What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a broad term for promoting brands through various digital platforms such as social media, mobile apps, email, etc.

Your digital marketing effort must focus on increasing brand awareness, promoting sales, and enhancing customer experience.

This post is the first part of a series targeted at business owners that need a primer.

Digital marketing has become a key component of businesses’ overall marketing strategy because of its effectiveness and efficiency. This type of marketing often uses digital technologies such as mobile phones, tablets, and computers to connect with customers.

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One of the first questions business owners ask me when they schedule meetings with me is: what is digital marketing?

According to Wikipedia, digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services.

With this in mind, I write this post to direct you to it when necessary. We can move on to more challenging issues and not spend too much time at meetings covering the basics. Time is money, as they say.

Therefore, I’ll briefly cover the definition of digital marketing, what it entails, what it is not, and what a digital strategy is all about. Let’s get started.

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Definition of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing, like any other type of marketing, is a way to connect with and influence your potential customers. However, internet marketing differs from digital marketing.

Internet marketing is advertising your product and services solely on the Internet. In contrast, digital marketing covers mobile phones (SMS and MMS), smartphone apps, email marketing, social media marketing, display advertising, search engine marketing, video games, etc.

Digital marketing, like any other type of marketing, is a way to connect with and influence your potential customers. However, internet marketing differs from digital marketing. Click To Tweet

Digital marketing is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of inbound and outbound tactics. It promotes and sells your products and services to your target audience by leveraging multiple digital marketing channels such as social media platforms, search, content, mobile, and email marketing.

If your product or service marketing involves using electronic devices, that’s digital marketing!

According to some stats, radio still reaches 85% of the US population weekly. Listeners listen for two hours a day. On average, 40% of all radio advertising expenses worldwide come from the US.

The article mentioned above observes that in a world where 9% of all drivers are on the phone one way or the other (texting or calling), how can we think billboards have a future during daylight hours?

With digital marketing, the number of potential customers found online is a much larger group of people than you are likely to attract locally.

Besides creating a website, you can also introduce search engine optimization, content marketing strategy, mobile marketing or affiliate marketing as a strategy to help you build brand awareness and move ahead of your competitors.

If you’re unfamiliar with the last two terms mentioned above, mobile marketing is about reaching your target customers in the various mobile app stores, e.g. Google Play, Apple app store or Amazon marketplace.

In its simplest form, affiliate marketing is about getting people to post affiliate links from their social network accounts and is a superb way to drive traffic to your website.

It is the act of promoting and selling your products and services by leveraging tactics such as social media marketing, search marketing, and email marketing. Click To Tweet

It helps if you think of digital marketing techniques as making yourself accessible to the people your business is trying to reach to offer your products and services.

Your business can attract a much larger audience than you could by catering to local prospects.

As the number of Nigerians spending more time on their digital devices increases, so will the need for internet marketing increase.

These days, savvy business owners in Nigeria are moving away from traditional marketing tactics that involve billboards, posters, flyers, and so on to online marketing.

The significant difference between digital marketing tactics and traditional marketing is that we execute digital marketing campaigns only through digital channels, giving digital marketers more control, tools, and data to analyse the effectiveness of a digital marketing project.

Although we can divide digital marketing into online and offline digital marketing, at Mauco Enterprises, our focus is on online marketing aspects such as

What Digital Marketing is Not

When meeting with a business owner for the first time over a 15-minute call, it’s a familiar story, and it usually goes like this:

I’ve tried everything! Fliers, posters, handbills, brochures, newspaper adverts, magazines, but nothing seems to work.

I’ve been there. I know the feeling. However, this is not about marketing through traditional means like fliers, brochures, television, newspaper or the radio.

Listen: this distinction is significant because you can run an ad on television, newspaper, radio or billboard. However, can you accurately quantify how many people watched, listened to or saw your ad?

With digital media, digital communication and digital marketing, you have the data to prove the performance of your inbound marketing campaigns.

Some digital marketing activities, such as digital advertising, search engine marketing and social media advertising, require payment.

Digital marketing does not mean you should go and market through every digital and social media channel under the sun. Click To Tweet

Others, like content marketing and influencer marketing, sometimes do not require payment, depending on your strategy.

Digital marketing does not mean you should market through every digital and social media channel.

It entails being strategic about the digital, social media and any other marketing channels you use. It would help if you were to partner with a digital marketing agency or a social media marketer that is the right fit for your brand.

What can such an agency do for your business? They can help you draw up an integrated marketing strategy or social media strategy for your brand and also help you implement it too.

This intelligence helps you to prioritise which marketing channels to spend more or less time on. Thus maximising the potential of all your marketing channels to reach your target audience.

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Your digital marketing strategy is a roadmap to achieving your marketing goals through your paid, earned and owned media channels.

According to this article, your end media refers to the exposure you earn through word-of-mouth marketing. Whether that is the content, you’ve distributed on other websites (e.g. guest posts), the PR work you’ve been doing, or the customer experience you’ve delivered. Earned media is the recognition you receive because of these efforts.

According to this article, you don’t need a massive budget if you’re focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation for a pre-existing website. With inbound marketing, the primary focus is on creating high-quality digital content that your audience will want to consume. Unless you’re planning to outsource the work, the only investment you’ll need is your time.

According to this article, you need to identify the proper digital channels to help you achieve your business goals and create better online user experiences.

For instance, PPC advertising is a splendid way to reach internet users on various networks through paid ads.

According to this article, many businesses either hire an agency to oversee their digital marketing strategy and tactics or pay for an in-house marketing team and automation software to cover their marketing needs.

Do You Have a Strategic Marketing Plan?

Some business owners in Nigeria might already use SEO, PPC, email marketing, social marketing, content marketing, sponsored content (e.g. blog posts, etc.) or marketing automation software and see some benefits in brand awareness.

However, ask yourself: Are you using digital marketing strategically? Can you calculate your return on investment (ROI)on digital marketing practices and marketing automation software?

If your answer to the above questions is No, then you’re leaving money on the table.

Hire a marketing agency to help you refine your existing marketing plan or create a new and solid one.

Do You Want to Learn More about Digital Marketing?

Mauco Enterprises is a digital marketing company that can help you derive more joy from your marketing efforts. Do you want to learn more?

These days, savvy business owners in Nigeria are moving away from traditional marketing tactics that involve billboards, posters, flyers, and so on to digital. Click To Tweet

Click the button below to schedule a consultation. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Schedule a meeting with me now to learn more. Trust me. It’ll all be worth it.

The Future Of Online Advertising In Nigeria

This is a relevant topic in the digital marketing industry. According to Statista, total internet advertising revenue in Nigeria will grow from 73 million U.S. dollars in 2018 to 133 million in 2023. Thanks to advances in technology and the increasing popularity of the internet, online advertising, which includes a range of ad formats such as email, search engine, social media, display and mobile advertising, is a suitable medium for advertisers.

In line with this global trend, internet advertising revenue in Nigeria has shown significant improvement in the last few years and is projected to continue to rise. By 2023, online advertising in Nigeria is forecast to generate 133 million U.S. dollars in revenue. Although wired or desktop devices still account for most of the revenue generated by online advertising in Nigeria, mobile is projected to take over as the most profitable device for internet advertisers in the country as of 2021. Online ad revenue for this particular type of device is forecasted to jump from an estimated 31 million U.S. dollars in 2018 to 73 million U.S. dollars by 2023.

Conclusion

In conclusion, digital marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to businesses in Nigeria today. It allows them to reach their target audience quickly and helps them build brand awareness and increase sales.

Digital Marketing in Nigeria (Updated)