DEFINITION OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Definition of digital marketing: Evolution and Usage

What is digital marketing and how it has evolved, as we know it today?

The first that should be said here is that one article is not enough to explain the whole concept of digital marketing. The sure thing is that the near future calls for extensive research and development in this sector in order to create a valuable knowhow for the professionals who will try to enter this business in order to offer their services to customers who would like to promote their online sales of products and services.

If you search the internet for a definition of “Digital Marketing” you will see that until now there is no accurate or academically acceptable definition given by someone who has devoted his studies into researching in this new highly trending discipline. I have my own thoughts for the cause of this and I will try to explain it here.

DEFINITION OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Amazingly, until now, most of those who were involved in digital marketing were people with limited or no knowledge in Traditional Marketingtechniques. One might ask, how can a non-marketing specialist offer any type of marketing advices to anyone who wants to sell products or services in the traditional way or even online? Until recently this was possible as the SEOs as they are called, could manipulate the search results of Google and other search engines by extensively building links and a successful keyword targeting. Today things have totally changed. The era of Panda and Penguin updates of Google has created huge problems to the so called “SEO Specialists” who have seen their “powers” being totally inactivated with no actual value as now they cannot guarantee any traffic boosting.

Therefore today SEO by itself has minimum or even no value in the digital marketing efforts of a website owner. What is actually needed for a successful website traffic boosting is an alloy of digital marketing techniques which should simultaneously utilize traditional marketing concepts. Therefore now the academic and the online business world have to examine and develop an effective digital marketing strategy plan that will offer to the website owners the desired result of traffic boosting. The problem I would consider here is that the website owners will have to incur a much higher cost in attaining the desired results for a website, something which until recently was not necessary as the traffic boosting could have been an one man show (SEO) with very good results.

According to my own academic background and my devoted experience in internet marketing since 2007 I have developed my own definition for Digital Marketing that I would like to share with you:

Definition for Digital Marketing:

“Utilization of Internet tools, knowledge, and experiences in conjunction with traditional marketing techniques in an effort to raise the awareness of the web users on a specific website (or any other web product- e.g. apps) with desired outcome the increase of revenues for the website owner.”

Effective use of digital marketing:

I think that this definition covers not just the case of corporate websites but also the one-man (or woman) handled blogs. According to my own assumptions anyone who devotes his or herself to share knowledge and ideas through a personal blog, at least in the back of their mind, they expect to receive an income for their time and effort. This income might arise either through selling ad space on their blogs to AdSense (or similar services) or being involved in affiliate programs selling products and services. Therefore the traffic boosting is and should be the target for any website owner as traffic raises the chances of making enough sales for a descend revenue at the end of each month.

Digital Marketing consists of a collection of theoretical tools which their use can offer a potentially successful result if used strategically by experienced professionals. This does not mean that blog owners cannot utilize digital marketing. As in traditional marketing depending on the size of the corporation and the budget available the efforts are analogous and the results fluctuate. However no marketing efforts probably would create such negative results with drop of sales and whatever this might cause to the website owner.