Overview

What this chapter is about

Every day, people search for products on the internet, watch videos, read articles, check email, and spend hours on social apps. Wherever people gather their attention, businesses want to reach them — and today that attention has moved almost entirely onto digital screens. Digital marketing is the practice of promoting products, services, and brands using the internet and electronic devices, so that a business can find customers, talk to them, and sell to them online.

A generation ago, a shop that wanted more customers put up a hoarding, printed pamphlets, or paid for a newspaper advertisement. It had no way of knowing how many people actually saw the advertisement, who they were, or whether it led to a single sale. Digital marketing changes this completely. When a business promotes itself online, it can measure exactly how many people saw its message, how many clicked, and how many finally bought — and it can show different messages to different people. This power to target and to measure is what makes digital marketing so important to modern commerce.

This chapter explains what digital marketing is and why it matters, how it differs from traditional marketing, the main types or channels of digital marketing (search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and affiliate marketing), and the common tools and metrics a business uses to plan campaigns and judge whether they are working. The treatment follows the standard, well-established approach taught at the Standard XII level; Maharashtra's Information Technology syllabus draws on the same widely accepted principles of commerce and computing used everywhere in the field.

To respect fairness and neutrality, this chapter describes the channels and tools generically — for example 'a search engine', 'a social media platform', or 'an email service' — rather than naming or recommending particular commercial products.