What is Digital Marketing & How Does it Help Your Business?

Digital marketing is an emerging field that has been around for decades. Yet in recent years, it has rapidly expanded and evolved.

But, do you know what is Digital Marketing? And how does it help your business?

In this article, we’re going to dissect Digital Marketing and its benefits.

What is Digital Marketing?

According to Investopedia, Digital Marketing is the use of the Internet and various digital tools to reach consumers and audiences. It can be categorized into Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

However, it is not limited to only that. In fact, many may have confused Digital Marketing with Internet Marketing. While Digital Marketing also encapsulates the use of digital means such as Television Commercials (TVC), Internet Marketing is a subset of Digital Marketing that solely focus on online tools. In short, Digital Marketing is an umbrella term that also includes Internet Marketing.

6 Types of Digital Marketing

Email Marketing

You may assume that Email is dead but it’s actually more alive than ever. Email is comparatively more effective as you can send messages straightly to your targeted consumers. From promotional emails to newsletters, Email Marketing is able to drive traffic to the website, and generate higher sales and conversions. 

If you want to know more about Email Marketing, read our blogs about them:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the boosting of your website’s rank on the search engine result page. SEO also refers to unpaid organic search activities on search engines. It highly focuses on getting your website ranked on the first page so that users would more likely to click on your website. 

Do you know that most users don’t look past the first page of the search results? And more than often they wouldn’t scroll to the lower half of the first page. That’s why it is crucial to optimize your website’s ranking so that you’ll get more traffic and clicks. Keywords are an important element in SEO because you want to rank for the correct and relevant keywords that could possibly bring you your targeted audience.

Here are some SEO blogs for you:

• SEO Glossary: 50 Important terms you need to know
• 6 Easy Steps To Research Keywords For Your SEO
• Why is SEO important for your company website?
• How To Analyze Relevant Keywords For Your Business

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Everything is about social media now! So, you definitely can’t leave this out! 

Social Media Marketing (SMM) serves as a great way to build your brand awareness and relationship with your audience. Although you may not get the results as fast as SEM, it is still a medium worth investing in. For small businesses, social media like Instagram help save the cost of setting up a website or eCommerce site as they have the “shop” function built-in. 

Learn more about SMM:

• How to choose the right social media platform for your business
• A Useful Guide To Instagram Story
• Awesome Content Ideas to Introduce Your New Brand on Instagram

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) was once referred to as both paid and unpaid digital marketing on search engines like Google or Bing. However, now it is exclusive referring to the paid advertisements also known as paid search or pay-per-click (PPC). 

SEM are those search results that have labelled “Ad” on your search result pages. They are generally located on the top of the pages. It is arguably one of the most effective digital marketing techniques as it is highly targeted and cleverly uses search engines’ optimal location to help your business gain more visibility and traffic.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing has been in the marketing strategy for a long time and it is still relevant today. It operates when influencers or businesses promote other brands’ products or services through their own channel and earn a commission every time a sale is made or a link is clicked. It is known as Influencer Marketing when an influencer endorses a brand. Whereas for businesses, it can happen through blog writing where certain software is mentioned and affiliated through a backlink.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is a new form of digital marketing. It is a marketing approach that fixates on planning, organizing and curating educational, relevant and consistent content to capture the audience’s attention and obtain their targeted customers. The content can be created in various kinds of formats on multiple platforms to cater for the different needs of readers and users. For example, short videos on Tiktok, visually pleasing images on Instagram and thought-provoking insights on Linkedin.

How does it help your business?

1. Cost-effective and efficient

While traditional marketing involved paid ads on television and print media that could be costly for your marketing budget, digital marketing like pay-per-click are cost-effective and efficient. You’ll only need to bid on the keywords and pay when someone clicks on the link. And if you cleverly do your keyword research, you can definitely get higher conversions than what you’ve invested in. 

Another benefit of digital marketing is that it is efficient and time-saving. Planning, creating and producing television or print ads can eat up a lot of time, especially when it involves a few parties. Nonetheless, digital marketing could save up half of it as one could conveniently set it up by themselves on their computer.

2. Increase Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is more than often being overlooked in marketing campaigns. Despite every marketing campaign’s goal being to drive sales, marketers should know that building brand awareness is the first step to do to achieve that goal.

When more than half of the population is online, businesses need to step up the game to build their brand awareness on digital platforms too. Fortunately, with social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it is now more convenient for business owners to set up a business account and implement their digital marketing strategies to increase their brand awareness.

3. Flexible

Be it Google Ads, blog posts, cold email or social media ads, you could flexibly produce a number of content formats to suit your customers’ tastes. Not only that, digital marketing can be very flexible in terms of the posting dates and times too. You have the freedom to schedule beforehand and track all the statistics and data you need.

4. High accessibility and broad reach

Everyone is on digital platforms now. You may assume that the older generation is not familiar with digital tools, but the truth is, they are quite knowledgeable about using email and Facebook now. So, if you want to reach them, try email marketing and Facebook Ads. On the other hand, if you target youngsters, go for Instagram or TikTok Ads. 

Compare to traditional marketing like newspaper ads and TVC, you could reach more audiences through digital marketing. The reason for that is that people nowadays do not read printed newspapers and watch television anymore. Instead, they would commonly read online news media and watch shows from online streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney+. 

5. Audience targeting 

Other than having the ability to reach a broader audience, digital marketing also has the capability to reach your target audience. For Google Ads, and social media Ads, you have the option of setting your target audience demographic information. For example, if you want this ad to reach people who are between the age of 25 to 45 and are located in Kuala Lumpur, you could select these criteria on the audience demographic option.

In a nutshell, the new marketing trend has gone digital. If smart business owners like you have not caught up and adapted to this new phenomenon, you’ll be losing a lot more customers than you think.

To get started, devise a Digital Marketing Funnel to better plan out your strategies. Not sure about it? Then head over here to read more.