What is Digital Marketing?

© March Oyinki 2017

Digital marketing in simple terms, refer to the process of attracting customers to your website and increase sales using mobile and Internet channels. Digital marketing is a broadly treated subject, and it is gaining increasing exposure, especially in the social media environment. Hundreds of articles are published online on an hourly basis, which focuses on different aspects of digital marketing. Despite the extensive and what sometimes appear to be extraneous, all manner of digital marketing content  flood the Internet.

Types of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing, which in some instance, is also referred to as online marketing, Internet marketing, and many other related names, can be described as any form of Internet centric marketing, promotions, advertisement or campaign for both private and business objectives, such as political campaigns, film industry, sports, religious activities, social events and many others; using one or several of the recognized channels of digital marketing including:

1. Social media marketing
2. Email marketing
3. Display marketing
4. Influencers marketing
5. Inbound marketing
6. Blogging
7. Mobile marketing
8. Content marketing
9. Video streaming
10.  Affiliate marketing etc.

These various forms of digital marketing are Internet based and are either on desktop computers, display boards or mobile devices, which are used for the promotion or advertisement of different types of activities with the main objective of driving traffic to an ecommerce website which allow visitors to make orders and pay through online funds transfer.

In a resolve to come up with an appropriate definition of digital marketing, I decided to conduct a little research on the subject and my findings were not quite impressive, and when I made a search on Google using the term ‘what is digital marketing?’ The search found what I consider as ten solitary pages containing about one hundred and thirty results. I consider it as solitary when compared with the search term ‘digital marketing’, which came up with over two hundred, and eighty-six results.

On the search list were SAS UK, Hubspot and Wikipedia, which made the top three sites, and this is how they defined digital marketing.

SAS UK gave a rather brief definition of digital marketing, “as the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media.” This definition though simplistic, it is straight to the point, but it does not provide sufficient depth to quality as a definition for scholars and the academia.

Wikipedia - defined “Digital marketing as an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.” This definition also lacked depth, because it emphasized more on the technology aspect and excluded the marketing channels.

Hubspot in its own version tailored its own definition along the same line with Wikipedia, defining “digital marketing as an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts.” These definitions are apt enough, certainly not the best the industry can provide, so developed one, and since digital marketing is made of two main elements, the technology and marketing aspects, it became necessary to have an all-encompassing definition of digital marketing.

In that instance, I am suggesting the following:

Definition of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a process of promoting, advertising and contents distribution on the Internet using one or more marketing channels to generate leads to the websites of advertisers, promoters and content owners with the intent of increasing sales.

I believe the industry can still do better and I therefore encourage all digital marketers and digital marketing scholars and faculties to threat this subject a lot more extensively and develop a more profound academic and scientific definition of the subject.