What Is Digital Marketing?

Do you want to learn digital marketing?

Well, before we get into the basics of digital marketing and even the advanced tactics, let’s first look at what digital marketing is.

This way we are on the same page before diving into strategies step by step.

What is Digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the sale of products and services through channels such as social media, SEO, email and mobile apps. Basically, digital marketing is any form of marketing that involves electronic devices.

It can be done online and offline, and in fact both types are important for a well-rounded digital marketing strategy.

Why Digital Marketing is Important Do you remember billboards? I do.

As a small child in California, my experiences in the backseat of our car usually alternated between: “Mom, when are we there?” and “Uh, look, McDonald’s, can we go?” whenever one of those 10-foot billboards showed up on the side of the road.

Growing up with Indian parents, the answer to both would usually be the same: “Not yet.”

Sometimes big brands even started a poster war, like this one between Audi and BMW, which caused some laughs:

In 2015, a ton of my clients were still spending hundreds of millions of dollars on billboard advertising.

Unfortunately or fortunately, poster advertising is usually dead.

Just think of it this way: Google and Facebook generate more revenue than any traditional media company because they control more eyeballs. That’s why digital marketing is important; that’s where the attention lies.

The reason why billboards like the above will die is that the future of driving will look like this:

driverless cars – digital marketing
Although driverless cars already exist, drivers still need to pay attention; in the future, as technology improves, not a single passenger will spend his time looking at the road.

Do me a favor, next time you’re driving and take a friend with you, take a look at the passenger seat.

Just for a second.

Even now, chances are good that you are looking at your phone.

If no one is looking at the street anymore, who is going to see this advertisement?

What’s more, the proportion of people who spend more time with electronic devices continues to increase, while print advertising continues to decline.

That means you don’t have much time to figure out this digital marketing stuff before you can turn off your old school printing press and close the store.

Summary of Digital Online Marketing

The 2 main pillars of digital marketing are online marketing and offline marketing. However, since I’m going to talk about online marketing in a separate guide, for the sake of completeness, I’ll just mention the different areas of online marketing here.

The 7 broad categories of online marketing are:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing (SMM)
• Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC)
• Affiliate marketing
• Email Marketing

Unbounce has created a great infographic that summarizes all types of online marketing in a clear diagram.

The beginner’s guide to online marketing on Quick Sprout is a great way to get started.

The History of digital marketing

Although it first became popular as a term in the early 2000s, digital marketing has actually been around for much longer.

How, much longer. About 100 years longer, to be exact.

Here is a picture of the first digital marketer in history:

gulielmo marconi – the first offline digital marketer
His name: Guglielmo Marconi.

What? Marconi?

Yup. in 1896, he was the first person to demonstrate a “public transmission of wireless signals.”

This guy invented the radio.

Shortly after its small demonstration in England, morse signals were transmitted over open water.

While it would take another 10 years for the radio to reach the general public, it didn’t take the creators long to realize that they could sell stuff with it.

The first live broadcast was from an opera performance at the Met and guess what people did afterwards?

You bought show tickets!

The digital marketing strategy was born.

Introduction to Digital Marketing

There are four broad categories of digital marketing: enhanced offline marketing, radio marketing, television marketing and telephone marketing.

Improved offline marketing is a form of marketing that is completely offline, but is improved using electronic devices.

For example, if your restaurant uses iPads where your customers can create their orders, the offline experience of eating Thai food, for example, will be enhanced with this electronic device.

People have been using digital media for decades to improve their marketing (they just forgot which way, as you will see).

example of improved offline marketing
Next there is radio marketing. The next time you hear an annoying, over-enthusiastic car dealer screaming every word of his commercial, thank Mr. Marconi.

Of course, we must not forget about television marketing. Television advertising has been around for more than half a century (and since 1953 also in color, nationwide; yes, there was a time before color television).

Finally, the largest and fastest growing area of offline marketing, with admittedly also many flops, busts and failures: telephone marketing.

Let’s take a closer look at the four areas.

Enhanced Offline Marketing

What is the difference between a billboard somewhere in the Arizona desert and a billboard in New York’s Times Square?

The size? The product?

3 letters: LED. Diode.

All billboards in Times Square are electronic!

improved offline digital marketing example of LED billboards in Times Square
Why? After all, in the Arizona desert, no one competes with them for people’s attention. If you have a billboard at all, you win.

But in Times Square, attention is probably more valuable than anywhere else in the world. Over 330,000 people pass through it every day.

If you want to be distracted, there are buses, taxis, promoters shouting, and then, of course, the electronic billboards.

Some of them are even interactive and show live feeds of the people in the square or pictures of customers.

Renting a billboard in Times Square for a year will save you a whopping $1,000,000-$4,000,000.

What other forms does improved offline marketing take?

What do you see these days when you go to an Apple Store?

offline digital marketing – apple store
People lean over iPads, Macbooks and iPhones.

If you have any type of electronic product, any product demo is an important part of your digital marketing strategy.

Okay, the next one is a good one. Remembering this, you can consider yourself an extremely happy child:

digital offline marketing demo CD
This is a demo CD for the original PlayStation. Some of these were distributed with other games or sometimes even magazines.

The same goes for PC magazines. Do you remember when they came with CDs (and later DVDs) and you couldn’t wait to throw them in your drive and see what samples were on it?

Slightly different from a demo, these are product samples in digital format.

Radio Marketing

Over 100 years have passed since that original first live broadcast of the opera performance at the Met and guess what: radio is still there.

Nearly 250 million Americans listen to the radio every month
People spend an average of 102 minutes a day listening to radio content
By 2023, spending on radio advertising is expected to increase by half a billion dollars
In recent years, the radio has made a smart move: the hosts read out advertising sponsorships at the beginning of the shows. Here, the presenter of the radio program reads out a script that you or he wrote, which advertises your product.

To create a sponsorship, find your local radio stations with a quick Google search. Find a station whose audience reflects the target audience of your company; radio stations should be able to provide you with the data that will help you choose the right fit.

For example, if your company sells maternity products, you want to find a radio program whose average listener is a woman between the ages of 24 and 40.

If you go the traditional way of radio advertising, it is important to be entertaining and attract the attention of the listener.

Cadillac and Dairy Queen are two brands that consistently come up with solid radio spots.

Here you can listen to some examples.

TV Marketing

TV marketing is such a goliath, it will probably never go away. It is also simply the industry where the most money is burned every year.

Some Quick Facts about TV Marketing:

the average American still watches 4 hours of TV a day, but that includes shows that are streamed
only 2/3 of people still subscribe to cable
78% of people have a subscription to several streaming services
Although it is more difficult for cable television advertising to target the right audience, has a low ROI compared to other forms of digital advertising, and generally seems irrelevant in the digital age, there is one type of television advertising that is still worthwhile. but it will cost you.

Do you remember that I mentioned that renting a billboard in Times Square for a year costs a million or more?

A 60-second commercial broadcast during the Super Bowl will cost $ 5.6 million.

Thanks to their cross-pollinating effect, the often viral and memorable commercials are still paying off.

About 10% of all TV commercials on social media come from Super Bowl ads. For example, about 8% of all views on YouTube go to TV advertising videos.

If your commercial makes it to the blacklist (commercials that the network decides can not be shown on TV), the viral effect is usually even stronger, like the notorious Carl’s Junior commercial, which could not be shown in the 2015 Superbowl.

In addition, these commercials become online assets that generate millions of YouTube views over time.

Unfortunately, the hype of the Super Bowl commercials is probably more of a leftover from a period of success that will soon fade.

The $ 200 billion that companies around the world still spend annually on television advertising is hardly justifiable, since every 10th person in the United States has a Netflix account, and there will be even more.

Television, as we know it, will die, giving way to the more tailored experiences to which we have already become accustomed.

So if you are planning to do offline digital marketing, I would suggest that you spend your time and money focusing on a marketing platform or channel of the future.

Telephone marketing

Nearly 75% of Americans own a smartphone, and in 2014 we passed the tipping point where more people access the Internet from their phone than from a desktop PC or laptop.

Mobile marketing is here, and in 2015, the amount spent on mobile ads first exceeded the amount spent on desktop ads.

Let’s look at some offline ways to market your products using telephone marketing.

There are 2 apps that are greatly underestimated, but they are on every phone, smart or not:

Call and text

Cold calling is the act of calling a person without prior contact and trying to sell you something.

While at about 3 sales per day (marketers call an average of 52 people per day, with about 17 calls until they find a buyer), it doesn’t have the scalability of social media or email, it’s still a valid approach to marketing.

The tactic works, but does not scale very well when selling to end customers (B2C) and contacting them before trying to sell helps to close the deal (especially in B2B, which is all about connections).

What works better is marketing via SMS, an “app” that is also available on every single phone.

Online or offline, a text message is almost a guaranteed read.

While you should definitely get permission first, for example in the form that your customers send a certain word to a phone number, there are several providers that offer text marketing on a large scale.

There are several ways to use SMS marketing.

digital offline marketing – use of text messages
Special offers, coupons and discounts are a great way for restaurants to attract additional customers and turn walk-ins into regulars.

More examples of successful restaurant SMS campaigns can be found here.

Using text reminders as customer service can also improve your mobile marketing, as many pharmacies do. You notify customers when your prescription is ready for collection.

Another option is to create a loyalty program in which you will send special offers and freebies to participating customers.

Conclusion on digital marketing

That’s the scoop on digital marketing. As you can see, the Internet is far from the only place where marketers can succeed even today.

Of course, no one can afford to miss the opportunities of the Internet, and after all, every marketer needs to master online marketing.

Using some of these offline marketing tactics can help you, in the meantime, not put all your eggs in one basket and diversify your lead generation beyond social media, content marketing and the like.

In addition, offline and online worlds collide. Traditional appliances such as refrigerators, stoves and even billboards are being modernized to take advantage of digital media.

Although our agency does not specialize in offline marketing, we can help you if you need help growing or building your digital online marketing strategy! Reach us to find out more.