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.
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