The days of billboards, yellow pages, and brochures are dead. We have the internet. Most of our heads are glued to some sort of a screen, if not an assortment of different screens, all day long, and that is why digital marketing was born.
Adopting an engineer’s perspective, marketers were facing the issue of not being able to reach as many potential customers as they can optimally target. Who is to say that A’s brochure was read and was not used as a napkin instead? Starting from that problematic, and at the start of the era of the internet, a light bulb flashed on top of marketers’ heads. Why not exploit the fundamental tool of human beings?
What is digital marketing?
It’s as simple as its name suggests:
- Digital: Internet, TV, Phones, Ipads, tablets, etc.
- Marketing: The commercial processes involved in promoting, selling and distributing a product or service.
So it’s the process of advertising, selling and administering merchandise or an accommodation through digital channels, the biggest of all being the internet.
Why digital marketing?
The first apparent reason is its low cost and profitability. As a businessman, the implemented mindset is to gain as many earnings as possible while spending as less as possible. Surely, Traditional marketing was profitable back in the day; however, its cost is insignificant compared to digital marketing.
The second one is, and I firmly concur, disregarding the product/service of your company; digital marketing works for whatever industry. Some startups can even catch up to leading companies if they use it optimally.
Following those, with piquant strategy, your company’s conversion rate will increase, and consequently, a growth of earnings and ROI (return on investment) is an imminent result.
Moreover, employing and perfecting techniques such as SEM and SMO is a key factor in gaining people’s trust and spreading the name of your brand. People actually use social media websites on an everyday basis and taking advantage of those sites to market your brand is an efficient way of reaching more people. Think of it this way: a man sees an ad promoting your product; he tells someone of his entourage about it, and then that someone tells someone else and then the word spreads until you eventually earn people’s trust.
Furthermore, digital marketing allows you to track real-time results whether it would be the number of people who have visited your site, conversion rates, increase/decrease in website traffic and so much more. Through this result, you can take precautionary measures and update or modify your approach.
Finally yet importantly, digital marketing expands your stretch. Because let us face it, one of the handicaps of traditional marketing is the narrowness of the geographic factor. A company is limited to a restricted terrain. However, with digital marketing, you are absolutely open for business 24/7 with unlimited reach worldwide.
Why not digital marketing?
By now, you have learned that digital marketing’s main facilitator is the internet. Unfortunately, some areas are cursed with a poor internet connection or no internet at all, which places a barrier on the reach for a consumer.
Another drawback is that digital marketing is only advantageous for consumer goods. In other words, pharmaceutical products cannot be promoted via digital channels.
In case your company had a breakthrough and made it to the big league, it has become stereotypical to acquire enemies along the way. One type of these enemies is anti-brand activists who attack your brand’s image through the use of a doppelgänger (a modified logo of the brand), most of the time hiding behind moral problematics concerning a promoted product.
To conclude and confirm, Digital marketing can never replace a face-to-face conversation. Why’s that a problem? A marketer finds himself unable to explain to the customer things about the brand’s image or inform him about the products. As a result, the consumer is left, sometimes, with noncomprehensible ads.
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