Digital marketing

Digital marketing is marketing of products or services carried out through digital technology, especially the internet. It can take numerous forms, including contextual or display advertisements, mobile advertising, and in-game advertising. Two of the best-known forms of digital marketing are social-media marketing, in which companies connect with customers using social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and viral marketing, in which companies create content designed to spread quickly throughout the internet. The use of digital-marketing strategies has allowed many businesses to diversify their marketing efforts even as traditional forms of marketing have often become less effective.

Overview

For decades, the field of marketing relied heavily on relatively few practices—most notably, print and television advertising. With the advent of digital technology in the late twentieth century and the associated decline of some forms of traditional media in the early twenty-first century, however, businesses were forced to develop new means of connecting with the public and promoting products and services to potential customers. The bulk of digital marketing takes place on the internet, which provides businesses with numerous opportunities to connect with consumers.

Much like print publications such as magazines, websites often feature visual advertisements that consist of pictures and text. Unlike print media, however, the internet provides advertisers with numerous tools to make their ads stand out, including the ability to include video or audio, create interactive content, or implement ads that open in new browser windows (pop-up ads) or appear on top of the website itself (pop-over ads). Through the use of activity-tracking data packets known as “cookies,” advertising services that contract with numerous companies can show users advertisements specifically based on their browsing history or other characteristics of their digital footprint. The dynamic nature of the internet has also enabled the development of contextual ads, typically text-based advertisements that are directly related to the written content of the websites on which they appear.

Digital marketers have also worked to connect with customers on a more direct and personal level through methods such as e-mail marketing, social-media marketing, and viral marketing. At times, companies send unsolicited marketing emails to potential consumers; when such messages are unwanted, they are typically considered spam. In other instances, customers subscribe to company mailing lists, and in exchange for receiving marketing emails, they are often rewarded with subscriber-only coupons and other deals. Using social-media marketing, companies attempt to foster the sense of a personal connection between customers and the business and encourage customers to promote products within their own social networks. Viral marketing occurs when a company creates entertaining, provocative, or informative content that becomes spontaneously popular and is shared widely by users who are not affiliated with the company.

Although internet marketing is the best-known form of digital marketing, advertisers have taken advantage of other digital technologies as well. A subset of online marketing is devoted to advertising optimized for mobile devices such as smartphones, and smartphone applications, or apps, often feature internal advertisements. Advertising also occurs within video games, including traditional banner or display ads as while as other techniques such as product placement and messages that encourage users to purchase bonus content for the game itself. Similar marketing methods appear in all forms of streaming content

By the 2020s, as social media use continued to proliferate around the world, marketers looked for additional ways to promote their products and engage with potential consumers. In addition to paying for typical display advertisements on social media platforms, many companies also turned to influencer marketing, in which high-profile users know as influencers are hired or given free merchandise to promote a product or service to other social media users. Many companies considered this tactic especially important for marketing to younger audiences, due to the high percentage of people in those age brackets who used social media.

Bibliography

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