Rapid evolution of technology has brought us to where we stand today, at the zenith of the Information Age. Of all the industries to benefit from digital overhauls to business practices, marketing is one of the biggest – if not the biggest.
Digital marketing is everywhere. Its efforts are encountered on practically any website you visit and drop into your email inboxes every day. How do we define a term that has become so broad and encompasses many practices? Let’s see.
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What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is a loose term encompassing any marketing that utilises electronic devices and the internet as its vehicles. It can include emails, videos, blog posts and articles, and other multimedia forms that allow interactive banners or even small games built into adverts. Often, it will incorporate aspects of traditional marketing such as sponsorships or brand partnerships.
Digital marketing is incredibly versatile. Some of the best digital marketing become viral campaigns that far outreach their original goals, becoming pieces of pop culture that spread just as fast via word of mouth as they do over Twitter or TikTok.
One of the most popular and successful viral campaigns ever is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The campaign, whose goal was to raise awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and increase donations for its research, saw people record videos of themselves dumping buckets of ice water over themselves and nominate friends to do the same.
The challenge itself spread through social media to the point that some 17 million videos were posted online, sweeping along celebrities who increased the campaign’s reach and momentum.
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What are the core types of digital marketing?
The various types of digital marketing change in number depending on who you ask, but there are some common core types:
Content Marketing
All the way back in 1996, Bill Gates famously wrote that ‘content is king’ in an essay that was hosted on the Microsoft website. Despite the almost-30-year gap between his internet back then and ours now, it remains an absolute truth for many marketers.
Content marketing focuses on the use of high-value content to impart meaningful discussion, education, or opinion to readers. What makes that value? Original content with in-depth comment and knowledge that isn’t looking just to push your readers into sales.
Content marketing goes hand-in-hand with SEO, drawing more organic traffic to your pages with content that outshines the competition and proves your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT).
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the not-quite-exact science of making your content and your pages optimised for search engine result pages (SERPs), hopefully ranking them highly and therefore making them more likely to be clicked.
Much of SEO is concerned specifically with Google, due to its overwhelming dominance of the search market. A lot of SEO best practice has been worked out over years by careful observation of what Google rewards and what it punishes, combined with the occasional snippet of information and some published guidance from Google itself.
The specific algorithms that help drive Google’s decisions regarding good and bad content are continually changing and being improved, so nothing is ever set in stone. The goal is ultimately long-term growth in traffic, yielding organic results that grow over time without being artificially bolstered.
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Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – GoogleAds
PPC is, in some ways, the antithesis of SEO. Instead of looking to earn higher rankings on SERPs, PPC adverts are placed in advantageous positions that their cost affords. When a search is performed on Google, the SERP may display results above even the number one rank for organic results. These are the Google Ads PPC results, which a business wins by bidding on its desired keywords.
It is thought that less than 10% of searchers actually click on the ad results, but as PPC only takes payment every time a link is clicked through, they can be worthwhile side investments for certain businesses.
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Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing includes all your business’s posts and activity on social media platforms for the purpose of furthering engagement.
This takes more strategy and thought than simply posting for the sake of it. Social media marketing needs to be scheduled and planned ahead, joining in with relevant holidays and leaving room for reactive content.
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Email Marketing
Social media may be quicker and yield instant interaction and feedback, but email marketing remains a highly effective tool for digital marketing.
Newsletters and regular updates can keep customers in the loop and gently remind them of your brand, while being a vehicle for content marketing and other forms of marketing to spread ever farther.
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Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing concerns efforts made to reach customers through their phones. Text messages, in-app adverts, push notifications, emails, and more can all fall under the banner of mobile marketing.
With smartphone users thought to number over 6.6 billion worldwide, mobile marketing has a platform in the pockets of over 80% of the people living on this planet.
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How digital marketing started
Digital marketing started in the 1990s, when the internet developed into an interactive platform and began spreading to ordinary homes. Web 1.0, the earliest version of the internet, gave little footholds for digital marketing as advertisements were actually banned in these earliest days of the internet.
As the internet evolved and became more interactive – more ‘read and write’ and less ‘read only’ – digital marketing began to take off, and not with the best reputation. Clickable banners began to appear in the early 90s, and the infamous pop-up is an irritating concept still firmly associated with surfing the web even today.
The internet’s development and sophistication extended to the means available to digital marketers. The dawn of the search engine, and particularly the birth of Google, meant that there were routes of large volumes of internet traffic that were reliably being taken.
This also spelt the very early beginnings of SEO, which has in itself developed from a loose set of tactics to force content higher up the listings, to a more complex and algorithm-powered art that works with Google rather than in spite of it.
The constant fight to occupy a position at the top of Google’s rankings introduced opportunities to offer paid results with more favourable positions. Despite high-ranking organic outcomes being overall more attractive to a business, some draw as much as 80% of their business through these paid results.
Google itself has grown to dominate the global search market, leading to a multi-billion dollar advertising business. Whether or not you’re seen on Google is now tantamount to being visible or invisible on the internet itself.
Digital marketing very much started as little more than a business of creating nets, to which businesses would try to lure their customers. Flashy banner ads, pop ups that would hope for an accidental click or a scare tactic to catch engagement, and emails that would hopefully be read and followed through.