WHAT DIGITAL MARKETING IS – WITH AWESOME DEFINITION & 16 EXAMPLES

Digital marketing includes marketing activities involving all electronic devices that interact with internet access. Companies use digital marketing channels to communicate with existing customers and reach new customers. Digital marketing channels are digital access points such as search engines, social media, e-mail, and other websites.

Digital marketing is the name given to the marketing process of a company or brand in the digital environment. It seems that sometimes people can be confused about marketing, advertising, and public relations. At this point, it is important for digital marketing and other digital media operations to be organized by a professional team within a specific plan, to be successful, effective, and accurate budgeting.

Digital marketing is an opportunity to attract customers’ attention and improve customer relations in order to increase brand awareness and potential sales by using all kinds of digital channels preferred by users as a marketing medium.

Digital marketing; It does not use traditional marketing channels such as print media, radio, and television. It uses mobile devices with an internet connection and interactive channels that you can access from computers. Digital marketing is also known by different names: interactive marketing, online marketing, e-marketing, web marketing. It enables you to reach your target audience in the right place and at the right time, and get fast and effective feedback.

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” Tom Fishburne

Digital Marketing vs Marketing

It allows you to present and sell products and services in digital marketing e-commerce channels. It also allows you to analyze the information visitors leave at the registration stage and the information your web browser records. It is extremely effective due to the ability to use features. At this point, although it has common features with traditional marketing, digital marketing provides results in much shorter times with much more effective methods by using the advantages of technology.

Marketing refers to all the efforts made to bring your products or services to potential customers. The concept of a target audience underlies marketing. The concept of sales emerges the moment your potential customers buy your product or service. The marketing and sales teams must work in coordination with each other in terms of the strategies planned at the marketing stage to be successful in the implementation stage.

Some see digital marketing as a subtitle of marketing as a concept that has emerged in the last 20 years. Still, the common belief is that digital marketing is a medium in itself, not a part of marketing, but a new form that it will evolve.

How Digital Marketing Works?

All kinds of content produced for use in the media broadcasting on the Internet and accessible via computers, tablets, or mobile devices (Web sites, company, and personal blog posts, infographics, webinars, short videos, e-books, e-catalogs, and online brochures)

• Social media channels: Posts made on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and advertisements made on these channels
• Ads displayed on search engines such as Google, Yandex, Bing
• Applications used in mobile devices
• In e-mail newsletters
• E-books
• In posts created with affiliate marketing called affiliate marketing
• In online PR and inbound marketing.

Why Digital Marketing? Advantages, Disadvantages

Many factors make digital marketing advantageous. The thing is that internet usage is growing exponentially day by day. The number of businesses and industries dominated by digital marketing also increasing. Now e-shops and online marketing have become the main sales channels for many business branches.

You order your clothes, household items, stationery, food, concert tickets online. Television channels are now broadcasting on the Internet. Newspapers have become e-newspapers, the music industry is resisting with records only thanks to its nostalgic effect. In short, many things in our lives have shifted to digital channels compared to 10 years ago.

1- Set Your Target Audience:

When your products are advertised on television, they are watched, but most of the viewers are not within your target customer base. However, digital marketing offers you the chance to identify your customer base and prepare an advertising budget to reach them. For example, you sell sports equipment for an audience of 16-25 young people, high school or university students.

You can request an advertising campaign to reach only people who fit this definition. The right target audience determines your budget. For example, you can advertise from your city or country, provided that users are connected to the Internet and whose age and education information are registered in their profile information.

2-Low Cost: 

The budget of a digital advertising campaign can be several hundred dollars or several million dollars. The main issue is not your budget. You can send millions of promoting e-mails with a limited budget. On the other hand, you can make a nationwide advertising campaign on social media channels such as youtube, Facebook with a large budget.

The point we want to emphasize is: your advertising campaign will be successful. Your chances of reaching the target audience are higher than classic marketing tactics. With digital marketing instruments, you will fit more customers with the same budget.

3- Reach The Customer Information

Through analytics tools such as Google Analytics, you get much information like which links are used by your visitors when they reached your website. Which pages of your site the visitor visited, which product images he clicked the most, how long they stay on any of your web pages. It is possible to access all this information to prepare and analyze detailed visitor reports. In particular, social media channels allow you to make a much more detailed customer analysis thanks to the profile information as well as the demographic features of your customers.

4- Contact With Customers

Each of the comments, requests, complaints recommendations, and likes, coming to your brand’s social media channel is a chance for you to communicate with visitors. Every visitor is a potential customer. The common belief is that after the sale, the communication with the customer ends until they return for a new purchase. In fact, digital marketing has changed that too. Being able to communicate with customers who buy your product provides a great advantage for the brand. Social media posts, e-polls, e-mail posts offer opportunities for communication.

5- Quick Results

Digital marketing is the fastest marketing method. It is a great advantage to be able to communicate interactively with potential customers and to have access to all your marketing channels with a few clicks on the Internet.

6- Ease of Shopping Online

Digital marketing is the most effective way to reach users who have a habit of shopping online. Shopping from home or work, on a mobile device or computer, is both effortless and easy. Especially during the pandemic period, e-commerce has also become an effective way to shop without increasing your health risk.

7- Re-marketing

Studies conducted in the US, Central European, and Northern European countries show that three out of four consumers research a product online before purchasing it. Re-marketing is a method used frequently by search engines and social media channels. In short, the system works as follows: Users visit your site but leave without shopping. Then, when they are visiting a different website or browse social media pages, they encounter your company’s advertisements. The reason you encounter these products on different sites and even in the following days is re-marketing, which is a cookie-based method.

What are Digital Marketing Channels?

1- Social Media Content and Advertisements

Social Media has the largest share of digital advertising after search engines. Social media is actually the most effective digital marketing medium, as it is the channel where promotion and PR activities are carried out, apart from advertising. Corporate use of social media requires careful language and careful preparation of all posts. A small mistake can spoil the popularity of your brand and its image in the eyes of customers. The success of your digital marketing efforts is also closely related to your daily sharing and communication with your visitors. ,

Social media is not just about popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. For specific sectors, there are popular channels that include people who use the product and service range of that sector. As an example, TripAdvisor has a trendy traveler’s guide company. Its mobile app is using quite often, and Tripadvisor is also considered a social media channel.

Analyze the social media channels used by your target audience and your customers. There may be names in the list that you have not heard before. Facebook may be the social media channel with most users. Still, if your target audience uses Reddit, then Reddit is the right marketing address for you. For the success of digital marketing and the correct use of your advertising budget, So you should choose the right social media channel.

2- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The process of placing your website higher in search engine results and increasing your site’s organic traffic is called SEO. Search engines list search results according to specific algorithms. Search engines periodically update these algorithms to provide better, more relevant results to their users.

There are two basic SEO strategies you can apply to drive qualified traffic to your website:

On-Page SEO aims to make your website appear at the top of the search results by using the keywords most searched by your target audience in the content of your website.

Off-Page SEO Articles and images on different sites about your products and your company, together with your site link convince search engines that it is popular. These links on various sites are called “backlinks”.

3-Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC are links posted on a search page, site, or social media channel to pay a certain amount per click, that contain a link to your site or a retail outlet. One of the most common types of PPC is the “pay-per-click” display of links you place for the top positions on Google’s search engine results pages. Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin are popular social media channels using PPC.

4- e-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is still functional, although its popularity is diminishing and very low on the target. The rate of reaching the target is low, but you have the chance to send millions of e-mails at the same time. If your target audience has given their e-mail address with their own consent or filled out the records on your website or social media channel, the rate of reading the e-mails you send will be higher.

5- Website

Your website is the final point to which interaction from all digital marketing tools is directed. Your customers visit your social media channels, read the e-mails you send or you are well known in search engines. All these efforts are to attract visitors to your domain address and to ensure that incoming visitors reach your products and services. Have your website software and design done carefully. It is compatible with the values ​​represented by your brand and your corporate identity. Keep your site updated. In the success of your digital marketing, it is important that the visitor you attract to your site likes the site, the pages load quickly and they do not experience technical problems.

6- Content Marketing

Content marketing consists of plugins and additional tools that support your website. For effective digital marketing, you should prepare unique content.

Blog posts: Make sure your site is a blog page. Regularly publish articles and news about your industry and products. These articles will increase the availability of your site in search engines, keep your site updated and attract the attention of your visitors.

• e-books: Prepare e-books about your industry, business, products and services, upload different e-books so that you don’t have license problems.
• Infographics: Infographics are graphic designs that explain its story step by step. It could be about your business or many other things related to the industry you are in. In recent years, infographics are one of the most popular content marketing tools.
• Short videos.
• Webinars and research results.

Digital Advertising

The above table, which shows the channels through which digital ad spending is made worldwide, includes data for the last four years and forecasts for the next four years. We see that the advertising budget allocated to the search engines specified with the green area and the actual digital advertising activities take the most significant share. Social media channels indicated with grey color are in the second place. For example, while digital advertising expenditures on search engines were 145 billion USD in 2019, social media was 92.8 billion USD. Approximately 3/2 of the $ 335 billion spent on digital ads in 2019 was on search engines and social media.

Digital marketing experts convey their marketing messages through the channels in the table. Includes; content posts, banners, promotional videos, search advertising as well as posts posted on social networks, online classifieds, and advertisements.

Generally, Digital marketing is divided into different devices and different digital channels depending on the usage statistics of the target audiences. For example, while determining the digital marketing strategy, broadcast content and budget, advertising and promotion budget, the data obtained by researching the target market and target audience are analyzed in order to reach the right audience and use the budget in a balanced way. You can prepare different marketing strategies for desktop computers and mobile devices. You need to work separately for social media channels, websites, and web browsers.

An example to show the power of digital marketing:

A poster is hung in front of the movie theatre, so everyone passing by the cinema sees the same poster. Digital marketing has personalized advertising tools. The target audience of the film is analyzed according to their characteristics such as age, gender, education, and hobbies. Ten different posters are prepared to attract the attention of different customer profiles. When potential customers browse web browsers or log in to their social media accounts, the movie poster appears, plus a separate poster selected according to each client profile.

It is impossible to measure how many people see your advertisement posted on a billboard. But in a digital medium, you deliver the product directly to your potential customers. Your customer logged into his Instagram account on his phone, and one of the current posts was an image promoting your products. 

Every movement on your website can be recorded, not only clicks but also how many seconds users wait on which part of a page, up to mouse movements.

In e-mail marketing, it is possible to easily reach very simple data such as how many people your mail has reached, how many people opened and clicked on your mail. In short, digital marketing channels allow you to reach the target point-to-point compared to traditional marketing and easily analyze the results.