Any marketing that uses electronic devices and can be used by marketing specialists to convey promotional messaging and measure its impact through your customer journey. In practice, digital marketing typically refers to marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. It can take many forms, including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads and social media posts. Digital marketing is often compared to “traditional marketing” such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail. Oddly, television is usually lumped in with traditional marketing.

At a high level, digital marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. Using these online media channels, digital marketing is the method by which companies endorse goods, services, and brands. Consumers heavily rely on digital means to research products. For example, Think with Google marketing insights found that 48% of consumers start their inquiries on search engines, while 33% look to brand websites and 26% search within mobile applications.

Advantages of Digital Marketing Over Traditional Marketing

Low cost

Marketing and advertising cost is one of the biggest financial burdens that businesses have to bear. While big businesses may not have so much trouble doling out millions for marketing and advertisement, for small businesses, this may be impossible or an unbearable nightmare. Marketing via digital platforms offers a more affordable alternative to the traditional method.

Huge return on investment

Nothing matters more to a business than the return on the investment it makes. Digital marketing offers a substantial return on small investments. Email marketing or running advertising campaigns on social media platforms cost little when compared to traditional marketing techniques.

Easy to measure

The success or otherwise of a digital campaign can easily be ascertained. Compared to traditional methods where you have to wait weeks or months to evaluate the veracity of a campaign, with a digital campaign you can know almost immediately how an ad is performing.

Easy to adjust

The knowledge of the performance of an ad will inform a business on how to proceed. For an ad campaign that is performing well, it is easy to invest more in it with just a click. But for an ad that is not delivering as expected, it can be adjusted accordingly or stopped altogether with ease.

In traditional marketing, it is more rigid as a mountain of paperwork must be signed and in most cases, these agreements are on a long or medium-term basis. So even if a campaign is not performing as hoped, subscribers will still have to wait for the expiration of the agreed period.

 Brand development

Businesses can use their digital platforms to build their company’s brand and reputation. A well-developed website, a blog featuring quality and useful articles, a social media channel that is highly interactive are some of the ways by which a business can build its brand.

Easy to share

Most digital marketing channels feature sharing capabilities that allow campaigns and articles to be shared with multiple followers. This helps to create a multiplier effect and has the capacity to tremendously improve sales results.

Precise Targeting

The traditional means of marketing uses the spray and pray method, where an ad runs over a platform with substantial reach with the hope that a few people who love what they see, hear, or read would make a positive approach. Marketing over digital platforms, on the other hand, allows for targeted campaigning where ads are presented to customers based on their preferences or initial action. Take, for instance, transactional emails (order confirmation emails, receipt, password reset) which will only be sent to customers following their action towards the business. In other words, customers get only what they ask for.

Global

The world, they say, has turned into a global village. This has been made possible via digitization. Digital marketing allows ad campaigns to be visible in any part of the world. This gives small start-ups the rare opportunity to go global via the immense exposure provided. The internet abounds with stories of start-ups that became hugely successful over a small period due to the opportunities created thanks to the global nature of marketing via digital platforms.

Segmentation

Not only does marketing over digital platforms allow campaigns to be targeted at specific customers, it also allows for customer segmentation. Segmentation is the process in which large customer groups are further broken down into smaller groups of customers according to a particular classification. Segmentation increases the chances of sales, as well as cut down on cost.

Take, for instance, an e-commerce store that has launched new offers for women’s clothing. Using digital platforms, offering, for instance, email marketing solutions, allows the business to send emails to women alone. And if an offer is available only in certain regions, residents of given areas can be the only ones who will get the email.

For segmentation to work effectively, adequate information must be collected from subscribers.

Greater Engagement

The cyber-world is getting noisier by the day, and any product or service that your business offers is most likely also being offered by thousands of other businesses. The average bounce rate on websites increased and the attention span of visitors is dropping. When visitors to a website do not immediately find what they are looking for, they leave for an alternative.

In all above discussion it is concluded that traditional digital marketing often fails because it relies on being hyper focused on one or two independent solutions. You could be great at SEO, or PPC, or social media and while that’s great, if these solutions are not combined into a comprehensive system that generates, nurtures, and converts leads, your results will often be less effective.