Digital marketing (digital marketing) is a general term used to refer to targeted and interactive marketing of goods and services that uses digital technologies to attract potential customers and retain them as consumers. The main objectives of digital marketing are brand promotion and sales growth through a variety of techniques. Digital marketing involves a wide variety of marketing tactics to promote products, services and brands. In addition to mobile technology, traditional TV and radio, digital marketing methods use the Internet as their primary communication intermediary.
Key Digital Marketing Activities: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Content Creation Automation, E-Commerce Marketing, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Direct Mail, PPC Advertising, advertising in e-books, programs, games and other forms of digital products. Channels that are not directly related to the Internet are also used: mobile phones (SMS and MMS), call back, call hold melodies. The fundamental concept of digital marketing is a customer-centric approach.
Digital marketing is a collection of methods using digital channels to promote and sell goods and services.
History
The term digital marketing began to be used in the 1990s. By 2010, the level of sophistication of digital marketing tools has grown significantly as a complex for effectively creating deep and relevant relationships with the consumer. The term digital marketing was not mentioned until the 1990s, but its roots go back to the mid-1980s, when the SoftAd Group (now ChannelNet) developed an ad campaign for several automakers: get a floppy disk with multimedia content to promote various car brands and offer free test drives.
The rapid development of digital media has created new opportunities for marketing and advertising. The widespread adoption of mobile devices with access to digital channels has led to the exponential growth of digital advertising.
At the moment, digital marketing continues to actively develop.
The growth of digital media is estimated at 4.5 trillion online advertising messages annually. In order to target advertising to Internet users, firms are beginning to actively use the analysis of consumer behavior on the Internet (Online Behavioral Advertising, OBA). The analysis of online behavior using innovative methods raises concerns about the security of consumers’ personal data, which is an important factor in building reliable connections. Digital marketing is often referred to as online marketing, internet marketing, or web marketing. Over time, the term “digital marketing” has become very popular in many countries. In the USA they use the term “digital marketing”, in Italy “web marketing”, in France “web marketing” or “digital marketing”, in the UK,
Latest developments and strategies
Digital marketing is based on ever-growing and rapidly changing technologies. The same characteristics are to be expected from digital marketing designs and strategies. Below are the highlights.
- Segmentation: Interest in digital marketing opportunities in market segmentation with the aim of identifying target markets in both B2B, B2C, and P2P (crowdsourced tools can be used).
- Influencer Marketing: Societies or people capable of influencing consumer behavior are called influencers. They served as the basis for the concept of digital targeting. Now it is possible to influence opinion leaders using paid advertising, such as Facebook Advertising, Google Adwords, MyTarget and other RTB sites, through complex sCRM systems (social CRM), such as SAP C4C, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage CRM, Salesforce CRM. Influencers are very popular on social media like Instagram. Currently, many institutions in their master’s programs focus on strategies for attracting opinion leaders. The main idea of the approach is that it is easier to deliver advertising content to the consumer who is actively looking for it than to the one to which the content gets accidentally.
- Analysis of the behavior of Internet users (Online Behavioral Advertising, OBA): is the collection of information about the online activity of users on various devices and sites in order to deliver advertising messages in accordance with the interests, preferences and needs of recipients.
- Collaboration: can be established between organizations, technical service providers, digital agencies to optimize efforts and share resources. Nowadays, an important factor in creating a marketing strategy is the personalization of advertising space using digital tools.
- Remarketing: Plays a major role in digital marketing. This tactic allows marketers to publish targeted ads, that is, to show an advertising message to a specific audience, whose representatives are constantly looking for some information on the network, in particular, information about products and services, or visit sites for other specific purposes.
- Advertising in games: the most common use cases are billboards in sports games, and in-game advertising can also appear in the branding of game objects such as weapons, cars, clothing.
Relevance
The use of digital marketing today not only allows brands and retailers to promote their products and services, but also provides online customer support through 24/7 services, quick response to customer messages, prompt order processing and much more. Working with customers and building communication with them on social networks allows brands to receive both positive and negative reviews, as well as determine which media platforms work well for them and allow them to expand their audience and attract new customers. Thus, digital marketing has become a more significant benefit for brands and businesses.
Nowadays, consumers often post online reviews on social media, blogs, and websites about their experiences with a product or brand.
Advertising messages addressed not on behalf of the company, but directly from the same users, opinion leaders, often have a greater impact on customers. This is a new way of communicating with the audience and promoting products with the help of bloggers. Also, ordinary users of social networks share their experiences, highlighting certain brands and products. This was highlighted in a study on Instagram, where it was noted that teenage Instagram users post images of food-related events, tagging the location on their social media platforms, providing free advertising for the brand.
Companies are increasingly profitable to use social media platforms to connect with their customers and create dialogues and discussions. The potential reach of social media is supported by the fact that in 2014 there were over 126 million unique users on the Facebook app every month and over 97 million on YouTube every month.
