Digital Marketing: What’s the buzz all about?

 

A hashtag

It’s hard to look away from things, especially when there’s a buzz around them. One such thing in the past decade of marketing has been digital marketing. But, how did it come in to existence and how it it now and how will it be in the years to come? Let’s find out.

How did digital marketing originate?

As we know, digital marketing is the use of digital mediums to increase awareness for the offerings. It started a long time ago, since the time radio became a popular means of broadcast. In the initial years of the radio, it was mainly used for broadcasting music, news and updates to the common public. The reach was not very high initially, but soon picked up. Brands also became interested in advertising to the listener base which was large by spending out budgets. So, FM radio can be said to be the first digital marketing medium.

The old radio 

Soon came the television. What people only heard until then, they were able to see now. On the other hand, brands were able to tell as well as show their products to the viewers. So, brands followed suit along with viewers in adopting television to a large extent for their marketing efforts. Thus, television is the first visual digital marketing medium that is still relevant and most widely used till date.

The old TV

This is in brief the origin of digital marketing.

Will digital marketing replace traditional marketing?

Before we can arrive at an answer, there are a few things to look at:

Internet access: As we know internet has changed our lives and the world a lot. It existed since sometime now, but has become widely popular in the last two decades. The advent of globalisation brought the need for communication, billing and much more at some other country. This need provided with the amount of business potential internet had, it became popular among common public and a lot of people have started using it.

The advent of free internet today

Smartphones and operating systems: Smartphones were not as they are right now. They were very clumsy and it was complex to do things, along with accessing the internet. Around 2005 and 2006, companies have come up with revolutionary software that transformed the way people did things. It was a personal computer, a hand-sized one. It was a break-through. People could access their mail, phone numbers list, access the internet, all of these with ease. This led to more and more people adopting smartphones. Also, as more and more people were using the internet, the cost of it started to get lower and lower. It’s simply due to economies of scale, where things get cheaper as more and more people begin to use them and competitors enter the space. 

The size of a smartphone today

The Pandemic – 2020: We’ve all faced the days during the COVID pandemic, where we were not able to go to offices for work, go shopping, go watch a movie amongst many other things. This has led to people surfing the internet for things. For example, Zoom has replaced the physical conference rooms; e-commerce platforms have become the virtual brick and mortar stores and online streaming websites have become the theatres. All of them existed even before the pandemic, but their utility just got amplied due to the fact that they provided things at literally the customers’ doorstep.

The COVID-19 pandemic

 So, from the above points, we clearly understand that more and more people are choosing to using the internet than to not using it. So, we clearly know that digital marketing will be in huge demand in the future.

But, to say that it will replace traditional marketing may not be right. Mainly because people still prefer to buy many things off internet. Moreover, nothing can replace traditional marketing efforts like samples, free gifts etc.. We can only identify the right marketing medium based on the business needs.

Career opportunities in digital marketing:

A career in digital marketing is very relevant

As we have just discussed, more and more people are switching to using the internet and so the demand for people who have digital marketing skills would definitely be in demand, now as well as in future. A digital marketer has the flexibility to sit at home and make things run smoothly. Further, this is not some work that can be automated. Maybe the process can be automated, but coming up with strategies, creatives etc. has to be done by a human only.

So, always be sure of things before believing them. Based on the above things, we can infer that the buzz around digital marketing is organic and would thus be a long-lived one.