What is Digital Marketing?

Marketing has always been about spreading awareness about a product/service to the audience to convert them into sales. You must see advertisements in newspapers, billboards, digital billboards, etc. These are all forms of marketing, often termed Traditional Marketing.

Enters Digital Marketing,

Digital Marketing has reformed the methods and strategy of marketing services and products completely. The boost in internet availability and affordability increased the number of people using online platforms such as social media, websites, and e-mail, giving marketers a new area for marketing.

Brands are now able to reach a wider and better audience more easily. That is what digital marketing is all about, increasing your brand’s reach using the internet as its tool.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing, also called online marketing is the mode of marketing your brand using an internet-based platform such as:

• Search Engines
• Websites
• Social Media
• Pay Per Click Campaigns
• E-mail

In short, if you are marketing your product using any of the above methods, it is called Digital Marketing.

Consumers rely heavily on digital media to find out information on brands and their products. 77% of the consumers research a brand online before buying and 51% of consumers google your brand at least once. These statistics are enough to explain the importance of digital marketing in the present time.

Why is Digital Marketing important?

Digital Marketing helps you reach a larger audience as compared to traditional marketing. Not to mention that digital marketing is way more affordable than traditional marketing. The cost of getting your brand on a billboard in a crowded place for one week is the same as a good digital ad campaign that you can run for a month. Additionally, you can focus on your target audience and communicate with them using digital platforms, something which was not possible at the time of traditional marketing.

A few major beneficial factors of Digital Marketing are: –

1. You can put more focus and promotion resources, on your potential prospects.
2. Easy to judge the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
3. More cost-effective than a traditional marketing strategy.
4. It is easier to optimize digital marketing strategy.
5. Digital Marketing can help small businesses compete with big brands.
6. Digital Platforms help you to communicate with your customers at every step.

Types of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is an umbrella term that ranges from SEO to Content Marketing. All types of digital marketing play a crucial role in increasing brand awareness and lead generation. All these types play a crucial role in the success of a good marketing strategy.

There are 7 types of digital marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay per click (PPC) Ads
• Social Media Marketing (SMM)
• Content Marketing
• E-mail Marketing
• Message Marketing
• Search Engine Presence

A good digital marketing strategy consists of the above types in different proportions. Each element has its uniqueness and quality which needs to be carried out after planning and research.

Note: A brand doesn’t usually focus on every type of digital marketing equally, some are focused more than others. It is all dependent upon the position the brand is in.

What does a Digital Marketer do?

After understanding the basics of digital marketing, you should now have an idea about what it is, what are its types and why is it important. Now let’s take a jump in understanding what exactly is the task of a digital marketer.

A digital marketer is responsible for driving brand awareness and generating leads for the business, using both organic and inorganic methods across a range of platforms. They are also responsible for creating a budget for the marketing campaigns for the company executives. They focus on different key performance indicators (KPI) for each channel, so that they can calculate the company’s performance across each one. For example, an Ads-specialist will look at the number of users who went to the “Call to Action” button as a KPI.

In big organizations, the task of different types of digital marketing is given to their domain specialist. Some of these specialist roles are:

1.  Ad-Campaigns Manager

KPI: Clicks on CTA (Call To Action)

The role of this position of a digital marketer is to run ads. Not only running ads but also the metrics that follow it, such as targeted keywords, daily budget, location of the ads, type of ads (Image, video, etc.), and many other metrics.

The Ad-Campaign manager’s primary role is to look over the complete campaign and make sure that it achieves its objectives. They work with other marketing managers to create, implement, and track the progress of the ad campaign that follows.

Digital ad spend in 2021 was 521 billion dollars and is expected to grow by 68% by 2026. This ad spend alone tells you enough about the growing field of Digital Ad campaigns.

2. SEO Executive

KPI: Organic traffic

The role of an SEO executive is to conduct research on relevant keywords for the business and optimize the content in a way to increase organic traffic. In short, the role of an SEO executive is to rank your business page on google using organic methods.

3. Content Marketing Specialist

KPI: Organic traffic on the blog, dwell time on the page, YouTube subscribers

Content Marketing is often confused with content writing by many people. No, these two are not the same. Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, and distributing information with the intent of acquiring a clearly defined audience. Whereas a content writer is responsible for creating written content that supports content marketing objectives.

4. Social Media Manager

KPI: Followers, Impressions, Shares

A social media manager as the name suggests handles the task of managing the company’s social media pages. They are required to create a posting calendar, along with the intent of the post across different platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. They also may work alongside content marketers to define the content which is to be posted.