What is the difference between digital marketing and internet marketing? What is the latest trend in the industry? How do big companies allocate their digital marketing budgets?
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a broad term that describes a set of marketing processes that encapsulate all available digital channels to promote a product or service or build a digital brand.
Digital marketing has replaced traditional marketing, transitioning from paper and newspaper ads to Facebook and PPC campaigns.
The channels that make up digital marketing include Website marketing, Social media platforms, Banner placement, email marketing, mobile marketing, SEO, pay-per-click campaigns, Web TV, SMS, billboards, and anything else with a digital foundation.
Resources to Learn More about Digital Marketing
- Digital marketing courses - The best online courses for beginners in digital marketing.
- How to learn digital marketing - a step-by-step guide to help you learn digital marketing from home.
- Digital Marketing Course Bundle - an online training course that covers everything you need to know about digital marketing.
Internet Marketing
Internet marketing is a subset of digital marketing. It is, in fact, the most important component since the majority of digital marketing activities fall within the boundaries of Internet marketing.
We will see below how digital marketing budgets are spent and their relationship with Internet marketing.
The major channels of Internet Marketing are:
Web site - A personal website, a corporate website, or even a personal blog hosted on a shared platform (like WordPress or Tumblr).
For many campaigns, a website is the starting point and the destination. For example, you run a digital marketing campaign to promote a website (starting point) and attract more visitors (destination).
Search Marketing (SEM) – Search Engine Marketing is the basis of Internet Marketing and consists of two important activities: SEO and PSA. There is a lot of confusion about these terms that’s why I wrote separate posts explaining the difference:
In a nutshell:
SEO involves optimization techniques for achieving higher rankings in Search engines. It has two major components: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Paid Search Advertising (PSA) involves getting visitors by placing ads on search engines. The most popular approach is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and the most well-known tool is Google Ads, which lets you advertise on Google and partner networks.
So, search marketing has to do with promotion methods related to Search Engines.
Social Media Marketing - Social media marketing is another component of Internet marketing that has gained considerable attention in the last couple of years.
Millions of users spend considerable time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. This fact has alerted digital marketers to take social media seriously and incorporate it into their digital marketing campaigns.
Content Marketing - When we talked about SEO in the past, we essentially meant link building, but this trend has changed since 2011, and content marketing has become the new SEO.
This simply means that good content has become again the foundation of SEO, and it is through content that you will build a better Internet presence, not through cheap link-building techniques.
Email Marketing - Email is not dead; on the contrary, it is one of the most important tools in every digital marketing campaign. Despite the influence of social media, email is still the most efficient way to convert visitors or readers into customers.
Email marketing gathers email addresses from people interested in your products or services to send them newsletters or offers.
Mobile Marketing – More and more users use their mobile phones to search the web, engage on social media, or find products or services to buy.
It is estimated that 60% of the traffic coming to a website is from mobile (this holds for my websites as well; check your Google Analytics reports, and you will be surprised).
Mobile marketing is about creating content or ads that are viewable and suitable for a mobile device. For example, websites should have mobile-friendly versions, and an advertisement on a mobile device may consider the device's location and show the nearest shops that sell a particular product.
Banner Advertising - Banners can be found on almost all web properties, including websites, mobile websites, mobile apps, search engines, newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Digital marketers try to promote their products or services through different types of banners (static, text, animated, images, videos, clever banners) on different platforms.
SMS Marketing—SMS is not dead. Despite the rise of online marketing channels, many companies combine internet marketing with SMS to reach more targeted customers. Many CRM/email marketing platforms offer SMS campaigns as part of their automated workflows.
What’s the latest trend? Where does the money go?
Perhaps the best way to understand the latest trend in the digital marketing industry is to find out how big companies allocate their marketing budgets.
This is exactly what Gartner did in a recent report.
The findings of this report are very interesting. They show, without a doubt, that most digital marketing budgets are spent on Internet marketing components.
In particular, the most important findings are:
- Marketing budgets represent 12% of total company revenues, and this is expected to grow even further
- Digital marketing represents 14% of overall marketing spend
- 50% of digital marketing activities are outsourced (if you are thinking of outsourcing, make sure that you do it correctly without spending a fortune)
- The most important digital marketing activities are: Web presence (website), digital commerce, and digital advertising
- Top digital marketing investments will be in eCommerce, social media marketing, content creation, and mobile marketing.
Conclusion
It is important to understand that Internet Marketing is a subset of digital marketing and not something different. When we talk about digital marketing, we mean Internet marketing plus SMS, WebTV, and digital advertising.
It is clear that companies are starting to appreciate the importance of social media as a marketing tool, and there is also a clear turn to content and mobile marketing.
