What is Digital Marketing

A simple definition

Digital Marketing is the activity of marketing through any kind of electronic devices. It can help making more money.

A quick explanation

Digital Marketing is a branch of marketing and helps a business selling more/better by:

• Making sure people know they exist
• Making themselves likeable
• Creating, maintaining a relationship with their audience

No matter how well marketers try to make it cool, fun, trendy and likeable: it’s always been and it will always be about money.

 Wait - how does being likeable and chatty help with making money? 

A more detailed explanation (but definitely less fun)

As it is part of the wider marketing field, Digital Marketing is also about making more money – not to be confused with Sales, where the goal is to make money, or Finance where they’re meant to save money. It doesn’t create value. It adds value to the business, the customer ends up paying more in one way or another.

Digital Marketing can be quick to deploy, reach many people and directly: someone looking at an ad on their smartphone is usually much more likely to see the ad than someone walking past a billboard. People generally have their smartphone at hand, tend to check it very often, and we are many to do so.

It reaches out to users in the digital world which exists in two dimensions (no pun intended): Online Marketing and Offline Marketing. Online Marketing covers any device connected to the Internet, and offline includes digital billboards or loyalty schemes in your favourite shops.

Some may argue that Digital Marketing doesn’t cover offline marketing, some others may say Radio and TV are part of it… for the sake of argument, let’s keep it simple! If we think of the word “Digital”, essentially, in the 21st century, it mostly means something with a screen that you can interact with up to a certain extent and usually online.

Why Digital Marketing?

People spend a lot of time on their screen. A LOT of money is involved, a lot of money is made, and there’s more money to come.

Born with the gift of mag… technology

With the “recent” technological prowesses mankind has gone through spanning over the last 30-40 years, we invented new spaces where we can communicate… and as we live in such a society, some people jump at every opportunity to have more space to sell. Internet happens to be one of these places where there’s virtually unlimited space.

No one’s quite old enough yet not to know about TV, paper, radio, billboards or even sandwich men-advertising because they still exist (if you didn’t know, please look out your window).

On the other hand, some may be too young to realise advertising in the digital space is something fairly new. In one word: Internet.

The opportunity is evidently there to intrude, advertise and sell more, and judging by the trends, it’s not going to stop anytime soon.

Do you know why? Because it’s so easy to learn about you with the Internet.

Cookies, but not the American word for biscuits

TL;DR: The Internet knows a lot about you, thanks to some spies that your computer keeps.

Everyone collects data on the Internet. The explanation is always along the lines of “We’re doing this to tailor your browsing experience with us“. Yeah, well, while it’s partly true, some features definitely need your data to be collected, some others don’t, and they don’t bother explaining that clearly.

For instance, do you have an active, genuine Facebook account? They know some of the following:

• Your email address (to ensure you are that same person)
• Your age and location exactly or approximately
• Your interests and hobbies
• Webpages you’ve visited

While the first three are something you usually give to Facebook (or are easy for Facebook to guess anyway), the last one may not be so obvious. We’ll save the detailed stuff for another episode, but essentially, your computer hosts some spies willingly that analyse your online behaviour and sends the information back to whoever designed the spy.

That’s a cookie.

Skip to the next part if this gets a bit too difficult (or boring, I’m not judging).

Cookies are used for many reasons and are not limited to marketing uses.

They can help the cookie provider understand what you do on their website and therefore learn more about your interests and guess in a fairly accurate way how close you are into purchasing something.

Once they have enough data about you, they can tailor the message and send something relevant to your interests, so that you’re more likely to read. And you reading the message is already some kind of victory for advertisers.

Another example for the savvy online shoppers who use Amazon. Have you ever realised you tend to see ads in various places for a product you’ve seen recently? You’ll even see it on your phone if you’re connected to your Amazon account on your phone. Ads will appear on Facebook reminding you you’ve seen a product recently on Amazon.

How do you think they know you’re interested in the latest quiche cookbook or the newest smartphones? They track you.

However, there’s no need to be paranoid. Knowing is already a big step forward, and we’re all here for the knowing part!

What is Online Marketing?

Online Marketing covers any marketing activity tied to any device connected to the Internet.

Why Online Marketing?

With the Internet, people consume information very quickly, so while it’s easy to reach out, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people will find or engage with a brand/product/person.

Online Marketing helps identifying the right people to build a good relationship with on the Internet (so that they can sell stuff and make money).

Online Marketing explained with food and books

You may have heard of the pillars listed above, but you may not know what they all mean.

Cookies aside, let’s run through some of the biggest ones with food and books instead of technical terms because you’re probably tired of reading long posts with difficult explanations.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

TL;DR: The art of making a web page appear on search engines (such as Google, Bing or Yahoo) without advertising.

Ok, but what does it do? 

Imagine you’ve written a recipe book about quiches: “Quichemaster”. One day, someone goes to a book store, and asks the clerk the following:

What’s the best way of making quiche, honhonhon?

The shop clerk might get startled by their weird laugh, but they’ll point them towards the cooking section, and if they know something about it, they may recommend a book he knows – or even a recipe from a book they know about, if they’re really that enthusiastic.

Well, as an author, you might want to make sure that the shopkeeper (in order of priority):

1. At the very least, knows about “Quichemaster”, the recipe book you’ve written
2. Read your book or enough of it to understand what it’s about
3. Understands your book enough to talk about it
4. Likes your book
5. Recommends your book instead of your evil competitors’ (because we can safely assume all competitors are evil)

If your book store person is honest, they will give an answer based on what they know and what they read. They may recommend one book over another, but as a professional bookseller, they’re not going to ditch any. At the end of the day, their goal is to make you stay and purchase something, but they’ll probably want you to purchase the best, most relevant (according to them) book.

After all, if they can’t provide you with a relevant suggestion, you may not come back to their shop next time.

There’s no single source of truth for a search engine; if you look at two dictionaries, they’ll give you the same definition of a word, but phrased differently. It’s the same for everything, it’s all about phrasing.

The future is now! You can talk to robots: it’s always been possible! ChatGPT wasn’t the first.

Actually, you have to talk to robots if you want to make your website known, although you’re never too sure how these robots understand you.

Search engines, such as Google or Bing, have robots that help people find different sources of information for a specific request. SEO is the part where you help them help people find one thing over another. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the best information in the world, if no one knows about it, you might as well not exist.

SEO is the art (and not the science) of telling the search engine (bookseller) 1) your website (Quichemaster) exists 2) and it is better than everyone else’s.

As it’s not an exact science, it’s however hard to pinpoint what exactly is going to make the search engine favour you over someone else. It’s an established field, there are plenty of professionals working in it, but even within the best practices, people can disagree… so it’s a bit of a minefield.

Search Engine Advertising (SEA)

TL;DR: Paying to make a web page appear on search engines (such as Google, Bing or Yahoo).

Back to food now: imagine the shop clerk is actually not so honest (read up if you’ve skipped that part), and he actually takes bribes. They will mention whichever book given someone pays him every time he mentions it. Also, they don’t mind mentioning more than one recipe book, they’ll however give preference and priority to the person paying them the most.

Quality matters, but not as much as the money. Obviously, they’re not going to recommend to the latest disco encyclopedia because it has nothing to do with the initial question, but if that book has the slightest mention of quiche lorraine in it, they’ll find a way to talk about it, as long as they get paid.

Authors who didn’t pay can still be recommended, but they just have that little time to talk about other books before their customer gets bored. You could be the best chef with the best recipe in the world, they’re not going to talk about it before a while. Too bad.

You can pay these same robots so that they can help you convey a message every time someone enquires about something you want them to know about (= search query).

Today, search advertising is often done on Google platforms – Google Ads (previously AdWords) or YouTube, but there are also a few search engines we don’t necessarily think of, such as Amazon or Apple’s App Store. Examples below:

Whenever you search something on Google, you need to type words (or speak, thank you, Google Assistant). These words can trigger ads, as long as someone is willing to pay for it to happen, and click on one of these ads cost money to the advertiser.

Targeting can be very advanced, especially with the use of cookies. An advertiser can identify you indirectly thanks to Google’s omnipotent reach on the Internet and target you based on your interests, your locations (work, home, travel), your age, your gender, and even your behaviour on the advertiser’s website.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

TL;DR: Online ads where the advertiser pays every time someone clicks on them.

To put it bluntly, PPC covers most of the advertising you can find on the Internet, including Search Engine Advertising (see above).

It’s a revolutionary system – well, it was when it came out, now it’s rather normal – in the way that the advertiser only pays every time someone actually clicks on their ads, so they have a certain guarantee of performance or at least visibility. It doesn’t matter whether an ad is shown one billion times or only twice, if no one clicks on it, it costs nothing.

PPC covers a wide-range of the ads you may have seen, including:

By the way, in the case of the last example above, the actual website (HuffPost) gets paid for showing these ads. You’ll find many of this kind of ads on blogs and media as they generate revenue, which partly explains why online media are so desperate to talk about the latest scandal.

Please remember to support your favourite bloggers/writers by enabling ads, you may or may not be against advertising, it only costs a bit of your comfort to enhance their livelihood!

Affiliate Marketing

TL;DR: Businesses pay money to have people review and/or promote their products/services.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be an honest review.

Well, it’s not so different from the other examples, actually.

Going back to the clerk, in this case, they can earn money from putting a product in the spotlight, or they could be incentivised for the sale of each product, as long as a partnership is established beforehand.

Wait, you guys are getting paid?

Yes, potentially. The amount really depends on how much authority (or fame) you have, and also on the compensation method:

• You could be paid for each sale you help generating.
• You could be paid for simply promoting a product.
• You could be paid each time someone sees the product you’re promoting.

Amazon is very famous for its Affiliate Marketing scheme where they reward the promoter for each sale they’ve helped making. Do you know any price comparison website? Some of them have a small “buy on Amazon” button – if you purchase a product through this button, they will get a small cut of the sale.

Wait again - did you just say people might be lying when they review products?

Yes… and no, don’t worry, there are many honest reviewers! It’s a matter of integrity but reviewers also play a long-term game. They could probably make some money by lying, but if the product turns out to be much worse than how well they scored it, they will lose their audience, and therefore money. If they’re known for good reviews, they’ll get more visitors and therefore more money. Simple maths!

There are times the product is given away for someone to review it, but in most cases the reviewer will ensure they notify their readers. You can never really tell whether the reviewer is 100% honest or not, so it has to do with a relationship of trust between you, the reviewer but also the product/brand/service being promoted.

On the other hand, there are also cases where businesses pay consumers directly so that they leave a good review on their product, regardless of their quality, and other cases where the website doesn’t allow you to leave (or simply doesn’t show) bad reviews, so beware of product reviews in general.

Some websites have no purpose besides ranking high with SEO (see above) and putting their affiliate links forward to generate money. Unfortunately, that’s where search engines fail to recognise low quality, borderline “spammy” content vs. genuine content as the review content is usually generic and plain bad.

Email Marketing

TL;DR: Using emails to send promotional messages, related to a brand, a product and/or a service.

Now, back to our little clerk person and the quiches.

Your local bookstore wants to let you know about the latest releases, discounts and other news related to what you’re looking for. They know you’re interested in quiches, great!

They will only share those exclusive offers (they’re always exclusive!) with those who they really like… and they really like those they know about. But guess what? They like you, because you’re special! You only have to give them your address.

So… you give them your email address and with your approval, they start by greeting you to confirm they have the right information, and then starts sending promotional messages on a regular basis.

Ever wondered why there are so many online giveaways? Or why everyone encourages you to subscribe to their newsletter as you skim through an article? It’s so that they can reach you in the future. You wouldn’t give your email away if you were not interested in the giveaway or in the newsletter in the first place. If you give it away, it means that you have some degree of interest in what they’re talking about. It’s just a matter of time until they figure out how interested you are, but they can also accelerate the process and try to make you more interested in it.

That’s for the easy part of email marketing, really, it’s basically you receiving some catalogues or some offers through your mailbox, but you get to browse and order from your computer.

The complicated part is where email marketing is really smart now, with the use of cookies (read above) and all the subtleties of automated emails based on your online behaviour.

What is Offline Marketing?

In the context of Digital Marketing, Offline Marketing (or just Marketing if you insist) covers any marketing activity tied to any electronic device without depending on the Internet.

Offline Marketing isn’t dead

While there has been a massive Internet boom over the past 20 years, it doesn’t mean more traditional marketing died down. They co-exist but offline marketing has to try harder to innovate in order to stand out a bit more, because we haven’t made that much progress in terms of non-connected devices… but that would be a bit unfair to say so.

From print to radio, radio to black & white TV, monochrome TV to colour TV, then to digital, HD, and now going towards the era of 4K HD, offline marketing is uniquely tied to entertainment and therefore doesn’t die so easily.

A small case about TV & Radio Advertising

In the case of TV advertising, the easiest way to prove that offline marketing isn’t dead is to look at the yearly spend on Super Bowl commercials.

While not “digital”, radio advertising is still very relevant, especially for drivers since it’s (supposedly) illegal to look at your phone and drive, but listening to radio is legal.

Who remembers their Final Fantasy VII demo disc on Playstation, their free demo of Age of Empires II for Windows 98… or even Internet providers sending free trial discs? While some of the offline marketing methods died (or evolved, demos/trials became downloadable) and it’s also true we haven’t invented many new things lately, we’ve actually made a lot of improvements in terms of how the message is delivered.

It’s not just audio coming out of a radio, there’s also video and it’s now 3D, virtual reality, environment / atmosphere (e.g. Apple Store, McDonald’s and Starbucks all look very similar around the world) and more recently, scent which connects back to the wider marketing, with sensory marketing although that would be vaguely digital.

Electronic billboards: Not dead & not dusted

Billboard may sound old-fashioned and electronic billboards probably do too, but we don’t mean illuminated billboards with flashy LEDs (for the sake of our environment, I sure hope it’s LED) and everything although it still seems to work down here in Japan:

but rather, fancy, animated billboards displaying on huge TV screens in shopping malls, airports and other trendy places:

Some more advanced billboards include scent diffusers, motion tracking cameras, NFC chips, interactive games among other new, cool things… like giant 3D billboards in Tokyo.

Creativity never ends when it comes to finding new ways to spend and make more money.

Capitalism, ho!

Offline gets its ways to you

TL;DR: We’re getting more and more desperate for advertising space, so we grab every little opportunity to advertise.

It’s nothing new, really: in movies for example, you can very easily tell when there are product placements.

If you notice a brand on-screen, it usually means that someone paid for the placement. Otherwise you would never ever notice any brand in a movie as it would shift your attention towards the brand instead of the movie.

Product placements are not limited to movies and TV series as they also appear in video games.

These product placements can ruin the immersion and/or the credibility of a game. I don’t disagree, especially because these games already cost a fair amount of money to the consumer.

In some cases, it’s the other way round: companies pay for the licensing fee to increase the immersion/credibility of the game (e.g. car brands in a racing game, football team names in a football game, sportswear in a skiing game…).

Some memorable examples of product placement:

• In the case of Final Fantasy XV (2016), Vivienne Westwood is shamelessly mentioned a few times as she designed the deuteragonist’s wedding dress. The fashion designer even has a shop inside the game, and because money knows no border, they even seem to accept American Express. All the camping gear used by Noctis and his friends are from Coleman, and most oddly, you’ll also find Nissin’s Cup Noodle (that your character can actually eat) vendors at many unexpected places. Or even this. This might have gone too far.
• Death Stranding (2019) features extremely well rendered Monster canned drinks. I guess energy drinks survived the apocalypse, somehow.
• Mario Kart 8 (2014) in which Mario and his friends can drive a Mercedes-Benz. I’m pretty sure it’s out of place, but hey, anything goes in a fictional world, I suppose…
• EverQuest II (2004) had a /pizza command line which allowed you to order pizzas from Pizza Hut straight from the game. It wasn’t an April Fools’ joke.

Long story short, offline marketing is definitely not dead. Brands will always find a way to remind you they exist, and they’re not short on money. Few would say no to an extra bundle of cash, be it game developers or movie directors, especially when product placements tend to be very expensive.

Unfortunately, you’ll rarely see any benefit on the consumer’s wallet: product placements don’t make the final product any cheaper.

Offline Marketing is Emotional Marketing

TL;DR: The idea that associating an emotion with a product/brand/service helps you notice it, remember it, talk about it and buy it.

This is how we came up with ads starring babies to target mothers, or exaggerated toy ads for kids, although these are getting more and more regulated.

They could have advertised in a plain way (e.g. “these nappies are good!”), but adding the cuteness of a baby running on grass helps with building the image of a baby-friendly product.

It may sound sketchy, but an ad is meant to trigger something within you.

Offline ads are limited in terms of personalisation, so we look at the more basic human instincts. Anger, joy, sadness or surprise are emotions we share as human beings, and it’s an easy way to reach the heart of a consumer… which is why companies always try to find new ways to reach us (see scent marketing & sensorial marketing above).

A love & hate relationship between offline and online

While offline marketing doesn’t directly depend on the Internet, marketing campaigns today are very much thought on a larger scale. It’s part of a wider scheme where offline and online marketing support each other in the same campaign to enhance a brand’s image… and help making more money (which, again, is the ultimate goal of marketing).

A lot of large companies blend offline and online now. Disney is one that comes to mind: they are everywhere. The recently released Disney+ streaming service (online), movies (offline), Disney Channel (offline), and the blurring between their offline and online services, especially in their parks (e.g. you can’t purchase pictures at their parks now, you have to get them online!) ultimately drive the consumer towards not just purchasing, but purchasing more and maybe, better – it’s all about perspective.

A few words to end it all

Marketing is a broad world, but Digital Marketing is a whole beast by itself! Here’s a fun retelling of the digital marketing history by an agency I like.

Yet, people (and companies by extent) end up putting too much effort into doing one thing – whether it’s email marketing, SEO, PPC or anything – they tend to focus on one thing. Focussing on what works is great for delivering profit, but an integrated approach is the only way forward for growth. In the grand scheme of things, marketing works as a whole, and a strategy which combines efforts across channels works best.

Main photo by Marvin Meyer via Unsplash