Digital marketing, which is defined as the marketing of products, services or ideas using digital channels to reach the target audience, aims to provide services by taking advantage of the opportunities of innovative digitalisation with internet-based applications in order to effectively announce the service, product or idea advertisements of businesses to large masses.

“Simply speaking internet marketing, also referred to as online-marketing, web-marketing, e-marketing, or i-marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.”^【1】 

Today, marketing functions are needed in order to achieve the targeted success in the functions of the enterprises and to construct them effectively. Businesses need to use marketing functions actively in order to direct the target audience to purchasing behaviours and to reach them.

Marketing functions called marketing mix are listed as product, price, promotion and distribution. Effective use of digital components is also effective in diversifying marketing functions. Apart from service and goods marketing, ideas can also be marketed.

It should be noted that digital marketing is an advanced style of internet marketing and allows contact not only with online technologies but also with offline customers and personalisation of needs.

_{Source: (ed.) Nadya Artha Fransiska, Andy Prasetyo Wati, Jefry Aulia Martha, Aniek Indrawati, Digital Marketing, Malang: 2020, p.10}^【2】 

Historical Development

In general terms, the chronological development of marketing progresses with the phases of product-oriented (industry 1.0), customer-oriented (industry 2.0), value-oriented (industry 3.0), virtual marketing-oriented 4.0 (industry 4.0) and ‘Marketing 5.0’, which continues its formation by blending with artificial intelligence today.

Marketing 5.0 includes the effective use of augmented reality, natural language processing, internet of things, virtual reality in marketing applications, sensor technologies, blockchain technologies, infinite data, robot technologies and artificial intelligence systems.

Advantages of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing, which creates an economically effective financial benefit, reveals its competitive aspect thanks to its features such as simultaneous access and interaction with the target audience, productivity, updateability, openness to innovations and developments.

The effective use of digital technologies in marketing has enabled new developments in pricing for companies.

The reduction in catalogue costs as a result of digitalisation has provided companies with opportunities such as revenue management and easier categorisation of services in dynamic pricing areas.

_{Source: The figure was created through the "Canva" application.}

Digital Marketing and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is used in areas such as data analysis, content production, customer service and marketing, enabling businesses and brands to reach their target markets more effectively.

With artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, which continuously improve marketing models by integrating new data while identifying trends and patterns for targeted marketing strategies after analysing large amounts of customer data, can increase accuracy in this context over time.

However, in digital marketing, providers of goods, services and ideas are not always willing to interact with robots or software. As a result, it is predicted that in the near future, customers will continue to prefer human-to-human marketing as well as digital methods and will have more confidence in it.