Digital Marketing Basics

Courtesy: http://blog.tbhcreative.com/2010/10/traditional-marketing-vs-online.html

Before going into the realm of what digital marketing is, I wanted to explore a bit about what marketing is in easy words.

Marketing – The science of making a product look more attractive for people to pay attention to it and make them feel that they need to buy it because without it, their life is in chaos.

Effective Marketing – Doing the above in such a way that people eventually do buy the product. In short, getting more sales.

PR (Public Relations) – A middle man responsible for the spread of information regarding the product from a company or an organization to the general public.

Long tail of marketing – A term popularized by Chris Anderson. It relates to the needs of the audience to get customized products instead of one-size-fits-all short and saturated end of the demand curve.

The New Marketplace

Now let’s look into digital marketing. Digital marketing is a huge emerging science that is new and ever-changing. Due to the lack of the public’s interest, trust and belief in a new product, the focus has been shifted from selling anything to the people to creating trust and giving away free information before people make any buying decisions.

Gone are the days when you can market anything to anyone with the right pitch. You can fool them once, but they would never again buy from you. People have become smarter with their money. We are constantly rushing to signs which display DISCOUNT or even better FREE. More and more people are connected to the Internet and are taking advantage of online shopping and coupon codes. We are living in a world of Smart Shoppers. Instead of marketing things that people don’t need, why not market to them the things that they really do need.

Where is the first place that you look for information? That’s right, Google®. Why do we use Google®?

• We trust Google® to give us the information we are looking for.
•  Information is current and/or trending.
•  Google® gives us the entire picture of a product as experienced by the people.
• People are continuously voicing their comments and Google® search engine through its’ massive algorithms gives us the relevant information with near-accuracy prediction of what exactly are we looking for.

Digital Marketing helps us to get to the niche market. That is where we are moving from the short end of the demand curve to the long end i.e., having a direct conversation with the people with free information to facilitate trust. That’s right. It’s not about people buying your product. Rather it is creating trust in people to listen to what you have to say about your product.

Digital Marketing involves the use of your website, along with other social media elements like blogging or writing articles on Facebook®, Twitter®, and LinkedIn® etc. to present your ideas, services or products. Yes, it does seem like a lot of research that needs to be done before it can be decided what the best platforms are on which you can start building your audience. It does involve a lot of time initially to get your presence felt, but once you are there were people are responding back to you, you are well on your way to establish a unique voice to your brand.

In my next post, I will be disclosing some of the facts of our massive search engine and how it affects our lives.

For further reading consider the following blogrolls:

http://www.longtail.com/about.html

http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2013/mar/06/digital-marketing-basics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_marketing

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1129&dat=20061007&id=UPNRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=YnIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4900,3120135