Digital marketing is simply marketing in the digital medium. It is marketing using electronic devices and online channels for a person, product, business, or service. Email, social media, and SEO (search engine optimization) are all great examples.

The Difference: Traditional Marketing VS Digital Marketing

Traditional Marketing uses non digital channels to acquire more business from the market, whereas digital marketing uses online digital channels. There is a long history of traditional marketing and a lot of the methods are still used today. Some examples of the methods, or campaigns, are print ads, billboards, enclosed mail, and flyers. Examples of a digital marketing campaign are email marketing, digital advertising, and SEO (search engine optimization).

How Does it Work?

Now that we know the difference between traditional and digital marketing, how does it work? 

Digital marketing works by creating a marketing campaign that takes advantage of multiple channels to connect your target audience to your business. Essentially digital marketing is creating avenues that can guide more traffic to your business, which in turn creates more business for you.

To give you a better idea of how digital marketing works, check out this example:

• Goal: Get more people to visit my website
• Channels: advertisements online, email, search engines
• Strategy:
  • Optimize your website so its more visible on search engine results
  • Create frequent informative posts on your website to draw in more traffic
  • Link your website in your social media and LinkedIn accounts to draw people from those to your site

Why is it Important?

Because technology has become so entrenched in daily life, it has created new avenues to advertise and draw in more potential customers for a business. Before modern technology, companies and businesses had to use billboards, tv commercials, newspaper ads, and letter mail campaigns to inform the public of their products or services.

However, today people utilize technology daily for entertainment, work, school, and seeking information on search engines. This provides an exponential amount of channels that companies and businesses can use to draw in new clientele.

In addition to this, the large amount of different types of online content has made it possible to find and target your ideal audience to make your marketing campaigns as accurate as possible. Billboards are seen by many but are advertising for just a segment of the population, but now you can target quite accurately just the segment of the public you are seeking.

Digital marketing is also important because you can also passively draw people in without having to intentionally advertise to them. An example of this is posting informative articles that are related to your product and informative for your target audience. Your target audience will often voluntarily seek out that specific information and may land on your article which in turn funnels that segment of the population to your website.

For the success of your business or company in today’s technology heavy era, some form of digital marketing is almost required.

What are the Different Methods of Digital Marketing?

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Implementing SEO cultivates your business’s search engine results to become more visible. In other words, SEO improves your rank results in search engines. When people use search engines, you want to be as close to the top of the results as possible.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – This is essentially paying for your site or business to appear as an ad on the search results page. A lot of the time SEM is used in addition to SEO.
• Email Marketing – A common marketing method is sending promotional content to potential customers. In other words, getting the word out by email. It is not uncommon to utilize automated scheduled newsletters to be sent to potential prospects.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – The method of Pay-Per-Click has become a staple of digital marketing. It is a form of advertising where you will only pay for the ad each time someone clicks on the link.
• Content Marketing – Using content marketing to get your business seen can come in a lot of different forms. Some examples would be podcasting, blogs, posts, and videos to draw people in to your business.
• Social Media Marketing – As of lately, social media marketing has really taken off. Promoting you business on different social media platforms has been a very effective way to draw eyes.

The Benefits

Utilizing digital marketing for your business or service can be beneficial in multiple ways:

• It’s easier for you to create brand awareness and engagement even after the sale
• Makes the “buyer’s journey” shorter because it presents your business or service to the right buyer at the right time
• Helps make your newly acquired customers loyal fans who will buy more and come back more frequently
• It will promote individuals sharing your business with others online and create a word-of-mouth effect.

In total, digital marketing is very impactful on the success of a business in today’s day in age. If you are looking to improve the growth and longevity of your business or service, it would be of major benefit for you to start implementing digital marketing into your business model. If you want to learn more, check out Infinite Game Studios for more digital marketing articles and services.