INTRODUCTION
Digital is revolutionizing marketing by increasing use of automation and allied technologies.
As consumers spend more and more time online, marketers are shifting their budgets to digital marketing. Customers are online means communication with them has to be online too. This is a salient feature of digital marketing.
Some of the defining characteristics of digital marketing are:
Two-Way Communication
In the digital environment, consumers decide which brands they wish to interact with. It is not just a marketer-controlled message, but consumers too take part in creating the brand and content.
Targeting of One
Marketers can precisely target their audiences in multifaceted categorical ways - age, location, gender, seniority, income, interest, behaviour, lookalike, CRM data, remarketing, device, etc. The communication can be personalized and highly interactive. On digital platforms, targeting is a rather sophisticated task, carried out using such algorithms as to precisely reach the target audience. It is targeting of one and not many.
Hence, unlike the 'spray and pray' approach of mass media, where we hope that some consumers will be in the market to buy our product, in digital marketing we precisely know how many consumers are in the market to buy and how we have to target them. Hence while mass media considers minimizing waste, digital media has no wastage.
Level-Playing Field
Digital marketing creates a level-playing field for all marketers. It does not require big budgets, and hence small and medium businesses can also leverage it. Traditional advertising has the entry barrier of high costs, which is not there in digital marketing.
Measurability
Digital marketing has marketing more powerful as it enables measurement of performance and calculation of return on investment (ROI), which has always been the holy grail of marketing. With digital marketing marketers can close the loop as they precisely know how many people saw the ad, how many people clicked how many visited the website, how many registered and how many bought.
Push and Pull
Within digital marketing, marketers have the choice of utilizing either push or pull medium. Whereas "Search is more of a pull medium, banner ads on websites chosen based on context is push marketing. Digital marketing enables brands to do both strategic brand building marketing and tactical sales-oriented activities. Marketers can form communities on social media, thus nurturing relationship with consumers, but the same activity serves to generate leads and sales as well.
Real Time
Marketers get instant feedback, which enables them to optimize their campaigns. From feedback they get to know what is working and what is not, and hence can tweak the campaign mid-way. This improves the ROI of digital marketing. Since marketers must modify their plan based on feedback, digital marketing utilizes short planning cycles. The plans should be short term and flexible so that one can improvise on them based on real time feedback.
Zero Moment of Truth
In marketing, there are moments of truth, like when a customer examines a product or service to get an idea about it. In earlier times, the first moment of truth was the point of sale, the second was when the consumer bought the product and the third was when the consumer used the product. The Internet has preceded all these moments of truth and has become zero moment of truth as consumers today look for information or reviews about a product or service on search engines, social networks, websites and online forums before visiting tore. Hence, it is imperative for marketers to be present on digital marketing sites because that is where consumers start their journey.
Origin of Digital Marketing
The origin of digital marketing can be traced to 1994 when the first banner ad appeared on the first commercial web magazine, Hot Wired (now Wired.com).
Below is the Figure shows the look of the first banner ad.
First Banner Ad 'You Will
Since then, the digital advertising market has evolved, and in 1996, the U.S. digital advertising market was worth US$301 million. During the following year the market experienced phenomenal growth, touching $1 billion. Around 1997, companies began thinking about placing advertisements on related websites and linking their web pages to the banners. In 1998, HotWired started selling banner advertising space to companies and achieved a sensational 30% click-through rate (CTR).
Search engine 'Yahoo!' adopted this idea by offering advertising space on its home page. Yahoo! acquired Overture Services (formerly GoTo.com) in 2003 for placing ads on its search engine results, which allowed Yahoo! to provide advertisers an option to select a bid amount and compete with other bidders to rank their ads higher. Google had already launched its advertising platform 'AdWords' in 2000 to provide advertisers a sponsored link of their website and a description within its search engine results page.
LinkedIn was launched in 2002, Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. Hence, 2000-2010 was the decade of social media, which achieved penetration worldwide. Alongside, a revolution was happening in mobile phone technology, aided by a sharp drop in smartphone prices, thus increasing penetration among masses. The penetration of Internet has also increased dramatically during this period. Hence, while the 1990s was fuelled by display advertising, the early part of the first decade of 2000 was fuelled by search advertising and the later part by social media. The decade of 2010s is fuelled by mobile.
Traditional vs. Digital Marketing
This image will give the basic details on how traditional marketing differ from Digital Marketing...
( Traditional marketing: eg. : NEWSPAPER )
Summary:
In this article, we had discuss the what is digital in real world and how it was invented with the proper requirements. The basic intro to the traditional marketing and digital marketing with differences. Further we will see, Digital marketing Plans, Skills for Digital Marketing, and Careers in Digital Marketing with vast view on different social media platform digital marketing.
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