#1 Importance of Digital Marketing.
Introduction
Digital marketing involves applying digital technologies, that is, web, e-mail, databases, mobile/wireless, and digital TV, to support interactive and non-interactive marketing activities aimed at achieving profitable acquisition and retention of customers within a multichannel buying process and customer lifecycle (Wymbs 2011).
Digital marketing demonstrates the range of access platforms and communications tools that form the online channels that e-marketers use to build and develop relationships with customers. The access platforms deliver content and enable interaction through different online communication tools such as organizational websites, portals, search engines, blogs, e-mail, instant messaging, and text messaging.
A key difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing is that the former uses digital technologies that are inherently measurable, permit conversations to be targeted, and facilitate the creation of relationships between customers and firms, whereas the latter is much more mass communication oriented. The number and ways of creating digital relationships and conversations with customers is growing exponentially, limited only by the imagination and entrepreneurial spirit of their creators (Alkhateeb et al 2008).
The main uses of digital marketing to date have been Internet-based search marketing and digital advertising, banner ads. A new approach to marketing, that is, the digital revolution has fundamentally changed marketing at the core. Most certainly digital technology has opened new channels for selling products and services, but it also has put customers in charge, creating a fundamental shift in the dynamics of marketing.
Nowadays, with the increasing development global business, digital marketing is more and more important to sell products online. An increasingly amount of users are using and engaging with digital media each year (Fulgoni and Lella 2014). Customers are engaging with digital marketing for various purposes including: for information search; purchasing online; social media; comparing products/brands. There is also an increase in accessibility with people being able to connect online more due to the invention of ‘smart’ mobile phones and ‘watches’ where people are encouraged to use the internet more through the manufactures of these products (Fulgonia and Lella 2014). Therefore digital marketing is not only rapidly growing within current marketing field, it is set to be the future of marketing, and it seems likely that digital media will soon replace more traditional forms altogether (Li and Kannan 2014).
There is also a change in consumer trends where customers are becoming more dependent on the accessibility of the internet and manage various lifestyle tasks upon digital media (i.e. research online before visiting stores, banking online only, reading online only etc.) (Li and Kannan 2014). Therefore companies have acknowledged this and it has now become a basic ‘standard’ expectation that all companies have a presence online (either for e-commerce or for providing information) (Li and Kannan 2014). This may therefore be seen as a minimum industry expectation to survive within industry.
Digital marketing is about how best to communicate with customers, how to meet their changing needs, and how to build sustainable relationships and loyalty. The fact about the current growth in digital technology has made it important for digital marketing as a field to be considered with high prominence.
REFERENCE
Fulgonia, G., Lella,A. (2014) ‘Is your digital marketing strategy in sync with Latino-user behaviour?’, Journal of Advertising Research, 54 (3), 255-258
Li,H., Kannan,P. (2014) ‘Attributing conversions in a multichannel online marketing environment: An empirical model and a field experiement’, Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), 51 (1), 40-56
Wymbs, C. (2011) ‘Digital marketing: The time for a new “academic major” has arrived’. Journal of Marketing Education, 33 (1), 93-106
Alkhateeb,F, Clausen, K., Khanfar,N., Latid,D. (2008) ‘Digital marketing: Legal and regulatory risk associated with Web 2.0 adoption of the pharmaceutical companies. Journal of Medical Marketing, 1 (1) , 311-318
