The landscape of Digital Marketing in today’s era

Prof. Soumi Chakraborty, Sr. Lecturer, IQ City United World School of Business, Kolkata Over the last century, companies across industries have used several forms of traditional media like radio, television, newspaper and hoardings to propagate their ideas or business solutions to end users. Cumulatively these channels have been termed as traditional media since they have been extensively used over a period of time and are still existing. Devices like laptops, smartphones, digital watches and the likes have permeated our lives over the last couple of decades. This eventually gave birth to digital media. Since human beings started interacting with these gadgets frequently, brand realized the need to be invest in this media to grab attention of prospective customer. Therefore, Marketing which involves digital media where software and programming controls the way they interact with us is termed as Digital Marketing. There are several aspects of Digital Marketing. They are:

• Websites & Blogs
• Search Engine Optimization
• Email Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Inbound Marketing
• Web Analytics
• Mobile Marketing

Why are brands planning to invest more on Digital Marketing as compared to Traditional Marketing? Brands can reach out to a huge number of customers using traditional marketing. Every day, new ads are broadcasted on television or printed on newspapers but it is almost impossible for Marketers to predict how many people have actually viewed their ads. Digital Marketing is a welcome relief to overcome these challenges faced by a Marketer. With the help of Social Media Marketing, Blog Subscription or Email Marketing, Marketers can collect data to identify the spending patterns of prospective customers or analyze several parameters like behavior or demographics of their prospective buyers. This enables them to target their ads accordingly. For example, if a person subscribes to a travel blog it implicitly means that the person is a travel enthusiast and is a perfect target audience for a travel portal. Digital Marketing enables a Marketer to have deeper understanding about potential customers. One can easily identify the target group of their ads, determine the click-through rate and predict the return on investment before conducting a Digital Marketing Campaign. It helps to minimize the cost associated with Marketing and increase profitability of the brand.