What is Digital Marketing? — G-MarketingHub

7 min readFeb 20, 2022

It’s 2022, a time when digital marketing is booming rapidly with new and innovative technologies like automation through Ai and Machine learning in search engines and social media to understand each individual and deliver compelling content to them. And due to the pandemic, staying online has increased drastically, as is the awareness of digital marketing among many typical users. Before diving into the topic of “ what is digital marketing? “ Let me share a few statistics with you to give you a brief understanding of how powerful digital marketing is.

Digital Marketing Fun Facts:

Did you know that there has been a hike in the usage of social media in the past year? On average more than three hours a day are spent on social media per user. The highest cut on usage percentage is given to Gen Z. According to recent social media platform reports, I’ve collected a few key reasons to be considered why Gen Z, Gen Y, Gen X, and Boomers use the internet? This data should be a valuable resource for you as a fresh Digital marketer:

Looking for new content?
What’s trending/talked about?
Following celebrities or influencers,
Researching new products,
Monitoring brand updates,
Livestream/Webinars,
Sharing opinions and
Identifying like-minded communities/groups.

I hope these pointers will be helpful for you, and with that said, let us dive into our main topic, What is Digital Marketing?

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is simply selling your product or service online to the right customers. The term “selling through online” refers to radio, television, social media, search engines, email, etc. (in simple terms, all electronic devices). Through digital marketing methods, you can analyse, understand, and provide your customers with what they actually need from your service or product more effectively.

A deeper look into digital marketing.

Digital marketing is mainly about finding your audience and converting them into customers by communicating online. Let’s take a look back; in the beginning, digital marketing focused on just showcasing the product or service to the audience. Many would have mentioned the first radio broadcast I got. Still, for a much better understanding, I provide you with the first television advertisement broadcast on July 1, 1941, which lasted approximately ten seconds. The video ad was about the Bulova Watch, which conveyed a voice-over message, “America runs on Bulova time.” with the below visual.

Ain’t that interesting!

Now, after this period, advertisers or advertising agencies have started to evolve. To stand out, they began to collect and track customer behaviour, emotions, locations, and sustainability (i.e., analytics) for a company’s product or service, which led to personal level advertising like the example below.

Looking back on history is fun! Now let us see how digital marketing has changed today. Digital marketing is now a two-way communication method where users can follow, interact with, and gather information from fellow customers about their favourite brands. This eventually forced the companies to use digital marketing platforms more effectively and humanely.

For example, In the beginning, Social Media platforms for a business were just about promoting their product/service. Later, it has changed to customer support platforms where customers share positive or negative comments about their recent purchase/experience with their Brand to the broader audience. This pushed businesses to adapt to the change of responding and actively monitoring their Brand on social media to quickly appreciate/solve customer problems.

Types of digital marketing methods.

There are many different types of digital marketing methods, and it solely depends on how creative you are based on the technological evolution you are experiencing. For a simple understanding, I would provide you with a few types of digital marketing methods.

Content Marketing

I consider content marketing the backbone of digital marketing because you can’t reach your set audience and build a community without good content. With the power of the internet in your hand, you can create a social media page, a website, a random post design, etc., etc., but if you do not have a proper catch-phrase (i.e., content), you aren’t going to move to the next level in your community.

Its fundamental objective is to locate your target audience and communicate with them via different forms like blogs, designs, podcasts, and webinars to develop a community where they can find themselves complete. The beauty of Content Marketing is that it can be shared on any platform without a need for a significant change in how it was structured.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is mainly about making connections with your audience community and understanding them to provide your product/service in a better way. You can make connections with your community through social posts and comments and by encouraging product usage articles and posts by your customers, responding to customer complaints, asking for reviews from recently purchased customers, etc.

A good example would be our food order app that asks for our feedback on the recently delivered order. In simple terms, each social platform has its own purpose that needs to be monitored and analysed by businesses to succeed.

Website Marketing

Website marketing is mainly about sharing as much information about your product or service as possible with actively looking customers. Once a customer finds you through the website, the information shared should represent your brand’s goal of gaining their trust. In short, always remember that a website will be your leading platform for customers to reach you out for business, so make sure you share accurate information and encourage your visitors to share it on social media.

Video Marketing

There is nothing great about watching and hearing information; in fact, people enjoy the information that can entertain, educate, or just inform them about current situations through videos. And when I think about video marketing, the first thing that pops into my mind is YouTube. During the pandemic crisis, people started to be online more to learn new things, be entrained, and understand the situation visually, which can be possible on the YouTube platform.

You may think there are other significant platforms for videos like Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, Josh, etc. I agree, but it’s not as good as YouTube when compared. Let me give you some facts. Youtube has become the second-largest platform for people due to its accurate/vast search result. People go to YouTube to gather information about a product before purchase, learn new skills, relax, etc. Business/Brands/Young YouTubers find more success through Video Marketing when combined with SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is like holding the Brand’s name-board and dressing up like that Brand’s character to attract/divert people into the store. Well, it is 2022, so you can do that by sitting at your home computer and promoting online for a good commission. In simple, Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based marketing system in which you earn some commission in sales happening by your unique link.

Affiliate Marketing can be done in various forms like Blogs, videos, podcasts, etc. In the beginning, Affiliate Marketing was just about sharing the links with a bit of information known by the affiliates. Still, in recent periods, people expect the affiliates to be trustworthy and loyal to their visitors/community before promoting a product/service.

Challenges in digital marketing.

Now that you have a basic understanding of digital marketing and a few of its varieties, it is time to consider its obstacles and determine whether it is a good fit for you.

Digital Marketing methods need to be stayed updated frequently due to the promoting platforms’ regular changes. Like any other method, Digital Marketing also has its own set of rules that can be followed, broken at a minimal level, and broken at an extreme level for achieving results in promoting platforms. But the major challenge is sticking to the rules that were already written; it will be a slow improvement process but highly successful in the long term.

Internet is old, and so are its datas’ we all had to agree that finding the latest information on the interest has become challenging when you’re a Digital Marketer. So if you are a newbie and want to understand the rules about what is Digital Marketing means, it will be very challenging to find the latest updates.

Because digital marketing is cheap and easy, the rivalry has risen to a high level; digital marketers must keep up with new platforms, tools, and AI technologies to compete and thrive. Due to this highly competitive field, many digital marketers develop new skillsets like website coding, design, learning automated tools, etc., to stand out from most local companies.

So these are the few challenges I would like to point out for you to get a better idea about Digital Marketing. Now for some, this could be a downfall, but let me simplify this by pointing out a few questions that we consider perfect to be a Digital Marketer. Are you a person who likes to talk more logically? Do you want to understand how things work? Do you analyze yourself frequently? And most importantly, Do you observe others/the situation around you?

If your answers are “yes” to at least three questions, you are good to start your career in digital marketing. Leave your worries about what to study, how to stay updated, etc. I will take care of that; just make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to keep in touch with the trends and join the community to meet all levels of digital marketers. They are happy to share their experience with you.

Conclusion

Now that you have a ground-level idea of Digital Marketing, you can start learning from today, improvising your skills quickly, and becoming an excellent Digital Marketer soon.

I have created a short ebook where I share my thoughts on where I began as a digital marketer; if you are interested, you can download that and start your journey.

I wish you good luck and always stay updated.

Originally published at https://g-marketinghub.com on February 20, 2022.