Digital marketing is that the use of the mobile devices , social media, search engines, and other channels to succeed in consumer. Some marketing experts consider digital marketing to be a completely new endeavor that needs a replacement way of approaching customers and new ways of understanding how customers behave to traditional marketing.
Types of Digital Marketing
We like better to use the terminology “digital marketing channels” instead of “types” as each channel which will be wont to reach potential customers are often complex counting on the extent of integration and tactics you apply across your digital marketing strategy and campaigns.
The 5Ds of digital marketing
To understand the importance of digital marketing to the longer term of selling in any business, it’s helpful to believe what audience interactions we’d like to know and manage. Digital marketing today is about more sorts of audience interaction than website or email… It involves managing and harnessing these ‘5Ds of Digital’ that I even have defined within the introduction to the newest update to my Digital Marketing: Strategy, Planning and Implementation book. The 5Ds define the opportunities for consumers to interact with brands and for businesses to succeed in and learn from their audiences in several ways:
- Digital devices – audiences experience brands as they interact with business websites and mobile apps typically through a mixture of connected devices including smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, TVs and gaming devices.
- New Digital platforms – most interactions on these devices are through a browser or apps from the main platforms or services, that’s Facebook (and Instagram), Google (and YouTube), Twitter and LinkedIn.
- Digital media – different paid, owned and earned communications channels for reaching and interesting audiences including advertising, email and messaging, search engines and social networks.
- Digital data – the insight businesses collect about their audience profiles and their interactions with businesses, which now must be protected by law in most countries.
- New Digital technology – the marketing technology or martech stack that companies use to make interactive experiences from websites and mobile apps to in-store kiosks and email campaigns.
Defining digital marketing
The use of web and other digital media and technology to support ‘modern marketing’ has given rise to a bewildering range of labels and jargon created by both academics and professionals. it’s been called digital marketing, Internet marketing, e-marketing and web marketing and these alternative terms have varied through time.
Digital marketing terminology
Digital Marketing is that the term most often used today, as we will see from these digital marketing definitions, in order that is that the term we specialise in .
Because of the recent debate about the utilization of the term ‘digital marketing’, we thought it might be useful to pin down exactly what digital means through a definition. Do definitions matter? we expect they are doing , since particularly within a corporation or between a business and its clients we’d like clarity to support the goals and activities that support Digital Transformation. As we’ll see, many of the opposite definitions are misleading.
Boiled right down to its simplest form, digital marketing is defined in my book Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice as simply:
“Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies and media.”
I expand on this definition of digital marketing to elucidate that, in practice, digital marketing includes managing different sorts of online company presence and presences like company websites, mobile apps, and social media company pages. this is often in conjunction with online communications techniques including the likes of program marketing, social media marketing, online advertising, e-mail marketing and partnership arrangements with other websites.
These techniques are wont to support the objectives of acquiring new customers and providing services to existing customers that help develop the customer relationship through E-CRM and marketing automation. However, for digital marketing to achieve success , there’s still a necessity for integration of those techniques with traditional media like print, TV and spam as a part of multichannel marketing communications.
If we glance at these other definitions of digital marketing like this definition of digital marketing from SAS: what’s Digital Marketing and Why does it matter? or this alternative definition of digital marketing from Wikipedia we will see that always there’s attention on promoting of products and services using digital media instead of a more holistic definition covering customer experiences, relationship development and stressing the importance of multichannel integration. So for us, the scope of the term should include activities across the customer lifecycle:
- Digital media and communications channels.
- Digital and mobile experiences like web design and mobile apps.
- Prospect and customer relationship management through marketing automation.
- Digital strategy and integrating multichannel communications and experiences.
- Digital technologies and platforms to manage all digital marketing activities.
The role of digital platforms in supporting integrated multichannel marketing is a crucial part of digital marketing, yet is usually overlooked. In some ways , this highlights how important it’s to interrupt down silos between ‘digital’ and ‘traditional’ marketing departments. Online channels also can be managed to support the entire buying process from pre-sale to sale to post-sale and further development of customer relationships.
Defining marketing
It is important to recollect that simply because digital marketing uses different communications techniques to traditional marketing, its end objectives are not any different from the objectives that marketing has always had. It are often easy to line objectives for digital marketing based around ‘vanity metrics’ like the amount of ‘likes’ or followers, so it’s useful in touch in mind this definition of selling advanced by the Chartered Institute of Marketing:
“Marketing is that the management process liable for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”.
This definition emphasizes the main target of selling on the customer while at an equivalent time implying a requirement to link to other business operations to realize this profitability. Yet, it is a weak definition in reference to digital marketing since it doesn’t emphasize communications which are so important to digital marketing. In Digital Marketing Excellence my co-author, PR Smith and that i note that digital marketing are often wont to support these aims as follows:
- Identifying – the web are often used for market research to seek out out customers’ needs and needs
- Anticipating – the web provides a further channel by which customers can access information and make purchases – evaluating this demand is vital to governing resource allocation.
- Satisfying – a key success think about digital marketing is achieving customer satisfaction through the digital channel, which raises issues such as: is that the site easy to use, does it perform adequately, what’s the quality of associated customer service and the way are physical products dispatched?
Optimizing digital marketing are often tricky, and an easy definition doesn’t necessarily translate into something that’s useful for achieving business objectives. that’s where the RACE Digital Marketing Planning framework comes in, because it can help break down digital marketing into easier to manage areas which will then be planned, managed and optimized.
Conclusion
So, digital marketing and social media marketing is about utilizing digital technology to realize marketing objectives. there’s no essential need for digital marketing to always be break away the marketing department as an entire , because the objectives of both are an equivalent . However, for now, it remains a useful term because digital marketing requires a particular skill set to utilize digital technology effectively.