What Is Digital Marketing, Basic Understandings Of Digital Marketing?

Arko Halder
8 min readAug 19, 2021

Nowadays marketing is not like what it is before a decade ago, it is changed now and after the arrival of COVID-19, marketing has changed even more. Marketing has evolved.

Print ads, Radio ads, Television ads sound cool but these are nowadays not much more effective. Yes, indeed, we can’t ignore traditional marketing totally, but if you want to succeed in today’s time in your business then you should have to know about digital marketing and you should use digital marketing. That’s why successful businesses rely on digital marketing.

So I’m here to tell you what is digital marketing?

Why Digital Marketing Is Important Nowadays?

Benefits Of Doing Digital Marketing

Types of digital marketing

Free Resources With Certificates To Learn Digital Marketing

1. What Is Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the act of selling products and services through digital channels such as social media, SEO, email, and mobile apps, and many more.

So that’s the formal definition,

But honestly, Digital marketing is just marketing, marketing that involves the internet or electronic devices.

So it is very important to understand marketing first, and the very important thing in marketing is to make the right offer, to the right person and at the right time.

2. Why Digital Marketing Is Important Nowadays???

Whenever a company (either big or small) launch their product or service, then they do marketing to make the product or service reach a lot of people, and as I said earlier that marketing is to make the right offer, to the right person and at the right time.

So, in today’s era, if you want to connect with your customers then you have to do marketing there where your customers spend their most of the time, and there is no doubt that today’s people hangout most of their time on social media, news sites, blog posts and in many different sites of the internet.

So, why you should do digital marketing?

why it is so much important nowadays to grow your business?

So if you notice carefully then you can see that Google and Facebook generate more revenue than any traditional media company because they control more eyeballs, they grab more attention, and that’s why digital marketing is important.

Everything is becoming digital day by day. People are watching Youtube instead of T.V., using various apps instead of radio, and reading online blogs instead of newspapers, and this is the only reason why almost every companies doing digital marketing nowadays.

In today’s era digital marketing matters.

3. Benefits Of Doing Digital Marketing

Some of the digital marketing benefits are as follows:-

i) Digital Marketing Is Cost-Effective

Marketing and advertising are some of the biggest financial problems that every type of business faces. Still, big businesses may not have that much problem spending huge amounts of money on ads and marketing but what about small businesses? They can’t afford that much.

You would be surprised to know that in traditional marketing a 30 seconds T.V. video Ad is cost up to approx more than lacs (in local T.V. channels).

But digital marketing makes it easy for small businesses to market their products, as it is very cost-effective. Marketers even don’t think of digital marketing as an alternative to ‘traditional marketing’ because it gives better results and conversions.

ii) Digital Marketing Is Measurable

So in digital marketing, you can able to measure every single thing.

Let’s understand this point with the help of an example

If you put an ad on T.V. for your product then you can’t able to measure things like how many persons watch your ad, who are interested in your ads.

But if you run your ad digitally (digital marketing) then you can able to see that how many persons saw your ad, how many of them are interested, who visited your website, how many likes and shares you got on your posts, from which region (place) you got more response and many more things like this.

This means you can track each and everything from digital marketing.

iii) High Return On Investments

As we all know that how much return on investments matters in a business. Digital marketing offers you a good return on small investments. You don’t need to invest huge amounts like in traditional marketing. You can invest as much as you want and can get a good return on investment.

iv) Global Reach

One of the most important benefits of digital marketing is that if your business is of small scale even then you can able to reach globally, you can able to sale your product/service globally. You can easily expand your business with the help of digital marketing.

v) Personalized

If any user visits your website and subscribes to your blog or buys something then you get some of their details like their name, e-mail address, mobile number, etc.

By using these data you can message them personalized or e-mail them. You can make them feel special by connecting with them personalized. This will help to increase their trust in your brand and you can easily build your brand.

4. Types Of Digital Marketing

i) SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

ii) PPC (Pay Per Click)

iii) SMM (Social Media Marketing)

iv) Content Marketing

v) Email Marketing

vi) Affiliate Marketing

The above points are some of the types of digital marketing, apart from these there are some more, but these are some of the main types. I’ll explain the above types in very brief with simplicity, because as in the initial stage itself, if you want to understand the types very deeply, then you will not be able to understand anything very well.

So it is important to know the basics first that what it means and after that, you can dive deeper into the types that how they work or how to apply them.

i) SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

I think you must have done it yourself many times that after searching anything in Google (Search Engine) you don’t go to the 2nd or 3rd page of results.

You mostly try to gather all the information you want on the first page of the results, right?

So your website/page must rank on the first page in search results. The better visibility of your page or website has in the search results, the more likely you can attract the audience to your business or website.

So the process to rank a website or blog to the top of the search results is called SEO.

ii) PPC (Pay Per Click)

This is online advertising in which an advertiser pays the publisher every time an advertisement link is clicked by a user that’s why it’s called ‘Pay Per Click’

Whenever a user clicked on an advertisement link then only the advertiser has to pay the publisher.

iii) SMM (Social Media Marketing)

In today’s time, most of the peoples are hangout on social media. So marketers take advantage of it, they see it as an opportunity for them. They take help from social media to market their products.

Whenever you use social media platforms to promote your product or service, this is called social media marketing.

I think you generally saw that many companies use social media to promote or market their product or service. e.g. Swiggy, Zomato, and many more.

iv) Content Marketing

The definition of content marketing is that it is a strategic marketing approach, focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract the audience.

Content marketing is not about marketing or promote a product or service, but it is about making aware the customers towards the product or service, educate them, inform them with relevant & valuable content (providing knowledge to them).

This means at the very first stage companies don’t start to promote their product or service, first, they provide knowledge to the audiences, make them aware of their product or service, instills trust inside their minds through content marketing.

Content can be in many forms like it can be in the form of video, e-book, infographic, email, podcast, photo, blog, etc.

This blog is also the kind of content that you are reading now.

v) Email Marketing

Email marketing means promoting your products or services to your potential customers or current customers using email.

By email marketing, you can aware customers about new products and services, new offers, etc. It can excite the customers about the product and make their mind goes towards buying.

Through the help of email marketing, a good personal connection can be built between customer and brand. It makes feel special to customers.

Many peoples think nowadays that email marketing is not effective anymore, but it is not true. Email marketing is still much more effective and powerful for both B2B and B2C marketing. You can’t underestimate it.

vi) Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a process of earning commission every time you promote and drive sales of a product or service of a particular company.

This means whenever you promote and drive sales of a particular company’s product or service then in return that company gives you some percent of commission. Although the commission may depend on the type of product, it can also depend on the price of the product.

Affiliate marketing is also a very good source of income. Nowadays many people do affiliate marketing and generate a handsome amount of income.

So, these are some of the types of digital marketing. These were the basic understandings of the types.

5. Free Resources With Certificates To Learn Digital Marketing

So now I am gonna tell you some resources where you can learn digital marketing free of cost.

Now let me tell you that going for free courses is not like they are not worth it. If you have dedication and will to learn something then you definitely learn or achieve something about it.

So the links are as follows:-

i. https://academy.hubspot.com/?&hs_chatflow=BOT118_VarA

ii. https://www.semrush.com/academy/

iii. https://www.coursera.org/in (You won’t get a certification, for certification you have to pay them. Otherwise the courses are free.)

iv. https://skillshop.withgoogle.com/

v. https://www.emarketinginstitute.org/

vi. https://copyblogger.com/

These are some resources where you can start learning digital marketing without spending a single penny. Go and check them and start gaining new knowledge and skill.

BEST OF LUCK :)

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