Effect of Digital Era on Marketing Strategies

Digitisation has improved the operational and execution capacity of several business-related domains. Traditional marketing has also been positively affected by the advent of digitisation. Successful marketers apply a customised mix of traditional and digital marketing strategies based on their marketing brand. Since more people are using digital platforms nowadays, the significance of digital marketing has also increased exceptionally high. Further, the cost and benefit ratio of the applied digital marketing practices is also very promising, as digital marketing costs are way less compared with traditional marketing practices. Currently, digital marketing has become the central area of practice by small businesses and large Multinational Companies (MNCs) alike.

What is Digital Marketing?

To understand the concept of digital marketing, we need to understand the Internet itself since digital marketing professionals utilise various platforms enabled by the Internet. It means that all the websites, social media platforms, blogging platforms, knowledge-based platforms, and even discussion forums fall under digital marketing practices. Digital marketing is a set of well-thought activities integrated with engaging and converting internet users through several platforms and content marketing practices. Digital marketing itself has evolved quite significantly in the past two decades.

Digital marketers were once considered to be catering to a small market and are now driving global sales through direct engagement with billions of people on a real-time basis. Traditional marketing is also working in parallel with digital marketing; however, smaller businesses are more inclined to spend their marketing budgets on digital marketing and perhaps do it for obvious reasons.

Digital Marketing Evolution the Past Decade

The evolution of digital marketing is indeed a fascinating concept. Back in the mid-90s, Internet users began to interact more with companies that advertised on the web, as it was when the first clickable ads appeared. However, in the 2000s, digital marketing became something else and started to change into something we are familiar with today.

As the digital marketing practices increased, brand-related communication was more democratic, and everyone became a producer of meaningful content that did not focus on sales as much. In addition, people can now interact with each other or with the content available on the platform they are using. The increasing number of Internet users has led to this change, which continues to grow today. Scholars point towards more changes in the web after the revolution of the 2000s and call it the emergence of modern digital marketing. As we step into the 5G internet networks, we can foresee another significant development in digital marketing practices.

Today online marketing is increasingly moving towards personalisation, that is, delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Some of the digital marketing concepts that evolved in the past decades include the following:

• Keyword placement
• Keyword Research
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Organic Traffic Generation and Positioning
• Pay Per Click Campaigns (Paid Advertisements)
• Click to Rate or CTR
• Backlinks
• Landing Pages
• User Engagement (Artificial Intelligence)
• Conversion of users into customers
• Ecommerce (Mass scale online market places)

What are the Benefits of a Content Marketing Strategy?

The digital marketing content is usually resonating with information, added value and strategic, impactful content, so it must be managed in the Digital Marketing department by a Content Manager. In other words, it is the marketing of a business or brand by sharing information that will ultimately help readers improve their lives. It can be in the form of a change in personal behaviour or, as most advertisers hope, it could be in the form of a purchase decision. It is not about forcing a sales pitch on people but about helping them move towards the best course of action.

Content marketing is a calculated digital marketing approach, which revolves around sharing content that brings value to the readers. It is vital to attract and retain a clearly defined target audience and ultimately drive profitable customer actions. There are several ways content is valuable for marketing purposes, and content includes everything visible on a computer screen. Content includes written content, graphics, sounds, videos and even the design of any digital platform.

Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is an individualised approach to marketing that companies use to shorten their sales cycle, get to know their customers, and create a more human-like shopping experience. Unlike traditional marketing, conversational marketing uses targeted real-time messages and intelligent chatbots instead of lead capture forms. This way, potential customers never have to wait for follow-ups and can engage with any business when it's convenient for them.

Social Media Marketing

Content marketing is quite prevalent on social media platforms; alone, Facebook has almost 3 billion users that remain active most of the time in a month. It means that a business can access a vast global audience through a social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many more. The fact that one social media platform can offer such a big market as a digital marketing tool reduces the cost of marketing overall, which demands a leaner marketing budget.

Digital Content Strategy - Why It's Important and How to Do It Right

There is no fixed step by step plan for a sure-shot digital marketing practice but rather a cycle, which needs consistent improvement with time. The Content Marketing cycle implies that each step is related to the previous one. From my perspective, this cycle consists of 4 primary stages: planning, creating, distributing and measuring. When it comes to Content Marketing, we cannot launch into content without having a plan, and we need to set goals and think about our target audience before starting to write.

Once we complete the prerequisites, it's time to create the content. It is where the main difference of this approach lies. We should think about our audience and devise our content in the format required by the media we selected. Sitting down to write is constant research for adding value to the content that we are about to write. And understand what the customer wants to consume and what could be a turn off for them makes the content producers avoid such practices.

Here we have to put our creativity into practice because we have to say something attractively and interestingly for the client. When distributing the content, we must ask ourselves, where is my audience? How do they consume the information? Social networks are probably the site par excellence to distribute our content productions; however, it's essential to know which platforms our target audience is more actively using.

We are defining our digital ecosystem, and understanding where our blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, etc., are going to be published plays a fundamental role here. Depending on our audience, at what time, how often, etc., are essential factors in the content marketing strategy. This analysis process should not happen at the end of the campaign but throughout the entire digital marketing journey. We cannot analyse after we have published 30 articles making the same errors repeatedly and losing our impact.

Conclusion: What should you do to prepare for the future of the digital era?

Digital Marketing is a set of activities that a company or person executes on the Internet. To attract new business and develop a brand identity. The primary function of Digital Marketing is to remain connected 24 hours a day and 365 days a year with our favourite audiences. It gives companies significant advantages like increasing revenue, identifying customer preferences, improving conversion rates, analyse competitors, among others. It is a constantly changing and attractive area of expertise; there's always something new to learn by digital marketers. If you work in an agency, you will always work with different clients, which means you will probably never get bored. Some of the basic components that are essential for being prepared for the futuristic digital era are shortlisted below:

Communication With Consumers

Communication is critical for any business if they plan to stay in the market for long; perception management of any business also carries considerable weight in their marketing strategies. Traditional marketing does not allow consumers to communicate with companies about what they have just seen easily with billboards, television, and radio. For this part, digital marketing enables the communication between companies and consumers directly, 24 hours a day and often in real-time.

Global Market Access

If you have ever studied marketing, you know that one of the famous 4 Ps of Marketing is "Place", that is, the place where you will carry out your marketing actions. For example, if your campaign uses billboards or brochures, the choice of location influences the cost and impact of the action. Any company can have a global reach in the futuristic digital world since there are no distances to cover or geographical limits that can restrain your digital presence.

As a concluding statement, digital marketing provides far more access to businesses and consumers alike to communicate with each other directly. It becomes a bridge among the two most important participants of any trade, the buyer and the seller but on a global scale where distance won't matter anymore.