How Digital Marketing Works

In how digital marketing works we will briefly look at things that digital marketing entails.  Digital marketing in this context refers to internet digital marketing, in other words, we are referring to online marketing.

What is digital marketing? According to Wikipedia: “Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium”.

With this definition using marketing point of view, digital marketing is one of communication channels to reach a target audience via internet; just like traditional media such as TV, Newspaper, Billboard, Magazine, etc.

Having defined digital marketing, now, how does digital marketing work, or what are the things digital marketing entail?

There are six components of digital marketing; these components are internet display advertising, social media marketing, search engine marketing, mobile marketing, influencers marketing and contents marketing. 

Let’s briefly mention what each of these components entails.

1. Internet display advertising: this includes internet banners, contextual headlines, sponsored ads, etc.
2. Social media marketing: this involves use of social media platforms and websites for marketing. There are categories of social media: social networking (e.g. facebook, twitter, and socialwider.com), news aggregators (e.g. reddit, feedly, and fark), wikis (e.g. aboutus, wikipedia, and wikia,) forums (e.g. cokoye, warrior forum, and nairaland), file sharing (e.g. slideshare, issuu, and slideboom), photo (e.g. instagram, pinterest, and flickr) and video (e.g. youtube, vimeo, and dailymotion).
3. Search engine marketing: this has to do with marketing using search engines. There are organic (non-sponsored) display, and paid (sponsored version) ads display normally shown at the top and bottom of searches internet users are making on search engines.
4. Mobile marketing: this is a marketing using mobile banners, responsive website and landing pages, sms, etc.
5. Influncers marketing: this entails inducing of a target audience using opinion leaders, public figures, trusted source, or respected authorities in a given field such as intermediaries, consumers, authors, journalists, musicians, industry analysts, etc.  Platforms commonly used by influencers are blogs, news portals, and social media handles/pages.
6. Contents marketing: this is a usage of contents to inform, remind, reinforce, or persuade an audience. This includes, but not limited to videos, infographs, articles, newsletters, press releases, case studies, testimonials, and whitepapers. Content makes it possible to have something to share, like, or go viral for viral marketing.

We can’t talk about how digital marketing works without including target audience, objective, goal, message, and creative.

• Target audience is the people (personas) you want to reach with your marketing (adult, men, women, youth, CEOs, traders, etc), their location (Nigeria, Africa, USA, etc), and their preferred digital marketing channels.
• Objective is the thing you want to achieve with your digital marketing: awareness, educate the target audience, establish the brand, remind, reinforce, etc.
• Goal is the specific thing you want to accomplish: 25% increase in sales in 1year, 90% increase in enquiries in a month, 50% app download in 2weeks, etc. This serves as the key performance indicators in the digital marketing.
• Message is what you want to tell the public or the target market about your offering: good quality, etc.
• Creative is how you convey your message to the target audience: problems solution ads, demonstration ads, comparison ads, etc.

To execute digital marketing you can do it yourself if you have the expertise, or hire digital marketing agency like AdHang to help you professionally manage your digital marketing.

This is how digital marketing works in brief.

Do you want digital marketing solutions in Nigeria, Africa, or anywhere in the world (English)? Hire AdHang team to help you plan, create ads and manage your digital marketing all over the internet. For AdHang digital marketing approach click here.