To understand the relevance of digital marketing one needs to understand the meaning of marketing as a topic first. The simple definition of marketing is: "To generate an environment of awareness and action in an industry to facilitate the sales of items and services in a specific market." The marketing concept is driven by the Marketing Mix or 4 P's of marketing, i.e. Product, Price, Place and Promotion. To put it differently, a successful marketing campaign will depend on the way the 4P's are mixed to address a specific market in the finest way. Promotion is a component of the promotional aspect of the Marketing Mix. The components of Promotion are: advertising, individual selling, sales advertising and public relations. Digital marketing consequently fits into the advertising aspect of Promoting and forms a subset of the overall promoting strategy.
Digital marketing refers to the job of technology to carry the marketing message to the customer and would include radio, television, the net, mobile phones, social media and other areas where technology is involved. It's essential to note that digital marketing is not just about the world wide web, but all digital technologies.
The world in a quite short space of time has gone crazy about digital technology and devices like PC's and expensive laptops, cellular phones, smart phones, computer tablets and other devices. Link these phenomena to the explosion of the web and social networking in consumer driven economies and you have a recipe for marketing success in digital marketing. The more you drive the consumption for all these technologies in a client driven society, the more you expand the marketing possibilities of all solutions and services. Not only is the digital marketing opportunities expanding, but the entire marketing effort is additionally strengthened through spontaneous viral marketing sparked off by digital marketing. Considering the fact that the USA has some twenty six million teenagers (9% of the population) who not merely represent a sizeable industry on their own, but additionally exercise an influence on 60% of the family budget spend, one soon enough understand the value of digital marketing as almost all of these teens either own or have access to mobile devices. These same men and women are extremely active on social media like Facebook and Twitter. What a marketing audience - impressionable, gullible, money rich and influential
There are certain restrictions to the use of digital marketing methods in South Africa imposed by the Client Protection Act, but they're not insurmountable and don't detract from the effectiveness of such strategies. Cell phones have turn out to be so commonplace among all age groups in South Africa, that SMS's and MMS's are incredibly potent methods of digitally marketing to such people. In South Africa, further, the teenage brigade virtually invariably uses smart phones, which brings the social networks right to their attention and use. This means that they're also exposed to banner ads and the like via these devices. The beauty of digital marketing, therefore, lies in the reality that there is a ready-made audience. As stated before, there are also other means of broadcasting digital marketing data, making this an extremely potent and intriguing technological aid.