Marketing is Cost-Effective

Compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing services in India are very cost-effective. You can spend as low as Rs 100 to reach out to many users online compared to traditional marketing methods. Marketing channels like TV, radio, and print cost a bomb compared to simply boosting a post on social media or email marketing.

Seen those hoardings on roads that look empty for months at a stretch?

They are only empty because they are expensive for most brands to afford. It should give you a generalization of how traditional marketing or offline marketing is very expensive. Hence, you need to understand digital marketing and how it is better than offline marketing.

There are many hidden costs involved in traditional marketing, while time is the only hidden cost in marketing. You need to spend a lot of time on internet marketing which brings insight into user behaviour and perception.

Smart Goals for Digital Marketing

Traditional marketing cannot be measured properly and is often done in vague metrics. These numbers are very vague as to whether the marketing effort did exactly reach the targeted audience.

On the other hand, online marketing is very specific and measurable. It gives you the exact number of users who saw your communication, how they responded, and what they said. A good digital marketing company will share regular reports periodically to show how many figures they can crack digitally.

It makes a hell of a difference between the two ways of marketing.

Once you know how your marketing strategy performs, you can choose the marketing channels accordingly. You can even change your communication and its timing to suit the effectiveness.

Digital Marketing Provides Two-Way Communications

Digital marketers get a chance to respond to their users and engage them head-on. It builds a strong connection with the users. Product managers can understand the pain point of their users and align the products accordingly. Two-way communications are one of the best advantages of digital marketing.

Traditional marketing is mostly one way. Users will not call you up or write down a mail or letter on seeing your hoarding, TV advertisement, or on hearing on the radio. It will be ridiculous to do so unless the user requires your product very badly. We make traditional marketing one way and difficult to understand the pain point of the users.

This two-way communication increases the importance of digital marketing for small business that needs to know what their customers are thinking to align their offerings.

Long-Lasting and Leaves a Footprint

Digital marketing services have a long shelf life, unlike traditional marketing. Your social media post stays as long as you want. The website stays live and visible on search engines as long as you keep it.

Unlike internet marketing, traditional marketing does not last long. Best marketing campaigns are remembered for a long time and have a long-lasting effect. The shelf life of the newspaper, TV advertisement, newspaper, or pamphlet should explain everything.

Internet marketing leaves a footprint that users can follow in the future and every marketing agency shows them as their portfolio. The top digital marketing trends anticipate agencies exploiting this footprint to their maximum benefit.

Digital Marketing Allows Selective Targeting

You can selectively target your communication online depending on parameters like demography or action. Social media platforms categorize users on various parameters that allow them to be targeted easily. You can select the age category, behaviour patterns, gender, region they live in, and so on.

Segmentation is crucial in marketing, allowing you to focus your marketing effectively.

On the other hand, traditional marketing is like a broadcast. If the user doesn't miss the marketing effort, you do not know whether he was the right intended user. It explains what digital marketing is and how segmentation plays a crucial role.

Social Media Marketing Connects with Mobile Users

Data consumption through mobiles has skyrocketed as users spend a lot of time on it, especially while travelling. They check social media posts, read blogs and articles, and love watching videos. All these are enough ammunition for internet marketers who can then target users even when they are mobile.

On the other hand, traditional marketing almost becomes useless when the user is mobile.

With mobile in every customer's hands, the advantages of digital marketing have increased many times.

Creates a Level Field

Digital marketing services are for everyone and not just ones with deep pockets. If you are smart and driven, you can digitally promote your brand at minimal expenditure. It has created a level field wherein startups with little to no money can compete with big brands. The voice of a creative brand cannot be suppressed digitally and will stand differentiated in the crowd.

Traditional marketing, on the other, is one hell of a wall that needs a lot of money to climb across. Most channels in traditional marketing require lots and lots of money, thus creating barriers for not-so-rich brands.

This level field increases the importance of digital marketing for small businesses that cannot compete with big companies owing to their limited budget. However, this has also led to the creation of many digital marketing agencies everywhere, and finding the best digital marketing company has become a real challenge.

Role of Mobile in Digital Marketing

We spend much time surfing websites or checking social media through mobiles. It brings mobile to the forefront of online marketing. As a marketer, you need to ask yourself what digital marketing is and how mobile plays a role.

Every marketing manager focuses on making the websites mobile responsive and leveraging the power of mobile. Apps and online games with good users are leveraged for marketing.

Types of Digital Marketing

All channels that use the internet and related technology can be considered channels. These channels can then be further clubbed, and some of these channels of marketing are:

Affiliate Marketing

In this channel, people (Affiliates) build their platforms or means to create traffic (Customers) on them. This traffic is then directed to the brand's (Merchant) website for the final purchase or viewing of the product or service. The merchant then pays the affiliate as per their understanding of the pay system.

For example, you might buy a phone and land on a website that compares different phones. After checking, you might have decided to buy a specific phone and clicked on the buy now. The website then takes you to, let's say amazon website, where the final sale takes place. Once you buy the phone, the affiliate gets paid by the merchant.

This channel requires clarity and is highly subject to cheating through technical means. Finding a good honest affiliate can be difficult to find and differentiate. Affiliate Marketing agencies often employ affiliate marketing to achieve the sales figure to meet their monthly targets.

Email Marketing

Emails are one of many tools you can use to target your customers. It requires sending emails to people with the offer or the product information. Users then click on the links in the email to land on the website.

Challenges in email marketing are

• Finding a good email blast service provider
• IPs of email marketers get blocked by email service providers to provide a good user experience. If nothing, these emails land in spam, where they are lost in the crowd.
• Finding a good email database

Unless users have registered on our website, email data that you might buy somewhere will have lots of problems. People use their official email id for buying, and when they leave the organization, the email is removed from the server. As the email is not valid anymore, the emails sent to such ids bounce back. Email marketing service providers generally have a quality check, and once the bounce rate exceeds the boundary, these email campaigns are stopped.

Sales conversion for this channel has always been found to be static between 2- 3%.

Video Advertising

This channel of promoting digitally through video is one of the most engaging as you hold the user's attention for a long time. Brands can show their product or service at length and roll out their offer.

Different from any other channel of marketing, video advertising requires users to only apply a little of their brains to absorb the message.

Factors like the use of colours, music, creativity, length of the video, positioning of the product, and choice of channels to promote the videos come into place.

Social Media Marketing

How important is social media as a channel of online marketing that needs no introduction? Users spend much of their time on social media, forming one of the most effective channels to target customers.

The challenge here is to create highly engaging content and stay active on the platforms. Brands will need a full-time social media marketing agency to follow the social media platforms. Anyone handling social media marketing of a brand needs to live and breathe social media for every minute of his waking life.

When you see your follower base increase consistently due to your efforts on social media, you start appreciating the advantages of digital marketing. You wonder what next may be in store.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google has been the go-to answer for every question. Brands aim to be the answer to the questions asked in their space for which they need to do search engine optimization (SEO). If Google does not present the brand as the answer, then digital marketers can run AdWords campaigns on them. These AdWords campaigns come under search engine marketing (SEM).

SEO and SEM play the most crucial role in marketing and occupy the top slot for almost every brand.

Budget Required for Digital Marketing Services

The budget for online marketing depends on the objectives of the marketing, brand capabilities, and the targeted users' demography, among other factors.

Our minimal marketing package is Rs 20 000 without including the media budget for AdWords and promotions. We do the below activities every month in the package:

• Target and achieve ranking for 15 keywords in the first 3 months
• Publish 2-3 blogs every month
• 20 high-end backlinks
• On-page and off-page activities regularly
• Social media handling by publishing up to 10 creatives every month
• Prepare and share monthly reports
• We take complete ownership of digital marketing for brands and deliver results
• The time required to see results
• Online marketing requires 3 months plus to start showing improvements in ranking. If the keywords are very competitive, this time can go up to 6 months.

With aggressive work, this time can go down but will require a lot of effort from the marketing team. Even the best SEO Company can only give results in a month.

Role of Content Marketing

Content Marketing plays the most crucial role in marketing as it is the main driving engine behind it. Content is crucial in blogs, guest blogging, social media, email marketing, and everything else.

High-engaging content can do wonders and improve the engagement of users, which further impacts SEO rankings. As users engage with the content, Google identifies the page to be good for users and then improves the page's ranking. Without good engaging content, any website, however good it might be, will face many challenges in getting ranked and will never be able to take advantage of digital marketing.

Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business

Marketing takes your product and service to the users and builds your brand. You can showcase the features of your products to the whole world in one activity.

Understand the questions a user can ask or information that he might be looking for and provide the same in your marketing. It can be through the website, social media promotion, or even email marketing. Once the communication is done, users absorb this message; the interested users show their interest by filling out a form or commenting on the social media post.

Digital Marketing for Business to Business (B2B)

The basics of digital marketing remain the same for B2B and B2C. 

Your communication will change depending on your sector, and the marketing channels will remain the same. Your contact can include messages like how your business gets impacted by the product you provide. It will be more along the lines of the functional advantages of the product rather than an emotional ones.

Functional specifications that create product differentiation would be highlighted to make decision-making easier.

For example, if you are selling kitchen equipment to B2B, you would highlight how your equipment increases the speed of operations. You can even focus on how the product improves product storage or shelf life.

So, the functionality takes centre stage, so your communication and marketing channels will be aligned accordingly.

Digital Marketing for Business to Consumer (B2C)

For the B2C segment for most products and services, aesthetics occupy the centre stage. It is also further exploited through branding and engaging users on a mass scale. 

For example, if you are selling kitchen equipment, you would focus on stylish and cool a user's kitchen will look after they use your product. You might think of showing how every homemaker uses your kitchen equipment to make the user believe this must be must-have equipment.

Once purchased, the product takes over the marketing and speaks for itself to create the word-of-mouth marketing every brand needs.

Role of Social Media Marketing

The future of digital marketing has a very special and solid place for social media in it. Social media plays a crucial role in marketing by promoting mass brand communication. It creates a strong story around you, and even Google takes this as an indication of the brand's relevance. Hence your SEO ranking gets impacted through your social media efforts.

You can take the product or service to users and engage them through social media. The usage of videos through social media is a big hit for brands. Show your creative side or build an emotional connection with users.

Social media should always be a big part of your marketing efforts, something you will see in the top digital marketing trends.

Various Roles in Digital Marketing

Marketing is a vast subject and requires a lot of people to work on different aspects of it. Some of these roles are too specific, and the tasks involved in executing them should be narrower. The digital landscape has created new and specific roles in corporate and particularly in a digital marketing companies. Some of the new roles that did not exist 10 -15 years earlier are:

Marketing Manager

In organizations, he is the final guy with whom the results of marketing rest. He ensures that all people below him work harmoniously towards the common goal – to promote the brand digitally. The parameters on which this marketing role is judged are – ranking, traffic, sales conversion, growth in customer base, and more.

He is the one who works on the marketing strategies that the brand will be employing. Hence his knowledge and experience in marketing have to be good. He must be willing and able to run these campaigns himself if it comes to that.

Marketing Executive

He is the one that executes campaigns and works on the tasks assigned by the marketing manager. Depending on the organizational structure, he might have a small team himself. His campaigns to drive traffic and ranking can be on Google, social media, or his website.

The role requires one to be technically sound and have a good understanding of how websites work. They have to work with developers to get the changes required for their work.

Digital marketing starting salary?

The salary can start from as low as Rs 10,000 a month and increases depending on your knowledge, skill, and performance.

SEO Executive

The prime role of the search engine optimizer is to get a ranking with an eye on the traffic structure of the website. A strong understanding of how search engines work and adapting their knowledge to form your marketing strategy is required.

You can further break down into his task:

• Finalize the keywords he would be targeting to get ranked on
• Analyzing website SEO – on-page and off-page to understand what changes are required.
• Monitor and prepare reports on Google Analytics
• Monitor and update the SEO efforts per changes in the Google Analytics program.
• Add and update text on the website, especially the blogs.

Social Media Marketing Expert

His prime role is to combine the brand's marketing efforts with social media management. The role requires creating engaging content for social media and then engaging users on social media. The role requires good knowledge of consumer behaviour, wants, and desires. Based on this, he aligns with social media strategy accordingly.

A good understanding of various social media platforms and the kind of users they have is required.

Copywriter & Content Writer

The role should be distinct from the content writer. There is a very minute and strong difference. A copywriter, for example, will write a few words that can go with the blog you will share on social media as a part of your social media marketing. The content writer will write that blog.

In other words, a copywriter brings creativity or ingenuity to writing through those few words. He might write – "Chicken is tastier than chocolate."

A content writer brings his knowledge to the subject matter. For example, he will write a blog – "How chicken is preferred to chocolate by teens now."

Conversion Rate Optimizer

Once a user lands on the website or the social media page, You must convert them to sales. The main task of the role is to get those conversions. Tricks used are – A/B testing, analysis of conversion paths, the efficiency of the marketing funnel, and aligning other activities that get those leads.

It's a crucial role that stands between the make and breakpoint for any brand.

Search Engine Specialist/Marketer - SEM Specialist

This role is generally used in brands where the budget for marketing is pretty good or in a marketing agency that handles many clients. The role requires the SEM specialist to use the provided budget efficiently and generate leads or sales for the brand. The ROI generally measures the work they bring to the table.

Inbound Marketing Manager

The role of the inbound marketing manager is to bring traffic to the website and convert them to leads or sales. Activities like blog posting, social media creative, publishing whitepapers, email marketing, and whatever else may bring inbound traffic are required to be executed.

Content Marketing Manager

As the name suggests, the role of the content marketing manager is focused on content. The content can be of any kind – blogs, videos, email marketing, guest blogging, whitepaper, etc. Their task is to create content that You can use further to bring traffic.

Analytics Manager

An analytics manager analyses data to bring insights into traffic, their conversions, and finally, how the complete marketing team result came out. Google Analytics, IT systems, and data handling are required.

Roles in marketing can be more than this, depending on the organization.

We hope the article explained what digital marketing is and what kind of roles you can expect here. Marketing becomes very interesting when you get results and the ROI graph increases. With all of its advantages, online marketing has many challenges, which we will cover in another article. If you are looking for the best digital marketing company in Delhi, feel free to connect with us.