The Future of Digital Marketing

DIGITAL MARKETING covers promotions of your products/services using electronic, digital gadgets and internet, ofcourse. Every company manufactures products or provides services and then uses several publicity techniques to reach the right audience at the right time. All of this achieved through marketing. History of advertising can be traced back to mid 19th century when it was done through newspapers and magazines.

With advent of new technologies, advertising grew rapidly in 20th century which was then done through radio, television and direct mails along with newspapers and magazines.

These are now termed as traditional marketing tools. In the late 20th century, Internet rose to be used as an important tool for advertising. Organisations started turning to online measures in order to boost their products. This was when the term digital marketing was introduced.

As years progressed, digital marketing encompassed all kinds of promotions done through search engine marketing, social media outlets, content marketing, video marketing, email marketing or pay per click advertising.

Traditional marketing has not yet vanished but is shrouded with more challenging and time taking strategies that are needed for it’s effective working. So why will people not turn to Digital Marketing? It is more cost efficient, effective and allows to measure, monitor and analyse in a much better and faster rate.

Therefore, if we talk about present day scenario, traditional marketing simply doesn’t stand a chance. According to Global Digital Population report by Statista, 4.57 billion people were active internet users in April, 2020.

Another report by Our World in Data states that on any day in the last 5 years there were on average 640,000 people online for the first time! This counts to 27000 news users every hour.

This number is still increasing every day. No surprise that organisations are going digital as marketing is all about finding your target users and communicating value to them at the right time. So it’s wise enough to find users on platforms where they are spending maximum hours of their days and nights i.e. on the internet.

Today digital marketing can work for any business of any type. Doesn’t matter what your company is based on or what it sells, digital marketing will find a way to attach to your business in any sphere. It makes companies build their content revolving around what are their customer’s needs and interests. It works on both, B2B and B2C, ends.

Not only does it adds value to your content but enable you to see accurate results in real time. For example if you put an ad on a newspaper or magazine, there’s basically no way to actually calculate how many people flipped to that page or saw your ad. There’s no surefire way to analyze if that ad helped in boosting you sales or in attracting audiences.

In contrast, with digital tools of marketing you can not only know the exact number of people who saw your ad, content or website but also can have a deep insight into other factors like their demographic areas, age groups, devices they used and much more.

Such results help you prioritize which area you can use to your benefit and which area needs improvisations. This clearly shows how in the recent years digital marketing has taken over traditional marketing techniques. Advantage that digital marketing holds over other marketing methods and the factors that straight forward emphasize on digital marketing being the future for everyone are,

Lower cost input with huge Return on Investment (ROI). It’s the most affordable media today. Gone are the days when one would spend thousands on getting their advertisement printed. Most of the tools of digital marketing are free and other cost you a trivial amount of money for ads.

1. Global reach as it can help extend your business and expand reach to more audiences around the world. Today it’s said that, ‘Going digital is going gobal’. And this is the reality. Through various platforms like facebook, twitter, instagram, linkedin etc, one can reach audiences in any part of the world.
2. 3. Viral content can bring customers to your business with actually no cost added. You just need to create a quality content and it will work wonders itself with no extra amount of work needed.
3. 4. Tracking results effectively and even faster aids in growing your business rapidly on a large scale. From having zilch information about your customers to having more than enough details, digital marketing has brought you way ahead in marketing strategies.
4. 5. Keeping up to the competition is not a difficult task with digital tools. You can keep a check on your competitors’ methods and can work on ways to improve your plans. It helps in forming strategies that would benefit your business.
5. 6. Presenting personalized content to customers according to their preferences is one of the sole reasons contributing to the popularity of digital marketing. With the help of ML and AI, automated results based on search preferences are produces that is highly effective in luring your customers in. Jeff Bezos, the Founder and CEO of Amazon, once said, “It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online.” One can make out from this statement how world has changed and will continue to change in the coming years.

Today, with increased connectivity and established digital grounds, changes are taking place even faster. All the techniques of digital marketing are experiencing an exponential increase and mind boggling developments.

The shift of world towards Artificial Intelligence is paving an even more easier way for digital marketing taking over all other forms. It is helping brands to personalize and optimize marketing campaigns allowing them to maximize their results.

This is definitely going to work in huge favor of marketers and sellers. Word-of-mouth marketing is now done by influencers who give voices to various products in their blogs, videos and other content and all of this is done online. Written articles talking about your products on newspapers is taken over by blogging and content marketing. Direct mails are replaced by electronic mails.