Digital Marketing is one of the most innovative and successful marketing concepts in the 21st century. Digital Marketing is the process of marketing through digital media such as the internet, social media, emails, and websites. It greatly influences both the promoters and customers.
Types of Digital Marketing
There are many types of digital marketing, but general classifications are:
EMAIL MARKETING:
As the name suggests, it is the kind of promoting goods and services through emails, it helps to maintain a personal connection with the customers as it enables the promoters to personally answer their queries and build trust and value in them. Businesses that engage in this marketing can update their customers about the products and offers they are introducing.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING:
You can easily identify the reach of the business by looking at the number of shares, likes, and shares essentially amount to free publicity for products.
It is a kind of marketing that involves delivering a quality piece of content to the customers. Content marketing and social media marketing are closely linked because businesses primarily deliver content through these social media platforms. The most important points to consider are that the content should align with customer expectations and preferences; it can take the form of a blog or a YouTube video.
INFLUENCER MARKETING:
This is the new version of digital marketing. Promoters market their products and services through celebrities and public figures who have large followings on their official pages. This has proven to be the fastest way of publicizing products because customers feel more connected to the feedback and reviews of the products from the celebrities, which influences them to make more purchases.This technique of digital marketing helps promoters to increase sales and reach out the customers effortlessly.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION(SEO):
SEO refers to the process of searching for pages from search engines like google or bing. The appropriate pages appear when people search for a particular page by typing in a set of keywords in these search engines. It helps to redirect the customers to desired pages through these keywords searched in the search engine. Another form of marketing, Search engine marketing, also comes under this. Search engine marketing, or SEM, is the platform where you can use and pay for advertisement space to make it appear on the websites or pages that users search.
These are the ads that frequently appear in many apps, games, and in websites that we surf through. The most common paid ad platform is GOOGLE ADWORDS. Another fast-growing and popular form of search engine marketing is PPC or PAY-PER CLICK ADVERTISING. In this, companies or businesses that display their ads get paid every time a user clicks on the ad.
VIRAL MARKETING:
Marketing that utilizes interesting, funny, and trending content is known as viral marketing. This is one of the easiest ways of marketing because, in today’s modern marketing landscape, everyone stays updated on various internet trends through viral messages and content like memes and troll videos.
MOBILE PHONE MARKETING:
All kinds of marketing start just with mobile phone marketing. This forms the base for all other forms of advertising. Social media marketing takes place over many apps or mail marketing, predominantly from mobile phones. Another advantage of mobile phone marketing is that it allows for traditional marketing methods, such as using phones and SMS.
Apart from these types of digital marketing, other types of advertising, such as television and radio advertising, commonly known as “OFFLINE ADVERTISING,” also come under digital marketing.
WHY DIGITAL MARKETING?
Earlier, starting a business was not a cakewalk, but in today’s century, starting a business and making it alive for many long years in this competitive world has proved to be difficult because start-ups and businesses are growing up at a high pace, and only those businesses which take up active promotions survive in this competition, and this proves to be easy and convenient with digital marketing. It also helps in maintaining a close and intimate relationship with the customers as the outreach is more economical. Earlier, marketing the products and services only meant pamphlets and posters, and other forms of deliberate physical efforts to publicize them, but now this digital media platform proves to be the most efficient way of marketing. Companies can also engage in last-minute promotions that can reach millions and billions of people around the world.
STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE FOR DEVISING A STRUCTURED DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN
SWOT ANALYSIS:
Be it starting a business or devising a marketing plan, it starts with analyzing the Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Analyzing these areas helps businesses devise marketing plans properly and reach a mass of people.
SETTING THE GOALS:
The goals of different companies differ from one another. For one, it could be of earning a profit; for another, it could be maximum sales, whereas, for non-profit organizations, the main aim is maximizing services; the companies must identify themselves with the goals that it tries to achieve and market their plan accordingly.
DEFINING MARKETING STRATEGY:
This includes the target audience, proper positioning of products in the market, and the creation of content. The target audience also differs from one company to another. For one company, the main target audience is women, whereas, in some companies, it is men; some companies even concentrate on a particular age group. So a company must understand its target audience and make some deliberate efforts to reach out to them. Another step in marketing strategy is positioning. Companies must determine their position in the market, a concept known as positioning. Content creation includes various techniques such as keyword search, social posting, and much more.
CARRYING OUT DIGITAL STRATEGIES AND TACTICS:
After carrying out these three steps, the next step is of devising digital marketing strategies and tactics for the company. It needs to analyze the various types of digital marketing tools through which it looks forward to bring them to the customers, be it viral, content, or SEO marketing.
MEASURING RESULTS
You must give this the utmost importance because the step taken above has no significance unless you measure its use. Measuring the effectiveness of the strategies and activities helps to change or analyze the condition of reaching the customers, and it helps in bringing in a more filtered and efficient plan next time when a company takes up.
IMPACT OF DIGITAL MARKETING
MOST AFFORDABLE METHOD TO REACH THE TARGET AUDIENCE:
Digital marketing is definitely cheaper than other forms of advertising, such as print advertising involves large expenditure, time, and effort. This is cost-effective because you can forward or post content or messages, reaching millions in just a few seconds.
EXPOSURE TO DIFFERENT PLATFORMS:
Digital marketing does not just mean marketing through social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram it also includes other forms of marketing such as e-mail, viral, and content marketing as well. Thus these types of marketing bring businesses into a world full of new opportunities.
EASY ATTENTION BY CUSTOMERS:
Since all these promotions happen online, and people spend most of their time online, messages can quickly reach people, and customers also promptly acknowledge them.
INCREASE IN BRAND AWARENESS:
Social media users feel that they identify with various new products in the market rather than the prevailing ones. Thus digital marketing helps to create a brand, and ads help in creating awareness among the brand to its users and non-users, thus confirming its survival in the market.
BOOST IN SALES:
You can sell anything on social media, regardless of quantities. This increases product sales, and aggressive promotions can further boost sales due to the high volume.
INTERACTION WITH CUSTOMERS AND AUDIENCE:
Frequent posts and statuses can engage customers and target audiences, keeping them aware of the products companies introduce. Traditional media featured one-way communication, involving only the sender of the message. In modern marketing, both the sender (promoter) and receiver (customer) participate, creating a two-way communication process.