Digital Marketing: What it is and its advantages

We could say that digital marketing is a subdivision of marketing, but it is far more than that. My friend at Northshore Loyalty is a digital marketing specialist and has helped me compile this article, so let’s take a look to define it better.

What is a digital or online marketing

Digital Marketing, also called online marketing, is defined as a form of marketing that uses new media and technological and digital advertising channels such as the internet, mobile, and IoT.

Thanks to the power of technology, it allows you to create personalized products and services and measure everything that happens to improve the experience.

So, Digital Marketing, for me, is a radical evolution of marketing thanks to technology that helps us to formulate strategies. Big data and the ability to measure and with exponential power over traditional media is what has unleashed the entire revolution in the marketing and advertising industry.

For example, thanks to Big Data in Digital Marketing there are applications such as Netflix or Amazon that always know what they have to recommend to us. Or thanks to email marketing and the traceability of the ” Customer Journey ” we can track potential customers to re-impact them with remarketing or retargeting.

Direct and Interactive Marketing: the forerunner of digital marketing

Direct Marketing is a strategic vision of marketing. The client uses all means of communication and publicity available. The goal is to identify prospects and foster response and customer-business relationships. In this way, we approach what we define as Digital Marketing.

In fact, Direct Marketing found a great ally on the internet, reaching its peak with new technologies, and was undoubtedly the starting point for the development of digital marketing. Also, the ability to measure and the possibility of creating personalized services tailored to the client but at a low cost.

Advantages of Digital Marketing

Due to the characteristics that the internet brings to Digital Marketing, we can clearly attribute the following advantages.

Digital Marketing is:

• Global: Once your product is positioned on the internet, anyone from anywhere in the world can access it.
• Interactive: The Internet is a two-way communication channel; therefore, Digital Marketing is also. In this way, communication between companies and consumers has been maximized, especially since the emergence of the RRSS.
• Perfectly measurable: The data is no longer based on market research, time-consuming and expensive to carry out. Now, they are collected immediately through the monitoring of the actions that the user performs directly on the internet. It allows obtaining personal data, preferences, and usability that, properly analyzed and managed, allow the creation of more efficient actions.
• Hyper Segmentable: Thanks to a large amount of information collected about Internet users, it is possible to diversify marketing actions much more. We can target increasingly sharp and defined objectives. Nowadays, we segment campaigns by incorporating new geographic and time variables and depending on the access device.

Tools, Strategies and Tactics in Digital Marketing

For me, there are three key activities in digital marketing: The first thing is to attract qualified traffic to the web that is carried out by the traffic manager or digital trafficker.

The second thing is to convert this traffic into actions that are normally worked by the trafficker, also with knowledge of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), although in large teams it is in the hands of the UX Product Design team; and finally there is the function of the digital analyst or web analyst that measures and identifies where the opportunities are and where the problems are.

This work circle is fundamental in digital marketing but there are also many other disciplines in which we work to generate digital marketing strategies and tactics:

• SEO or Search Engine Optimization: Seo is the natural positioning in search engines like Google. It consists of making optimizations to appear as high as possible on these pages.
• SEM or Search Engine Marketing: In this case, it is also to position our page in search engines or directories but pay for it. It has become one of the most important tools in Digital Marketing because the consumer uses these mechanisms at the end of the purchase funnel.
• Inbound Marketing: consists of inverting the marketing pyramid. Instead of looking for customers with advertising, what it does is make it easier for them to find you and get to know you.
• Email Marketing: it is like the old postal mail but electronic. Widely used as a communication tool with clients and also to find new clients.
• Social Media Marketing: Brands now have a digital identity and voice. Now Social Networks are its greatest exponent.
• Affiliate or partner marketing: the best way to grow is through agreements and collaborations with third parties. On the one hand, there are networks that concentrate affiliates and, on the other hand, there is business development work with alliances.
• Remarketing or Retargeting: the ability to re-impact people who have visited your page, business, or app.
• Native Advertising or Native Advertising: it is advertising integrated into the media in such a way that it does not even look like advertising.
• e-Commerce: it is the transfer of traditional commerce to the digital world. It involves transnational websites or apps where the online purchase or service occurs.
• Programmatic advertising: it is a way of buying audiences through technologies such as a DSP that allows segmenting the people you want to reach by changing the buying model in traditional advertising. In this way, you bid for the medium where it is cheapest to hit them. One of the most typical ways to buy is through “Look Alike” audiences, which are users who are most similar to those who buy my product or service.
• Web Analytics: this allows you to measure and know how the user behaves through graphs and data.
• UX / UI design: it is about designing the interfaces with which the user interacts. Your experience with the use of the web and the app must be friendly and satisfactory.
• Customer Experience: it is about building experiences from start to finish in the journey map of a potential customer until they become a customer both on social networks and on the web or app.
• CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) or conversion optimization. We use heat maps, and data to measure and test new proposals throughout the chain to improve flow and funnel.