Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Role Of Digital Marketing

To fully grasp the importance of digital marketing a person has to grasp the true meaning of marketing as a subject first. The basic definition of marketing is: "To create an environment of awareness and response in a marketplace to facilitate the sales of merchandise and services in such market." The marketing idea is driven by the Marketing Mix or 4 P's of marketing, i.e. Product, Price, Place and Promotion. In other words, an effective marketing strategy will depend on the way the 4P's are mixed to address a particular industry in the best way. Promoting is part of the promotional aspect of the Marketing Mix. The components of Promoting are: advertising, individual selling, sales promotion and public relations.
Digital promotion for that reason fits into the advertising aspect of Promotion and forms a subset of the overall advertising strategy.

Digital marketing refers to the task of technology to carry the marketing message to the client and would include radio, tv, the internet, cellular phones, social media and other areas where technology is involved. It's significant to note that digital marketing is not merely about the net, but all digital technologies.

The planet in a really short space of time has gone crazy about digital technology and devices like computers and laptops, cell phones, smart phones, pc tablets and other devices. Link these phenomena to the explosion of the world-wide-web and social networking in customer driven economies and the result is a recipe for marketing accomplishment in digital marketing. The more you drive the consumption for all these technologies in a customer driven society, the more you expand the marketing possibilities of all items and services. Not only is the digital marketing opportunities expanding, but the entire marketing effort is further strengthened through spontaneous viral marketing sparked off by digital marketing. Considering that the USA has some twenty six million teenagers (9% of the population) who not only represent a sizeable marketplace on their own, but further have an influence on 60% of the household budget spend, 1 soon enough realize the importance of digital marketing as virtually all of these teens either own or have access to cellular devices. These exact same individuals are very active on social media like Facebook and Twitter. What a wonderful audience - impressionable, gullible, money rich and influential

There are certain restrictions to the use of digital marketing techniques in South Africa imposed by the Consumer Protection Act, but they are not insurmountable and do not detract from the effectiveness of these kinds of strategies. Cell phones have become so commonplace among all age groups in South Africa, that SMS's and MMS's are extremely powerful ways of digitally marketing to these kinds of individuals. In South Africa, further, the teenage brigade nearly invariably uses smart phones, which brings the social networks right to their attention and use. This means that they are also exposed to banner ads and the like through these devices. The beauty of digital marketing, therefore, lies in the simple fact that there's a ready-made audience. As mentioned before, there are also other means of broadcasting digital marketing data, making this a very powerful and fascinating technological aid.


By: Petro Solt