Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing is a modern marketing strategy that entails promoting products, brands or services through electronic media or digital technologies like the internet, social media, online forums, and emails.
Digital marketing applies both push and pull techniques; outbound marketing technique is where enterprises use ads to reach their intended customers or audience. Currently, these enterprises are using advertorials to pass their advert messages. Inbound marketing is where enterprises use social media, and other digital contents to advertise themselves. This technique is able to reach more consumers but tends to get ignored by uninterested parties. This problem is solved by audience segmentation where content is showed only to interested parties but in this case, they would reach fewer consumers.
Also, there is the development of marketing automation software that assists in digital marketing. This software enables enterprises and companies to study customer behavior and try to find out their potential of accepting or consuming new products to be introduced in the market, it also helps these companies to reach a more audience. There is also the use of geolocation and mobile marketing, hence companies are able the location of their customers and send them promotions or discounts as per where they are. Advertising companies are also able to develop algorithms that are able to identify consumer locations and send or show advertisements as per the area or country they reside.
The rise and increased usage of social media have spearheaded an increase in digital marketing have it has provided a cheaper and more reliable platform where companies and businesses can promote their products, brands, and services. Not only is it reliable but also there is a guarantee that your advertisement will reach millions of people. Social media enable marketing where advertisement are based on user preferences, likes, and activities on the platform.
Digital marketing has got its own challenges, mostly to digital marketers; intense competition – being that digital media are cheaper and attract both big and small enterprises hence it is difficult to capture consumer attention at times; proliferation of digital channels – since there are various channels and device which differ in protocol and interfaces and also consumers interact with these channels and devices in different ways; high data volumes – consumers leave behind a traffic of data after visiting digital channels, this makes it difficult to manipulate and analyse this data in order to get meaning information about consumer preferences and inform marketing leads from it.
The complexity of digital marketing has grown more due to the rise of several channels used in communication and also there is a need for data mining and analysis in order to get informed on consumer interests and preferences in order to reach not only a larger audience but also interested and the correct audience. There are several tools and software that have been developed to help companies and businesses to study and understand customer preferences and behavior. Also, enabling them to know how their past advertisement performed and a customer response to this advertisement.