INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MARKETING

Digital marketing is the use of digital technologies and platforms to

promote products and services, as well as to connect with potential customers. It is
an incredibly versatile and powerful tool that can be used in various ways to reach
people worldwide. Digital marketing utilizes multiple digital technologies to
deliver promotional messages, such as mobile phones, computers, and other
digital media and platforms.

It can be used for B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Consumer)
marketing, depending on the goal and objectives of the campaign. Digital
marketing offers unique advantages such as greater reach, improved targeting,
personalized messaging, and better ROI (Return on Investment). It also allows
businesses to stay up to date with marketing trends and technologies. With the
right strategies and tactics, companies can leverage digital marketing to increase
their visibility and reach a larger audience.

MEANING OF MARKETING
Marketing refers to the activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or
selling of its products or services. Marketing includes advertising and allows
businesses to sell products and services to consumers, other businesses, and
organizations.

MEANING OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, Digital marketing is the act
of promoting products and services through digital channels, such as social media,
SEO, email, and mobile. It is a form of marketing that helps businesses to reach
their target audiences, build relationships, and boost sales through digital
channels. Digital marketing utilizes a combination of tools such as analytics,
social media, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine
marketing (SEM), email marketing, mobile marketing, and more to create an
effective digital presence.

Digital marketing is a powerful way for businesses to reach their target customers
and engage with them in meaningful ways. It enables businesses to create
personalized messages for their customers, increasing the likelihood of message
recall and purchase intent. Additionally, businesses can leverage digital channels
to track customer behavior and identify areas of opportunity. By using digital
analytics and other data-driven techniques, marketers can better understand their
customers’ needs and preferences and tailor their offerings accordingly. Digital

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marketing also gives businesses access to a larger audience than traditional
marketing channels due to its ability to reach people across the globe.

HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF DIGITAL MARKETING

The term Digital Marketing was first used in the 1990s. The digital age
took off with the coming of the internet and the development of the Web 1.0
platform. The Web 1.0 platform allowed users to find the information they wanted
but did not allow them to share this information over the web. Up until then,
marketers worldwide were still unsure of the digital platform. They were not sure
if their strategies would work since the internet had not yet seen widespread
deployment.

In 1993, the first clickable banner went live, after which Hot-wired purchased a
few banner ads for their advertising. This marked the beginning of the transition to
the digital era of marketing. Because of this gradual shift, the year 1994 saw new
technologies enter the digital marketplace. The very same year, YAHOO was
launched.

Also known as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" after its founder Jerry
Yang, Yahoo received close to 1 million hits within the first year. This prompted
wholesale changes in the digital marketing space, with companies optimizing their
websites to pull in higher search engine rankings. 1996 saw the launch of a couple
more search engines and tools like HotBot, LookSmart, and Alexa.

1998 saw the birth of GOOGLE. Microsoft launched the MSN search engine and
Yahoo brought Yahoo to the market. Two years later, the internet bubble burst
and all the smaller search engines were either left behind or wiped out leaving
more space for the giants in the business. The digital marketing world saw its first
steep surge in 2006 when search engine traffic was reported to have grown to
about 6.4 billion in a single month. Not one to get left behind, Microsoft put MSN
on the backburner and launched Live Search to compete with Google and Yahoo.

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Then came Web 2.0, where people became more active participants rather than
remain passive users. Web 2.0 allowed users to interact with other users and
businesses. Labels like ‘super information highway’ began to be applied to the
internet. As a result, information flow volumes –including channels utilized by
digital marketers- increased manifold, and by 2004, internet advertising and
marketing in the US alone brought in around $2.9 billion (about $9 per person in
the US).

Soon, social networking sites began to emerge. Myspace was the first social
networking site to arrive, soon followed by Facebook. Many companies realized
all these fresh new sites that were popping up were beginning to open new doors
of opportunities to market their products and brands. It opened fresh avenues for
business and signaled the beginning of a new chapter in business. With new
resources, they needed new approaches to promote their brands & capitalize on
the social networking platform.

The cookie was another important milestone in the digital marketing industry.
Advertisers had begun to look for other ways to capitalize on the fledgling
technology. One such technique was to track common browsing habits and usage
patterns of frequent users of the internet to tailor promotions and marketing
collateral to their tastes. The first cookie was designed to record user-habits. The
use of the cookie has changed over the years, and cookies today are coded to offer
marketers a variety of ways to collect literal user data.

Products marketed digitally are always now available to customers. Statistics

collected by the marketing blog for 2014 show that posting on social media is the
top online activity in the US. The average American spends 37 minutes a day on
social media. 99% of digital marketers use Facebook to market, 97% use Twitter,
69% use Pinterest and 59% use Instagram. 70% of B2C marketers have acquired
customers through Facebook. 67% of Twitter users are far more likely to buy from
brands that they follow on Twitter. 83.8% of luxury brands have a presence on
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 Pinterest. The top three social networking sites used by marketers are LinkedIn,
Twitter, and Facebook.

Evolution of Digital Marketing – The Timeline

 The 90s

Archie, the first search engine, debuted in the early 1990s, heralding the birth of
search. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, quickly followed.

The first clickable web-ad banners were introduced in 1994. The first identifiable
social media site was launched in 1997, with 3.5 million users (about twice the
population of Nebraska). In the 1990s, a slew of websites still in use was found,
including Google and Yahoo's web search, both of which debuted in 1998.

 The Millennial Generation

A massive economic bubble grew in the new millennium. However, the bubble's
peak and burst between 2000 and 2002 harmed many businesses. Many new sites
were launched in the 2000s as the economy recovered from the boom, including
the beginnings of LinkedIn in 2002, Myspace and WordPress in 2003, and
Facebook in 2004. In the early 2000s, mobile text messaging marketing became
increasingly popular.

 The Mobile Era

The latter half of the decade saw increased marketing and sales, with Amazon's e-
commerce sales surpassing $10 billion (about $31 per person in the US). Over the
next few years, mobile app culture expanded with the introduction of WhatsApp,
Instagram, and Snapchat to the digital world.

 The Present

Today, 65% of an individual's digital media time is spent on a mobile device. The
digital advertising industry is now valued at around $200 billion (about $620 per
person in the US), with Google Ad Words accounting for 96% of the company's
revenue. With an estimated 3.1 billion online users, social networking has led the
digital marketing revolution. The rise of bloggers and Instagram has resulted in a
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$1 billion (about $3 per person in the US) industry for influencers, which are
anticipated to grow. Digital marketing is expected to grow in the coming years,
with many new developments and changes in this exciting industry.

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5D’s OF DIGITAL MARKETING
The five D's of digital marketing are as follows:

Digital Devices

Digital devices are those that people use almost every day. For example, these can
get used to marketing to a specific audience—computers and mobile phones.

Digital Content Platforms

These are the platforms with which users interact regularly. You can use them for
advertising. As an example, consider social media.

Digital Media

Paid or owned digital media channels can be used to reach your target audience.
They include things like online advertising and social media marketing.

Digital Data

Data about your target audience used to achieve a marketing goal is called digital
data. You can generally collect data about your target audience through surveys,
apps, and other means.

Digital Technology
Digital technology is all about using technology to achieve a marketing goal.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR)
are a few examples.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT DIGITAL MARKETING

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1. Most customers do not like pop-up ads
Studies have shown that more than 73 percent of people dislike pop-up
ads. They always find these ads annoying as they are trying to focus on other
things. Most businesses have realized this and no longer use pop-up ads.

2. The use of product videos can increase product sales

Customers want to understand the value of your product before making a
buying decision. It is most effective to convey this information through images
and videos. because it is easier to understand the product by watching videos.

3. Compared to other forms of social media, YouTube has higher engagement

and a lower bounce rate.
Compared to other social media channels, YouTube users spend more
time viewing content. Studies show that YouTube has higher post-click
engagement and referral traffic rates. Digital marketers must use the right platform
for advertising if they want to compete for attention.

4. Consumers have a short attention span of 8 seconds on average

If a website is not optimized for speed, it may not be able to attract
significant traffic. The short attention span of consumers may also result in low
completion rates for videos that are too long.

5. Most online experiences begin with a search engine

An interesting fact about digital marketing is that most web experiences
begin with a search. It remains the same premise even though some less dominant
search engines exist, such as Bing and Yahoo.

To rank better on search engines, digital marketers need to develop strategies. By

doing so, they will be able to drive traffic to their sites and their preferred content.
To perform SEO, site managers place keywords and create backlinks. As a result,
Google’s search algorithm ranks it higher in its results.

6. Videos are the most shared content on social media

The most shared things on social media are videos, especially short ones.
It is because they create emotions in the audience. The videos create engagement
in a short amount of time as well as being informative at the same time.

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TikTok is a video-based app that has over 1 billion users worldwide. It is
important for digital marketers to create appealing video content to target their
audiences based on this case study.

7. Interactions on weekend posts are higher than those on weekday posts.

This is the simplest online marketing fact on our list, but most marketers
fail to take advantage of it. Engagement is low because most of the content they
upload, and post does not follow a set routine.

It would be wise to upload the most engaging content during the weekends. In this
way, people can publish more informative content during the workday. Content
creators used to upload content during workdays. Weekends are holidays, so they
are not uploading content during those times. It is now possible to schedule posts
a long time in advance thanks to scheduling apps.

8. The process of SEO is as simple as walking.

SEO is one of the most important elements of raising your company’s
profile on search engines. When people search for specific keywords, SEO
ensures the content of your company will appear first on their results pages. While
many people think SEO is easy, only experts know which keywords to use to
enhance your content.

9. It is always bad to receive negative reviews.

To improve, you must accept criticism. Many companies consider
removing negative reviews, but negative reviews are opportunities. You can learn
from a negative review where there is scope for improvement for your company.
In this way, you can convert a detractor into a supporter by engaging in productive
and private interaction with the reviewer.

10. 74% Of the Organic Traffic Comes from Google

This is why most business owners want to optimize their websites mostly
for the Google search engine. After Google, Bing comes in second with 10.62%,
and then Baidu comes in third with 9.75%.

11. If your PPC ads lead your visitors to your website, they are more likely to
buy your products
PPC ads are popular due to their high conversion rates. It is believed that
most people who click on them are serious about making purchases. Search
engine visitors who find your products organically have a lower conversion rate
than those who find them through PPC ads.
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12. Rankings are not directly affected by rich snippets
Since 2009, rich snippets have appeared on the SERP page as a sneak
preview. Do they directly affect your rankings? Well, not really.
Rich snippets add extra information to search listings, but according to Google,
they do not affect rankings. According to Google, rich snippets do not currently
have a direct impact on site rankings.

13. The third-largest digital ad seller is Amazon

Even though it falls behind Google and Facebook, Amazon is one of the
best digital advertising platforms today. Omit revenue from ads, it has maintained
a consistent upward trend.

TYPES OF DIGITAL MARKETING

1. Affiliate Marketing

With the increased prominence of online marketing, affiliate marketing also

known as influencer marketing

Affiliate marketing utilizes the ever-growing popularity of industry experts and

social media influencers. In working with these third-party influencers, your
organization will collaborate to promote your products or services as
compensation. In collaboration, influencers will engage their audience with posts,
blogs or videos to bring in more business for your organization and create new
leads.

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 Within the last few years, affiliate or influencer marketing has grown immensely
with new media like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and blogs being a mainstream
form of entertainment and news. Affiliate marketing has become one of the more
popular forms of digital marketing. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the
affiliate marketing industry was estimated to be an $12 billion (about $37 per
person in the US) industry in 2022.

The job market is growing for marketers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics
(BLS) predicts a 10% increase through 2031 in the number of advertising,
promotions and marketing managers. * In 2021, the median salary for those
positions was $133,380, according to BLS. *

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing uses storytelling and information sharing to increase brand

awareness. Ultimately, the goal is to have readers act toward becoming a
customer, such as requesting more information, signing up for an email list or
making a purchase. “Content” can refer to blog posts, resources like white papers
and e-books, digital videos, podcasts and much more.

In general, it should first and foremost provide value to the consumer — not just
advertise the brand or try to make a sale. Content marketing is about building a
sustainable, trusting relationship with your customers that can potentially lead to
many sales over time, not just a single transaction.

Content marketing works in symbiosis with other types of digital marketing: It is a

way to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) into fresh website content,
and the content created can be shared as social media posts and in email marketing
publications. Looking at the analytics for your content marketing can tell you a lot
about your customers:

 What are they looking for when they land on your site?
 What kinds of content make them stay on the site longer and keep looking
around?
 What kinds make them lose interest and navigate away?

Unlike a method such as PPC, content marketing is a long-term strategy. Over

time, marketers build up a library of content (text, video, podcasts, etc.) that will
continue to bring users to the site via search engines, according to Adobe
Experience Cloud, an organization that specializes in digital experience tools.
This content library also helps promote knowledge of your brand and increases
your profile as a resource for information.

And, if users are visiting your site for information, ideally, they will remember
you as an authority when it’s time to make a purchase.

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 Content marketing is a great avenue for people who enjoy writing and/or video
and audio production. But as with digital marketing in general, it also calls for
strong strategic and analytic skills.

There are tons of website-building platforms and blogging sites you can use to get
into content marketing. For free and low-cost options, you can consider:

 WordPress
 Medium
 Hubspot CMS
 Wix

Some of these tools include features that provide tips on how to incorporate SEO,
social media, email marketing, website design and more, so you can get the full
digital marketing experience.

3. Email Marketing

Even with the emergence of social media, mobile applications and other channels,
email is still one of the most effective marketing techniques, Rogers said. It can be
part of a content marketing strategy, providing value to consumers and, over time,
converting an audience into customers.

Email marketing pros not only know how to create compelling campaigns, but
they also understand optimal audience outreach and are skilled at analyzing
customer interactions and data, and making strategic decisions based on that data,
according to the American Marketing Association (AMA).

Email marketing software can offer many different analytical measures, but two
that marketers are always striving to improve are the open rate — the percentage
of recipients who opened the email — and the click-through rate — the number of
recipients who opened the email and clicked on a link in the email.

According to a leading email marketing software company Constant Contact,

there are many things' marketers can do to make their emails more appealing to
users and more likely to be opened.

These include:

 Create a Sense of Urgency – Writing an email copy that lets your recipients
know that time is running out to get a special deal or that there are only a limited
number of offers available can increase the number of people clicking through to
your website.

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 Personalize Your Email – Setting your emails and subject lines up to incorporate
the recipient’s name is a proven way to increase open and click-through rates. (A
sample subject line: “Katie, a special offer just for you.”)

 Let Recipients Set Their Preferences – Allowing users to specify how often they
want to hear from you can help keep some of your email subscribers subscribed to
your list and clicking on your emails.

4. Marketing Analytics

One of the major advantages of digital marketing is that it is highly trackable and
measurable. Once, the only trackable marketing pieces were coupons and similar
direct mail offers. If a customer used the coupon, you knew the message
resonated.

Today, analytics allow marketers to track user behavior at a highly detailed level:

 How many times they click on a link

 How much time they spend on a web page
 How often they open emails and much more

But the vast amount of information available about digital marketing performance
can feel like drinking from a fire hose, and marketers must be able to truly
understand what the data mean and how they should inform strategy.

Not only does this allow marketers to learn what is successful with consumers and
adapt their marketing messages moving forward, it also means they can
demonstrate their value to the company. Understanding all this data and using it to
make strategic decisions is an important part of a digital marketer’s work — and
one that sets them apart from their traditional counterparts.

There are many tools available for measuring the success of digital marketing
campaigns, and many marketers will use some combination of these tools,
depending on their needs and their audience. One of the most used tools for
marketing analytics is Google Analytics, which can be customized in nearly
endless ways to measure:

 How your site is performing

 Which keywords are bringing users to your site
 How users are navigating through your website and much more

Having good, accurate analytics and the know-how to interpret them can help
marketers “fail fast,” quickly cutting campaigns that aren’t working and building
better campaigns around concepts that have a proven track record of success. Over

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time, you won’t just be using analytics to measure your campaigns — the
analytics will also inform and improve your campaigns.

In a digital marketing degree program, you'll study a wide range of issues

pertinent to a marketing career path, including marketing plans and strategies,
branding, mobile marketing and digital advertising.

5. Mobile Marketing

This digital marketing type is focused on reaching your target audience on their
smartphone or tablet. Mobile marketing reaches people through text messages,
social media, websites, email and mobile applications. Marketers can tailor offers
or special content to a geographic location or time, such as when a customer walks
into a store or enters an event.

In February 2021, Statista conducted a survey in which 46% of the respondents

claimed they spend between five to six hours a day on their phones for personal
use. In addition, 22% stated they spend 3 to 4 hours a day on their phone,
according to Statista, and from the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021, mobile
users in the U.S. around 40 minutes a day on social media apps, with Facebook
and Instagram holding the largest audience.

E-commerce has grown immensely in the last few years, becoming an important
part of the global retail world. In 2022, retail e-commerce sales were estimated to
surpass $5.7 trillion (about $18,000 per person in the US) worldwide, Statista
reported.

Marketers know that you need to take your message to where your customers are,
and it is very clear: Your potential customers are on their phones.

6. Pay-per-Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results.

This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning that once you are no
longer paying, the ad no longer exists. Like SEO, PPC is a way to increase search
traffic to a business online.

Pay-per-click can refer to the advertisements you see at the top and sides of a
search results page, browsing the web, watching YouTube videos and using
mobile apps.

One of the other things that differentiates pay-per-click from SEO is that you only
pay for the results. In a typical PPC model like a Google AdWords campaign, you
will pay only when someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website. You
can spend just about any amount of money on pay-per-click advertising. Some

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 companies may see results from investing just a few hundred dollars, but plenty of
large companies spend tens of thousands a month on pay-per-click.

How much it costs to run an ad or promote your search results will depend
primarily on how much competition there is for your keywords. High competition
keywords (i.e. keywords that many people are searching for and that many sites
are trying to be found for) will be more expensive and lower competition terms
will likely cost less.

When you set up a pay-per-click campaign, you will also be able to choose
whether you want your ad or promoted results to be shown to users all over the
world or only within a specific geographic area. If you are marketing a brick-and-
mortar business, this ability to tailor by location helps you not waste ad dollars
serving ads to users who don’t live anywhere near your business, according to
Google Ads.

7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The goal of SEO is to get a business to rank higher in Google search results,
ultimately increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website.

To accomplish this, SEO marketers research words and phrases consumers are
using to search for information online and use those terms in their own content.
According to leading SEO software company Moz's "Beginners Guide to SEO,"
SEO encompasses many elements, from the words on your web pages to the way
other sites link to you on the web to how your website is structured.

So, what are some things that can improve a site’s SEO? It’s important to
understand that one of the things that makes SEO challenging is that the answer to
this question always depends on search engines and their most current algorithm.

Keeping that in mind, here are a few of the most important things for SEO
strategists and marketers, in general, to understand about how SEO works today,
according to Moz:

 Content indexing – It is important to allow search engines to clearly “read” what

your site content is, by doing things like adding alt text for images and text
transcripts for video and audio content.

 Good link structure – It is important that search engines can “crawl” your site
structure to easily find all the content on your site. There are many things that an
SEO specialist can do to properly format links, URLs and sitemaps to make them
most accessible to site crawlers.

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 Keywords and keyword targeting – Properly deploying your keywords (i.e. the
search terms you want your site to be found for) in your content and headers is
one of the fundamental building blocks of SEO. It is no longer good practice to
“stuff” your content with as many keywords and keyword variations as possible.
Writing high-quality content that uses keywords in the headers and a few times in
the crawl-able page content is now considered better practice and will make pages
rank better in search results.

8. Social Media Marketing

This includes everything a business does via social media channels. Just about
everyone is familiar with social media, but marketers must approach social with
an integrated and strategic approach. Social media marketing goes far beyond
simply creating posts for social channels and responding to comments.

To be effective, efforts must be coordinated and consistent rather than an

afterthought. To help keep posts consistent, there are many online tools available
to automate and schedule social media posts, although marketers only should use
automation as a tool, not a “set it and forget it” solution. Users will figure it out
quickly if there is no real person behind the posts.

Social media marketers should not be in a silo separate from other marketing
functions. Social marketers need to work with the company’s wider marketing
team to coordinate their message across all platforms, online and off, so that every
part of the brand is telling the same story.

A crucial part of social media marketing is analytics. Social media marketers must
also be savvy at analyzing the performance of their posts and creating strategies
based on that data. It’s important to measure how well your current social media
posts are performing before continuing to implement your new strategy.

Statista reports that 86% of industry professionals stated that an increase in

exposure to their company was the leading benefit of social media marketing in
2023. Behind that, 76% of companies claimed an increase in traffic to their
website was the largest advantage, according to Statista.

There are also several free options to spread your message that goes beyond
Instagram and Twitter. Some other options include Google My Business, eBay
and Facebook Messenger and Marketplace.

In other words, social media marketing is a lot more complicated than managing
your personal Facebook or Twitter profile. It requires a blend of creative thinking

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and objective, data-driven strategy and may be a great fit for professionals who
enjoy blending these two disciplines.

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