The Rise of Digital Marketing: Benefits, Challenges, and Future Trends

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Digital Marketing
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Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Discuss how digital marketing has become more popular than traditional marketing and evaluate
its successfulness.............................................................................................................................4
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................9
References......................................................................................................................................10
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Introduction
The trend of digital marketing is increasing tremendously nowadays. With the help of this study,
several elements will be studied that will help in understanding the significance of digital
marketing over traditional marketing. The study will focus on the history of digital marketing
and likewise incorporate the effects of advanced technology on the growth of the organization.
With the help of this research, the researchers will try to identify the factors related to digital
marketing that helps the firm in gaining competitive advantages. The research will likewise show
the differentiation between the digital marketing strategy and the traditional marketing strategy.
The researchers will likewise try to identify a number of advantages related to digital marketing.
Background of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing can be defined as the marketing of products or several services with the help of
the latest digital technologies. This is known as digital marketing. Digital marketing can be done
on the internet with the help of mobile phones, display advertising, and different digital medium.
In 1990, term digital marketing was used for the first time. With the arrival of the Internet and
the development of Web 1.0 platform, users can be able to find the information which they want
but they cannot share that information on the Web. In 1993, the first clickable banner was
invented, in order to advertise. This was the beginning of the era of digital marketing. In 1994,
Yahoo was launched which was the first search engine optimization. Yahoo was invented by
Jerry Yang, Yahoo got 1 million hits within the first year. Digital marketing was started evolving
and with the launch of other search engines like LookSmart, Alexa, and HotBot, digital
marketing started evolving at a rapid pace. In the year 1998, Google was invented. Microsoft
launches its own search engine which was MSN and Yahoo also launch its own search engine
which was Yahoo web search (Royle and Laing, 2014).
The digital marketing saw its big evolution in the year 2006 when the traffic in search engine
reaches to 6.4 billion users in a single month. In order to expand its business more, Microsoft
launch Live Search in order to compete with Yahoo and Google. Google came up with Web 2.0
in order to allow users to interact with other users and businesses. Features like super
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information highway introduced on the Internet. As a result, advertising and marketing through
the internet brought $2.9 billion in the US. Now its turn for the arrival of social sites, Myspace
was the first social site that arrived on the internet, soon many social sites arrived like Orkut and
Facebook.
Companies started realizing that advertising and marketing of products on these social sites is the
biggest opportunity for them. This is the new chapter of digital marketing in the form of social
sites. With the availability of new resources, companies begin to initiate new approaches in order
to promote their products and services on the platform of social sites. Another milestone in the
industry of digital marketing was the cookie (Järvinen and Karjaluoto, 2015). This is the
techniques used by the advertisers in order to track common browsing habits and also the usage
of various patterns of the users which they are searching on the internet in order to do
promotions collateral marketing of their taste. First ever cookie was designed to track the user-
habits on internet. There is a rapid change in the use of cookies and nowadays cookies are used
in order to offer different ways of collecting user data to the marketers. Products are available to
the customers all the time with the help of digital marketing. Statistics done by
Marketingtechblog in the year 2014 showed that posting ads on social media sites is the top
online activity in the US. In order to survive in the market, it is essential for the marketers to
keep an eye on the new emerging trends and the new developed smarter search engines in order
to promote their products and services (Lehdonvirta, 2013).
Types of Digital Marketing
There are two main groups of digital marketing which are online and offline. Offline marketing
can be done with the help of radio, television and phone advertising (Patrutiu-Baltes, 2016).
Online marketing can be done with the help of 7 major things which are Email marketing, Search
Engine Optimization, Pay-per-click advertising, Search engine marketing, Content marketing,
Affiliate marketing, and Social media marketing. These are the 7 major categories of online
marketing through which digital marketing of various products and services can be done.
Email marketing is the process of advertising your products or services with the help of emails.
The organization can use Emails in order to promote their products and services by sending
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direct emails to their clients and customers. Organizations can also provide updates, new features
of products and reminders to their customers with the help of emails.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of collecting traffic with the help of free, editorial,
organic or natural search results search by various people on different search engines.
Organizations can optimize a number of searches done on the search engines in order to stay up
to date about the needs of the customers in the market. This can be done with the help of relevant
keywords and relevant searches.
Pay-per-click advertising and Search engine marketing is the process of collecting traffic of
different websites by purchasing advertisements on different search engines. The most famous
paid search platform used by several marketers is the Google Ad Words and the second most
popular search engine is Bing Ads (Tiago, et. al., 2014). The other platform is Pay-per-click
advertising which is done on several social sites. Search engine marketing and Pay-per-click
marketing can be done with the help of various search engines. They can gain profits whenever
their ad gets clicked by the customers. Due to which not only the search engine make profits but
also the owner of the site can be able to target their potential customers.
Content marketing is basically the approach of strategic marketing which focuses mainly on
attracting customers by providing relevant, consistent and valuable content to the audience in
order to gain any profits through customer's action. Content marketing is the process of
communicating with the customers in order to educate the customers about the new strategies of
the business and give them relevant information about the new products and services (Ryan,
2016).
Affiliate marketing is the phenomenon of making profits by promoting the products of other
companies. This marketing can be done in order to earn profits by advertising the products of
other companies on the websites or blogs of promoters. This will be beneficial for both the
company and the promoters.
Social media marketing is the process of promoting products or services on the platform of
social media. Social media is the platform used by a large number of population and promoting
the products on social media will be beneficial for the company in order to accomplish the goals
and objectives. With the help of social media, organizers can improve the brand quality of the
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products, improve customer's service, and can collect various feedbacks of customers (Kannan,
2017).
Benefits of Digital Marketing
There are various benefits of digital marketing for organizations as compare to traditional
marketing which is as follows
Low cost is the biggest advantage of digital marketing for various organizations. Organizations
have to spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising of their products and services. This
can create a financial burden on the companies, especially for small business companies. With
the help of digital marketing, small business companies can promote their products and services
at very low cost as compared to traditional marketing. Digital marketing can create a big impact
on the growth of the business with that at an affordable cost.
The success of a digital campaign can easy to measure. As compared to the old traditional way
of marketing where organizations have to wait for weeks or sometimes months in order to
measure the veracity of the campaign but in a digital campaign, an organization can immediately
determine the performance of the advertisement.
Organizations can use the digital platform in order to develop their brand and also the
reputation of the company. With the help of useful articles, a blog featuring quality, social media
channels, and well-developed website, companies can develop their brand which is not possible
in traditional marketing.
The most important thing for any business is the return on investment. With the help of digital
marketing, many firms can make big returns on small investments. Email marketing or
marketing on social media have a low investment but it can make big profits to the company
which is the lack in the old traditional marketing.
Organizations can advertise their products or services through digital marketing in every part of
the world (Taiminen and Karjaluoto, 2015). This will give big opportunities, especially to the
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small start-ups to go global. There are many cases in which small start-ups become very
successful in a short period of time with the help of digital marketing.
Digital marketing allows organizations to precisely target their audience according to their
preferences or initial actions. Companies can target those audiences only which is suitable
according to their services. This will save them lots of time for the companies and also would be
cost effective. This feature is not available in old traditional marketing.
In digital marketing, it is easy to adjust if the performance of an advertisement is not good. If
the ad campaign is performing well it is easy for the organization to invest more with just a
simple click and if the ad is nor performing well then also it is easy to adjust that advertisement.
Whereas in traditional marketing, in order to adjust more paperwork have to be signed in most of
the cases which are a big burden for the companies. These agreements are done on the long term
basis and if the ad is not performing well then the subscribers still have to wait until the
agreement get expire.
There are many factors related to digital marketing which helps the organization in gaining a
competitive advantage in the market which are Contents and gadgets explode, it is quite clear
for the marketers that there is a content and gadgets explosion and also there is a growing
scarcity of customer attention. Mobile phones are on the top priority when it comes to the device
explosion and fragmentation of results (Grishikashvili, et. al., 2014). In order to address these
requirements, digital marketers need to find out their core content and brand message so that they
can distribute that content on every channel. Customers are using multiple devices and
distributing the core content on the various channel would be beneficial for marketers in order to
gain a competitive advantage.
There is a rapid increase in the online ad spend per user which shows that there is a continuous
growth in the number of internet users. In order to take benefits of this thing, marketers need to
be careful about what they are advertising. Online ads will not only get prospects but it will help
the companies to develop a deeper level of customer loyalty and engagement. This would be
beneficial for the company in order to accomplish the goals and enhancing the growth of the
company (Hennig-Thurau and Hansen, 2013).
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It is essential for marketers to understand the importance of the location of their customers. If
any marketers are posting an advertisement for weekend sale on a retail store, then it is important
for the marketer to know the location of the customers. For example, customers are on a vacation
and they are receiving the advertisement for weekend sale, it is obvious that they will not be
going to make it. This is the waste of time and cost for the marketer. Marketers can able to find
out the location of the customers and according to that eliminate the location barrier which saves
the time of company and customers. This will give a competitive advantage to the company.
Conclusion
In this essay, the importance of digital marketing in the growth of the various companies has
been concluded. This essay concludes the various benefits of digital marketing over the old
traditional marketing. History of digital marketing has been concluded in this essay and also the
evolution of digital marketing in the era of the modern world. There are many factors which have
concluded in this research which helps the organizations in gaining competitive advantage in the
market.
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References
Grishikashvili, K., Dibb, S. and Meadows, M., 2014, April. An investigation into big data
impact on digital marketing. In International Conference on Communication, Media,
Technology and Design (pp. 146-150).
Hennig-Thurau, T. and Hansen, U. eds., 2013. Relationship marketing: Gaining competitive
advantage through customer satisfaction and customer retention. Springer Science &
Business Media.
Järvinen, J. and Karjaluoto, H., 2015. The use of Web analytics for digital marketing
performance measurement. Industrial Marketing Management, 50, pp.117-127.
Kannan, P.K., 2017. Digital marketing: A framework, review, and research agenda.
International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), pp.22-45.
Lehdonvirta, V., 2013. A history of the digitalization of consumer culture. In Digital virtual
consumption (pp. 18-35). Routledge.
Patrutiu-Baltes, L., 2016. Inbound Marketing-the most important digital marketing
strategy. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov. Economic Sciences. Series
V, 9(2), p.61.
Royle, J. and Laing, A., 2014. The digital marketing skills gap: Developing a Digital
Marketer Model for the communication industries. International Journal of
Information Management, 34(2), pp.65-73.
Ryan, D., 2016. Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the
digital generation. Kogan Page Publishers.
Taiminen, H.M. and Karjaluoto, H., 2015. The usage of digital marketing channels in
SMEs. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 22(4), pp.633-651.
Tiago, M.T.P.M.B. and Veríssimo, J.M.C., 2014. Digital marketing and social media: Why
bother?. Business horizons, 57(6), pp.703-708.
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