EAP 6.2 - Digital Marketing: A Positive or Negative Societal Force?

This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of digital marketing and its impact on society. It begins by defining digital marketing and comparing it with traditional marketing methods, highlighting differences in performance measurement, customer interaction, planning timelines, cost-effectiveness, and viral potential. The essay then explores various forms of digital marketing, including search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, content marketing, and email marketing. Furthermore, it discusses the advantages of digital marketing, such as global reach, cost efficiency, personalization, improved conversion rates, and ease of measurement. However, it also addresses the disadvantages, including the need for specialized skills, time consumption, high competition, potential for reputational damage from negative feedback, security and privacy concerns, and increased dependency on technology. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding digital marketing's complexities and its applications in real-world organizations.

English for Academic Purposes 6.2
Digital marketing has changed how companies communicate with their
customers. To what extent is this positive or negative development for
society?
Digital marketing can be defined as internet marketing which makes use of computing
devices and internet in order to promote products and services offered by the organizations.
The following discussion is based on the working of digital marketing and comparison of
traditional and digital marketing. There will also be an overview of digital marketing,
followed by some of the advantages and disadvantages. Finally, the essay will conclude with
a summary of the main points.
Traditional marketing uses tools to promote the products and services such as
television and radio broadcasts; published marketing in newspapers and magazines; and
sponsorship, whereas digital marketing uses tools such as digital and electronic media; search
engine optimisation (SEO); and social media marketing along with the pay per click and
many more. Performance measurement is difficult in traditional marketing whereas it is easy
to measure the performance with the help of digital marketing by data collection from devices
such as cookies. Traditional marketing has no interaction with the customers whereas digital
marketing has interaction with the customers. Traditional marketing is planned over a long
period of time whereas digital marketing is planned over a short period of time. Traditional
marketing is time consuming and expensive process whereas digital marketing is reasonably
cheap and rapid way to promote the products and services. Traditional marketing has no
ability to go viral whereas digital marketing has a ability to go viral. Traditional marketing

can only get responses during work hours whereas digital marketing responses or feedback
can occur anytime (Kingsnorth, 2019).
There are different forms of digital marketing such as search engine optimization,
which is one of the forms which helps the company to rank their website on the top of the
search results. Pay per click is another form in which by clicking on the advertisements the
company has to pay to the concerned website. Social media marketing includes the promotion
on social media applications such as Facebook and Instagram along with Twitter and
YouTube. Content marketing includes attractive and relevant content to demonstrate to
customers so that they can feel connected with the brand. Email marketing includes sending
bulk emails to customers for the marketing of products and services (Hanlon, 2019).
There are different advantages of digital marketing, such as organisations being able
to reach their customers on a global basis, which means a wider reach to the target audience.
It is cost efficient in nature which is trackable and measurable in terms of results and
performance, it also has personalization features along with openness among society. It
improves the conversion rates along with the social currency so that the society and
organisations can be comfortable while transacting online without any complications and in
an easy manner. It is more effective and efficient than traditional marketing. There is a huge
return on investments because it incurs lower costs which means any remaining budget can
be saved for relevant investment in future. It is considered as an easy to measure and adjust
tool for marketing, which results in brand development for greater expansion on an
international basis. It also includes the easy to share benefit with the help of precise targeting
of the specific customers. It has advantages on a global scale with proper segmentation and
greater engagement with the customers and other stakeholders of the business. Further
advantages are such that the organizations stay updated with products and services, find
greater engagement, get clear information about the products and services, easy comparison
with other companies, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week shopping, share content of
the products and services, apparent pricing and enabling instant purchases (Desai, 2019).
However, there are disadvantages of digital marketing which include the highest level
of skills and training along with the knowledge of computing and using of the technical
devices while having the good capabilities of managing the internet and networks. Moreover,
it is time consuming in nature and possesses high competition in the marketplace.
Additionally, complaints and feedback can destroy the reputation of the organisation.
Security and privacy issues are also major issues, which include viruses and hacking which
results in data loss and the breaching of private and confidential data. High competition is

another major issue because nowadays, every organization is switching its marketing
strategies from traditional to digital in order to gain highest advantages of technology. This
has resulted in strong competition in the marketplace. This has also led to a high dependency
on technology, and transparency in pricing resulting in pricing competition among
organizations. This competition is not limited to the regional or national basis, but on global
basis (Yogesh, Sharaha and Roopan, 2019).
To conclude, that digital marketing is an important concept to learn and study so that
its applications can be applied in real world organizations. Therefore, it is important to
analyze the concept and working of digital marketing. It is necessary to determine the
comparison between traditional and digital marketing. It is essential to examine the forms of
digital marketing. It is significant to gain knowledge about the advantages and disadvantages
of digital marketing for society. Hence, this essay covers all such areas in order to better
understand the conception of digital marketing.
References
The Effectiveness of Digital Marketing (2015). Available at: 6.-Effectiveness-of-Digital-
Marketing-in-the-Challenging-Age-An-Empirical-Study1.pdf (researchleap.com) – Last
Accessed: 21st October, 2021
The Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies and Approaches (2018). Available at: The
Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies & Approaches: A Review of Literature
(ijsrp.org) – Last Accessed: 21st October, 2021
The Psychological effects of Marketing. Available at: The Psychological effects of
Marketing.pdf – Last Accessed: 21st October, 2021