What is Digital Marketing or Online Marketing? Discover how to boost your brand with this strategy

Digital Marketing, also known as Digital Marketing, is the set of activities that a company (or person) executes online with the aim of attracting new business, creating relationships, and developing a brand identity. Among its strategies are SEO, Inbound Marketing, and Content Marketing.

The concept of Digital Marketing may seem very clear, but at the same time, it is very subjective.

How to understand a matter that encompasses so much? Does any action on the Internet of my company characterize Digital Marketing? What are the best strategies? How to extract the maximum potential of these actions?

There is no doubt about the usefulness and growth of digital marketing in the coming years, and many people already know it.

And you? Are you ready to know all about this universe?

If your answer is "Yes", we have created this complete content so that you understand exactly what Digital Marketing is, its main benefits, the strategies used, and how your company can take advantage of it. What Is Digital Marketing Strategy

What is digital marketing or online marketing?

Digital Marketing or Online Marketing is the set of strategies aimed at the communication and electronic marketing of products and services.

It is one of the main ways available for companies to communicate with the public directly, personally, and at the right time.

Philip Kotler is considered the father of Marketing, and defines it as "The social process from which people and groups of people satisfy wants and needs with the creation, offer and free negotiation of products and services of value with others".

However, the ways to make that happen change almost daily.

For this reason, it is currently impossible to talk about marketing and ignore the fact that more than half of the world's population has access to the Internet and that by 2021 there will be 2.3 billion digital consumers.

This explains why Digital Marketing is the most prominent way of doing and conceptualizing marketing at the moment.

The term is used to summarize all your marketing efforts in the online environment.

Using digital channels, such as blogs, sites, search engines, social media, emails, and others, companies try to solve the ailments and desires of their customers and potential customers.

Digital Marketing can be carried out by individuals, companies, universities, NGOs, associations, churches, etc. But you must take into account cultural, psychological, geographical, and legal factors that influence people when buying or selling a product or service.

Before continuing our study on Digital Marketing, I must warn you that this is a long article. For this reason, we make this content available for download in PDF. Just fill out the form below:

The great flow of communication that the web provides today favors agile strategies, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Inbound Marketing, and Content Marketing, as we will see in the next points.

When we talk about increasing our network, strengthening our brand, and making better sales, these are all objectives that digital marketing is an important tool to achieve it.

How Online Marketing was born

In the 90's the first version of the Internet emerged, a little different from the one we know today: the so-called  Web 1.0.

The old Internet did not allow users to actively interact with web pages but allowed them to find information in a simple search system.

It was like a library where you went into and found what you wanted, but you couldn't alter the content you found.

In this primitive moment of the Internet the term "Digital Marketing" was created.

However, it was still very similar to traditional marketing, since the communication was unilateral,  made by the company on an institutional site, and the consumer only passively received the content, without close interaction between the two parties.

In 1993, Internet users began to engage more with companies that advertised on the web, as the first clickable ads appeared around this time.

However, it wasn't until the year 2000 that digital marketing became more like what we know today.

The advent of Web 2.0 allowed anyone to become a content producer, making the flow of digital communication more democratic.

Look at the difference between the two:

There is research that points to other changes to the web, even after the revolution of the 2000s. Those changes are now called Web 3.0 and even 4.0, but that is a matter for another day.

The point now is that digital marketing, also known as "Online Marketing", "Internet Marketing" or "Web marketing", has already evolved a lot since its creation.

Today, this is moving more and more towards personalization, that is,  delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

Main concepts of Digital Marketing

Just as each specialization has its specificities, digital marketing is a universe with its own terms. Before we begin, let's elucidate each of those main concepts.

buyer persona

Unlike traditional strategies, Digital Marketing works with the concept of personas, which are semi-fictional profiles, based on your real consumers, and who represent your ideal buyer.

Thus, you manage to create more segmented and directed actions for the right people, saving time and money.

lead

Leads are business opportunities, that is, the contacts that, through an Inbound Marketing strategy, leave their key information so that you can identify potential customers and feed them with relevant content until they are ready to buy.

Sales funnel or Pipeline

This concept represents the stages through which a user passes before becoming a customer of a company, from understanding a problem to purchasing consideration and the final decision.

Customer Journey

Before investing their resources in a product or service offered by a brand, the client completes a whole history of interactions with the company.

The concept that most accurately represents it is that of the "Customer Journey" — customer journey, in the free translation into Spanish — which consists of the set of contacts with the company until becoming one of its official consumers.

If you want to know all the details about the main factors of the Customer Journey, Lupita Pérez — our colleague from the Customer Success team at Rock Content — will tell you about them in the article at the previous link.

landing page

They are lead capture pages, 100% focused on collecting relevant information from users.

The idea is that on the landing pages, you offer valuable content or material and in exchange, the most interested visitors leave their contact information and, with that, become leads.

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the optimization of your site so that it is understood by search engines.

These are actions that contribute to improving the positioning potential of your pages and content, helping you meet the main requirements of search platforms such as Google and Bing.

CTA

The Calls to Action or CTA, are the buttons or calls that lead to action that users must comply with when visiting a page so that they continue in the flow of your sales funnel and arrive at the moment of purchase ready for consumption.

Conversion

Conversion is the term used to represent the process of attracting users to your contact base and moving them to the bottom of the sales funnel.

The goal of conversion optimization is to discover where conversions are not being leveraged correctly within a blog or website. And the best way to do that is to analyze data and run tests that indicate points for improvement.

Segmentation

When we talk about segmentation in Digital Marketing, we are referring to one of the most important and efficient tools available to spread a message to a portion of the audience that has very specific characteristics.

Segmentation allows campaigns to be personalized and provides a focus to impact those potential consumers who resemble the brand.