Digital Marketing is a form of marketing which specializes in reaching the specified target audiences with the possibility of extreme personalization, and it can be directed very precisely on a digital platform or a medium. Digital marketing has been creating ripples in the market because of its exceptional performance in reaching the mass audience as the digital footprint of the target audience is easily available. Firms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter etc. have an extensive reach in the masses and this has made the job digital marketer relatively easier, but the scope of work has increased manifolds.
Digital marketing gives a high ROI because most of the users who consume the content or an ad are already driven by the intent to look at the product, hence driving such users to the next logical step in the sales funnel i.e. making a purchase is relatively easier and convenient. Additional feature of digital marketing is that the marketing attempts or initiatives are happening when the user is online, which means that users are consuming the marketing efforts unlike the traditional form of marketing in which marketing efforts can go a miss because the consumer might choose to ignore it altogether.
Digital marketing in context of the day is unavoidable. However big or small a firm is, indulging in digital marketing is never an idea. There are mechanism like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in digital marketing that does not even cost a single rupee to run (if you have a website/app ready with content) and they might give you the best of returns. When we talk about SEO, it can drive the most organic form of traffic to your website and generate revenue, as the leads are of high quality and often aware of the product or services that a firm has to offer.
Some other mechanism used in digital marketing are SEM (Search Engine Marketing) which comprises of creating ads to be shown on to Google searches and on GDN (Google Display Network). While google search mechanism ensures that your website gets searched when someone is looking for the content available on your website, Google AdSense makes sure that your ad for the relevant product or services is shown on relevant searches.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is another dimension of digital marketing which has evolved to be huge in the current times owing to the massive amount of users present on the social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest etc. The amount of data that the users have voluntary shared with these platforms is humongous, and it leaves a lot of information to target the users depending on their preferences and different profiles.
Digital marketing is mostly data driven, given to the fact that a lot of data is available and data analytics plays a key role in the field of digital marketing. Digital Marketing and Data Analytics have been siphoning the power of the huge information sources present. With the number of digital citizens on the rise, with the increasing reach of internet and data services, digital marketing is reaching the places where traditional medium could never have reached economically, if at all reach such places.
Digital Marketing has seen a huge influx in terms of investment from every firm, with showing great potential in the future. In the earlier times, when TV and Print combined used to account to majority of the media/marketing spends of the company, digital marketing spends now account somewhere between 10-12% of all the marketing spends which is a big achievement for a form of marketing which was non-existent a few years ago. Even the percentages mentioned are on the rise on Y-O-Y basis.
On the onset, we can see that digital marketing is a force to reckon with, with its reach expanding non-stop with each passing extent. It won’t be surprising that you are reading this article on a platform where you have been targeted to this page with one or the other mechanism of digital marketing mentioned above. Digital marketing is smart and it is here to stay. Better to catch on this hot potato if you are a business unless the opportunity just walks by.
By: Shubhendru (Founder at Webeesocial.com)