What is digital marketing or online marketing?

Digital marketing (or online marketing) encompasses all those advertising or commercial actions and strategies that are executed in the internet media and channels. This phenomenon has been applied since the 90s as a way of transferring offline marketing techniques to the digital universe.

Parallel to the tremendous development and evolution of digital technology, online marketing has been experiencing, progressively and very quickly, profound changes, both in the techniques and tools used (and in their complexity) and in the possibilities it offers to recipients. . Let's see how.

How online marketing was born: from web 1.0 to web 2.0

In its beginnings, online marketing was based on web pages 1.0 and came to be a translation of advertising from traditional media (television, radio, paper media ...) to the first web pages, which did not allow a bidirectionality in communication with users. The advertising companies totally controlled the message and limited themselves to exposing it to the audience.

In addition, the advertising of the web 1.0 stage was limited, in most cases, to reproduce a showcase of products or services in the form of an online catalog . Even so, this type of advertising already pointed out interesting virtues , such as the potentially universal scope, the possibility of updating the contents and the combination of texts, images and, little by little, also multimedia formats.

But, in a few years, the revolution arrived . A frenzy of technological development allowed the massive introduction of a higher level internet. Web 2.0 was born and, with it, marketing 2.0 (as current digital or online marketing is also known). And what a change!

From that moment, it began to be possible for all users to share information easily thanks to social networks, forums or platforms, allowing the almost instantaneous exchange of pieces that were previously impossible, such as photos and video.

The Internet became much more than a means of searching for information and it became a great community . Currently, the network is only understood as a means of exchanging information in two directions . Feedback is, therefore, total and fundamental between brands and users, with the pros and cons that this entails.

The tools of digital marketing

Digital marketing offers us a series of tools of great diversity, from which can be carried out from small actions at practically zero cost to complex strategies (and, obviously, more expensive) in which to combine an infinity of techniques and resources. These are the main ones:

1. SEO
2. SEM
3. Content marketing
4. Social media marketing
5. Display Marketing
6. Affiliate Marketing
7. Email marketing

1. SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is Online marketing. Search engines are search engines that index web pages so that we can find what we are looking for. The best known and most used search engine is Google, but it is not the only one. Google's big competitors worldwide are Yandex (Russia) and Baidu (China).

SEO allows us to know the logic behind these search engines and to be able to put the pages of our website in the first results to get organic visits. SEO is time-consuming and labor-intensive, but the results come with a lower long-term investment. By depending on the algorithms of search engines and the good practices that we apply on our website, the control we have over SEO is much lower when compared to other channels.

2. SEM

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) commonly refers to advertisements that appear within search engines. The main differences with SEO are that, as they are paid ads, the chances of segmentation are very high, the control we have over SEM is much higher and the results are immediate. 

3. Content marketing

The content marketing is a digital marketing strategy based on creating content to attract the target audience. Typically this content is in the form of blog articles, ebooks, infographics, or videos. Like SEO, it is also a long-term strategy with little control over the audience. 

4. Social media marketing

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with the audience with 3 objectives:

• improve branding
• increase leads
• get sales

In part, social media marketing is like content marketing: it must capture the attention of our target audience in the medium or long term . But, on the other hand, you can also have the support of Social Ads , which are ads on Social Media platforms, with Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads or Youtube Ads as the most popular platforms.

5. Display marketing

Display marketing is a type of online advertising that is characterized by the well-known banners . Surely you have seen many of these ads in one of their various forms: text, image, video, audio or even game. They stand out for their high creative flexibility.

6. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy in which the affiliate takes advantage of their website traffic to promote a company's product.

7. Email marketing

As we already know, email marketing is the marketing strategy that is based on taking advantage of a company's database to send communications. Despite being a highly exploited strategy, following good habits, it is still one of the most effective and with the best return. 

The advantages of digital marketing or online marketing:

Digital marketing is an essential strategy for brands due to the great opportunity for growth, positioning and sales or customer acquisition that they represent .

Potential customers, or at least the vast majority, are constantly connected to the internet from their computer and, in recent years, also through their mobile phones or tablets.

This context has led to a wide range of advantages of digital marketing, among which are:

• Affordable costs. Online marketing is affordable in terms of budget, especially when compared to traditional marketing channels such as television, radio or the press. 

• Greater capacity to control, optimize and correct campaigns due to the collection and possibility of consulting in real time the results obtained, in addition, in an exact manner. 

• Great flexibility and dynamism . With the possibility of carrying out tests and changes on the fly based on the results obtained and the behavior of the users regarding a campaign.

• It allows a very specific, personalized and precise segmentation. In an online marketing campaign, the company can segment its campaigns taking into account the sociodemographic and psychological data of the users, as well as their behavior on the Internet. 

• It allows an exact measurement of the campaign. Results obtained, benefits, return on investment (ROI), etc.