
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is a way of marketing goods and services using digital technologies like mobile and computer and other social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and instagram.
Digital marketing is categorized as email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing, Affiliate marketing, web-based advertising, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, and marketing analytics. Eventually, any marketing campaign that uses digital mediums is called digital marketing.
Digital marketing is also called online, internet, or web marketing. Digital marketing became famous in 2013 with the excess use of smartphones.
Digital marketing uses the same principles of traditional marketing but offers additional principles to understand consumer approaches and behavior while purchasing products. The major challenge in digital marketing is that businesses should often find innovative ways to attract customers to sell their products.
A digital marketer is an individual who uses digital media and other social media platforms to reach potential customers through advertising their company's products and services.
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The history of digital marketing
The name Digital marketing was first used in the 1990s. A new way for consumers to buy products has emerged with the internet and social media platforms. The first web platform, web 1.0, allowed users to find the information they needed but did not allow them to share it.
Marketers were still trying to figure out how to sell their popular products online, even at the end of the 1990s. The first advertising banner went live in 1993 and hotwired purchased a few other ads for advertising. This period saw the beginning of online advertising. Soon 1994 saw new technologies like yahoo entering the digital marketplace.
Yahoo saw over 1 million people opening their accounts within the first year. After that, more search engines like HotBot, Alexa, and Look Smart were launched in 1996, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998.
Digital marketing saw a massive leap in participants in 2006, with more than 6.4 billion traffic reported monthly. More user interaction with online marketers started in 2006 after the social networking site Facebook's launch. Many companies began to promote their brands from then on through social networking sites.
Why is digital marketing important?
Digital marketing helps business owners to promote their business online by using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. One of the main advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing is the visibility and reaches to international customers with less cost and labor. Effective targeting of your ads is possible by knowing who your audiences are. You can target more audiences using popular keywords for search engine optimization, pay-per-click (PPC), and demographic information from social media handles. When you want to advertise your products locally or globally, the best way is to opt for digital marketing as it is cost-effective, unlike traditional marketing, where you must spend enormous money to reach a global audience. Marketers can build customized channels and advertise their products/services online through social media handles. So that more viewers can become your customers if they like your product.
Types of digital marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization for websites is essential to improve website ranking and drive more traffic. SEO determines what people are searching for and what popular keywords can potentially gain more visitors.
The main difference between search engine marketing and optimization is that SEM brings organic and paid traffic, whereas SEO brings organic traffic to the website. SEO is essential for every website as it is a good marketing channel for promoting products.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing is a form of paid marketing that helps promote websites by increasing their visibility on search engine result pages (SERP). SEM incorporates SEO for looking at and rewriting website content to achieve a higher ranking on search pages.

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Pay Per Click (PPC)
Businesses use pay-per-click campaigns to display their ads on social media handles. The PPC campaign drives more traffic to their website and makes viewers buy their products/ services. If a PPC campaign works well, the advertiser returns on ad spend (ROAS) is high as more viewers visit their site, and Google asks advertisers to pay less for ads clicked if it considers the ad valuable to the viewers.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is sharing information about a particular product/ service in blogs, newsletters, social media posts, emails, and videos. Through content writing, you can engage your customers with your posts; when they want to buy the product, they are more likely to choose your products.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing uses platforms where businesses promote their products/ services through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, etc. Social media marketing has a built-in data analytics tool that helps users monitor their advertisements' success and identifies more ways to engage with their targeted customers.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one type of advertising of your company's products by third-party publishers, and the company pays the publishers some amount of money for bringing customers. The third-party publishers are called affiliates, and the commission fee boosts them to find ways to promote the company.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is a form of paid advertising that creates ads similar to the page content, design, and function of the media format they appear in. That means they merge with the website content and look like a part of the editorial flow of the page. They did not seem like a distraction when viewers viewed the page's content, achieving more user engagement and eventually creating higher click-through rates.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation uses software that automates regular marketing work. They automate repetitive jobs like email marketing, generating ad campaigns, personalized advertising, and even social media posting, eliminating human action.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the popular ways to market your company's products. You can keep engaging your audience about the latest versions of your brand products and make them purchase your products by offering discounts. The main benefits of email marketing are to build a healthy relationship with your customers and drive traffic to your websites.
Online PR
Online public relations uses the internet to communicate with customers about the products/services they offer. The main goal is to increase a company's online presence by sharing photos, videos, or content on the company's social media handles.
Audio & Video Marketing
Audio marketing chooses radio, podcasts, and virtual assistants to promote the company's products. Video marketing chooses videos; gif's to promote products. If you want to generate more leads choose video marketing as it not only brings more leads but also increases your search engine ranking on Google.
Influence Marketing
Influencer marketing enrolls influencers or celebrities who can influence the viewers to buy the company's products. Influencers promote particular brand products on their social media handles like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram by sharing photos and videos of them using those products. In turn, companies pay influencers to advertise their products.
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Inbound marketing vs. digital marketing
Inbound marketing generates customers organically to their website through blog writing and email marketing. Types of communication involve videos, slide presentations, blog posts, media posts, graphics, social media posts, eBooks, and case studies.
Digital marketing is the marketing of goods/services using digital mediums. Digital marketing uses tactics like pay-per-click campaigns, search engine optimization (SEO), etc.
B2B vs. B2C digital marketing
B2B products are sold to companies, whereas B2C products are sold to consumers/individuals.
B2B is a long-term relationship, whereas B2C is a short-term relationship.
Decision-making about tie-ups is a long-term process. There is a shorter decision-making process in B2C marketing as emotions come into play while buying a product.
B2B mainly focuses on the niche audience. B2C emphasis on large-scale audience.
The main goal of B2B marketing is to build trust and credibility with your content, whereas the primary goal in B2C marketing is to create impulse and urge to buy with branding and messaging.
Digital marketing benefits
Global and local reach
One of the main advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing is the visibility and reaches to international customers with less cost and labor.
Digital marketing is not used for advertising your brand internationally, but it does also help you to promote your business locally. Local visibility of your business is needed if your business is dependent on nearby customers.
Targeting specific audiences
Effective targeting of your ads is possible by knowing who your audiences are. You can target more audiences using popular keywords for search engine optimization, pay-per-click (PPC), and demographic information from social media handles.
Cost-effectiveness
When you want to advertise your products locally or globally, the best way is to opt for digital marketing as it is cost-effective, unlike traditional marketing, where you must spend enormous money to reach a global audience.
Customized channels
Marketers can build customized channels and advertise their products/services online through social media handles. So that more viewers can become your customers if they like your product.
Digital marketing challenges
Time-consuming
Building a successful brand online takes a lot of time, and hard work as you must focus more on developing strategies, analyzing changing market trends, connecting with your audience, and much more.
Competitive
With more businesses entering into digital marketing, there is a lot of competition. You will be out of the match if you effectively promote your brand.
Data privacy
Protecting your customer's data from breaches is a big task, and data privacy is safeguarded by enabling firewall and VPN connections.
Technology
Digital Marketers must constantly update their website with changing trends, which is one of the biggest challenges to keeping up with Google. Other platforms continuously update their algorithm to create a better user experience.
How can I become a digital marketer?
To become a digital marketer, one must understand how online marketing works and what tools help to achieve your marketing goals and earn a high return on investment (ROI). Digital marketers must complete at least one course on search engine optimization (SEO), Email marketing, Social media marketing, Content marketing, online advertising of products/services, pay-per-click, mobile marketing, Affiliate/influencer marketing, video marketing, and Audio marketing. Build your digital marketing portfolio that includes your work experience, the best papers you have published, and a few testimonials given by your previous employees about the quality of your work. While creating a portfolio, include your resume and mention your areas of interest, contact details, samples of your work, and Testimonials. Include all your bio details in your CV. The main aim of creating a portfolio is to make people contact you and provide you with job opportunities, so to make them call you quickly, give your contact details and email address.
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What skills are needed in Digital Marketing?
Today every organization needs a digital marketer capable of handling all the issues their website faces. With many companies adapting to online advertising of products and hiring digital marketing professionals, here are the five skills you require to become a digital marketer.
The digital marketer must know how to do search engine optimization for websites, as it is essential to improve website ranking and drive more traffic.
Pay-per-click is used by businesses to display their ads on social media handles. The PPC campaign drives more traffic to their website and makes viewers buy their products/ services.
Conversion rate optimization is to increase the number of people visiting your blog and make them become your customers. For this, the digital marketer must know how to use A/B and multivariate testing. He should also be able to identify weak-performing pages.
Social media marketing and Email marketing are the use of social media platforms where businesses promote their products/ services through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, etc.
The digital marketer must work on various analytical and reporting skills that help businesses improve search page rankings.
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Conclusion:
We hope our article on "what is digital marketing" has given the answer you are searching for. This article clearly explained in detail the importance of digital marketing to promote your business and the pros and cons of digital marketing. So, here is the end of our writing.
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About Author
As a content writer at HKR trainings, I deliver content on various technologies. I hold my graduation degree in Information technology. I am passionate about helping people understand technology-related content through my easily digestible content. My writings include Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Python, Salesforce, Servicenow and etc.
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FAQ's
Digital marketing is a form of online marketing of goods and services using social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, instagram, and other digital media channels. Promoting goods through digital channels has become increasingly popular in the 2000s with the internet worldwide.
- Global Reach
- Cost-effective.
- Maintain a healthy relationship with customers.
- Track your performance in real-time.
- Easy to promote your brand.
The most popular tools digital marketing managers know are Google Ads, WordPress, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Canva, Miro, Hootsuite, Twitter analytics, MailChimp, HubSpot Sendinblue, Omnisend, Tweetdeck, Facebook Insights, and many more.