Emerging era of digital marketing

T J Joseph, Bengaluru, July 16, 2015:

Digital marketing involves mining of data to determine individual customers' tastes, hobbies, food preferences etc. and products and services customised to suit an individual's profile.

Digital Marketing uses the Internet, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Skype etc.), Short Messaging Service (SMS) and file sharing services (Google Drive, Dropbox etc.) to promote products and services offered by companies and establishments.

In the digital space, marketing is highly focussed. Advertisements and promotion campaigns are no longer "one-size-fits-all". It is directed at a particular com munity, a social group, family or even individuals.

But you should know that digital marketing is not e-commerce. The latter is the sale of goods and services through a digital medium. Digital marketing involves understanding customer preferences in much greater detail than was ever possible hitherto.

In fact, e-commerce companies themselves use digital marketing to further their sales. Digital marketing is also used by brick-and-mortar shops and service providers to promote their offerings.

The field has numerous opportunities to offer to those interested. Here's looking at a few:

*  Analytics professionals: When marketing through digital media, the effectiveness of each effort or expenditure needs to be analysed. Usually, raw data is available in Big Data. Analytics uses advanced statistics and sophisticated algorithms to analyse effectiveness.

*  Community managers: The Internet propagates development of communities of people from around the worl d with similar interests, such as fans of a particular television show. Managing such communities and providing a link between customers and the parent organisation is the work of people in this area.

*  Content marketers: Content marketing is that set of activities which involves creation and sharing of media and publishing content used to acquire and retain customers. The information may be in the form of news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, Q&A, photographs, images etc.

*  Digital advertising professionals: This career is the equivalent of advertising in newspapers and magazines, but now in digital space, e.g., running Facebook or Google ads. 

*  Email marketing professionals: Email is one of the media in the digital space and it is possible to market goods and services through aggressive and imaginative mass emailing. In this activity, techniques and methods of persuading customers to buy products or services ar e fine-tuned and made suitable for emailing.

*  Graphic designers: The digital medium lends itself to visual presentation of information, either static or dynamic. Along with content writing, graphic design creates the pages in digital space that will be viewed by customers over the Internet and on mobile devices.

*  Marketing strategists: These are experts who work out the overall strategy for a company, identifying which channel and which market can best be tackled using a particular digital medium. They would work out the specifics of the strategy to be used in each case.

* Mobile marketers: This is the equivalent of email marketing, but on mobile devices. Products and services can be marketing directly or indirectly along with apps.

*  SEO experts: This is one of the most important functions in digital marketing. SEO uses many techniques to ensure that a particular content appears high on the relevance listing, and people in this area do this.

*  SMS marketers: These experts who specialise in marketing through SMS's, which has its own unique set of capabilities and constraints. SMS marketers adapt the overall marketing strategy of an organisation to sell through SMS.

*  Social media managers: Users of social media number in the hundreds of millions. They can be construed as a social bloc, much like a large country. The Internet provides a direct access to the population of this "country" and marketing products and service can be done to the citizens through social media.

*  Software developers: Coding in digital marketing is no different from other areas. Understanding languages like HTML, Java, Python, Ruby etc, as well as understanding CSS will be mandatory.

*  User experience experts: User experience with a marketing approach is very important because it is very easy (just one or two clicks of a mouse) for a user to switch to another site. These experts would assess and monitor user experienc e to ensure that users find their experience delightful.

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Source: Emerging era of digital marketing