What is Digital Marketing?

Define the reach of digital marketing using the "5Ds of Digital" and the Snippet360 Planning Framework

My recent blog article on digital marketing trends presents the latest innovations, but let's get back to the basics of defining digital marketing. This is important because in the business world, especially traditional marketers or business owners, the term "digital" simply refers to "our website" or "our Facebook page". This way of thinking limits the scope and possibilities of what is being managed and means that activities that should be managed can be missed.

Types of digital marketing

We prefer to use the term "digital marketing channels" rather than "types" because each channel that can be used to reach potential customers can be complex depending on the level of integration and tactics you apply in your strategy and campaigns. digital marketing.

Our RACE Planning Framework traces the online customer journey across all potential points of contact, showing the breadth and opportunities offered by digital marketing - more than a "website" or "a Facebook page".

The 5Ds of digital marketing

To understand the importance of digital marketing for the future of marketing in any business, it is helpful to think about the interactions with the audience that we need to understand and manage. Digital marketing today involves many more types of interactions with the public than websites or e-mails ... This involves managing and exploiting these "digital 5Ds" defined in the introduction to the last update of my digital marketing: strategy, planning and implementation. delivered. The 5Ds define the possibilities for consumers to interact with brands and businesses to reach and learn from their audiences in different ways:

Digital devices: The public feels the marks when they interact with professional websites and mobile apps through a combination of connected devices, including smartphones, tablets, desktops, TVs, and game consoles.

Digital Platforms - Most interactions on these devices are via a browser or applications from major platforms or services, such as Facebook (and Instagram), Google (and YouTube), Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Media - Different paid, owned and acquired communication channels to reach and engage the public, including advertising, email, search engines and social networks

Digital data - information companies collect about their audience profiles and their interactions with businesses, which must now be protected by law in most countries.

Digital technology - marketing technology or martech stack that companies use to create interactive experiences from websites and mobile apps, for in-store kiosks and email campaigns.

Defining digital marketing

The use of the Internet and other digital media and technologies to support "modern marketing" has created a bewildering array of labels and jargons created by both academics and professionals. It has been called digital marketing, internet marketing, email marketing and web marketing, and these alternative terms have varied over time ...

The term "digital marketing" is the term most frequently used today, as these definitions of digital marketing indicate. So that's the term we focus on.

Due to the recent debate on the use of the term "digital marketing", we thought it would be useful to define exactly what digital means by definition. Are definitions important? We think so, because within an organization or between a company and its customers, we need clarity to support the goals and activities that support digital transformation. As we will see, many other definitions are misleading.

Reduced to its simplest form, digital marketing is defined in my Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice:

"Achieve marketing goals by applying technologies and digital media."

I develop this definition of digital marketing to explain that, in practice, digital marketing includes the management of different forms of online presence and business presence, such as corporate websites, mobile apps, and pages. corporate social media. This approach is associated with online communication techniques, such as search engine marketing, social media marketing, online advertising, email marketing and partnership agreements with other websites.

These techniques are used to support the goals of acquiring new customers and to provide existing customers with services that help develop customer relationship through e-CRM and marketing automation. However, for digital marketing to be successful, there is still a need to integrate these techniques with traditional media such as print, television and direct mail as part of multichannel marketing communication.

If we look at these other definitions of digital marketing, such as SAS digital marketing: What is digital marketing and why is it important? or this alternative definition of Wikipedia's digital marketing, we can find that often, we focus on promoting products and services using digital media rather than a more comprehensive definition covering customer experiences, relationship development and stressing the importance of multichannel integration. So for us, the scope of the term should include activities throughout the customer's life cycle:

• Digital media and communication channels
• Digital and mobile experiences such as web design and mobile apps
• Lead Management and Customer Relations via Marketing Automation
• Digital Agenda and Integration of Multichannel Communications and Experiments
• Digital technologies and platforms to manage all digital marketing activities

The role of digital platforms in supporting integrated multichannel marketing is an important part of digital marketing, but is often overlooked. In many ways, it shows how important it is to break down silos between "digital" and "traditional" marketing departments. Online channels can also be managed to support the entire buying process, from pre-sales to post-sale and further development of customer relationships.

Defining marketing

It is important to remember that while digital marketing uses different communication techniques than traditional marketing, its end goals do not differ from those of marketing. It can be easy to set goals for digital marketing based on "vanity metrics" such as the number of "likes" or followers. It is therefore useful to keep in mind this definition of marketing advanced by the Chartered Institute of Marketing:

"Marketing is the management process that identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer needs in a cost-effective way."

This definition emphasizes customer-focused marketing while involving the need to link with other business operations to achieve this profitability. Yet this definition is weak in digital marketing because it does not focus on the communications that are so important to digital marketing. In Digital Marketing Excellence, my co-author, PR Smith, and I note that digital marketing can be used to support the following goals:

Identify - The Internet can be used for marketing studies to know the needs and wishes of customers.

Anticipate - The Internet provides an additional channel through which customers can access information and make purchases - assessing this demand is critical to managing resource allocation.

Satisfactory - A key factor in the success of digital marketing is customer satisfaction via the digital channel, which raises questions such as: Is the site easy to use, does it work properly? What is the associated level of customer service and how are physical products shipped?

The optimization of digital marketing can be tricky and a simple definition does not necessarily translate into a useful element in achieving business goals. This is where the RACE Digital Marketing Planning Framework comes into play, as it can help break down digital marketing into more manageable areas, which can then be planned, managed and optimized.

Our graphical summary definition of the scope of digital marketing

To answer the question "What is digital marketing?” We have developed this new visual definition summarizing all the activities that make up digital marketing that need to be managed as part of Snippet 360 Insights RACE planning. We explain the best practices for all these activities in our digital marketing training course. The infographic is divided into activities to develop and manage the top digital strategy at the bottom marketing activities.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is therefore about using digital technology to achieve marketing goals. It is not absolutely necessary that digital marketing is always separate from the marketing department as a whole, since the goals of both are the same. However, for the moment, this term remains useful because digital marketing requires certain skills to effectively use digital technology.