Mediaboss Marketing

New Delhi | Published: July 1, 2020 5:12:24 pm

Written by Shrey Aggarwal

Digital marketing is about promoting products or services using digital channels. It is primarily focused on internet-based technologies. It also includes marketing to mobile and electronic devices.

A successful digital marketing campaign supports a companys business goals. It is often deployed in conjunction with traditional marketing, helping the business expand and develop its brand and reach, identify leads, and gain market share at a much more reasonable cost.

Digital marketing is extremely important for any business as it allows them to connect with consumers, where they spend a lot of their time online. It has many aspects to it and a few major ones are listed below:

Social Media Marketing (SMM): This can include paid as well as organic marketing on social media channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, etc. This is becoming ever so important with the increasing popularity of social media channels.

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Search Engine Marketing (SEM): This is basically paid marketing on search engines of Google, Bing, Yahoo even though google is the major part of search engine marketing, Bing plays a big role if you are marketing globally.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): For organic or non-paid search rankings, this is the most powerful tool in the long run. SEO is considered a very strategic channel by most companies and while it does not give instant results, you should invest heavily in SEO to get sustained benefits in the long run.

Content marketing: Writing relevant content to engage users in the form of blog posts, Quora answers, email content. Video content is also a part of content marketing and is gaining traction rapidly. A well-made and engaging video can help significantly in generating organic reach.

Affiliate marketing: Engaging affiliate website or partners to generate referral traffic is a major part of marketing when you are managing a business that has a significant scale.

There is a lot of cutting edge work that is being done in digital marketing by deploying skills such as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, are at the forefront of driving these marketing innovations.

Opportunities in digital marketing

According to Statista.com, the number of internet users in India as of January 2020 is around 629 million of which 400 million are active on social media, making India the second-largest internet market in the world. This number is supposed to grow by 20 per cent annually due to the availability of cheap data charges.

With such a growing digital footprint, companies are investing heavily in online marketing as it is the easiest and cheapest way to reach such audiences.

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The digital advertising expenditure in India stood at 160 billion Indian rupees in the fiscal year 2019, with estimates to reach almost 540 billion rupees by the fiscal year 2024. This marks a good 28 percent growth rate in digital ad spends in the country, as per Statista.

With such robust growth in spends the market is surely in need of skilled digital marketers and one can grow in any of the following fields, for instance, as a digital marketing strategist, digital marketing executive, web content manager, SEO analyst, social media specialist, online leads manager, Google AdWords specialist, email marketing specialist, e-commerce specialist, online leads manager, web analyst, online reputation manager and many more roles.

Courses in digital marketing

Most digital marketing experts are self-taught in the current workforce, most learned on the job or from free content available on the Internet. This was feasible earlier as the scope of digital marketing was very limited, but as the function is growing day by day there is an increasing demand for skilled digital marketing professionals. This is where a structured online course for digital marketing comes into play which not only teaches fundamentals but also provides hands-on exposure to relevant tools and techniques.

One such course is delivered by Great Lakes Institute of Management in collaboration with Great Learning. Premiere management institutes like IIM-B also offer courses like marketing and digital marketing, digital and social media marketing, NIIT also offers digital marketing certification course, UPES has a BBA in digital marketing and AMA also offers professional certificate marketer (PCM) certifications. Several online courses from marketing experts and foreign universities are also available for students who are pursuing a course in different subjects and wish to top up their degree with digital marketing certification or degrees.

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The author is Senior Manager Digital Marketing, Great Learning

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