What is Digital Marketing (Definition, Meaning & Overview) for Beginners

What is digital marketing?

What we actually mean by that term and how to understand it simple and easy as a beginner?

Why is it called an umbrella term? What does it mean and what all does it cover?

Know everything about digital marketing in this best 2023 guide for beginners.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is growing fast.

It is growing in popularity.

Every day more and more businesses are adopting digital route for marketing.

And everyday more and more people are learning it to practice and take it as a profession.

But it is also growing as a vertical and horizontally.

The digital marketing of 2023 is far broad and comprehensive than what it used to be back in 2013 or even before.

There are more ways to do digital marketing than few years back.

It is not more dynamic.

It is now more technology based or oriented.

Yet it is not difficult to understand, learn or even practice for a website or for your business.

You must be wondering why digital marketing is called an umbrella term.

This is what we will discuss and explain here.

We all have and use laptops, computers and most of the smartphones.

But why are we talking about these?

These are digital devices.

These are the mediums.

These digital devices deliver digital marketing.

Let us understand what all digital marketing is about.

Here is digital marketing explained to you in simple terms.

What is Digital Marketing

What is Digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the practice and profession of doing marketing using various digital devices and online channels and platforms. It puts the business and its marketing assets and messages over the Internet and accessible 24/7 online.

Digital marketing helps your business be seen online at various platforms.

How do we define it?

One way to define digital marketing is this.

Digital marketing is how we use online platforms, techniques and methods to reach out to target audience to market and promote a business, product or a service.

This is how we can explain digital marketing further, based on its definition.

There are certain online platforms and there are certain techniques to use those platforms to help market and promote a website, business and its products and services.

Search engines like Google.

Social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn.

These are all websites but also the platforms and mediums to take an individual or entity online and help it do digital marketing for its business and its products and services.

This is what digital marketing is all about.

Helping a set of audience or anyone find or know about your business, your products and services online is what is digital marketing and how it works essentially.

Here we use Internet and digital devices as mediums as compared to the traditional marketing which used mediums like newspapers, magazines, telephones, etc.

And we always online in this digital way of marketing.

For this it is also called Internet marketing or online marketing.

Digital Marketing means building an assisted, coordinated and networked online presence for a business or a website.

Digital Marketing is plural and not singular in every way.

Offline and Online Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is online however, it also uses some offline mediums.

If you understand digital marketing as marketing on digital devices then often times they are used offline too.

And even if it plays a little part, offline is often included.

Like we use text message to increase our reach. This we do to drive people to, may be, our website, or simply to get in touch with.

However, what we mostly use is online digital marketing.

And that is what we are talking about here.

Online Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is often used as synonym for online marketing or internet marketing.

But there is little difference between offline and online digital marketing which you need to understand.

As we said before, digital marketing is an umbrella term which uses different online and digital platforms and also devices.

What we usually associate digital marketing with is its online segment.

What does online digital marketing includes?

12 Types of Online Digital Marketing

Here are the 12 types of online digital marketing

6 Types of Offline Digital Marketing

Here are the 6 types of offline digital marketing

What We Do in Digital Marketing

What we essentially do in digital marketing is use the online channels to build the online presence of our business.

We use these channels to market our business.

There are ways to do digital marketing on each online channels.

These ways are techniques how to use and optimize these channels to build a marketing presence or profile of our business.

Overall we devise strategies taking the channels as the base and using the techniques for marketing.

What Does Digital Marketing Do and Why You Need It

Our daily lives are now centred more around devices.

Try to look at people around you for some time.

Whether you are walking, shopping, dining.

People are mostly or at least every now then, on and off, check their devices which are mostly the smartphones.

And most of us glued to it for a very long period during a day.

What digital marketing does is reach your audience through these devices.

You can reach as many audience as you want.

You can be sitting in your office and reach a worldwide audience with digital marketing strategies.

At most times, you can also target which type of audience you want to reach.

Here are Some Examples of Digital Marketing and How It Works

And all this can be both online or offline.

Strategies of Digital Marketing

What do we mean by digital marketing strategies?

Marketing is not just about going to someone with the hope to make them your customers.

That is not an effective approach to marketing.

It is about finding your customers.

People who can be your customers.

So marketing or effective marketing is always driven by strategies.

The same goes in digital marketing.

We need to create or devise digital marketing strategies to find our customers through those online platforms.

Every channel of online marketing works in its own ways.

People behave and use different channels in different ways.

So we begin with understanding people’s behaviour and needs on different channels.

Then we move on to understanding how best can we connect and serve them on respective channels.

Doing all this means we are devising a holistic digital marketing strategy for our business which further includes strategies for different online channels.

How to Start Digital Marketing

If you want to start digital marketing for your business or start learning it, we have the perfect ways.