Digital Marketing - What Is It?

[Micheal Jorden]

Digital marketing can also be called internet marketing or online marketing and it's about identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements in the digital sphere while achieving your company goals.

It encompasses a wide variety of online channels including pay per click advertising, internet search engine optimisation, social media marketing marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing and many more.

Additionally, it involves tracking, measuring, monitoring and managing online campaigns to generally meet business goals, while satisfying target markets needs and wants. So, all activities focus on goals and objectives and customers are at the heart of most operations.

For true success with digital marketing, it's important to create a marketing plan or strategy that helps guide your activities and this is what you need to include inside:

Marketing Analysis

An analysis is a health and wealth check of your company to assess how well you are performing on digital channels. It can help you to review your company to see what you lack and what you need to accomplish to reach your mission.

An analysis also involves researching your competitors to discover who they're and how well resourced they are. Competitors come from all directions and include international businesses that are selling to the local target market and you can't ignore them.

Your analysis will even look at your target customers to discover who they're and what they require or want. You'll identify their demographics and assess if you have the ability to meet their requirements whether they're consumers or business customers.

Marketing Objectives

From your marketing analysis, you can have a success of information that will allow you to to craft your marketing objectives. Remember, your objectives are short-term and they must be in line with your mission and goals.

They should be specific audit marketing, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-related and you need to take into account your company resources as you create them.

Your objectives will guide your strategy so it's important that you take a moment creating them and ensure that they are important to your business.

Target Marketing

In your marketing analysis, you can have identified customer segments that you want to target along with your products or services. Now you should identify which segments to a target based in your objectives and the resources that the business has.

This really is one of the most difficult parts of your digital marketing plan and it's important that you pick only the segments which is profitable. So you need to avoid targeting all segments because that will likely dilute your efforts and exhaust your budget for little in return.

Marketing Strategy

The marketing strategy is the majority of your digital marketing plan and covers your marketing mix elements such as for instance product, price, place, promotion, people, process and physical evidence. So they are all of the marketing tactics that you've to implement to reach your objectives

Much of what you include here will came from the research that you carried out in your audit and analysis.

Budgets and Controls

Lastly, you need to set a budget that's sufficient enough to implement your marketing tactics. When you yourself have a tiny budget, you need to only include those tasks that are most critical to your success.

Control is about identifying contingencies and deciding how to proceed when things make a mistake, as they generally do. So you need to regularly check and review progress and ensure that you are on the way to achieving your objectives.

Mike Ncube is a Digital Marketing Consultant and Marketing Author and his latest book is "The DIY Guide to Online Marketing Success" ;.He blogs regularly about the most recent digital marketing trends and he has published books, case studies & whitepapers that will allow you to along with your campaigns.