what is online marketing? Features and benefits

New technologies and the digital era come like a hurricane to change everything as we knew it, marketing is one of those things that has to reinvent itself and adapt to the internet, hence the emergence of online marketing, read on and don't miss a single detail of digital marketing.

what is digital marketing?

Digital marketing or online marketing is a set of actions or marketing strategies that are carried out within the digital media. This is based on new channels and formats in which you have to carry out your strategy such as social networks, blogs, websites, and many other elements. From online marketing have emerged new marketing strategies such as inbound marketing, content marketing, and other new strategies.

Origin of online marketing

This term has been coined since the 1990s, and implies a way of transferring existing traditional marketing techniques to the new technological and digital era.

It has been developing a series of changes in both techniques and tools due to the fact that it has evolved so quickly and constantly. At the beginning, online marketing was based on web pages 1.0, where the advertising that existed in traditional media had simply been transferred to the first web pages, but in these there was still no bidirectionality, there was no feedback because there was no way to communicate with users. Companies and brands were limited to displaying an advertising message to the audience, as if it were just another traditional medium.

Online advertising was based on showing a showcase of your products and services within an online catalogue, which was tremendously innovative, not only because you could see a catalogue of a brand's products without going to the shop in person, but also because thanks to the internet, the reach was international. Apart from the new possibilities in terms of new formats and content.

But in a few years came the revolution that web 2.0 brought with it, giving birth to marketing 2.0, which is basically what we know today as online marketing. Thanks to this there was finally communication, all users could share information thanks to social networks, forums and other platforms. At this point the internet went from being a purely informative medium to become a two-way community in which information could be exchanged in both directions. Something essential for brands and advertising.

Finally we find the web as we know it today, the web 3.0, which can be defined by four characteristics:

• The first is that it is a semantic web, that is, the internet stops being all robotic and becomes meaningful, which means that the software is capable of interpreting natural language.
• On the other hand, we have artificial intelligence, which is precisely what allows the web to know the semantic intentionality of each page.
• On the other hand, we have 3D graphics , which are revolutionising today's web pages, and augmented reality is a futuristic innovation that is gradually triumphing and entering the digital era.
• Finally we have the ubiquity and connectivity, we are talking about the internet of things, that any object of our daily life starts to be connectable, so there are a series of omnipresent profiles in the network.

Characteristics of online marketing

1. Lower cost
   Compared to marketing in traditional media, online marketing is cheaper, on the internet there are thousands of possibilities that you can combine to your liking by deciding how much to invest, as there are so many formats and channels you have thousands of options to choose from.
   
   
2. Segmentation
   Segmenting your audience is a good step to reach your target customer, from the internet is much easier than with traditional media, if you pay to broadcast an ad on television, anyone who is on that channel will see the ad, whether or not it resembles your buyer persona. That is why the segmentation that exists within the internet is important, and is done using parameters such as age, gender, location, user interests, and many other parameters. This feature of segmenting the audience thoroughly is one of the most important because what allows each ad appears exactly to the audience that will become a potential customer.
   
   
3. Integration with the consumer
   There is no more marketing in which brands focused on showing their products and services to as many people as possible. Digital marketing tries to create a connection between the brand and the customer. The product is no longer the centre of the strategy, it has become the consumer, who is the one who will decide whether or not to consume our products and services.
   
   
4. Measurable results
   Thanks to digital marketing, we are able to measure the reactions that users have to any of our digital marketing campaigns. We obtain a large amount of statistical data that we can use to improve and optimise our campaigns.
   
   
5. Greater flexibility
   Any mistake that we see that we have made thanks to the above mentioned statistics, we can solve it in a matter of minutes. We have to take very little time to correct those mistakes because in the technological era, what matters is immediacy.

Advantages of digital marketing

1. Global marketing: Thanks to the internet, we do not only have to be satisfied with customers who are close to our physical shop, we are globally connected, and thanks to this, anyone can access our market and even buy from anywhere in the world.
   
   
2. Instantbidirectionality: Thanks to the ease of communication provided by the internet and its multiple platforms, consumers can ask questions and express their doubts at any time, saving time by not having to go to a physical shop or call. In addition, brands are quick to respond as they benefit from receiving feedback from their customers.
   
   
3. More to choose from: By allowing the consumer to see the entire catalogue online, we are giving them more to choose from and they can even decide to buy more than one product.
   
   
4. Greater satisfaction: In just one click, the customer will be informed of all the characteristics of the product, as well as images and the availability of the product.

Digital marketing has revolutionised marketing in general and the way we consume, it has brought many advantages for both brands and customers, so we must be very attentive to new innovations and never stop reinventing ourselves in order to survive.