Digital marketing basics

What are the fundamentals every marketer is doing today? What keeps spinning the network of agencies and clients to attract consumers? This is a short introduction.

We think about digital marketing as a more or less a newborn field of business. But in fact, we can count the age of digital marketing not in years but in decades. It looks fresh, but actually it’s old. And it evolved maybe faster than anything in business before. It looks like it is easy to tell why: it is entirely technology driven. But is this for sure? Does fast paced technological change drive digital marketers job? Yes and no, both. The driver is the fast-changing consumer needs and habits. Technological innovations’ effect on marketing is indirect. People change so marketing should too.

Let’s take a snapshot of what are the basic, most proliferated concepts and tools in digital marketing now.
Digital marketing started changing mass communication into 1-to-1 communication slow and steady. It is not too brave to say we are living in the decade of the personalization with all the positive and negative effects. Personalized recommendations and echo chambers are the two sides of the same coin. But this won’t stop, all the technological changes are pushing companies into this direction.

The most used tool of the digital marketers these years is data, which can sit in a CRM system or somewhere else.
This gives the ability of several sophisticated digital marketing activities.

• Precise segmentation, not just demographic but transactional and behavioral too. This enables targeting a lot of small or micro segments to gain efficiency.
• Good data enables also the personalization of mass communication and the content used for it. For example, personalized eDM-s with proper addressing.
• It is getting more and more common to automate parts of the marketing communication with pre-defined triggered messages and drip or multi-step campaigns.
• From the business perspective marketing automation gives the opportunity of cross-sell and upsell campaigns. Highly developed retargeting possibilities (like tracking pixels of Facebook and Google) make these business goals a reality.
• Trial and error based iterative development is a very common practice in digital marketing. For example A/B testing of different tracking or conversion metrics.

To conclude what is essential for digital marketing is executing multichannel marketing campaigns. Running a lead generation campaign on Facebook, simultaneously orchestrating PPC campaigns and delivering SEO optimization, accompanied with a robust social media presence. This is the current norm in digital marketing.