Chapter 11: Digital Marketing
Learning Objectives
- Students will understand the role of digital marketing in the formation of marketing strategy.
- Students will be able to list and describe the most common types and characteristics of digital, social, and mobile marketing.
- Students will be able to explain the process for creating an effective digital, social, and mobile marketing campaign.
Introduction
Most people will agree that digital marketing has changed marketing in many ways. Unfortunately, many people also believe that marketing is all about digital marketing. That’s not the case. Marketing is about strategy, as we have focused on throughout this text. Digital marketing is an extremely valuable tool to help us be more effective in preparing for and implementing that strategy.
Digital marketing is any marketing that uses electronic devices and can be used by marketing specialists to convey promotional messaging and measure its impact through the customer journey. In practice, digital marketing typically refers to marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. It can take many forms, including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads, email campaigns and social media posts.
Digital marketing has created numerous opportunities for marketers to target their market more specifically, to gather valuable research information, and to provide more customized customer contacts. The affordability of digital marketing has proven to be a boon for small companies that have struggled with the costs of traditional promotion methods. In view of all the positive advancements digital marketing has created, we need to recognize that ethical and legal challenges have emerged as well. Assuring customer privacy and protection of their information from unauthorized usage, has proven to be a challenge.
In this chapter a preliminary look at digital, social, and mobile marketing will transpire. An in-depth look is beyond the scope of this chapter as the variance and technical advances take more time than is available in an introduction to marketing course.
