Unit – 1
Digital Marketing Meaning, Scope & Importance
Digital marketing is the component of marketing. Also called online marketing. Digital marketing uses online channels to promote products and services, while traditional marketing uses offline channels. Marketing is one of the most fundamental things in a business, as it helps obtain people’s attention. There are two methods of marketing. One is traditional marketing, a classical marketing, and the other is digital marketing, a modern type of marketing. Digital Marketing is one type of marketing that uses the internet and social media for advertising businesses.
| Comparison basis | Traditional Marketing | Digital Marketing |
| Definition | It is one type of marketing that utilizes media, TV, or magazine to advertise any business’s services and products. | It is one type of marketing that uses the internet and social media for advertising businesses. |
| Engagement | Low | Relatively high |
| Conversion | Slow | Extremely fast |
| Nature | Static | Dynamic |
| Investment returns | Not easy to measure | Simple to measure |
| Effectiveness | More expensiveLess effective | Less expensiveMore effective |
| Targeting | Standardized | Customized |
| Tracking | Not possible | Possible |
| Reach | Local | Global |
| Tweaking | Not possible once the advertisement is placed | One can change or edit anytime |
| Results | Slow results | Quick and live results |
| Communication | It is mostly one-way communication | It is a two-way communication |
| Interruptions | It is not easy to skip the advertisements, as they are bound to the users. | One can easily skip between advertisements if it does not interest them. |
Importance of Digital Marketing
You can compete with larger corporations –
Competition is the hardest part of running a business. When you’re in a market with bigger corporations like Walmart, Target, and Amazon, it’s hard to compete with them. Those companies are all well-established brands, which automatically leads people to trust them. With digital marketing, though, you have a fighting chance against those bigger corporations. Your business can reach interested leads with the same methods as those larger companies do. Methods like SEO and PPC level the playing field. With SEO, your site ranks in the search results based on relevancy. A corporation can’t buy their way to the top of the ranks. They have to optimize their pages just the same as a small mom-and-pop shop. When you use PPC, Google ranks ads based on relevancy, too. Even if a corporation bids twice as much as you for the same keyword, it doesn’t guarantee them the top spot. They can’t b uy a top-ranking ad spot because, again, the rank is based on the relevancy of your ad. This creates the opportunity for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to compete with bigger corporations. If you can create content that is more relevant to the selected keywords than your corporate competitors, no amount of money will enable them to outrank you. In short, digital marketing is a great opportunity for your business to compete with bigger companies to obtain more relevant leads.
You can choose from a variety of strategies –
Another great thing about digital marketing is how many options it gives you. There are a lot of different ways to market to people online, each with their own advantages. You might focus on creating website content to rank in search results, or you might send out emails. You might even market to people on social media. Of course, there’s no reason you should limit yourself to one strategy. You can use multiple strategies together to help you reach a wider audience and drive more conversions.
Some of the strategies you can use include:
- SEO
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Social media marketing
- Email Marketing
You can monitor your campaigns and optimize them for better results –
Another contributor to the importance of digital marketing is that you can easily track and monitor your campaigns. When you invest time and money into your campaigns, you want to know that they are working. Digital marketing makes it easy for you to track your campaigns, which allows you to adapt and drive better results. When you use traditional methods, it’s challenging to know the results of your campaign. If you run a TV ad, you may have to ask every person that comes into the store about what brought them to your business. It would be a very time-consuming effort that could annoy people who visit your business. With digital marketing, you don’t need to worry about bothering your audience.
Every campaign you run is trackable. You can easily track a campaogn’s ROI and other indicators to see if it is driving valuable results for your business. You can see metrics such as impressions, clicks, likes, shares, comments, conversions, and more.
The type of metrics will depend upon the medium and what you want to measure. You can easily set up your tracking system to monitor specific metrics for your campaigns. When you can track your campaign’s performance, it’s easier to fix it and adapt to changes. Whenever you run a traditional advertising campaign, you typically can’t make changes until the campaign is over. It only benefits the next campaign you run, which can make it feel like you wasted money on the previous campaign. With digital marketing, you monitor your campaigns as you go. You can see if they are successful or need improvement. If your campaigns need improvement, you can make immediate changes and implement them at any point during your campaign. Being able to save money when you can make immediate changes is why Internet marketing is important for your business. It allows you to get more out of your campaign and spend your budget more wisely.