What is digital marketing? Relevance and importance for business
The mastodons of the British press – The Times and The Sunday Times – are seriously going digital. The digitalization plan includes publishing part of the content on social networks in real time, enhancing the visual part, etc. Finally, they are going to increase the audience with the help of search promotion and SMM (surprisingly, before that they managed only with weak cross-posting in social networks). It’s funny to see how even the old major Western publications, which have ignored trends for so long, give up and go digital with their heads. Smaller publications, like the rest of the world, did this ten years ago. Few people today can survive without an internet marketing service. We offer you to learn what digital marketing is and how to use it to successfully run a business and gain a confident position in the market.
What is Digital Marketing?
At the turn of the millennium, humanity began to move from the real world to the digital one. The entire purchase cycle – from choice to payment, communication with the outside world and leisure gradually began to be carried out in the Digital space.
Naturally, the changes also affected the organization of business activities. One of the innovations of the digital age, caused by technological and scientific progress, was the emergence of digital marketing.
Digital marketing or digital marketing is marketing that allows you to conduct business, work with customers and communicate with business partners using digital information and communication technologies and electronic gadgets. That is, it is marketing within the framework of modern digital technologies.
The concept of digital marketing arose in the nineties, along with the domestic spread of the Internet. But it is important to note that his definition then (in the 90s), ten years ago and today are not identical. The concept of digital marketing is constantly changing, improving and adapting to human needs.
How digital marketing is done
Note that digital marketing and digital marketing are not the same thing. In this context, the second concept is broader, including Internet marketing, but is not limited to the Internet.
Web marketing exists both online and offline. On the Web, it involves: SEO promotion of web resources, contextual advertising (search, media, video advertising, in-app advertising, etc.), targeting, teaser advertising, and email newsletters.
Offline is:
- text messages;
- digital TV and digital radio;
- digital outdoor advertising;
- QR codes.
Now we have a clear idea of what digital marketing is, including QR code marketing—it is marketing that solves business problems by using all the tools and media of the electronic digital type.
Internet marketing, as well as social media marketing (SMM) are narrower areas of digital marketing that have formed naturally with the spread of Internet and social media businesses.
Also, online PR can be included in the digital basic set – reputation management on the Internet by creating a positive information field of the company in the digital environment, Digital-art as part of the branding of works, etc.
How Digital Marketing Works
In order for any tool to be useful, it is important to take it with a full understanding of the principles of its operation and tasks. And digital is no exception.
Once upon a time, the consulting company McKinsey described the path of interaction between the brand and the consumer in four phases:
- Selection of a number of companies to fulfill the need.
- The process of studying and evaluating alternative companies to solve problems.
- Purchase.
- Getting a consumer experience.
- Repeat purchase.
That is, first the consumer must notice your company in the digital space and evaluate it as one that is able to fulfill his current need, then the person must choose your offer from among competitors, become a client, be satisfied and become a regular client.
Marketing should influence the buyer at every stage, and digitalization has led to the fact that now the Internet is present at all stages of the purchasing path – from the moment the need is realized – to the moment of purchase and use of the goods. That is, in the case of most goods and services, a marketing strategy today should include a digital promotion complex at all phases of interaction with a client.
The set of tools is individual for each company. Its composition depends on the goals and objectives of the business, its specifics, the nature of the competitive environment and the activity of competitors, the geographic location of the market and the typology of consumer behavior.
The formation of this list is carried out in the agency of Internet marketing and digital marketing. Note that we mentioned them separately, because they are not the same thing. Let’s consider the difference.
What is a digital agency
Such companies are full-cycle digital marketing. They provide a full range of services for the presence and promotion of business in the digital environment:
- Branding
The marketing team is building a brand from scratch. - Website development The
IT department is responsible for creating a website or other project: a startup, a mobile application, etc. - Design
From identity development and web design concepts to A/B testing of various UI/UX solutions and creating a unified style in social networks. - Support – technical and content.
And, of course, marketing is the development and implementation of marketing strategies using available digital tools and channels. Accordingly, to the question “who is a digital marketer”, we will answer – a specialist who is responsible for solving this problem.
All this can be implemented only by the forces of a large diversified digital agency, whose services are expensive. Small projects have to optimize costs and order only highly profitable services that require the involvement of professionals. And here we are talking primarily about Internet marketing.
What is an Internet Agency
A narrower activity of an Internet marketing agency is focused specifically on promoting a business on the Internet. It indirectly concerns all the tasks listed above: the formation of the “face” of the brand, IT support, design, support for the resource’s performance, but only as part of the implementation of the marketing strategy. The efforts of the Internet agency are aimed at:
- Company recognition. The path to making a purchasing decision begins with getting to know the company and its offering. Therefore, the efforts of Internet agencies are somehow aimed at expanding the awareness of the target audience, the visibility of the company in the digital environment, etc.
- Lead generation. Digital marketing is a convenient tool for building a customer base, establishing contacts with potential customers.
- Attracting clients. Internet marketing professionals use online tools to attract customers to businesses and implement retention programs for repeat purchases.
- Attracting traffic. It is important for areas outside of e-commerce to attract visitors to the site. Our Internet agency, for example, uses more than 10 traffic sources to solve this problem.
- Formation of demand. It is more difficult to promote innovations than products with existing demand. However, Internet marketers have successfully used the distribution of educational content and advertising to educate future consumers about the value of new products, the opportunities they provide, or the problems they solve.
The relevance and importance of digital marketing for business
Internet agencies are formed by a team of specialists who understand the mechanisms and possibilities of the digital environment and use its advantages to develop their clients’ business. In particular, we are talking about the following.
Search and segmentation of the target audience
On the Web, you can find target audience for any business. Moreover, digital marketing is a resource that allows you to find narrow audiences and create personalized messages for them. Companies in the old-school offline are used to making advertisements addressed to a wide target audience, counting on the reaction of a certain percentage.
The digital environment makes it possible not to broadcast one USP for everyone, but to create several channels of interaction with the audience and involve potential customers in the dialogue to the maximum.
This is what internet marketing agencies do.
Analytics and forecasting
Web analytics tools are the greatest value of digital marketing. Thanks to them, almost every step of users in the digital environment can be tracked. This allows the specialists of an Internet marketing agency to objectively and realistically evaluate the effectiveness of certain activities and channels, as well as draw up an accurate portrait of the target client. Analytics allows you to keep your finger on the pulse and make changes in real time to make promotion more accurate and cheaper.
Wide audience reach
Digital tools make it possible to attract an offline audience to the online market, and vice versa, and the number of audience that you can reach has almost no limits.
Direct communication with the audience
Modern consumers want to be as involved as possible: to express their opinion about products, services and companies, they want to share consumer experience, offer their own solutions for the product, etc. They also love personalized brand communication. The digital environment offers a wide variety of channels and ways to build such communication with literally every consumer. And the online promotion team or digital marketer is a figure whose task is to find the right channel and use its potential to the maximum.