Digital Marketing overview

What it is

If you are intending to promote a brand you should look at Digital and Social Media Marketing as the form of possible promotion channels, and the choice of it is up to you.

According to the Digital Marketing Institute, Digital Marketing is the use of digital channels to promote or market products and services to consumers and businesses.

Digital marketing uses internet, mobile and offline tools, exhibition stands LCD and traditional forms of advertising to attract the attention of the audience and to drag it into the virtual world. Referring to Wikipedia: Digital Marketing key objective is

to promote brands, build preference and increase sales through various digital marketing techniques. It is embodied by an extensive selection of service, product and brand marketing tactics, which mainly use the Internet as a core promotional medium, in addition to mobile and traditional TV and radio

You can also read the definition of Digital Marketing at techopedia.com, slideshare.net, businessdictionary.com, #passion4digital MOOC, iversity.org and others.

Trends in use of the terms ‘Digital Marketing‘, ‘Social Media Marketing‘ and ‘Internet Marketing‘, defined by Google Trends in October 2015, are shown in Figure 1 below.

Fig. 1. Google Trends in use of the terms

The search of “Digital Marketing” in Linkedin.com indicates 20,956 companies (Figure 2). The biggest group of these companies (11577 items) has size equal or less 10 employees. Second group of companies with size 11-50 consists of 5860 items, and third group (51-200) consists of 1383 items. The first place among regions belongs to USA, 2nd – Great Britain, 3d – India. Selecting option Groups enables to see 3284 “open” and 2204 “members only” groups.

Fig. 2. Search results

Why it matters

Usually a person or a company needs in digital marketing when

• service or product is designed for people who use the Internet and mobile smart-phones frequently
• there is need to raise awareness about your product, service or company quickly enough to a limited audience
• customer’s decision to purchase your product greatly influenced by emotions
• it’s necessary to give customers access to information about product, service or company at any time and any place they want it
• it’s important to support communication with the target audience
• your product or service has a lot of characteristics or a complex structure, i.e. it contains a large amount of information.

Moreover, it enables to analyse marketing campaigns typically in the real time – what is being viewed, how often, what content works and does not work, etc. This analysis is in the context of traditional marketing goals:

Awareness
Acceptance
Purchase Trial
Retention
Loyalty

Next, there are 5 different points of mentioned field of business activities as Digital Marketing that might be interesting and useful.

5 aspects of Digital Marketing

1. Time

by eliminating location as a barrier to doing business, companies can focus on customers’ time, which is still scarce.

2. Costs

Companies, for example Adobe, spends about 70% of its marketing budget on digital. These expenses are aimed at deeper level of customer engagement and loyalty. But if they are spending more money for online advertising per user, then they have to earn more gains per user, too.

David C. Edelman in his paper noted the following.

Traditional marketers spend about 60% of their budgets on “working media” (or paid placement), 20 % on creating content, and the balance on employees and agencies… Active digital marketers tend to devote about 30 percent of their marketing budgets to paid media and 50 percent to content. Customers do more of the heavy lifting as they decide what to look at, play with content, and forward it to their online communities. We have found that by making the right investments, active digital marketers can spend significantly less on marketing as a percentage of sales, with little to no deterioration in performance.

3. SEO

The main benefit of SEO is that you can attract free traffic and free customers to your business on an ongoing basis

4. ZMOT

Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) is aimed at the explanation of the decision-making moment of online shoppers. ZMOT happens online, usually started by a Web search, and in real time both day and night, satisfying an emotional need of the consumer. It involves communication of many parties: customer, marketers, friends, strangers, websites and experts. Rishad Tobaccowala said [teambishop]

When consumers hear about a product today, their first reaction is ‘let me search for it online.’ And so they go on a journey of discovery: about a product, a service, an issue, an opportunity. Today you are not behind your competition. You are behind the technology. You are behind your consumer.

Finally, look at Google’s definition of ZMOT. It is that moment when consumers grab your laptop, mobile phone or some other wired device and start learning about a product/service (or potential boyfriend) you’re thinking about trying or buying. This means that consumers do not want to just hear what you are saying about your brand. They want to know that offered service or product is as valuable as you say it is and buy it with confidence.

5. Maturity

A digital business maturity model is business planning tool to help company evaluate its digital and social media marketing performance, improve products, services and processes against an established goal and standard. It includes the levels of maturity, assessment criteria and a method to score your efforts relative to the criteria.

That is to say the model will allow you to evaluate your current situation, place your company on the scale of maturity and develop an improvement plan.

There are still many interesting and useful points in Digital Marketing.