The era of digital marketing

Imagine a world, one hundred decades ago, when technology was scarce, overly expensive, and simply not available.

Well, thankfully, that world died centuries ago to not only birth but break the dawn of the new technological world we enjoy and live in today, where nearly everything is not only possible but is made simple by tech including the way business is conducted these days.

Imagine for a moment, a business, geographically situated far away from its public or customers. Decades ago, that would have simply amounted to a recipe for a disaster in epic proportions because of the unavailability of the technological know-how to market services or products to customers.

Today, digital marketing caters niftily to situations such as the one simulated above where tech brings companies to the doorstep of their consumers, customers, potential customers, and stakeholders regardless of the distance apart, with just a click of a button or visit a website and all customer needs and queries are sorted.

Digital Marketing has become the livewire of contemporary businesses today and quite a phenomenal force to reckon with, the newest trend and perhaps a glimpse into the future. Fortunately, this force has come to stay.

This is good news for the future of businesses which includes for-profit businesses and nonprofits. It is almost a loud voice that says to businesses, digitally market, or perishes.

The markets for businesses are so segmented that an online presence presents not only new opportunities for growth, but also an enhanced route to reaching out to customers, and potential customers and building lasting relationships with stakeholders, stake-seekers, and the general public. It is no more a cliché that an online presence is only necessitated for global businesses or concerns or even huge multinationals.

It holds true that even a kiosk kind of business with the right insight and wealth of business knowledge requires an online presence not only to sell but to locate, and satisfy customers and it's simpler to tell people that, hey! this is where I am and you can locate me here to do business with me.

Digital marketing has become a thing to be mentioned because of technological advancement complementing it, that today, when you go to the remotest of villages, you can be sure to notice at least two or more people digitally inclined and I’m talking social media, I’m talking about being hooked online, I’m talking about just surfing the Internet making use of available resources. When was the last time you wanted a product and actually walked into a shop?

When you wanted to purchase that new mobile phone, you always wanted one that was not yet launched, where did you go to read about it? how did you get information about it? Through the digital web, right? Businesses may want to use social media analytic tools after creating a website to measure the degree of responsiveness of their ad campaigns, and how the public or your customers or potential customers interact with you via this web.

The number of clicks, views, likes and interactions are measured through social media analytics, painting a vivid portrait of how the public engaged with your site, and ad and what specifically triggers or peaks their interests just by using analytics.

How much time people spend engaging your ad, website, or page becomes a goldmine for digital marketing professionals. Because then, that becomes valuable data that tells them what kind of content drives web traffic and content which do not.

This is where tailor-made ads and digital marketing targeting come to play. Your target and launch an ad or a campaign that becomes impossible to be ignored by your audience because the analytics revealed their preferences and interest which you imputed into your campaign they cannot resist or ignore because it is research-based.

Thus, digital marketing utilizes research to operate. This becomes feedback for your organization to be able to make tailor-made content that would drive traffic to your website in hopes of translating it into sales. Remember, the prime aim of marketing, all forms of marketing are for it to generate, translate or metamorphose into sales.

If it does not, then marketing has failed. Digital marketing has become so crucial in the world of businesses today that there’s a kind of generation known as Generation Z mainly made of the youth who are technology savvy, in tune, and inclined. And these people literally eat, sleep and drink from the net.

They are enthused by technology and are appetized by gadgets such as Smartphones, Laptops, MacBooks, Tablets, ear Pods, or smart watches amongst others. These are people who technically have their lives evolving and revolving around the Internet.

Now, if your business is youth inclined, if your business has to do with people of the younger generation, then what are you doing if you're not digitally marketing, what are you doing if you’re not digitally in tune, what are you doing if your presence is not felt on the digital media or web where you could access a chunk of your stakeholders if not customers.

Digital marketing is applicable to not-for-profit organizations that, here you’re not marketing, selling, or advertising a product or service but showcasing evidentially the proof that the funding provided by donors has been Judicially put to good use by hosting ads with pictures, videos, and write-ups detailing how life changing and life touching the organization has been to many vulnerable communities because there was enough funding to fund certain humanitarian projects.

This demonstration digitally, not only cushions donors but has the potential to motivate other donors to fund future projects because then, credibility and goodwill would have been established.

In essence, what this seeks to convey is that in non-profit organizations the issue of digital marketing has to do with trying to market the organization to donors or potential donors in such a way that it sparks desires of interest in your organization, such that donors want to invest in your organization, they want to donate to your outfit to ensure that all the humanitarian project proposals sitting on your desk collecting dust without funding, is actually activated and Kick started making available the requisite funding.