Every day, you hear buzzes out there “digital marketing is the future,” or that “digital marketing can make you a millionaire.” And I know what you think in your mind: “What the heck is digital marketing anyway?” Well, you won’t have this question anymore. Read to this article to end.

What is digital marketing?

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the process of reaching out, engaging, and converting online audiences into paying customers using a variety of digital tools and strategies. Now, we have used number terms we need to explain here. First, what do we mean when we say digital marketing is a 'process'? It is a process because it can be best implemented in a sequence of steps and repeated to keep it working. The steps include creating a digital marketing plan, identifying relevant online audiences, budgeting, implementing the digital marketing plan, and controlling the process by measuring and monitoring results.

Second, we turn to defining online audiences so that you can understand other terms well because we will be using this term all along. Your online audience is the people who either already are your customer or can be your customers and are present online in most of their daily routines. Just like in traditional marketing, online audiences can be segmented based a number of variables such as location, platforms they spend their time on, devices they use too access the internet, their interests, their actions online, and the list goes on. But every marketer will segment their audience the way it suits their goals the most and what they want to do with their audiences.

Third term we need to explain is ‘reaching out.’ Reaching out means identifying where (on which online platform such as Facebook, YouTube, or any other website or blog) your audience is on the internet and saying your first Hello to them. This might be in the form of a search ad when the potential customers look for a specific product or service in a search engine such as Google, a blog article answering a question your potential customer is pondering on, or a Facebook ad shown to them because they match the criteria you have set for who can be your potential customer. Note that these are just a few ways digital marketers reach out to their potential customers; in reality, the list goes on.

Fourth, engaging an audience online means showing them the content (text, videos, images, sounds) they enjoy. For example, a digital marketer trying to engage an audience such as pet lovers will share funny videos of cats on their website, YouTube channel or Facebook page. People will watch the video enthusiastically, react to it, comment on it, and share it if they like it so much. All these actions count as engagement. In a broader sense, all the time spent by customers doing any actions on your platforms (website, or social media pages) is engagement. Because today’s customers are bombarded with messages from millions of platforms and companies trying to get their attention, engaging online audience is the real deal.

Finally, what is conversion? Conversion can be defined in different ways depending on what matters the most to the marketer. Generally, conversion is the successful completion of action by the customer that the digital marketer considers really important. For example, when a customer completes a purchase, or signs up for newsletter. Conversion rate is the number of customers completing the target action divided by the total number of people who see the message or call to complete the action. Conversion rate will vary depending on how the marketer defines the conversion, what business they do, and how valuable each conversion is.

So to sum up, digital marketing is similar to traditional marketing in the sense that it is the process of finding customers for the product, digging deep into their needs, engaging them in different ways and them getting them to perform certain actions (buy a product and buy again). But certain aspects differ greatly in digital marketing because it is really different where (on the web as opposed to on the road or in the mall), how (by clicking on a digital ad as opposed to by looking at the billboard on the roadside) the advertisers interact with the audience.

Just before you go, bring your ear closer to me I want to tell you something. "This is just a brief introduction or definition of what digital marketing is, for details such as what activities and channels it includes, and what are some best digital marketing strategies, keep coming to our website. We will keep teaching you interesting stuff. And yes, we love it when you leave a comment."