The age of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has been around for more than a decade, but since 2010 it has really taken off with many larger companies buying out smaller ones, especially in recent times.

So when did it all begin?
It all began in the 1990s when the term “digital marketing” was first used, but since 2010 it has developed at such a pace that it now accounts for $7.5 billion of the money spent in the US on advertisements and this amount is set to rise in 2014.

What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a form of advertising, but it does not use traditional advertising avenues. Instead, it uses the new age of advertising which includes smartphones, tablets, PCs game consoles and laptops. It can be delivered in a variety of different ways to each device more on which we will discuss below.

Digital marketing does not mean the end of traditional marketing as there will always be a place for it, but as more and more companies and organisation scrutinize their ROI (return on investment) we can be sure that digital marketing is here to stay for the long haul.

Alternative names for Digital Marketing
The UK has adopted the name “digital marketing” while the US – the biggest marketing market in the world, has stuck with its traditional name which is either “online marketing” or “internet marketing” which makes science. So why has the UK adopted a different name, no one knows for sure.

Are there different types of digital marketing?
There are 2 main types of digital marketing online which are
Pull – where the user actively seeks information on the web. That can be considered one of the reasons why so many webmasters are involved in SEO to try and gain maximum exposure for their websites thus giving them more traffic. Other forms of pull include e-mails which we have all received in the past, or video which is one of the main reasons YouTube started to allow advertisements on the videos you upload. We all use text messages with the development and technology of the smart phones which is also another form of pull advertising.

The other type of digital marketing is known as push marketing.
This involves the user seeing advertisements on blogs or websites that they didn’t request to see and also includes text messages and e-mails.
The user may not always have requested a text message or e-mail, known as spam and unfortunately wildly used in digital marketing today with the pay day loan companies and claims companies being held responsible for lots of this in recent years.

Other areas where digital marketing has become very popular is social media sites like Facebook as the marketing company know they are going to get in front of millions of people with their digital advert depending on their budget.

In the last year we have also seen re-targeting become very popular online due to the enhancements of technology which hopefully will see the marketing return a better ROI than before which in turn will simply make digital marketing even greater moving forward.

So how can social platforms help?
If we take Facebook as the prime example we can see they have over 1 billion users already and growing, also there are so many groups in Facebook the user can join related to their hobby, interest or for some other reason, which makes marketing so much easier to these people with the technology Facebook has provided its user for advertising with.

Imagine you want to advertise Harley Davidson Motorbikes for sale in London UK. Firstly you could narrow down the people that see your advert to London only or London and surrounding vicinity then you could narrow it down to male users, after that specify the age of the user you want to target. With Harley, typically being from 35-55 years old. Then run your advert for 7 days either on impression basis or CPC basis whichever you prefer.

This gets your advert in front of a targeted audience and hopefully a better ROI. The other big advantage of this type of advertising is that you can see who has viewed your advert, how many clicks you have had to your website or landing page and you can make corrections to the advert within minutes – something that is not possible with traditional marketing.

It has also been suggested that having an image with eyes looking at you from the advert gets a better response but there is no exact data for this yet.

If your advert is not performing you can take it down with ease and save your advertising budget for another form of digital marketing or tweak your advert and run another alongside it then split test them to see which advert type performs the best for you.

What is retargeting?
Re-targeting is relatively new but more and more companies are using it as it has a good ROI compared to some other forms of advertising and is why more and more companies are catching onto it and using agencies or platforms to re-target their audience.

How it works in its simplest form is you can use a platform such as adroll to set up your account and add a few adverts to your account that you can get made on fiverr or someone else to make for you then you will get a small piece of code to enter into your website header and that is it. The software and technology from the platform will do the rest. Basically what will happen is once a visitor comes to your website then leaves and visits another website they will be shown one of the adverts you have uploaded to your platform which would continue to remind them of your website.

These adverts can include discounts or other incentives so the user will return to your website and complete the call to action instead of you losing out to your competitors.

This is a basic overview of digital marketing and we will be looking at its other aspects in the future so be sure to subscribe to our newsletter or visit Infintech Designs to find out more.