Digital Marketing Explained: What It Is, Advantages & Types [2024]

Digital Marketing Explained: What It Is, Advantages & Types
Home » Digital Marketing » Digital Marketing Explained: What It Is, Advantages & Types [2024]


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Who will believe me if I say the internet is considered the most important medium for advertisers, accounting for 51 percent of total media spending in 2020? As reported by Statista, It was calculated that digital advertising spending amount worldwide amounted to 521.02 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. Now the source projected that in 2026, the spending amount would reach 876 billion dollars. 

Definition of Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is referred to the online marketing of products or services reachable to end-users through digital channels like emails, social media, google advertisements, etc…. It is very easy to reach your customers or potential customers through the use of digital marketing.

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It is also called online marketing where you use different types of acquisition channels like social media platforms, email marketing, search engine optimization, etc… to market the products globally at a very low cost, unlike traditional marketing.

The History of Digital Marketing

The Digital marketing term was first used in 1990. This era was the birth of the web 1.0 platform. This platform allowed users to consume the content that they did want to find out but did not allow them to share the content over the web.  In 1993, the first clickable banner was live, after that Hotwired purchased a few banner ads of their advertisement. 

This marked the beginning of digital marketing. The same year also Yahoo was launched. Within 1 year of launching, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang’s guide “world wide web”, Yahoo got 1 million hits through the web. At that time digital marketing space was totally changed. Everyone wanted to optimize their website according to Yahoo search engine guidelines to pull a higher ranking on Yahoo SERP.

In 1998 we saw the birth of Google. Microsoft launched the MSN search engine and Yahoo upgraded themselves and launched the Yahoo web search. After 2 years internet burst out and the smaller search engines were left behind or wiped out.  In 2006 digital marketing had grown up when the result was 6.4 billion traffic through search engines within the month. There was a huge boost for the digital marketing world. Everyone wanted to pull traffic to their website through search engine optimization.

Now the digital marketing industry has grown up. Largely Google, Facebook, Tiktok, Linkedin, etc,.. These top giants have covered the digital marketing space. Businesses are advertised on this platform to pull traffic to their website. As per insights, 43.0% population in India is active on the Internet, that’s the reason companies are focusing on digital marketing space.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the method of online marketing where you are able to reach your customers or potential customers through a digital medium like a social platform (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc…), search engine, paid advertisement, etc… This method is able to target the audiences on the basis of age, location, budget and also able to decide which channels or medium to their business.

Making a strategy for online marketing is the core concept of digital marketing. Unlike traditional marketing, you need to be active at the time of making the strategy for online marketing. There are a lot of acquisition channels are involved in digital marketing. You always need to keep eye on these channels. Because you have a fixed amount of budget for online marketing to achieve better ROI. So you have to take a decision about which channels are good for your business and where you need to invest more money. There are some important points that need to be checked whenever you do digital marketing for any kind of business.

Business Objective

You first need to find out the objective of the business. All businesses have their own objective and they want to achieve these objectives within a time frame. So as a digital marketer, you must give attention to these objectives. 

Acquisition Channels

Digital marketers before deciding which acquisition channels are good for their business first be clear about their audiences. Audiences are the core concept of the online platforms where you pull out the traffic for your business. Let’s say Linkedin has users who are business professionals, working professionals, CEOs, CTOs, etc… So if you have a business that wants to target working professionals & business professionals then you should be thinking about more budget for this platform. 

Goals & KPIs

Goals are responsible for the business objective and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are responsible for the Golas. Every business has its unique objective that is fulfilled by its goal. At the time of selection of the goals of the business, you must check the business objectives. Your goals should be like for lead generation sites; the number of leads collected, number of inbound calls, etc… Similarly in the selection of KPIs you must check the business goals and their objective. Your KPIs should be numbers or metrics so that you would easily measure them. 

Digital Marketing Importance, Benefits and Advantages

The way of marketing is changing day to day. It all depends on the users and your audiences. 10 years back the way of marketing are totally different from today. At that time there was no digital marketing because of the lack of technology and the internet revolution. Now technology has changed, everyone is in the internet world. Any product, or service you can sell or buy within 5 minutes because of the digital world. Here we are sharing some facts and insights about digital marketing so that you can easily understand the importance of digital marketing.

 – Digital marketing advertisement and marketing was estimated globally at $350 billion in 2020 now it is projected to be $786.2 billion by 2026

– 63% of businesses have increased their digital marketing budget just this past year

– According to the Bureau of Labour Statics, the digital marketing job demand is increase by 10% by 2024- above the average for all careers.

– Google holds more than 90% of the search engine market share of the total market.

– Customers are 70% more likely to buy a product from retargeting ads. 

I hope you read the above stats and understand the importance of digital marketing and its future. Now we will explain some of the core concepts about the importance of digital marketing.

Better Reach

Unlike traditional marketing, you will get better reach; I mean you have the choice to segment audiences and connect with proper or specific content for specific audiences. In traditional marketing, you do not have the choice to segment the audiences, only you were shooting the marketing content to a larger audience. Also, you do not have the proper tracking and targeting system. For that reason, you were not able to decide the proper outcomes from the advertisement channels. 

Now technology has changed, you have a proper targeting system and global reach within less time frame. You can target the right people at right time with the right message. So now your business will reach globally or locally at the right audience at the right time due to digital marketing has come in the world.

Increase Brand Awareness

Every business has need to promote its brand globally or locally. Large companies are investing a lot of amounts of money in brand awareness. In simple terms, Brand awareness means a user who wants to buy a product or service, will directly go to their website as he remembers the brand name and purchase it.  So here due to internet marketing evolving, every business; small, medium, and large have the flexibility of the budget. Small and Medium businesses will also participate or invest in brand awareness due to less cost and market segmentation. 

Cost Effective and Faster

As I already discussed in the above point, cost-effectiveness means flexibility. Unlike traditional marketing, you can choose the budget and invest it in your profitable acquisition channels. You can do it in less time because you can do it on your own with the use of the internet.

Automation is also playing the important role in this digital world of marketing. Every platform is focusing on automation with the help of machine learning and AI (Artificial Intelligence) because their objective is less cost and faster reach.

Easy to Target

Unlike traditional marketing, you have a lot of choices available to target your audiences that’s why you can target your niche in depth. Digital marketing is the best way to find your audience in-depth and target them easily on the basis of location, budget, age, interest, etc…

Leveraging deeply to target your audiences you have a lot more advantages if your targeting would be right then, you would reach your audiences at a very low cost. You would also get relevant leads at minimal cost because of targeting your audiences. That is the power of digital marketing.

Remarketing

It is a good way to retarget your audiences who have already visited your store, websites, apps, etc… online. Let’s assume some have visited my website and they did not purchase your product or buy the services till now then you will take the advantage of remarketing because through this method you would reach the same audiences with attractive online campaigns like offers, coupons, and some other attractive options. Remarketing is one of the best methods of digital marketing that would reduce your budget and probability of getting highly relevant leads.

Remarketing does work on cookies. When someone visits your website through any medium like a browser then they store some unique id to that user and send it to your acquisition channels or tracking platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc.. Thereafter you retarget your audience through these channels.

Customer Relationship

Digital Marketing is the best way to make relations with your customers. In the current marketing concept, customer relationship is the core concept to build the audience. Using digital marketing technics you would easily build relationships with your customers. There are a lot of methods where you would use to make relationships. For example, you can use social media channels; Facebook, Twitter, etc… to connect with your audiences easily. 

Types of Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing can be broadly divided into 8 categories including; Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Social Media Optimization (SMO), Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Marketing Analytics, and Affiliate Marketing.

1) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is a great way to acquire leads for your business. SEO is the process of optimizing your website according to search engine guidelines to pull traffic and get a higher ranking on search engines. Google is the most popular and no 1 search engine which is why everyone focuses on Google and optimizes their website according to Google guidelines. Search engines basically have an algorithm that will lead them to all websites and there is a vital task running in the background to rank the website in search engine result pages accordingly to their algorithm.

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Search Engine Optimization will take time to rank your website on the search engine result pages. Because there is a lot of work to optimize your website. Search engines also need to recognize the new website to rank into their SERP because their algorithms are based on many factors. If you want to visible your business instantly in the market then you must choose other options like PPC, influencer marketing, etc.. Because SEO takes time at least 1 or 2 months but it will lead to long-term business.

Google has more than 200 ranking factors for ranking signals of websites in the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Here are some of the core concepts of Google algorithm that are running in the background Google search engine.

Indexing: It is the way to index the website into Google Indexing. Google has a robot called Googlebot that works to index, analyze, and organize content.

Crawling: Is is a way to discover the pages and links that lead to more pages.

Backlinks: Backlinks are one of the top most ranking signals on Search Engine Result Pages. In this process, you have to get referred by some relevant and authority-based website through the linking process.

Keywords: Keywords are one word, phrase, or more than one word. Keywords are also one of the top-ranking signals for websites. In this process, you have to think about your landing pages and websites because you need to prioritize your relevant keywords that will fully satisfy your audiences or users.

2) Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-Per-Click is the way to reach your audiences instantly. In this process, you only pay when users will click on your ad campaign or see your advertisement. There are some acquisition channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Linkedin, Youtube, etc.. play a major role to run this type of campaign to acquire the leads for your business.

PPC basically depends on acquisition channels and competition. The cost will decide the popularity of channels(no of users active on that platform) and the competition of keywords. Commonly PPC advertisement rates will define on the basis of a flat-based model and a bid-based model. 

Flat-Based Model: In flat-based PPC rates depends on the Publishers. The advertiser will pay a fixed fee for their advertisement to the publisher. Publishers have a list of price lists on basis of the website’s different-different locations and the advertiser has a choice to choose the location of the advertisement at a fixed price rate.

Bid-Based Model: In the bid-based model, each advertiser makes a bid with a maximum amount of bid that they are willing to pay for an advertising spot. Then the publisher will run an auction using automated tools. An auction will run whenever a visitor triggers the ad.

Noe the winner of the auction is generally determined by rank. It’s not totally dependent on the money it also depends on the quality score of the landing page. So you also need to be focused on the quality of the landing pages. Quality scores calculate the relevancy and some other factors like speed, User experience, and more of the landing pages.

3) Social Media Optimization (SMO)

It is a great way to connect with your audiences. There are some popular social channels currently users are most active. The name of the channel is; Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Snapchat, Ticktok, and more. The objective of all these channels is to acquire more new users and make the consistency of returning users. However, each platform has a different type of audience. Linkedin has professional and business-oriented users wherever Instagram has audiences whose ages are below 40.

So you have the choice to segment the audience on the basis of the social platforms where you can reach your right audiences at a low cost.

4) Content Marketing

Content Marketing is a great way to teach your audiences the facts and make a strong relationship with them. There is some important point you need to keep in mind when you write the content. First, you think about your audiences; what they think, what they need, which topics they need to learn, etc..

Now you need to think about your services or products; Why the user will buy your product, Did the users have an awareness about your product, and what will impact users when they buy the product I mean the value of the product. So now you have understood what are the points you need to be focused on.

Keywords also play the important role in content marketing. Before creating the strategy of content marketing you must do work on keyword research. Because it is the best way how to acquire audiences. There are mainly 2 types of keywords; Informational & Transactional.

Informational Keywords: It is based on informational topics. You just need to spread awareness and facts about these topics.

Transactional Keywords: It is all about your products and services. You just write content that will focus on the value of the product and services. 

5) Email Marketing

Email Marketing is still the relevant marketing method of digital marketing. Email marketing is also a direct marketing source of products or services. You can promote your product or services through these channels. There are some important types of email marketing; welcome emails, newsletter emails, lead nurturing emails, confirmation emails, invite emails, promotional emails, survey emails, and seasonal marketing emails. So now you can make a strategy on the basis of the types of emails and how you will make relations with your audiences.

6) Influence Marketing

An influencer is someone who has the knowledge, and authority and specialized in specific subjects. Currently, it is the most popular marketing channel of digital marketing. In this marketing, you just need to find out your business’s relevant influences or some popular influencer who will be famous in your audiences. No, you just need to prompt your business through these influencers because they have their own audiences and the ability to influence their own audiences.

7) Marketing analytics

This technic is the only way to analyze your business. In this process, you just find out the outcomes of the business and do the right action on the basis of the data. In this process, you will analyze your audience’s behavior on your website. Which channels they have come from, Why did they exit without purchasing anything, which landing pages are more valuable for your business, what’s the average time duration of the users, and more.

So it is a powerful method of digital marketing. Through this process, you take the right action about your business. This will decide which acquisition channels are more valuable or which one is not. You will also decide the future of the business and would make the proper strategy for your business.

8) Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a process where 3 persons are involved. The first one is a seller who wants to sell the product or services. The 2nd one is a buyer who wants to buy the product or services. And the last and third one is the Intermediate who will earn a few commissions because he is a medium in between 1st and 2nd person. 

An affiliate has its own audience and they earn some commission because they sell someone’s product or services to its own audience. In other words, they sell someone’s product and they earn a few percent of the profit on this product or service.  

What Does A Digital Marketer Do?

Digital marketers do a lot of activities that roles will be to make the business profitable through online marketing strategy. If you hire a digital marketer you give the responsibility your business would become profitable through online marketing channels. Now firstly we will discuss the roles of digital marketing and get to know what digital marketers actually do. 

Find The objective of the Business

They will sit with the top management or with your boss to discuss the objective of the business so that they will be clear about their audiences and make a proper strategy to get the business profitable. Once they finalize the objective of the business then they set the goals and KPIs so that they can track the result of their work. 

Manage Campaign & Brand Building

They will focus on how to manage the marketing campaign and promote a brand through different acquisition channels like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more. Managing campaigns are the most important part of digital marketing because this will generate leads for your business. So they have to make sure the leads are relevant to your business and that it not be too costly.

Digital marketers also have to make sure the awareness of the brand. Making a brand is not an easy task in this process you have to create a proper strategy to promote the brand. Acquisition channels & content marketing play the most important role in this process.

Business Analysis & Outcomes

Analyzing user behaviors is the core role of a digital marketer. Before that, you have to track everything in your work and make proper reports so that you will become honest about your acquisition channels and work activities. Now you have to analyze all reports and audiences’ behavior. So that you can take decisions about which channels are beneficial to your business and where you need to invest a lot more budget that will take your business profitable.

Outcomes are the gold of your business. You have to find out the gold of the business as a digital marketer. Ultimately every business owner focuses on outcomes and they should. Because A lot more budget is spent on the business and everyone must expect better outcomes. So as a digital marketer, it is your responsibility to focus on the outcomes and get the best result from the total budget spent on an online marketing campaign. 

Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing strategy is a process to find out the objective of the business and create a proper online campaign to target the customers or potential customers to build a brand and acquire the leads, analyze the work reports to get the right decision to get better results or outcomes from the invested budget on the campaign. A Digital Marketing strategy is a great way to implement online marketing work activities in the right way to achieve the objective of the business.    

Planning

It is the way to make proper planning for an online marketing campaign. Before planning, you need to find out the audience of the business and then you have to decide which acquisition channels are the more valuable to your business so that you will be honest about your marketing budget campaign. First, you need to work on the business objective and then you have to decide the goals of the business that will parallelly work to the business objective thereafter you need to decide the KPIs of the business that will parallelly work to business goals.

Implementing

As a digital marketer, after planning you need to focus on the execution part. Without execution, nothing will happen. So once your planning will be done then immediately you have to start the work on it. In this process, you have to do R & D (Research & Development) on your marketing campaign so that it will decide which campaign is better or which is not.

Optimizing

Optimizing is a great way to find insight into your business in the digital marketing program. Optimizing your online marketing campaign will save you a lot of marketing budget. You have a clear insight about your marketing campaign where you need to invest the money and where not. You can optimize your online marketing on the basis of gender, location, interest, and more.

You also have the option to optimize on a campaign basis. Because you will better know about your campaign performance and audience behaviors.

Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which is it?

Inbound marketing and digital marketing are not the same as many people think. There is a difference at some distinct points. Inshorts, you can define Inbound Marketing as a specific mythology while digital marketing is any marketing done through a digital medium. Now we will describe each point separately.

Inbound Marketing

As I already said Inbound marketing is a specific methodology where you will create a strategy that outlines precise steps and the best practices. It is the best way to attract the audience and convert them organically. Inbound marketing totally based on personalization and focus on how to deliver the message to consumers in an effective manner.

It is the best way to acquire high-quality leads in a natural way to push into the conversion, more qualified leads traffic to pull to your website through this method. In conclusion, you can say that inbound marketing is a strategy-based marketing that will only focus on quality traffic to your website which will lead to more conversions.

Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is a broad term that will not only focus on leads that will lead on building a brand for your business. It is a compilation of short-term tactics a business can be used to reach its consumers. Examples of this would be social media campaigns, pay-per-click campaigns, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts.

Digital Marketing can be seen as inbound marketing as it offers the tools to increase the traffic to your websites, building brand, and overall marketing efforts.

Now the question is which one is right for you,  Digital Marketing or Inbound Marketing? So the answer depends on the objective of the business. If your business needs only leads then you need to focus on inbound marketing where you need to be persona-based content and their only objective is to acquire highly qualified leads. And if your business objective is to build a brand then you choose digital marketing where you will use the tools to reach your audiences with the right message at right time.

Does Digital Marketing Work for All Businesses?

Yes, Digital Marketing will work for any business in any industry. Digital marketing is actually applied to acquire the right audiences at right time. Now in the digital world, everyone is on the internet and they are active online that is why digital marketing will be worked for any business in any industry. Because ultimately you need to connect with your audiences to acquire traffic to your website. Nowadays every business in every industry has a website and they need to increase their business online because their audience is online and they want to consume the content online. In short, you can say that if you want to increase your business then you must opt for digital marketing technics. Also Read | Digital Marketing Project Ideas!

B2B Digital Marketing

In this process, you have to acquire highly qualified leads through digital marketing technics. Your campaign would be focused on mainly lead generation via websites or digital channels. You can opt the digital channels like Linkedin for B2B lead generation marketing where your demographic is spending their time online.

B2C Digital Marketing

If your business is focused on business-to-consumer (B2C) then you must work on consumer behavior so that you can create the campaign from a consumer point of view. First, you need to analyze your product and services and then you have to find out the right audience or which channels’ audiences are the best for your product or services thereafter you need to create a campaign to target these audiences so that they are more likely to buy your product or services.

Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

Fundamental of digital marketing is only the digital marketing program that is offered by Google. It is a free course accredited by Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe and The Open University. This course has 26 modules with real-world examples that help you knowledge into action. Also Read | Digital Marketing Colleges India!

What You Will Get: You will improve your CV with this course and also get a certificate and the probability to find better jobs in the digital marketing field. Here are some important facts about this fundamental of digital marketing course.

Details of the CourseProgram Features
Modules: 26Self-paced learning
Hours: 40Video tutorials
BeginnerUnlimited access
FreeRecognized certificate

Digital Marketing Course

By increasing the digital world, Digital Marketing Courses are becoming more popular day by day. Because every business needs a digital marketer to the visibility of their business online. This course can be completed by anyone who has an interest in online marketing and a basic knowledge of computers. In this course, there are some important modules that need to be learned to become a digital marketing expert. Also Read | Digital Marketing Course Fees!

Content MarketingSearch Engine Optimization
Search Engine Marketing (Google Ads & Display Marketing)Social Media Marketing
Social Media AdvertisingEmail Marketing
Marketing AutomationAnalytics
Affiliate MarketingIntegrated Digital Marketing

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) In Digital Marketing

Key performance indicators are the metrics that will help you to measure the results and that will lead to your business goals and objective. Every digital marketer must find out the KPIs of their business si that they will see the clear performance of digital marketing work results. Here we are sharing a few common KPIs that most digital marketers are being used. 

Cost per leadCost per conversion
Percentage of conversionMonthly website traffic
Visits per channelAverage time on page
CTAs conversion rateTraffic from organic search

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FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

⭐ What are the 4 types of digital marketing?

The common 4 types of digital marketing are SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay-Per-Click), SMO (Social Media Optimization), and content marketing. Want to learn more regarding this, you can check the expert answer here.

⭐ What is an example of digital marketing?

An example of digital marketing would be Social Media optimization, Consumer speaks or testimonials, pulling traffic to your website through SEO and other mediums, video promotion, lead generation, brand awareness, and more.

⭐ Is digital marketing a good career?

Yes, due to the increasingly digital world and internet use digital marketing jobs are one of the most trending jobs in the world. If you learn digital marketing then you have a lot of choices in your career. If you want, you can start your own business to offer digital marketing services or you can apply this method to your own business. You also have a better job opportunity with a good package in any industry.

⭐ How Much Will Digital Marketing Cost My Business?

We can not quote the exact cost of a digital marketing business. Because every business has a different objective and the location is different so no one can tell you about that. But yes I’ll give you an idea so that you can assume the digital marketing cost of your business. The average cost of the digital marketing budget for a small business ranges from 5 lacs to 12 lacs.

⭐ What Kind of Jobs In Digital Marketing?

There are a lot of job roles available in the digital marketing field that is; digital marketing manager, search engine optimization, social media marketer, paid media optimization, affiliate marketer, performance marketer, and more.

⭐ What are the challenges of digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a function that continues to work on innovation. Every time you need to be in R&D mode. You have to reach the message at right time to the right audiences. So you can say that there are a lot of challenges to achieving your objective. Some of our; creating ranging content, complying with privacy and data sharing regulations, mobile-friendly approach, an omnichannel approach. 

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