In simple terms, Digital Marketing refers to the use of digital devices to market your products or services. Thus, Digital Marketing is a form of marketing that makes use of electronic or digital devices like computer and internet, smartphones, tablets, digital voice recording, mobile apps, web banner ads, etc to engage potential and existing customers. Therefore sometimes, it is also referred as Online Marketing or Internet Marketing.
From sending a simple email to your customer or a weekly newsletter with recent updates, uploading an interesting post on your company’s fan page or even sending a text reminder, all these are different forms of Digital Marketing.
Digital Marketing Channels:
Undoubtedly, Internet is the crux of digital marketing. whether you talk about newsletters, e-mailers, SEO, blogging, almost everything revolves around the internet. We also have Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram to enhance various aspects of digital marketing. Also, the craze for tablets and smartphones among all ages has opened broad gateways for online marketing. For instance, there are various mobile apps that help the companies leverage their products and services.
Why Digital Marketing is so Important?
The euphoria of Digital Marketing began in 1990s and gain popularity in 2000s and today it has become an integral part of many organizations. Earlier traditional forms of marketing included TV commercials, billboard ads, radio, newspaper…however, all these marketing channels have time and money constraints. With the emergence of digital marketing, companies can spread the desired information anytime and anywhere. Similarly, the customers and people in general receive the updates, promo offers, fresh articles/blog posts right in their in-boxes. This information could be related to business, education, current affairs, entertainment, sports, shopping or anything else.
Here are some of the advantages of Digital Marketing:
Digital marketing has given a lot of relief to companies (whether small or big) as well as to the consumers. Let’s look into some of its advantages:
1. Economical:
Digital Marketing is very economical as compared to traditional marketing channels such as television, print ads and billboards. There are many free tools available on the internet which helps us to spread the brand image of one’s company as compared to one ad printed in a daily newspaper or one commercial aired on television.
2. Convenient:
One can upload an attractive banner ad or receive an email anytime and anywhere! Similarly you can send text messages from the comfort of your home or read an interesting blog post when stuck in the traffic. Are all these things possible with traditional marketing?
3. Instant Feedback:
A successful marketing experience happens when instant or timely feedback is received. This gives a lot of opportunities to the companies to clearly understand the needs of the consumers and also the consumers get a comprehensive picture of the company offerings.
4. Real Time Analysis:
How many people opened your newsletter and how many clicked on the Call to Actions? Who filled out the form for the promotion you are running or what is the bounce rate for your SEO pages? All this and much more is possible with Digital Marketing.
5. Flexibility in designing the campaigns:
There are many online tools and software available that can be used to create beautiful and attractive marketing campaigns. Moreover, being digital you can share your ads world-wide, without restricting to any particular location.
6. Building Long-term Relationships:
Digital marketing also helps in building long-run trustworthy relationships with customers and leads. With Analytics gaining a lot of popularity, one can easily judge the likes and dislikes of your customers or the market you are targeting and build your products and services around those. You can now send tailor-made offers and personalized emails to make your customers feel ‘special’.
7. Time & Effort Saving:
Digital marketing, with all its automated tools, saves a lot of time and effort of the company as well as the consumers. For instance, through automated email tools, we can create uniform and pre-scheduled emails that will keep going to the leads/customers once they sign-in to your account. This one time effort keeps lakhs of users engaged with your brand.
8. Easy to Grasp:
Learning digital marketing is not at all a rocket science. A good marketing sense and creativity is all that is required to take your company’s marketing strategies to the next level. In fact, digital marketing has become a very high-end profession in today’s era of internet and computers.
With all these advantages, companies can get better insights and can take quick and effective decisions in planning their future course of action.
In today’s competitive world, if organizations want to succeed, they need to harness the power of digital marketing in the best possible way. Businesses need to understand which form of digital marketing or which combination of digital marketing will be most effective to them. In fact, a blend of digital and traditional marketing techniques will bring out the best results.
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