The advent of digital marketing

What is digital marketing? Unless you have been living under a rock, you may have heard the term digital marketing at work, from your friends and even family members. According to Google Keyword Planner, there was an average of 823,000 searches made per month globally for the keyword "digital marketing", as seen in the image 1.1 below. The countries with the most number of average search volume for digital marketing are India (35.60%), United States (15%), Pakistan (4.90%), Indonesia (4.40%) and United Kingdom (3.60%), as seen in the image 1.2 below. With the rise of internet users worldwide in the past decade, how people discover and learn more about brands and products have been predominantly through the help of the internet. Brands have also exerted much more effort to be seen by their potential customers online through their website and social media channels. The recent global pandemic was a catalyst for digitalization for both brands and customers alike. According to the report published by DATAREPORTAL for the Philippines at the start of the year, a whooping 86.98 million Filipinos are said to be internet users, dictating a 73.6% internet penetration rate for the archipelago. With that being said, let us define what digital marketing is, and examples that we can take note of.

 

 

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing, simply put, is the use of non traditional media such as digital technologies like websites, mobile apps, social media and search engines to reach the brand's/company's marketing and overall business KPIs/goals. Your go to social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and your favorite celebrities and content creators are all important examples of digital marketing.  Digital marketing can be divided into 2 categories, which are outbound marketing and inbound marketing.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is very similar to traditional marketing where the main focus lies in pushing out the brand/company's messaging or product to your desired target audience hence the word "outbound". In most cases, your target audiences may have never heard of your brand or product when the outbound marketing advertisement would hit them. But through a repetitive process of making your brand seen by your target audiences, your goal is to increase your brand's awareness and ultimately brand recall. You as a brand would literally push your desired message to your target audiences. Common outbound marketing method would be using programmatic display ads that are seen in selected websites, Youtube video ads that you often see in the middle of watching your favorite content creators, and even social media advertisements that hit you while you scroll through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and even Linkedin. Those who are interested in the advertisements that they are exposed to will be lead to click the advertisements, which will lead them to the website or desired landing page of your brand. Targeted audiences who failed to click on the ads can be retargeted again. Outbound marketing is recommended for brands who wish to quickly increase its brand awareness through reach and impressions on different online channels.

Inbound Marketing

Unlike outbound marketing that pushes out your messages to your desired target audience, inbound marketing pulls your target audiences to your brand's website, social media pages, content and services. Inbound marketing is all about targeting people who are already interested in your brand's industry, services and or products. As explained earlier, internet penetration is at an all time high and is prospected to increase annually. That indicates that more and more people will research online in their favorite search engine or social media channels when they look for brands, services or products that they are interested in. Inbound marketing as a higher chance of converting your target audience because of one key factor - user intent. The people you are targeting with inbound marketing already has the intent to be online, which is actively look for services and products that are similar to yours. Commonly seen inbound marketing methods would be search engine marketing (Google search ads), search engine optimization (SEO), blogs, and contents like youtube videos and social media posts.

The outlook for digital marketing

Digital marketing is already deeply embedded in our day to day lives. Those who are part of Generation Z  (born between 1996 to 2012) and Generation Alpha (born between 2013 to 2025) basically lived their whole lives with social media and the digital world. It would be rare to find people who will go through physical copies of the Yellow pages just to find the brand that they are looking for. Everyday more and more companies are creating their company website for people to easily discover them and to learn more about their services and products. Even B2B companies are exerting more effort to create content in their social media channels to attract people to their pages. We are confident that digital marketing dependency will increase more and more, and there will be new and exciting channels and methods that will be introduced in the market to look out for.

If you are interested in your company or brand's digital marketing landscape, or if you are curious on the different digital marketing strategies that your competitors are currently implementing, feel free to drop us a message below. We are excited to provide a free consultation to help assess your company or brand's digital marketing current status and opportunities ahead. To browse through the different services we offer, kindly click this link.