It’s hard to find out exactly when marketing was created (and digital marketing), perhaps it was created when the first commercial exchanges were made, and who knows when that happens.
Marketing as a category has been established for years, but it’s constantly evolving, adopting new methods ever more efficient.
In recent times, from the 20th century, marketing started to enter the digital era. Soon, company budgets started going from outdoors, brochures, radio and television to the internet and all it has to offer.
At that point, digital marketing was born, which can also be called online marketing or web marketing, although digital marketing is more popular these days.
So what is digital marketing?
By definition, digital marketing is a set of activities that a company or person executes online with the goal of attracting new business, connect and develop a brand identity.
It’s not by chance that company budgets are migrating to this new way of doing marketing, because it has a lot of advantages over traditional marketing, that allow for a bigger ROI (return on investment).
Digital marketing is easier to measure, it has clear metrics and it has become essential for companies across all industries, both B2C and B2B.
Currently more than 90% of the buying process starts with an online search, so digital marketing is here to stay.
The advantages of digital marketing
Digital marketing is growing at a steady pace. Besides the fact that the number of people that uses the internet grows rapidly, there are also other advantages the digital world offers, such as:
Global reach
If you ever came across the 4Ps of marketing, which are Price, Product, Promotion and Placement, you know that if you’re doing a campaign with outdoors or flyers, there is geographic limitation in its “Placement”, which could affect the cost and effort of the campaign, since they are part of the “real” offline world.
On the other hand, on the virtual world, any company can have a global reach, since there are no distances to be made nor geographic bounds.
Engagement
One of the advantages of marketing on the internet is that it’s a two way street.
Long were the days of unilateral communication, and digital opens several ways for companies to more richly connect with its audience.
Not only are you able to get your audience’s attention, but every time they interact with a marketing campaign, they are also providing valuable info for you, such as behavioural and demographics, which can help a company better understand its target audience and create more effective campaigns.
Metrics
This is by far one of the advantages of doing digital marketing.
On the internet almost everything is measurable, such as total visits, clicks, campaign performance, and many other KPI (key performance indicators).
This data is very important for marketers and companies to be able to measure and optimize their campaigns to make them more efficient. Remember, “Knowledge is power”.
Real Time
Most of your data can be measured in real time. This allows you to measure your campaign performance and adapt quickly, in order to fix any problem or optimize for opportunities, avoiding wasting money and time on whatever that’s not working (or not working as it should).
Think about a magazine ad: it can’t be changed after it goes to print, and it’s hard to measure it real performance. On the other hand, the copy for an AdWords campaign can be adjusted how many times you want, according to the feedback you get from your data.
Targeting
You can collect an enormous amount of data about users on the internet, which allows you to make smart choices and investments targeted to your audience.
Having this kind of power makes your marketing campaigns considerably more effective.
Digital Marketing Strategies
As in traditional marketing, digital marketing has hundreds of tools available, mediums and places that can be used to get the results you’re looking for.
Here are some of the strategies and tools that every companies should have to take full advantage of digital marketing:
SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
Search Engine Marketing is any marketing action focused on bringing results through search engines, like Google. SEM is of great importance because today search engines are the main entry medium that people use over the world on the internet, and they can bring highly targeted traffic.
When a website is found on a search engine, there is already an interest from the user on the question or problem that he needs to solve, which raises the chance that user is highly qualified.
In Search Engine Marketing there are two main disciplines: SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click).
SEO (search engine optimization)
SEO is one of the main digital marketing strategies on the internet and its goal is to improve your position on the organic search engine results.
Good SEO work may involve dozens of different actions, such as optimizing your website for faster loading, optimizing for mobile devices and creating good content.
Being first in Google is a great way to bring in qualified traffic, “free” traffic that you don’t have to pay (unlike pay-per-click).
While you can and should experiment with ads in your strategy, being able to pull traffic to your website without being dependent on budget (for the ads) is a major advantage of SEO.
A good base for SEO is optimizing your website on-site and off-site. On-site means taking care of all your meta tags, such as title, keywords and description in your header. Off-site means getting relevant links from authority sites.
Creating quality content for your website is also a good idea, because it can bring users to articles you post on your blog (and you do have a blog right?).
PPC (pay-per-click)
Search engines generate revenue through ads that advertisers (such as yourself) pay to display on their sponsored results. This is called paying per click.
Google shows that those ads are sponsored, which may make them less effective than organic results (but it depends on the user and what he or she is searching).
Google has a PPC network called AdWords, in which you create your ads and they will be shown according to the keywords that matter to you, to bring in targeted traffic to your website and/or landing pages.
Although AdWords is paid, it can be very effective. Just because you’re paying for the ads, don’t think you can slip up: Google wants to provide a good user experience, so your ads must be relevant to your audience. If your ad is relevant and the user clicks to a useful and relevant landing page, Google will reward you by lowering your cost per click.
Display media and ad networks
Display media is a common medium in digital marketing. You’ve probably seen the famous banners all around the internet and other similar creatives.
When digital marketing really lifted off, advertisers would invest on display media, as it was the online equivalent to buy print media ad space.
Display media evolved and ad networks showed up, which are centralized networks that distribute ads on several websites across the internet, without the advertiser having to deal with those third parties.
There are a number of ad networks today, some are more corporate like, others are niche oriented, and there’s Google’s AdSense, which is probably the biggest self-service ad networks.
Email marketing continues strong and steady, and is by far one of the mediums favoured by marketers and companies, because the subscriber gave you permission to send content to his inbox (hopefully you’re not buying a list, because that’s terrible).
As with other mediums, such as display, the use of email in a marketing strategy evolved over time. Nowadays it’s not enough to get a giant list of emails and shoot mass emails to the list hoping to get a sale at ridiculous low levels of conversion rates.
These practices no longer work like they used to, because your email will go to the recipient’s spam, and besides, buying lists is a no-no, because people didn’t gave you permission to send them emails.
Native advertising
This is a relatively new concept on the internet. Native advertising has gained momentum after display media started losing ground with the growth of content marketing.
Native advertising is advertising that matches the form and function of the platform where it appears. It’s common nowadays for brands to create their own lists or “ad-editorial” ads. An example of this is BuzzFeed.
The growth of native advertising is due to the fact that people don’t want to be interrupted when consuming content, and on the internet it’s easy to get distracted (and being interrupted by annoying ads).
So brands decided to create content themselves, and insert them on their own websites, mixing their content with their use of native ads.
Not many people know this, but Google AdWords ads are a form of native advertising, since the ads mix with the organic search results.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a digital marketing tactic that uses several resources mentioned in this article, and uses content as a way to attract and retain your audience, with the goal of generating business.
Content marketing is focused in the creation and maintenance of several mediums, such as a blog, that is used to deliver valuable content to your audience.
Setting up a content marketing strategy may involve several mediums and tools, like a blog, publishing on social media, integrating with email marketing, and lots of planning to be able to deliver good results.
Others
There are already a number of tools and tactics in this article, but this is by no means a complete list, because new mediums and tactics show up in digital marketing.
Other ways to take advantage of digital marketing is marketing focused on social media, video and virtual reality. A good agency must be up to date with trends and digital strategies, knowing what to use with each client in order to provide them with the best results.
Enjoyed this article so far? Then you’ll love part 2. Click here to read Digital Marketing: what’s that anyway? Part 2
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