Digital marketing is a blanket term for a large group of marketing professions relying on the use of digital technology to leverage exposure. When talking in general, digital marketing is a service, brand or product promotion via different forms of electronic media. Activities of digital marketing includes:

• SEO (search engine optimisation)
• Content marketing
• Content automation
• Social media marketing
• Display advertising
• Email marketing
• Display advertising
• Affiliate marketing
• Search marketing

Digital marketing is affordable for every organisation and it is widely used by marketing and pr agencies. The internet age and growth of mobile devices has lead to creation of new methods of marketing. Social networks open great possibilities for traditional marketers to us as a new source of attaining international appeal. In this sense the Internet offers a variety of applications which can be used to distribute information or market a product and all that plus being able to interact with your customers.

To understand what is digital marketing, it might be useful to firstly understand what is not. Traditional marketing channels include TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, leaflets, etc so essentially you can say that digital marketing is marketing on a non physical platform. The drawback of traditional marketing are a lack of communication with potential customers and not being able to have real time interaction, therefore this form of advertising is not as effective in modern age where customer opinion matters greatly to a company’s success. Traditional marketing simply doesn’t facilitate a 2 way communication channel between customer and businesses making it very linear. With this in mind i read via Agency Inc blog that the main difference of the two types is that, traditional marketing nowadays tend to aim at impressing the customer while digital media aims at creating an interactive dialogue.

Why do you need digital marketing?

Comparing to traditional, digital marketing allows to analyse organisation’s advertising campaigns in real time, therefore it allows to understand fast what works better and what’s not working. This type of marketing allows potential customers to access information whenever and wherever they want it. Digital media is a fast growing field, and majority of your customers probably use a certain type of device to access it. So customers are able to get a broader variety of opinions about your business or organisation, not just your company’s sales line. People need brands they trust, so more likely they will believe other existing customer’s opinions than yours.

Companies need to analyse the number of interaction in social media, for example downloads of apps, retweets in Twitter, likes if Facebook, number of subscriptions and many other.The more interaction you get, the better position you will get in search engines and the more secondary clients (the ones which are not yet your clients or your social media subscribers) will know about your organisation. Digital marketing channels are important, however the main work is on the marketer. Marketer needs to know everything possible about potential clients, this is where social networks can come in handy, it allows for marketer to learn about their tastes and preferences through creative social dialogues. That might help significantly in engaging in communication with buyer as well as this information can help to create more relevant SEO saturated content. Working with social networks might even require an audience analysis, large companies do it often as knowing your audience is one of keys to better results.

After you finished audience analysis, building a digital marketing strategy would be an ideal start for a fast growing company as well as for those which don’t know where to start with. It is simple to create a digital marketing plan as it is cheap and accessible for all sort of businesses. In fact many digital marketing opportunities are free and are open for anyone to try. Take SEO for example, according to Paul Gordon & many other it is one of the most effective method of attaining organic traffic to a website, and it is a completely free medium of digital marketing. Digital marketing is also particularly helpful for growing businesses as it has a lot of potential to grow a company in a very short amount of time given the marketer knows how to interact with their audience effectively.