The Definition of Digital Marketing

When it comes to digital marketing there's a lot of confusion involved. What is digital marketing? What is it for? People make it a lot more complicated than it really is.

Essentially, digital marketing is a form of marketing that encompasses the use of digital tools or channels to communicate to your audience. A good example of this is a channel that you may use to communicate to your audience is Facebook. When you post on Facebook, whether you have one follower or a million, you're communicating to your audience. If you use tools like mini chat to put a Facebook message out or text message out, that's another example of using a tool to communicate to your audience. These are examples of digital marketing.

Businesses can leverage digital channels, such as social media, search engines, emails and other sites as a part of their online reputation management strategy. So, it's not necessarily just the channels that you may be thinking of like Instagram or LinkedIn. Search engines are a good example of a channel that's super popular and so is email. I know a lot of people are saying that email is dying, but they've been saying that for over 10 years and trust me, it is not dead. It's being used more and more and more because it's a cornerstone of corporate communication.

There's many different aspects of digital marketing. For example, in a digital marketing agency you may find a social media marketing department or a SEO department or even a UX department. These are all examples of different departments that can happen to encompass a digital marketing campaign. They all make up one big picture which is creating your brand presence online. That's the goal. So, when you think about UX, you're like UX's design, how is that related to digital marketing? Well, when someone lands on your website, that's your brand, that's your presence. How are you communicating that message out when people land? That's all part of digital marketing. Just like when you post an image on Facebook, sometimes that image is a photo, other times it's a graphic. You may be using tools like Canva which is free to create that image.

There's also traditional marketing. So, I want to break down digital marketing versus traditional marketing so that way there's no confusion. Traditional marketing is essentially the same idea as digital marketing except the idea of the online component or the digital component. For example, traditional marketing would be using tools like billboards, print ads, magazines, newspapers, direct mail, phone calls, like dialing and saying hey, would you buy X, Y and Z from me versus using WhatsApp, which would be more digital. Doing direct phone calls, that would be more traditional. In other words, traditional encompasses a form of physical marketing. Digital would be using tools like social media channels, emails, search engine optimization, blogging. You pretty much get the picture.

So, why does digital marketing matter? Well, Google and Facebook generate more revenue than any other traditional media company out there because they control more eyeballs. That's why digital marketing matters. It's where the attention is. Look around you. Odds are at least half the people that you're looking at right now have a phone and are on it, right. I'm not talking about the phones in the pocket, I'm talking about they're literally on their phones. They got the Apple AirPods in their ears or headphones, they're doing something with their phone. That's where people's attention and eyes are. If that's where their eyes and attention is that's where there's money to be made.

How many of you actually look at billboards? Chances are, a bus comes by with a billboard or you see a billboard on the street, you probably ignore it. That's why Google and Facebook are much bigger than any traditional media company out there. So, is digital marketing worth it for your business? Well, chances are it is. It's worth it for almost every business out there other than ones that are like government related, and the reason being is government type businesses are more contract basis where you don't really need digital marketing for that. But, typically for almost every single business you can do well through digital marketing.

If you're not sure on where you can get started with digital marketing, you can use tools like Ubersuggest. You can type in any of your competitor URLs or if you don't know your competitors you can type in any keywords and Ubersuggest will show you all the people rank for it. That'll give you ideas for competitors. What's beautiful about Ubersuggest is it tells you what keywords your competitors rank for, where they spend their money, what keywords they're ranking for, what content they're creating that's getting social shares from Facebook or Pinterest. It's telling you what you should focus on to do well, especially if you're starting out.