Digital Marketing - Fighting its way to the top

A platform that has created a completely new horizon for companies to sell and market their products. The concept of Marketing has been around for more than a century and for most part of it, the conventional method has been used. With an experience in digital marketing for all most 5 years, I have noticed that still the off-line “main-stream” method is preferred. Most of the marketing budget allocation at many major companies are still assigned to print, media, outdoor, site branding, television and the likes, giving an extremely small share of the marketing budget to digital marketing in most cases. Though, in the last few years the growth has been increasing in the digital space.

The concept of digital marketing sprung in 1990s and early 2000s, with Google playing a massive role in it, which was then followed by several social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The Mobile sector too has started playing an important role in the development of this platform, mainly through mobile applications and games. Several websites are running in large profits due to help of online marketing. Google search engine has approximately 11.94 billion monthly searches, World-wide email users stand at approximately 2.5 billion, Youtube has approximately 1 billion monthly unique visitors, Facebook alone has a reach of 1.23 billion monthly users and Linkedin and Twitter put together have more than 500 million users. Keeping in mind that a large sum of these users overlap, but these numbers are still extremely large enough, with an incremental increase in percentage every year.

Nowadays it has become extremely important for a company to set up a website, one of the first things a company does while starting up and a consumer while purchasing. To reach a website easily is an extremely difficult task for a company to achieve unless the url (uniform resource locator) is known by the user or the website/company has an extremely unique name. To make this possible a company would have to optimize their website on Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine, Google is the most preferred search engine. SEO (Search engine optimization) needs to be done to a website that highlights keywords and relevance to match what the user is looking for. This could be achieved through meta tags and accurate data. A constant check on the viewer-ship and traffic of your website could be managed by a tool called Google analytics, which could help you improve the performance, speed and other parameters of your website.

The issue is that the process does not end here, a company that needs to sell or advertise its products need to do so with the help of SEM (Search engine marketing) a concept that displays ads according to the keywords typed by the users, SEM is a complicated process since many people want to promote their products and the space to do so is limited, hence a daily bid is placed based on the popularity of the keyword on the day. Adwords by Google assists the seller with this task. Other options of advertising includes social media and email ads, with a direct focus on the company’s target audience judging by the profile information,  website ads (for example: an airline providing website, advertising about hotels) and direct search engine ads that have tie ups with several websites to display advertisements.

Another important part of digital marketing and the negative of its fast pace growth, is that customers are becoming smarter. They would like to review the product before purchasing it, hence they most often than not do their research through consumer forum websites and blogging sites, especially if the ticket price of the product is substantially high for the consumer. Hence companies need to work on a term called “reputation management” to nullify the bad comments if any and prove their product worth the buy in the eyes of consumers.

Several digital marketing agencies perform all these tasks on daily basis for several companies to assist carry out their process in a smooth manner. The paradigm shift from off-line to online marketing is slowly but gradually taking over the market and the way products are advertised and sold. 

64% of the world – We are connected!

Let’s imagine a kilogram of weight in our pocket, I tried it and it felt extremely awkward. That was the approximate weight of the first wireless mobile phone developed on 3^rd April 1973, but the positives were that it built a massive platform to open several avenues in massive mobile technology enhancements to always stay wirelessly connected to people around the globe. Today, we have approximately 64% of the world using mobile phones for several purposes, right from the basic usage of making calls to constantly monitoring your heart rate. The mobile phone has become an extremely integral part of our lives, so much so that I am a Nomophobic, and weirdly don’t mind it at all.

Reminiscing the time when pixelated black text on a 96 by 65 pixel screen with a green back-light that alternately worked as a lethal attacking device or for some as a device that enhanced their sexual desire due to its unnecessarily high vibrations that notified an incoming call or a message. Major changes in technology have enabled us now to answer a call without physically answering it. The perpetual need of a mobile phone have led to several brands venturing into this market, with Nokia, Alcatel Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola, Blackberry, Xiaomi among others changing hands in dominating the mobile phone markets in various countries. Technology development in the mobile industry has been extremely quick, a company like blackberry that once managed to sell 15 million handsets and a must have device for most mobile users in one quarter of 2009 to becoming a social joke just 4 years later.

The cannibalistic war for the top spot is always on, and this is not restricted to only the companies that produce these products but for most consumers as well. Every consumer has a set perspective and belief of their device he/she owns. For me as a consumer and a technology buff with a strong opinion, I would blatantly state that I'm a huge Nokia/Windows Phone believer. With phones like the HTC one, Samsung S5 and the Nexus series, it’s hard to hold my ground and in spite of all the major competition I foresee Windows Phones to dominate the market again, with its mobile-first, cloud-first strategy among other major developments, over the next couple of years. Some might point out that I have left out the unintentional flexible screened IPhone 6 and IPhone 6 plus, the reason being from my point of view, apple have started focusing way too much on the design and less on the functionality on their devices.

Getting in and getting out of the hardware phone market is an extremely difficult task, but Google managed this well. Google faced a lot of criticism due to its more than $9.5 billion loss while changing hands from Motorola to Lenovo, but many people ignored the fact that Google managed to earn approximately 17,000 patents, 7,500 applications, a large cash pile and a large amount in deferred tax assets from Motorola and with technology moving faster than light, patents possibly hold way more future value than running a hardware mobile business. This has just helped in increasing the patents battle between Microsoft, Apple, Samsung and Google.

What can we expect from our mobile phones in the future? Surely not just a champagne coloured phone with minor performance improvements. We are surely looking at concepts like modular phones by phonebloks, intentionally flexible screen phones by Samsung, transparent phones by polytron technologies among many others. Sorry Ethan Hunt and Tony Stark, we are catching up faster than expected.

Life minus the ease

The word "ease" has a completely different meaning all together today, for me ease directly corresponds to technology and its enhancements. To start off with something as simple as, without it today I would be probably clacking away on a typewriter and post which that piece of paper would be lost within all the pile of trash without any kind of circulation. The inception of technology, one of the biggest gifts to mankind without which we would certainly be incomplete. A person today can be judged by mainly three things, the amount of money he/she makes, the place where he/she stays and his/her internet speed.

Technology as defined, is something that makes life convenient with the application of scientific knowledge. Let’s try and imagine a regular working day without it. To start off our day waking up/ stage 1, we most certainly would have to rely on family members who are possibly dreamless sleepers or insomniacs to personally wake us up (minus alarm clock). Getting ready/stage 2, without a sense of time, seems like a certainly easy task for most (minus a watch). Using the public transport/stage 3, this is a little tricky to analyse if buses/trains/monorails could be considered as mainstream technology, even if we don’t consider them as main stream technology, their back-end systems surely are and so are the back-end systems for the punishment lights. The easiest and quickest solution to get you to your destination would be animal slavery, due to derailed trains and bashed up buses  due to lack of communication and sync (minus public transport). Reaching work in the worst possible state, only to know that the day has just begun. Running around to meet people personally and waiting for telegraphs/posts to hopefully arrive (minus outlook). Lack of knowledge on the current happenings in the city, which means death or being robbed is always on the table (minus the internet). After a long day of torture, returning home to an over populated house of your cranky, angry, demanding and playful children (minus entertainment systems).

For me the minor inclusions of technology makes or breaks my day. For example staying in a city, where the weather is very unpredictable, a small automated reminder by Siri, Cortana or the likes to carry my jacket would immensely change my day for the better. Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get – Forest Gump. A statement apt for a life without technology.

Sometimes the things that are easily attainable, shouldn't be taken for granted.