What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a term that has been around for quite awhile but hasn’t been very well defined, encompassing things like banner advertising, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click. Yet, this is too narrow of a definition. What about email, RSS, voice broadcast, fax broadcast, blogging, podcasting, video streams, wireless text messaging, and instant messaging? You get the idea.
To clearly define what digital marketing is let’s talk about what it is not. For starters, it does not include more traditional forms of marketing such as radio, TV, billboard and print because they do not offer instant feedback and report. Sure, some people may respond to a call to action from an advertisement in one of these mediums but there is no way to know the exact number of people who saw or heard it. Such data is collected (and still then just educated guesses) long after the initial ad impression is made. Yes, convergence has made television at bit more interactive, with devices such as TiVo able to record viewer statistics like those for Web sites, but there is still a long way to go. With digital marketing, however, we’re already there.
At its heart, digital marketing centers around the Internet, which has become both a communication vehicle and a very powerful marketing medium as the recent Doubleclick acquisition by Google demonstrated. The Internet can be used both to push a message to someone like email, IM, RSS, or voice broadcast, as well to “pull” content serving a banner ad and Pay Per Click search terms. Digital marketing, therefore, can be thought of as the combination of push and pull Internet technologies to execute marketing campaigns.
Because it is digital, a reporting engine can be layered within a campaign allowing the organization see in real-time how that campaign is performing, such as what is being viewed, how often, how long, as well as other actions such as responses rates and purchases made. Please note that each digital marketing technology is different and they cannot all provide the same types of reports. Also, digital marketing is constantly evolving and new technologies are being created all of the time.
To help promote this new concept of digital marketing, we recently updated the Wikipedia entry for the term and did our best to not only define digital marketing but to explain what it is as well as the players in this space. In the true collaborative spirit of Wikipedia, we invite you to add your own thoughts and ideas, as we too are still adding and editing. Currently our definition is:
Digital Marketing is the pratice of promoting products and services using database-driven online distribution channels to reach consumers in a timely, relevant, personal and cost-effective manner.
Broadband Internet, WiFi and phone Web access are also spurring growth worldwide. A recent report showed that Web usage increased 10% from last January to this January globally. Not surprisingly, billions of marketing dollars spent on traditional channels is already starting to shift to digital marketing campaigns and this will continue to increase as the Web matures. As a marketer, I am very excited about the future and what digital marketing will look like in the years ahead. I mean, we just got to Web 2.0 so who knows what will be coming next? If you haven’t already started, you need to build a database of customers or potential customers and find out how they wish to be reached. You can do this through the digital marketing technologies I’ve mentioned in this article and then use these systems to market your products and services. Make sure you are ready to take full advantage of digital marketing and watch your revenues soar.
Jared Reitzin
CEO
mobileStorm Inc.
Start Small Business Blog
hi Jared. I’ve re-edited the wikipedia article from your amendment, to try and make it fit in more with what I originally wanted to start (as a discussion) when I first created the entry.
For me, the main thing that I’d disagree with in your amendment is the use of the word “online” in the initial description. This word itself sets digital marketing too much in line with Internet marketing, of which there is now a lengthy ongoing discussion on wikipedia.
Digital marketing, IMHO, goes beyond Internet or online marketing, certainly for now, because it includes devices and channels which do not involve The Internet or World Wide Web – such as mobile phones.
This fact alone means it needs to be broader than Internet or Online and why it needs to have it’s own category. I think some people on wikipedia have it wrong – they want to roll digital marketing into internet marketing, but I think for me it’s almost easier to do it the other way around.
I’d like to add that this probably won’t always be the case, as IP networks will begin to seep into all these digital channels and replace the proprietary ones so that every does get distributed or accessed via the internet, but whilst we remain disconnected at times this definition needs to remain in place.
Thanks for helping with the article, much appreciated and, as you point out that’s all part of the collaborative spirit.
Howard. Good point about the online mention. You are right in that digital marketing does extend beyond connections to the Internet, especially re: mobile marketing. We’re also on the same page that digital marketing definitely isn’t a portion of Internet marketing but rather an entirely difference concept altogether.
Truth be told, the whole philosophy around digital marketing changes on a seemingly daily basis so I’m glad to see that there are others out there like us to try to nail down what it all means.
Hello Jared
Your article helped clarify my concept of ‘Digital marketing’.
One question which arise at this moment is,
does Digital marketing operate on the same methodologies as traditional marketing?
Thanks.
Bithika –
Glad you found the article useful. Not quite sure what you mean in terms of the difference in methodologies between digital and traditional marketing. Can you be a bit more specific so we can answer the question? In general, though, digital marketing certainly adheres to some general principles, such as determining your audience, giving them a Call to Action, and adjusting your message based on initial response/feedback.
The main difference is that, unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing gives you almost instant analysis and many more tools to personally monitor your campaign’s effectiveness. Again, if you can provide a bit more information as to what you are seeking, we will be able to better answer your queries.
This is a useful summary of the scope of digital marketing.
I would agree with the importance of blending push and pull communications, particularly when you cover customer acquisition, conversion and retention separately.
It’s definitely more than SEO as many seem to think and now we have social media as well.
Dr Dave Chaffey
Author: Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implmentation and Practice
[...] What Is Digital Marketing: In which we welcome newbies to the [...]
Hi all – great article and interesting comments. Howard, I would love to know more about what you said: “IP networks will begin to seep into all these digital channels and replace the proprietary ones so that every [one] does get distributed or accessed via the internet”
Other channels that seem to fall into digital marketing so far are telecommunications (cell/mobile phones and voice broadcasting) and digital billboards. It sounds like what you see happening in the future with these is the Internet replacing telecommunications and even computer network infrastructures so that all these channels, as you wrote, are fed by the Internet.
I wonder what this means for a sparsely populated and spread out country like Australia. Some of our more remote communities won’t be getting the upgrade to the broadband internet infrastructure that the rest of the country is getting. So if you’re sick of being bombarded by digital marketing, I suppose you’ll just have to move out to a country town somewhere!
But mobile phones are now part of the Internet and eventually we will be accessing the Internet maybe as much 50% of the time on our portable devices.