If you are totally new to digital marketing, check out this brief history and the basic concepts and terms in this realm. Skip it and move on to the other presented “various menu sets” if those sound ubiquitous to you. This is just how my cognition functions. Whenever I want to understand something, I want to dig from its root.
A brief history
The term Digital Marketing was coined in the 1990s, together with the digital age taking off with the explosion of the internet era and its Web 1.0 platform, even though at that time, digital marketing was mainly perceived as a form of advertising to customers. For instance, after HotWired (the first commercial web magazine) purchased some banner ads for their advertising in late 1994, the history of digital marketing witnessed many significant transitions with new technologies entering the digital market realm. In the last decade of the 20th century, many big names were born such as Yahoo, HotBot, LookSmart, and Alexa and Google (1996), which later considerably contributed to shaping the whole digital marketing territory. In the first decade of the 21st century, since web version 2.0 came with the emergence of new social media and mobile tools, digital marketing concept was perceived as a powerful means to create and co-create an engaging experience with the customers.
In the new era, the connotation of digital marketing has evolved from a specific term for the use of digital channels to do product marketing – to an umbrella term. Financial Times Lexicon defines digital marketing as the process of building the brand, acquiring and retaining customers or increasing sales utilizing the new digital technologies. The American Marketing Association (2015) describes that digital marketing includes activities, institutions, and processes facilitated by digital technologies to create, communicate, and deliver values to current and potential customers as well as other stakeholders.
Basic concepts and terms
In digital marketing, it is common that the terms “media” and “content” on those media are usually used interchangeably. However, the tools themselves should not be mistaken with the messages, or in other words, digital media channels should not be understood as the digital content which are delivered to the customers, using the digital channels.
Digital media channels
Digital media channels are defined as online communications techniques, utilized in marketing to achieve goals of brand awareness, product/service familiarity and favourability, and influence customers’ buying decisions via interactive contents curated by companies and other users on digital media.
It is widely acknowledged that traditional media such as print ads, TV, and radio are known for their “pushing nature” which only “push” the messages in one direction from the organizations to the audience. It is the type of one-to-many form of communication, or sometimes is referred as “monologue”, because it does not allow dialogue between the message receivers and the senders. Digital media with its intense interactivity characteristic, provide the opportunity for dialoguing with the customers, and strongly connect those consumers together.
Further, digital media can affect buyers’ purchasing decisions. Website, a digital medium, is considered as a mix between advertising and direct selling because it can engage with the customers via digital content and encourage them to buy the products. Social presence on social media channels (i.e. Facebook) with the new advertising functions can also trigger purchases.
Digital content
There are many ways to understand what is considered as a piece of digital content. It is defined as “bit-based objects distributed through electronic channels” by many academic researchers. In another fashion, many practitioners in the content industry argue that “digital content is anything that can be published”. This means that if a user is using the internet, that person is most likely consuming, watching, or listening to a piece of digital content.
Relevant, meaningful, and valuable digital content attracts potential consumers and increases their engagement, wins their trust and admiration through the creation, dissemination and sharing of useful digital contents. Brands have used digital content marketing to support the realization and achievement of various business objectives, including brand awareness, customer attraction and retention through maintaining of customer relationships and loyalty.
Content marketing
There are a lot of presented ways to understand content marketing, from both academia and practises. Despite some differences, most definitions cover certain aspects such as the nature and process of content marketing and its crucial role in any digital marketing and branding strategy (see table below). Content Marketing Institute (2015) defines “content marketing is the marketing and Business Process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action”.
| Source | Definition |
| Brenner, M (2015) | Content marketing is about delivering the right content on the right platforms to the right audience. It is the effective combination of created, curated and syndicated content |
| Graubart, B (2015) | Content marketing is an approach by which companies seek to author and/or share contextually relevant content to create or reinforce their brand messaging. When done effectively, content marketing is not done in direct support of a sales process, but rather by positioning a company or individual within a space |
| Pulizzi (2013) | Content marketing is owning media as opposed to renting it. It is a marketing process to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in order to change or enhance a consumer’s behaviour. |
| Holliman & Rowley (2014) | Content marketing is the activity associated with creating, communicating, distributing, and exchanging digital content that has value for customers, clients, partners, and the firm and its brands. |
The challenges that most firms have to face when implementing content marketing is to find a good balance between the editorial content which is distributed for free or organically and the one which is charged for (paid advertising or paid reviews).
Unlike many other digital marketing activities, digital content marketing does not operate as a campaign, but rather on an ongoing basis to deliver and enhance the organization’s values over time.
Digital Marketing Strategy
Digital marketing strategy is the process of marketing products and services by leveraging social media technologies for content creation and communication, taking into consideration many aspects such as the firm’s situations, the uncertain and complex nature of external environment, and interactions of other dissimilar factors and variables. Digital marketing strategy can yield productivity in an economic scale thanks to its cost efficiency. An effective digital marketing strategy should take into account the scopes, scales, and speed of digital business strategy, as well as its resources.
In today’s world of simultaneous media usage, it is essential for a digital marketing strategy to incorporate different digital channels (website, social media, online partnership, search engine, affiliate marketing) in order to communicate and deliver the company’s value propositions to customers and other key stakeholders.
Phew! Quite a post to read! 1100 words. Congratulations on your completion of this post! You can now confidently move on to enjoying the next menu sets!
References:
Brenner, M. (2015). Get the Biggest SEO Bang for Your Content Marketing Buck. Retrieved August 20, 2018, from: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/ 2015/03/brenner-seo-content-marketing/
Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital marketing: Strategy, implementation and practice. UK: Pearson Education.
Graubart, B. (2015). Retrieved November 10, 2018 from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312627570_The_use_of_content_marketing_strategy_tools_in_the_Polish_research_institutes
Holliman, G. & Rowley, J. (2014). Business to business digital content marketing: marketers’ perceptions of best practice. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 8(4), 269-293.
Järvinen, J., Tollinen, A., Karjaluoto, H., & Jayawardhena, C. (2012). Digital and social media marketing usage in N2N industrial section. Marketing Management Journal, 22(2), 102–117.
Li, S., Li, J.Z., & He, H. (2010). A Web-Enabled Intelligent Approach towards Digital Marketing Planning: The Integrated System and its Effectiveness. 9th International Conference on Applied Computer and Applied Computational Science, 17-22.
Prahalad, C.K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004). Co-creation Experiences: The New Practice in Value Creation. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(3), 5–14.
Pulizzi, J. (2013). How to know content marketing when you see it. EContent, 36(10), 16-17.
Swatman, P. M. C., Krueger, C., & Van der Beek, K. (2006). The changing digital content landscape: an evaluation of e-business model development in European online news and music. Internet Research, 16(1), 53-80.