What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a form of direct marketing which links consumers with sellers electronically using interactive technologies like emails, websites, online forums and newsgroups, interactive television, mobile communications etc.
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Digital Marketing Definition
According to Wikipedia, Digital marketing (also known as data-driven marketing) is an umbrella term for commercialization of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.
The internet has upended how consumers engage with brands. It is transforming the economics of marketing and making obsolete many of the function‟s traditional strategies and structures. For marketers, the old way of doing business is unsustainable. – Edelman, 2010
Nature of Digital Marketing
It is imperative to understand the basic nature of digital marketing.
- It should be relevant
- It should be a personalised character. The user must be able to get personalised feed based on his/her interests.
- t should be Cost Effective
- You could measure the impacts of your campaigns through high measurability.
- Digital campaigns are extremely scalable campaigns.
- A user can engage with the ads, or there is scope for higher engagement.
- It should have an ability to go viral
- It enables you to compete with the bigger players at Level playing field where a user could be able to decide where, when & how his/her ads will be displayed.
History of Digital Marketing
In the early of 1980s, IBM brought the world the first PC for as little as $1500(INR 96510)you could have a system 50 Kilobytes of memory that could hook up to your television, play some games and even process text and with this, you could certainly argue that impending digital revolution was going. The business began to take advantage of this new compact computing power in all shot of ways but when it came to marketing one of the first applications was digitising customers and prospect information. Many of you take this for granted today, but the company called Act was the first to do this in the mid-90s and there saw afterwards gave rise to the sales forces automation platforms that eventually turned into today‟s customer‟s relationship management systems.
On the consumer side, the early internet had made the transition into the public space and building on the networks & services like America online. The first graphical web browser was created in 1993 at the University of Illinois. It was called „Mosaic‟ and its core components would later w be taken to markets as Netscape Navigator. Microsoft soon got into the game with internet explorer, and suddenly just about everyone was online.
Few short years later, the .com boom was in full swing and consumers, and business jumped into anything and everything that had to do with the internet realising the virtual sea of possibilities that the future would hold. Suddenly there was a web page for every product and every service out there and marketers realised that the consumers now had access to all the information they would need to make new kinds of buying decisions to make new purchasing cycle.
Search engines became the defector gateway for anything to be found online, and by the year 2000 Google had realised this could be monetised and launched the first version of its AdWords product letting advertisers bid to show their ads to people typing in keywords that indicated interest in their products & services. Publishers were plastering their content wildly available for free with banner ads & ad serving technology was connecting supply and demand at a large scale.
We had all learned to depend on emails throughout the 90-90s and by 2003 we already had can spam compliance legislation to deal with the advertisers that figured out so cheap and easy to blast their messages in this electronic version of traditional direct mail. Spam was brought under control, a new breed of tools and technology was created and a Modern integrated email management platform and marketing automation platforms now evolved.
As infrastructure raised ahead providing ever more bandwidth, storage and computing power the web change from place to present static information to a platform to interaction. Moreover, during this time, people initial scepticism of entering creating card information on a website has turned into e-commerce revolution. By 2011, eBay had sold nearly 40 Ferraris on its mobile app. Perhaps the most importantly the exorcism of data left behind every one of these interactions as never been richer. From the log file passes to today‟s enterprise analytics solutions and big data tools, the marketer has never before had access to more data. Coupled with this unpreceded computing power and today we realise the dream of data-driven decision making and even real-time predictions & automation to achieve massive customise one to one customer’s interactions at scale.
