Chapter 1: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

Today, most of our lives are lived online, and most of our purchasing and buying decisions are made online. We shop online (even when it comes to supermarket purchases), learn and study online, work remotely, work out online, make friends, find entertainment, and even date online. As you have probably noticed, there's not much that isn't done online nowadays.

If you own a business, I'm sure you know that most of your customers have found you online, and if you are in the services industry, you already know how important this is. Even when a customer has met you offline, they have chosen you by word of mouth, which probably started online as well.

Have you thought about how you find out about all those services and products? How and what you find out about them is somehow related to marketing. Marketing is one of the key functions that all organizations must undertake—all organizations require effective marketing and advertising to succeed.

According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), "Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

In general, marketing is responsible for the following:

• Providing customer satisfaction
• Increasing demand
• Providing better quality products to customers
• Building a good reputation for the organization
• Generating profitable sales

However, marketing has evolved and has become digital as well. Digital marketing is an all-embracing term that encompasses all marketing activities done through digital channels. It includes all the tasks that are done online, ranging from social media to affiliate marketing.

This chapter will provide you with a comprehensive list of the most common digital marketing techniques and their core areas.

Here are the main topics we will be covering in this chapter:

• An overview of digital marketing and content marketing
• Digital marketing tactics
• Measuring your digital marketing success
• Digital marketing strategy

At the conclusion of this chapter, you will have learned how digital marketing can help raise brand awareness online, build relationships with potential and existing customers through valuable content and promotional messages, and increase customer retention and acquisition.