Digital Marketing Explained for beginners

In this article, I will be breaking down the basics of digital marketing, Digital marketing meaning and how it can benefit your business. I will explain the advantages of digital marketing to help you understand it’s importance and significance in using it to grow your business in the times we now live in. 

 

 

What is digital marketing? 

Digital marketing is simply a form of advertising and selling products and services on the Internet with digital tools and methods like social media, Display Ads, Email marketing and so on.  

The Internet is a digital space where people from anywhere in the world can gain access with a mobile device and get all sorts of information online and also  be able to communicate and connect with other people and businesses from anywhere in the world. 

Because there are billions of people using the Internet in real time, We can reach out to almost anyone on the Internet and sell them our stuff. 

The process and method of doing this online can be considered as digital marketing, because it works online rather than offline like traditional marketing. 

 

Traditional marketing

has been around for thousands of years and it’s still mostly practiced till date. Business owners market and sell their products and services by giving handouts, Putting up Banners, billboards, distributing flyers, business cards, organizing events, seminars and so on. 

 

These traditional marketing methods are quite effective for so many businesses even till today but it has its limitations compared to digital marketing that is why digital marketing is very popular nowadays for a lot of  businesses that are becoming aware of its benefits and opportunities against traditional marketing. 

 

So let’s go over the basics of digital marketing. 

 

Digital Marketing Basics

The basics are simple. Find and Identify where your target audience is on the web and simply market your products or services to them. Although there are methods, techniques, strategies and processes required to achieve this basic principle. 

Once you are able to understand how to use these methods to digitally market to people online then it is possible to sell practically anything online. 

Before we move on some of the methods and processes of digital marketing, let me break down why digital marketing has more benefits and more potential for any business to exponentially grow and scale up their revenues. 

 

Advantages of Digital marketing to traditional marketing 

To show you how important and innovative Digital Marketing is, I will be placing the advantages of digital marketing against traditional marketing in the table below. So it looks like a Digital marketing vs Traditional marketing table.

 

Digital marketing	Traditional marketing
Reach and Visibility have little to zero limitations.	Visibility is usually limited to the business location or vicinity.
Can find and target your ideal audience faster	It may take a while to find your ideal audience.
Little or no infrastructure required for Advertising	A lot of resources and infrastructure is required for advertisement.
Can be very cheap and cost effective especially for beginners	Can be capital intensive for beginners
Can easily scale up a business with advertising and promotions.	It’s difficult to scale a business
Can allow you to track and monitor your marketing campaigns.	You have little or no avenue of tracking data from your marketing campaigns.

 

You can see that digital marketing can be more powerful compared to traditional marketing. It’s cheap, fast and easy to set up for a business compared to traditional marketing.

Although digital marketing definitely has its disadvantages (Which are super few). But overall it has more potential to grow a business faster and easier compared to traditional marketing. 

Let’s dive into the Types of digital marketing. 

 

Types of digital marketing 

1. Social media marketing 
2. Email marketing 
3. Bulk SMS
4. Mobile Advertising 
5. Ecommerce 
6. Content creation 
7. Online pay per click Advertising 
8. Display Advertising 

 

We have more types of digital marketing methods but these are the most common and most efficient ones for most businesses today. 

 

So let’s go through the types briefly. 

 

1. Social media marketing: Basically almost anyone that uses the Internet has at least one social media account. We are talking about billions of people and millions are always active on social media. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, twitter, Snapchat, Tiktok etc. Because of the massive amount of people on social media, it has been an outlet for businesses to market their product to people on social media. And because you can target people that are interested in specific things, social media has been a powerful tool for marketing.

 

2. Email Marketing: this is a method of sending adverts and promotions via email to prospects. One can collect email contacts from prospects and leads on their website via an opt-in form that collects email addresses and use this medium to keep up with their leads via email and to eventually market their products or services long term. And because this can be a very personal method of selling it can be very powerful. So many businesses use email marketing to make huge sales and profits from their email list.

 

3. Bulk SMS: This is very similar to email marketing but instead of using email addresses of prospects we use phone numbers. So businesses can send phone messages (SMS) to their prospects by collecting their phone contacts. 

4. Mobile Advertising: Mobile Ads are very easy to use and cheap for business to reach huge numbers of Internet users using their mobile phones. So businesses that find value in mobile users use this medium to instantly get eyeballs on their products very fast. Mobile Ads range from push notifications on mobile phones to Display and video Ads in mobile apps and games. 

5. Ecommerce: People that sell physical products set up an online store with the product images and description and price and arrange them in categories and set up payment options. So interested buyers that come to this online store can go through these products and make a purchase and once that happens the product gets delivered to them, Instead of the buyer physically going to the real store to buy the product.

It’s a great way to save time and effort for customers and because ecommerce has been a convenient way to sell physical products to customers online it is also very powerful because you can sell and deliver products to customers from anywhere even far away from your store. 

 

 

6. Content Creation: This is simply creating valuable and useful pieces of information for your audience on the Internet and growing a fan base. Content creation ranges from creating articles for your blog, video content for YouTube, Images and graphic design pieces for Instagram or Pinterest and so on. This can be a direct and indirect form of digital marketing. It depends on what type of content you create and how it’s been structured for marketing and promoting your business. Content creation is very important as it can be used in all aspects of the types of digital marketing listed. 

 

7. Online pay per click Advertising: Also known as PPC Advertising. It’s a paid form of advertising and it works by creating a headline or title with a description and it usually has a link. Then it is published online where there is a lot of traffic and activities going for visitors to see and click on the advert. Each click will cost the owner of the Ad. PPC is offered by Search engines like Google, Bing Yahoo, PPC Ad networks like propeller Ads, popcash, Evadav, 50onRed and so on.

 

8. Display Advertising: Very similar concept to PPC but it uses Images for Advertising. The images will have your destination URL link so that when visitors click on the image they are sent to your website, landing page, sales page etc. Display Ads are usually offered by  Display Ad networks like Google Adwords, Taboola, Leadbolt, Adknowledge etc.

So you can see that there are different ways you can promote your business on the Internet with digital marketing. 

Businesses are now realizing that they can exist not only in the real world but in the digital space. And the digital space has proven to be even more powerful.

 

CONCLUSION

Digital marketing is the future of marketing and has already shifted the focus of many businesses today from traditional marketing methods to using the Internet and building an online presence. So as a beginner it is much easier to use digital marketing to grow your business and sell your products and services.