Digital Marketing - Introduction
Today’s era of Internet has opened a gate of vast variety of opportunities for businesses. Using social networks, one cannot only share a private picture of one’s birthday but also earn customers for one’s business and reach them conveniently. The speed and ease with which the digital media transmits information and help boost a business is amazing.
Let us first throw some light on the scope of digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is the term used for the targeted, measurable, and interactive marketing of products or services using digital technologies to reach the viewers, turn them into customers, and retain them.
So, how is digital marketing different from traditional marketing?
The traditional manner of marketing involved businesses to advertise their products or services on print media, radio and television commercials, business cards, bill boards, and in many other similar ways where Internet or social media websites were not employed for advertising. Traditional marketing policies had limited customer reachability and scope of driving customers’ buying behavior.
Digital marketing achieves targets of marketing a business through different online channels. Let us see how.
The following table lists a few points that differentiate digital marketing from traditional marketing −
| Traditional Marketing |
Digital Marketing |
| Communication is unidirectional. Means, a business communicates about its products or services with a group of people. |
Communication is bidirectional. The customer also can ask queries or make suggestions about the business products and services. |
| Medium of communication is generally phone calls, letters, and Emails. |
Medium of communication is mostly through social media websites, chat, and Email. |
| Campaigning takes more time for designing, preparing, and launching. |
There is always a fast way to develop an online campaign and carry out changes along its development. With digital tools, campaigning is easier. |
| It is carried out for a specific audience throughout from generating campaign ideas up to selling a product or a service. |
The content is available for general public. It is then made to reach the specific audience by employing search engine techniques. |
| It is conventional way of marketing; best for reaching local audience. |
It is best for reaching global audience. |
| It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. |
It is easier to measure the effectiveness of a campaign through analytics. |
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is the manner of generating website traffic or attracting viewers and customers through social networking websites such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. Social media marketing is a subset of digital marketing.
All social networking websites support sharing of content, but all are not necessarily employed for digital marketing. While Facebook emphasizes on personal sharing, Twitter emphasizes on tweeting short messages about ones’ opinions or reactions, and LinkedIn goes for professional networking, Pinterest motivates to market one’s ideas and online businesses.
Principle of Social Media Marketing
Social media grew up as the most popular outcome of the Internet as people around the world like to communicate and share their special moments, problems, ideas, and suggestions with others. They also like to learn about a place worth visiting, a new craft projects, recipes, or a new language. Social media websites enable you to share content of your choice with right audience at your convenience.
This popularity of social media has inspired the business minds around the world with the idea of small online businesses. One can open a store in Amazon, eBay, or any other custom platforms such as Shopify or Etsy. But the main challenge is finding the customers. There are ways like search results in Google, Bing or in any other search engine. But for a new business with established competitors, it takes a long time to get a high rank in the search results.
Social networking websites are a great solution to this challenge. The basic technique here is to share engaging posts and the right content created for the desired audience. Then the audience helps by sharing the content further, which in turn reaches further. Hence there is another option of advertising the product, services, or ideas on the social networking websites where there is less degree of competition.
This tutorial describes how you can employ Pinterest for marketing your business.
