What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a discipline that has been growing intensely in every sense over the last two decades. But what is digital marketing actually covering and why is it one of our focus areas? Well, there is no exact definition of digital marketing, it is a broad concept that means different things to different people; it can basically refer to any marketing efforts in the digital space.

While digital marketing is often just one element in a broader marketing strategy, the digital part of marketing is increasingly dominating. No wonder, as more than 80 percent of all purchases of services or goods start online according to studies. Tools and platforms available for digital marketeers are constantly proliferated and improved to target, interact and measure in even more sophisticated ways. This presents great challenges and even greater opportunities for the companies and their marketing departments that need to seize new opportunities faster than their competitors to keep or improve their market position.

Advanced digital marketing tools

This also leads us to answer the second part of the questions; why we as an agency for independent consultants focus on Digital Marketing:

Since digital marketing is covering a variety of specific disciplines that each require solid technological knowledge and hands-on experience to truly excel, it makes good sense to hire digital marketing experts for each specific area. Meanwhile, few companies will have the need and budget to hire a niche expert as a permanent employee, and the solution for getting flexibility, variable cost and high expertise can be found in the freelance consultant market.

The purposes of digital marketing are essentially the same as with traditional marketing, but the tools and speed of change are significantly different. This short video gives a good overview of the complexity of the digital marketing field, the advantages and the challenges:

Omnichannel – creating a seamless customer-experience

As we have just seen, digital marketing also makes it possible to create and track customer journeys to an extent that was never seen before. This has also resulted in the concept of omnichannel, which is relevant e.g. when you want to target a potential customer at every relevant stage of a buying process through whatever channel necessary. Omni-channel is often used in the sense of taking multi-channel to the next level and make the customer experience truly seamless.

Remarketing – never lose the customer out of sight

Omni-channel leads us to the related concept of retarketing which will be an important element of any omni-channel strategy. Retarketing is when a potential client, who has already shown interest in your products or services by visiting your website, is targeted with customized ads to try to make him or her finish the buying/conversion process on your site:

Marketing Automation

While Omni-channel is very often used in a retail B2C context, and remarketing has a main focus on online ads, marketing automation is an umbrella term that covers both of these and more. Marketing automation makes it possible to create personalised customer flows to convert e.g. web visitors into leads and eventually clients. Integration with CRM systems and seamless handover of qualified leads to the sales department makes marketing automation ideal also for B2B companies. Marketo, one of the leading marketing automation platforms, explains the value and functionality of marketing automation here:

SEO, SEM and SEA

Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and the related sub-fields of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Advertisement (SEA) could make an entire session of its own. But at the same time these concepts are also core in digital marketing and heavily overlapping with the other concepts in this “What is digital marketing” session. Since the majority of major purchases – whether online or offline – start on Google, the visibility in the search engines will also be a central element in most digital marketing strategies (other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo! or, in China, Baidu, are also relevant here, but looking at the statistics, Google is dominating with a market share of 75 percent).

While search engine marketing covers the entire discipline of being visible and correctly referenced in the search engines, SEO is about achieving this organically, while SEA is about buying advertisement space, e.g. Google Adwords, to be visible for the right potential customers:

Google Ads – pay-per-click visibility in Google

Talking about SEA, Google Ads is one of the dominating advertisement methods to make use of in search engine advertisement:

Social media marketing

Social media marketing, including the more and more sophisticated advertisement options, could fill another session of its own. In terms of advertisement, the great advantage is obviously that people provide the platform with so many personal details that you can target exactly the group of people of relevance for your product or service.

This video is actually focused on the link building potential of social media but gives a good idea of the many other direct and derived effects of social media activity:

Conversion optimization – turning traffic into sales or preferred actions

Now that we have put a lot of effort in being found by potential customers, we also want to make sure that they actually convert into a client (or whatever objective we have). Therefore, we need to make sure that the landing page, this is the page that this person is sent to through the referencing or ad, makes it easy and appealing for the visitor to buy (or sign up, contact etc.). Neglecting conversion optimization is a waste of the good traffic you earned both organically and through paid marketing efforts. Conversion optimisation requires a good understanding of the broader discipline UX that focuses on creating a great user experience.

Measuring and Analytics

Last but not least, one of the key advantages of digital marketing is that it allows us to track every action, collect data, analyse and compare. From the very basic split-testing and identifying of issues in the user-journey on a website to the more complex modelling of similar audiences and break-down of specific campaign; anything is possible. The most common tool is Google Analytics with a functionality so broad that the largest challenge is to know where to focus and not drown in data. Needless to say, that analysis is a key element in marketing automation and similar.

Let us wrap this What is digital marketing session up with a very general introduction to Google Analytics.

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