Unless you have been living under a rock for the past two decades, you probably know how big and powerful the internet has become. It stopped being a luxury a long time ago, and now, over 3 billion people have access to the internet.

Such a large influx of people has also resulted in the internet becoming an all-unified, single biggest platform for anyone to market or advertise their products or services. This has led to a new branch of marketing – one that wasn’t imaginable in a non-fictitious context not more than a couple of decades ago – Digital Marketing. It is the word given by contemporary academicians to this relatively new form of marketing that is done using the online medium.

Digital Marketing has some inherent advantages over the traditional forms of marketing and this article shall be covering a few of them.

1. Targeting

Kicking it off with the most obvious advantage of digital marketing. The ability to target exactly the people you believe fall into your customer segment is what actually made digital marketing all the rage when it first got started.

Spending millions of dollars on advertising to a general audience stops making much sense when you can achieve the same number of sales or conversions for an amount that is far less.

Digital Marketing methods let you pick exactly who will see your ad so that you reach only the people who might be interested in your product rather than be a part of the noise in people’s inboxes. 

2. The Pricing Methodology

Another thing that makes digital marketing so appealing to companies and other people looking to market their products or services is the fairly interesting pricing methodology that most sites that let you run ads use.

Traditional marketing avenues like hoardings or TV commercials charge by the number of hours or minutes that your ad is displayed in a given duration and these charges can be quite hefty even though it is possible that not even a single person in your customer segment gets to see your advertisement.

In digital marketing, however, you only get charged when someone from your customer segment views your ad or clicks on it.

This can save a company a lot of money while getting them the same, if not a higher, number of conversions.

3. A Global Audience

If you are a startup that wants to scale quickly or a company looking to expand into a new country, then digital marketing is the easiest way to reach the new potential customer base.

The internet is used by people in almost all countries and if they are on the internet, figuring out a way to advertise to them through digital marketing is possible, easy and affordable. This is especially true for people whose products or services they provide are completely location independent as they can simultaneously market to customers in all corners of the world using the power of digital marketing.

4. The ability to track and measure

It is exceedingly difficult to measure the degree of success of a particular traditional marketing campaign. There is no solid way to measure exactly how many people visited your shop to buy your product because they saw your ad in the local newspaper.

This problem becomes bigger the wider the customer base becomes. It is essential to figure out which of your marketing strategies are working and which are not so that you know where you need to focus for maximum effectiveness.

On the other hand, when it comes to digital marketing. You can track exactly how each of your marketing campaigns performed in any given time window and you can easily make adjustments accordingly. This saves not only time but also a lot of money that could have gone to waste on ineffective advertising.

5. Increased engagement

It is a medium which enhances the engagement of your customers with your business, product, services, etc. 

The reason why increased engagement is one of the advantages of online marketing is that digital marketing can create various forms of marketing through which the engagement can be increased.

A solid brand can be created if the business is well-interacted and integrated with accurate social media strategies. With the right marketing, the business can easily convert cold leads into active and eventually paid customers.

6. Use of various strategies

There is no one way through which you can approach social media marketing. There is something to every type of brand that is available out there. 

The brands can identify their target market and use various different strategies to market their brand. Moreover, the brands can customise their strategy and methods for different channels that are available and reap the benefits of digital marketing.

Some of the common strategies for social media marketing are-

1. Search Engine Optimization
2. Email marketing
3. Local search 
4. Social paid ads
5. Forum Engagement
6. Influencer marketing
7. Remarketing 

7. Goal oriented 

Digital marketing serves as that medium which helps in achieving the goals that have been set by the organisations to achieve. Setting a goal allows organisations to be clear with their approach which reaps fruitful results. 

Every campaign that happens requires goals to be set which allows for setting benchmarks. A set of KPIs allows the stakeholders to measure if the goals were achieved or not.

Sales, clicks, leads, etc. can become a part of the goal. However, the team can dive into deeper intricate goals. The goals can be set keeping in mind how the product, service, etc could impact the marketplace. There are various tools that can be used to measure the results and get insights such as Google Analytics, etc. 

8. Diverse content types

Content is the key to digital marketing. The reason why content is one of the advantages of digital marketing is that brands focus on their content while marketing, as it helps the brand to send their message using different ways and eventually reach a wider audience. 

Among the available content types, the brands can choose any of their choices and build refreshing campaigns for their brands. The brands can easily choose any available content that speaks to their customers. 

Some of the available content types which brands usually work with-

1. Blogs
2. Podcasts
3. Video
4. Infographics
5. Quizzes
6. Whitepapers
7. Emailers
8. Ebooks
9. Webinars
10. Forums 
11. Social media posts 
12. Webinars

9. Beginner friendly

Although digital marketing has various other technicalities that are required to be learnt by the beginners, it can be something easy to work with. By choosing the right approach and methodology, the users can reap optimum results. It then becomes a matter of finding the appropriate strategy to work with for your business.

Best Online Digital Marketing Courses

10. Quick 

Digital marketing is used by companies to reach a wider audience quickly and effectively. With online advertising strategies such as Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, the organisation can reach a wider audience speedily.

A quick reach means testing new marketing strategies and ideas and quickly seeing if they work well in the long run or not. There is no need to wait for a longer duration and see if the strategy will work or fail. It helps organisations to save time, money, and effort and use the resources to their advantage. 

With these advantages, it’s obvious that almost every company today is investing in digital marketing strategies, and even coming up with departments focused solely on digital marketing. The opportunities, therefore, in this field, are ever-increasing – to say the least. So, how are you looking to bank on it?

Top Digital Marketing Skills

upGrad’s Exclusive Digital Marketing Webinar for you –

What’s new in Marketing?

Digital Marketing Free courses to Learn

Popular Digital Marketing Blogs