What is Digital Marketing? Digital Marketing Basics

Hi, welcome to this blog which is an introduction to digital marketing. Do any of these icons look familiar to you? Did you google something today or check your Facebook maybe? Did you see that funny video which went viral yesterday or did you read the tweet by that famous cricketer? If you did, then you are a part of the digital world; along with 3billion other people. which is 40 percent of the world's population. Wow, that’s a large number and wherever there a huge number of people there is huge marketing opportunity. Which is what digital marketing is all about.

§  Introduction to digital marketing

 At the end of this Blog, you will be able to understand what digital marketing Is, its scope, the channels. identify the need to go digital. Why companies have to include digital marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. and of course, the basic objectives are digital marketing that for which it’s used.

§  What is Digital Marketing?

 As I mentioned before there are three billion people who are online today. which is close to 40% of the world’s population. who are these people? what are they doing? How are they doing? It we will take a look at that.

62% of these people are browsing the internet through their computers or desktops .31% which is again a huge number are doing school through mobile devices, through their mobile phones. The smartphone revolution has made this possible and 7% do so through tablets.

 you will be surprised to know that off the total time spent on media on electronic media or otherwise 54% of the time is spent on online media. Of that 54% that people spend on online media,28% the social marketing, which is in most cases Facebook .13% is microblogging which again is about Twitter and the rest of the activities are a mix of updating blogs, reading news ,watching TV or online and other activities .

What is this translate? When people are spending so much time on media, there is huge opportunity for you to reach out to them during that time and this is a result.

 You will notice that budgets for paid search advertising and display advertising both of which are fundamentals of digital marketing, have been increasing over the years. This year it is estimated that there will be a spend of 126 billion dollars. The increase in digital spend is three times increase in the total ad expenditure for marketing. When we spoke about search advertising. where is this money being spent? This again is related to where is the time being spent? the Google search engine has a largest chunk, followed by Baidu and Yahoo and Bing.

When people invest on search advertising, they put up ads on the search Network.  As you know, 28% of your time is spent on social media. which in most cases is predominantly Facebook, but Facebook has space for ads too.

Email marketing is another important branch. have you ever got emails about loans or construction of you houses or about eBay or Amazon in a new office . If you have, you know what I am talking about.

§  Why go Digital?

 Why are three billion people online? What is this thing about digital media that is attracting everyone? Let's see that in detail.

o   Multiple channels and Devices A user the digital media offers multiple channels and devices to do what they want to do. They have a wide range of sites the social media to connect with, to maintain relationships. This cross-device integration you can start on a desktop go through a mobile and end on your tab.

o   Better Decision Making There’s also better decision-making. This huge number of choices want to buy a bag there ten sites that'll offer you one. With five sites probably offering you better discounts than what you can get at the store.

o   Easy to Buy and Return And of course they are easy to buy and return. You're going to come home and deliver to you and if you want to return it in most cases, they going to pick it up as well. And of course, with one it’s another payment gateways buying online is easier than ever before.

§  For a marketer there are loads of reasons.

 

o   Relevance I will compare this aspect to traditional advertising. If you are driving down a road and you see a hoarding about let’s, say jewellery. You may or may not be wanting to buy jewellery at that point. You may not have the money for it or may not be in a mode for it. But if you are looking online and say want to buy your rings online, I want to buy jewellery online and you see ads that are relevant to you from a jewellery store. That has an extremely high degree of relevance as compared to the hoarding that you see on the road.

 

o   Personalization In lots of cases Google and Facebook and other sites that you use collect a lot of information about you. Which is legal. But they can use this information to create a better advertising experience for you. You can even see emails where your name is highlighted for example, I see emails that read Hello Amit, would you like a loan today or you could see ads that could be based on your previous browsing history. If you have been shopping for diapers for your kid, you could see ads that say maybe you should buy a new diaper back again.

 

 

o   Cost Effectiveness Cost effectiveness is a big driver for digital marketing. Traditional media overtime has become super expensive. Placing an ad in the newspaper or buying a holding for a month is a large outlay of money. Whereas digital marketing can probably started off with one tenth of that investment.

 

o   High Measurability The digital media is also an extremely measurable medium. Going back to the example of the road and hoarding you may not have an exact count of how many people actually saw the ad on the touring. You will not know how many people went into your store because of that hoarding, and you will never know how many people bought that particular item because of what they saw on that particular Road. unless of course that was the only marketing media that you were using at that point of time. But digital media you can track this to the very last click. You will know how many people came to your site, from where they came, what they saw on your site and what they bought, what was the value of that purchase, and will they come back again you can track that as well.

 

o   Scalability Digital campaigns are extremely scalable campaigns. If I create a campaign for the US today, I can easily replicate it for India tomorrow. There is no permissions involved, there's no time involved. It’s all done within a few clicks.

 

o   Scope for higher engagement How engaged can you be with the hoarding on the road, can you talk to it and you change it, you can’t. But you can be super engaged with an interactive ad that you see on a website. we will see examples later where you can actually make the ad work for you. You can make characters in the ads do different things by clicking a mouse around; that is engagement.

 

o   Level playing field What do I mean by a level playing field. If I were a small little business, obviously I will not have the monies involved to compete with a large player, a national player. But you can do so in digital marketing. You can actually decide where your ads will show, to how many people they will show and if your ads are of high quality, you might actually end up paying lesser then the bigger players in your market.

 

o   Ability to go viral And of course there is the ability to go viral. How many of your friends ever passed down a paper cutting to you and said wow look at this ad. Not likely but a lot of them must have shared a wonderful ad on their Facebook profiles and that multiplies. That is free advertising.

§  Objectives

             Let’s look at the objectives of digital marketing.

o   Driving sales and leads This is direct response marketing where your campaigns will get people to buy something from your website. In some cases, they may not want to buy something but probably convert to a lead. Where they will sign up or a coat or sign up for a subscription.

o   Increase Brand Awareness If you're a small brand that nobody knows about or if a huge plan but introducing a new product. A new addition to your product line and you wants to increase brand awareness digital marketing is the answer.

o   Clicks go your websites For businesses that are not really selling a product and don't need sales or leads or not advertising a product; but just want people to come to this site. Could be a new site could be a blog about cooking, could be something about the environment, that you want to talk about. Basically, you're driving people to your site and this can be done to digital marketing.

 

·        User behaviour and Best practices

  User behaviour is an important factor in advertising. There isa difference between how it is treated in traditional media and digital media. Let’s look at a few factors that mattering digital marketing.

o   First page of results There's a funny quote that I read the other day that the best place to bury somebody is on the second page of results because they're never going to be found. If you are not in the first page of a search engines results nobody is ever going to click in and see your ads. So, it's important to be in the midst of action which is on the first page.

o   The First Fold First fold is that part of the website that you see without scrolling down. Again, most people are not involved enough to scroll down and therefore if you want your message to be heard it’s important to be in the first fold.

o   Right mix of text and images We need a right mix of text and images. Too much text will make it look like a newspaper, too bookish. Too many images will look like clutter. In fact, there's a term called banner blindness where the brain is attuned to tuning out stuff which looks like too much of ads. So, you need to have the right mix of text and images.

o   Clarity of content Somebody who comes to your website needs to understand what your website is all about. He shouldn't have to be clicking through five or six links to get a gist of what your site is about. It needs to be there upfront clear and easy to understand

o   Clear call to action A call to action is a signal to the user about what he has to do. What do you want people to do when they come to your site.Do you want them to buy something, do you want them to sign up somewhere, do you want them to give them your email id? what do you want them to do. unless you tell them clearly, they aren’t going to be able to understand.

o   Quick and Easy navigation is very important fact. have you ever been to websites, but you try hitting the back button and you come back out of the site? If you have that’s terrible, is it. A user needs to understand how he can move from one page on the site to another. A prominent back button a home button all this will help.

o   Security Security is a major concern because there is lots of commercial transactions happening on the web. You put in your credit card details, you do not want to be fished. But you do not want to end up spending a lot of money unintentionally. The security is important in resources in creating a secure atmosphere for your users.

o   Responsiveness In this world of social media the people expect you to talk back to them. brands have a particularly important responsibility of responding back to the user. If somebody posts on a brand's page that I didn't get this product, or it was bad. It becomes important for the brand to respond back and say we're sorry we will look into it. If you don't that leaves a very bitter taste in the user’s mouth. So, watch out for responsiveness.

           That brings us to the end of this model. Let us take a look at what we learned.

v  We learned that exponential growth and digital highway or the digital world is a huge opportunity for marketers.

v  Users can be reached in various channels, search, display, social media, email marketing and more.

v  The benefits of digital marketing are numerous. A few important ones are relevance, measure, ability, and scalability.

v  The main objectives additional marketing and driving sales and leads, clicks to your site or increasing brand awareness.

v  And finally, we learned about how user behaviour in the digital world is different from the traditional world and what these sets expectations for what factors are important when you look at a digital marketing campaign.