What is Digital marketing and its types?

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a general term for all the steps a business takes to connect with customers through electronic technology. Digital marketing promotes and sells products or services to potential customers through online platforms such as email, social media, mobile marketing, online customer communities, webinars, and other video-based content. 

The digital marketing process involves tactics similar to traditional marketing. Businesses can combine both traditional and digital marketing techniques in a strategy. 

Importance of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing helps a business reach a much larger audience than would be possible with traditional marketing methods, as the reach of the internet is global. This marketing method also allows companies to target potential customers who are most likely to purchase their product or service. 

For example, a business can promote holiday sales by notifying past customers via email or sharing updates about the sale on social media. Organizations have a number of different online methods they can use to reach customers, including email, social media, text, banner ads, or affiliates.

Social media provides a common way for individuals to interact and communicate with organizations. Likewise, marketers on these platforms can gather insights from their target audience and increase customer loyalty by communicating with them. Digital marketing strategies can be quickly adjusted as needed. 

For example, the platform and format of communication may change if the target audience changes platforms. Digital marketing has become more complex due to the various new communication channels that have emerged, but also in terms of the analysis required to understand customers, prospects, and their preferences.

Organizations use a variety of tools to understand the behavior and preferences of customers, prospects, and leads. From social media listening to predictive analytics and big data analytics, businesses are using a variety of resources to understand customer responses to their digital marketing efforts.

Types of Digital Marketing 

Digital marketing can come in many forms, including the following: 

Email marketing. 

Businesses reach out to customers and prospects via email with the goal of promoting current business practices, such as sales or events.

Social Media Marketing. 

Organizations use social media marketing through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to connect and communicate with customers and prospects, let them know about updates or offers, and just to communicate and build social trust. 

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising. 

PPC advertising allows organizations to advertise on various websites with paid ads. An example of such an advertisement is a banner advertisement. When sufficient data or cookies are collected about a user, these ads may be targeted based on characteristics such as age, gender, location or general interests. 

The ad publisher gets paid every time a user clicks on the ad. 

content marketing. 

This digital marketing strategy tries to reach customers through content. Content refers to something that an organization produces and publishes on a website intending to promoting it through other forms of marketing, such as social media or email. Sponsored Content. An organization pays another company to create and promote content that highlights the marketer's product or service. 

Affiliate marketing. 

An organization pays a commission to an influencer on a specific platform like YouTube or Instagram to promote their product or service. Short Message Service (SMS) Marketing. Businesses may choose to use SMS messaging to send promotions to customers. 

Political candidates running for office commonly send text messages as part of their campaigning efforts. Marketing automation software is also becoming increasingly important for digital marketing as companies seek to reach a broader audience of potential customers and link customer behavior to potential new purchases. 

For example, organizations use marketing automation to measure visitor behavior on their websites and then target visitors to potentially sell products and services.

Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing 

Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on attracting customers with internet content created by companies. The goal of inbound marketing is to get customers to come to the company, rather than marketers competing for customers' attention. Examples of inbound marketing content and tactics include: 

• blog posts 
• photos 
• infographics 
• videos 
• podcasts 
• presentations 
• e-books white papers 
• e-newsletters 
• webinars 
• search engine optimization or SEO social media marketing. 

The difference between inbound and digital marketing is that digital marketing is not divided into inbound—and outbound methods are different. Digital marketing is used as an umbrella term for all marketing measures that include digital reach. 

Inbound marketing targets customers through online platforms such as social media or search engines and is intended to create content to be displayed in those places to drive organic traffic to an organization's website. While outbound marketing can potentially reach a wider audience, it also carries the risk of harassing uninterested consumers. 

Inbound marketing is intended to reach interested prospects through target group segmentation, but by its very nature it can reach a much narrower group of potential customers. Inbound marketing is also an important tool for retaining existing customers. 

More regular communication with customers and the ability for organizations to engage with customers by providing informative, educational content and promotions helps retain customers' attention.