Digital Marketing: While the term came into popular use during the early 2000s, it has actually been around for quite some time.

Way back in 1896, Gugliemo Marconi demonstrated the use of public transmission of wireless signals. Shortly afterward in England, morse signals began to transmit across open water. And while it took around 10 years for radio to reach the public, the creators realized in less time than they could use it to sell stuff. This led to the birth of the Digital Marketing Strategy.

So, the myth that Digital Marketing has anything and everything to do with the internet is wrong. Digital Marketing is any form of marketing product or service that involves electronic devices. It can be done both online and offline.

Overview of Digital Marketing

The 2 major pillars of Digital Marketing are Online and Offline Marketing. Over here, we will talk about the big categories of online marketing.

Following are the major categories of Digital Marketing:
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
3. Content Marketing
4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
5. Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC)
6. Affiliate Marketing
7. Email Marketing

So, what exactly is Digital Marketing? The term itself is quite wide.

Here are the 4 big categories of Digital Marketing:

Enhanced Offline Marketing:

This type of marketing takes place offline entirely, but in an enhanced manner with electronic devices.
For instance, if a restaurant uses iPads/tablets to take orders for its customers, then the offline experience, i.e. eating is enhanced with this electronic device.

Many people have been using digital media to enhance their marketing for quite some time. Like in Times Square, where all the billboards are electronic. The attention span over there is more than anywhere else in the world with 3,30,000 people crossing it each day. Some are even interactive, that show live feeds of people walking on the square or pictures of customers.

Radio Marketing:

While profits might have shrunk, the radio isn’t dead entirely. It still manages to reach 85% of the population with an average listening time of 2 hrs per listener. Besides creating a good creative radio commercial, internet radio is currently doing a good thing by following the route of podcasts: Advertising before the beginning of shows.

Television (TV) Marketing:

TV or Television marketing is most likely never going to go away as it is one of the industries where investments are done quite heavily. However, ever since Google Video turned into Youtube, the efficiency of TV ads has dropped down drastically.

TV ads are quite unspecific. In today’s world, where search engines, retargeting, social media and email marketing, the consumer is used to being marketed around products it already cares about, ignoring everything that’s not relevant to them.

TV, in the form that we know, is going to die eventually and will make way for a custom-tailored experience. So, if one plans on doing offline digital marketing, one should spend their time and money focusing on a marketing platform or channel of the future.

Phone Marketing:

In today’s age, Smartphones are ruling. Over 80% of internet users use a smartphone from their phone rather than from their laptops/desktop computers.

Mobile Marketing is the future. The amount spent on mobile ads will exceed the amount spent on desktop ads. It is also estimated that in 2020, the amount of money spent on mobile advertising will be equivalent to mobile advertising.

In conclusion, we can say that the internet is slowly emerging as a place for marketers to gather success. No one can afford to miss out on the opportunities offered on the web and eventually, every marketer will have to adopt the process of online/digital marketing.