Digital Marketing VS Internet Marketing – What is the latest trend?

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a broad term that describes a set of marketing processes that utilize all available digital channels to promote a product or service or build a digital brand.  Digital marketing has come to succeed traditional marketing and the transition from paper and newspaper ads to Facebook and PPC campaigns.

The channels that make up digital marketing include: Web sites, 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.

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing components

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.

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The major channels of Internet Marketing are:

Web site – Either a personal website or 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 i.e. you run a digital marketing campaign to promote a website (starting point) with the purpose of getting more visitors (destination).

Search Marketing (SEM) – Search 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:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) VS Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEO VS Pay Per Click (PPC)?

In a nutshell:

SEO has to do with optimization techniques for the purpose of achieving higher rankings in Search engines. It has two major components: On Page SEO and Off Page SEO.

Paid Search Advertising (PSA) is about getting visitors by placing ads on search engines. The most popular approach is the Pay Per Click (PPC) and the most well-known tool is Google Adwords which lets you advertise on the Google and partner network.

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 and one that is gaining a lot of attention the last couple of years. Millions of users spend a considerable amount of their on-line time on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn and on other SM platforms and this fact alerted digital marketers to take SM seriously and make it a part of the digital marketing campaigns.

Content Marketing – In the past when we talked about SEO 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 and not through cheap link building techniques.

Email Marketing – Email is not dead but 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.

In terms of marketing, email marketing is the process of gathering email addresses from people interested in your products or services for the purpose of sending 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. In fact it is estimated that 30% of the traffic coming to a website is from mobile (this holds true for my websites as well, check your Google analytics reports and you will be surprised).

Mobile marketing is about creating content or ads that is viewable and suitable for a mobile device. For example: websites should have mobile friendly versions and an advertisement shown on a mobile device may take into account the location of the device and show the nearest shops that sell the particular product.

Banner Advertising – You can find banners in almost all web properties i.e. 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) in different platforms.

What’s the latest trend? Where does the money go?

Perhaps the best way to understand what is 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 latest report with title Digital Marketing Spending Report, 2013.

The findings of this report are very interesting and they show without a doubt that the majority of digital marketing budgets is spend on Internet marketing components.

In particular the most important findings are:

Marketing budgets represent 10% of total company revenues and this is expected to grow by 6% in 2013

Digital marketing represents ¼ of overall marketing spend

50% of digital marketing activities are outsourced (if you are thinking to outsource, make sure that you do it correctly without spending a fortune)

The most important digital marketing activities are: Web presence (website), Social media marketing and digital advertising

Top digital marketing investments will be made on 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 in essence 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.

Mobile web site Vs Native App and why webmasters should care?

A mobile web site or mobile friendly web site is not the same as a native android app or a native iPhone app or a native Windows mobile app. The mobile web site VS Native app is not exactly a debate as to which one is the best, but these are technologies that can (and should be) used as part of your overall Internet Marketing strategy.

Why you should care?

As a webmaster you can use both these technologies to increase the traffic and exposure of your web site. I would say that besides search engine traffic and social media, mobile traffic (either through search on mobile or through the various mobile markets) is among the best ways to promote your web site.

What is a mobile friendly web site?

Smartphones, either Android, iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile, have significant differences compared to desktop Pcs or laptops. They have smaller screens with a lower resolution and their basic navigation method is touch. When a normal web site is viewed on mobile (through a mobile browser), the user experience is not so good since the user has to scroll up and down, left and right and probably magnify the screen in order to read an article or navigate through the site.

A mobile friendly web site is optimized for the mobile browser. The buttons are bigger, fonts are easily read and there is no vertical scroll bar. Click on the screenshots below to see how a non-mobile friendly web site looks on the mobile browser versus a mobile friendly web site.

mobile friendly web site

Click image to enlarge – Mobile friendly web site

example of non mobile friendly web site

Click image to enlarge – Non mobile friendly web site

Providing your users with a mobile friendly version of your web site is a must. Recent research shows that 30% of search traffic is from mobile and this is number is steadily rising. I’m sure that if you take a look at your analytics data you will see the same trend. It is also a fact that visitors are more likely to exit a web site if they don’t find quickly what they are looking for and a desktop web site viewed on a mobile browser is a bad experience.

A mobile optimized web site is good for SEO

I have said it in my SEO Tips article, Google run various campaigns about this and every SEO is insisting that you should not forget your mobile users. In fact if you really want to have a high quality web site, a mobile site is a necessity.

An additional source of revenue

In addition if you are running adsense on your desktop site you can also run adsense for mobile within your mobile friendly web site and gain from the additional revenue.

What is a native app?

If you own an android, iPhone or Windows mobile you may have noticed (or used) an icon on your mobile desktop that leads to the Google Play store, Apple store or Windows marketplace respectively. This is the place where you can download and install native apps on your phone. So a native mobile app is an application developed especially for the particular platform which can be made available in the respective mobile markets.

The hidden benefits of mobile markets to web site owners

Why should you care? How can you, as a webmaster, benefit from these?

For starters, there are millions of users per day who download and install apps from the mobile markets. Both Apple Store and Google Play have reported that they already passed the 1 billion application downloads. In addition, Android is set to have 1,300,000 new users per day!

What does this mean? There is a huge number of online users who are using their mobiles phones to look for information (apps, games, magazines, books etc.) in the respective mobile markets. You may have read about the success of Angry Birds and how the company made millions overnight from selling their game through these markets.

How can a webmaster benefit from mobile markets?

You can develop a native app for your web site and make it available in those markets. The app can represent your content, products or services in a format optimized for mobile phones or tablets. By doing so you are bringing your brand in the hands of more users which will result in:

More visits to your mobile friendly web site and desktop site.

More sales (if you are selling a product)

More direct visits

Brand awareness

Additional revenue from advertising (if you choose to run ads on your native app)

Additional revenue from selling the app (if you choose to sell the app)

More subscribers

More social followers

A real case study

Back in 2011 I have developed a native android app for one of my sites. The app is basically showing my latest content in a format optimized for android phones and tablets (see screenshot below). Whenever I publish a new post on the site my android users get a notification in their mobile phones.  The application is nothing fancy but it’s a good way for android owners to follow my site updates.

Soon after that, I have also developed a Windows Mobile App and published the app on the Windows Marketplace.

After almost one year the applications have been downloaded more than 150,000 times (and growing steadily) and the majority of users still have the app on their phones or tablets. What was the benefit for my site?

More direct visits

More visits to the mobile friendly version

More social followers

Small monthly revenue from the ads running on the app.

How can you develop a mobile web site or a native app?

Depending on the platform you use for your site there are a number of free and paid tools you can use to develop a mobile friendly version. I use WordPress and a paid plugin (wptouch pro – has a free version as well) to easily and quickly create a version for smartphones and tablets.

Developing a native android app is a bit more complicated than just installing a plugin and it also depends on the kind of application you want to create. You can use odesk.com or any other freelancing service to hire a developer (or hire me – contact me for a quote) to do the work for you. I will cover this is in more depth in another post so stay tuned.

So what is the difference between a mobile web site and a native app?

Now that you know more details, it is easier to understand the differences between a mobile web site and native app. In summary:

A mobile web site is a version of the desktop web site that is optimized for viewing through a browser on a mobile device (or tablet). It cannot be published on the mobile markets and the only way for users to find your mobile web site is to type the address from their mobile browsers. You can monetize your mobile web site by running mobile ads.

A native app is an application developed for a particular platform (android, iPhone, Windows). The resulting application is a file that can be uploaded in the respective mobile market. Once published in the market it can be searched through the market and installed on the device.  You can monetize your native app by either running ads on by setting a purchase price.

Mobile web site Vs Native App and why webmasters should care? by Alex Chris