The Importance of Digital Marketing
Today, across the world, a lot of businesses are becoming close knit and are moving towards more sustainable means of marketing and advertising. In the end, both companies and businesses have realized the importance of Digital Marketing and started investing into it. But here is a different ball game—does Digital Marketing belong to the marketing professionals alone? The answer is—NO. The role of Digital Marketing is spread beyond brand awareness and hardcore advertising. Companies, businesses, and individual personalities alike have realized its importance in the present scenario. They are using these skills for a better connect with the market, boost online reputation and presence, and stay ahead of the competition.
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| What is Digital Marketing all about and why is it Trending? |
In a Nutshell
This blog will clearly demonstrate the precise points as to why business owners or individual entrepreneurs, working professionals, or students need Digital Marketing today. Its importance is currently being realized by a lot of small or medium business owners. This encourages them to make necessary affiliations, tie ups with popular industry websites such as Justdial, Alibaba or IndiaMART, and bring them a lot of relevant inquiries to begin with. Also, a lot of them have switched to the E-commerce model, thereby earning good profits. However, now let̢۪s talk about those businesses which are not into any products and cannot be listed on these wholesaler websites. How would they benefit from the Digital Marketing?
What is Digital Marketing all about and why is it Trending?
Every small business has a dedicated target audience which is active on certain digital channels. Say for example, even if you describe your business as a small and comparatively less popular food joint. Still we can say that a good Social Media strategy and maintaining a clean profile on Food rating apps are the best bets to manage your reviews, get more brand mentions or PTAT (commonly known as People Talking About This), offer discounts to the customers who tweet about your food joint, or click pictures and give reviews on any of the online platforms. It is all about building a base and increasing visibility! Isn̢۪t it?
Digital Marketing teaches you how to build, scale up, and sustain your Brand̢۪s online reputation across all relevant Digital platforms (which is known as Online Reputation Management). Nowadays, businesses thrive on online presence, reviews, and customer testimonials. This is so popular that even the oldest businesses are taking online reviews very seriously. A lot of businesses and Brands, invest heavily into the maintenance of good reviews and converting bad reviews into good ones by dedicatedly addressing customer queries across various online platforms. Hence, an essential part of Digital Marketing knowledge is also maintaining your brand reputation online, apart from marketing and creating a hype about your name. Irrespective of the industry, product type, or service type that your business is into, Online Reputation Management is an extremely important exercise which a Digital Marketer must perform to maintain a good reputation in the Online space.
Importance of Digital Marketing for Business Owners:
Let̢۪s talk about the individual business owners now. Whether you are a proprietor of a small setup, or a mid-sized company, you can customize your Digital requirements and use Digital Marketing as per your criteria. Let̢۪s say you have a business of short-time consulting, or any non-mainstream and non-B2C industrial services. Further let us consider that you are completely into B2B, you could be more focused on building your network and contact base through LinkedIn, then you should focus on your Online Reputation by being actively involved in discussions on Quora, target your client companies through a portfolio of Google Ads, marketing through promotional Emailers, and so on. The consumer businesses these days do well because of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, but not many B2B business have those options. Still, Digital Marketing has many options for you as well.
In another scenario, assume you have a business dealing with an offshore unit to bigger companies—like a KPO or BPO. Even here, Digital Marketing can be very useful to you. Hence, the importance of Digital Marketing is irrespective of your industry or your educational qualification. Whether you have a small, medium, or large business, or you are into services of products, Digital Marketing will surely play an important role in shaping the future of your business. What many individuals, business owners, or Marketers miss out is sustainability, and not lack of choices in Digital Platforms. The term ‘sustainability’ in Digital Marketing clearly indicates living up to the high expectations of the promises you made to your customers during your aggressive marketing mode.
Importance of Digital Marketing for Working Professionals:
Let’s talk with respect to each profile or individual type, about its suitability to everyone. A lot of working professionals have doubts regarding the importance of Digital Marketing and how can it add value to their current skillsets. Talking about working professionals in non-marketing streams, it is evident that a lot of companies today will choose to hire Digital Marketers with prior experience or a Marketing degree. An exhaustive Digital Marketing Advanced course from EduPristine can give you the necessary knowledge, experiential learning, and skillsets required for ‘on the job’ skills, than the theoretical skills which are good to know. This will surely help you change your work profile to Digital Marketing, widen your career scope, and open a lot of Marketing profile opportunities for you.
Besides, a lot of companies opting for process smoothness have now taken to digital means to ease their work processes and maintain ERPs and CRMs online. So, in such a scenario, a working professional with average to the least knowledge in technology or online platforms will find great difficulty in acclimatizing to the growing needs to go Digital. Digital Marketing unlike Traditional Marketing, acclimatizes you to certain tools, and uses technology to smoothen processes and teach you Marketing—a dual benefit. Hence, whether you are into Sales (which requires digital penetration to reach your contacts and to maintain leads on Sales CRM), Operations, Human Resources, Finance, Production, Logistics, or Design & Development, today everything is shifting to Digital.
Importance of Digital Marketing for Students:
Similarly, we should discuss this from the student’s perspective. A lot of students have various doubts regarding how Digital Marketing can help them find better jobs, or give them the desired push in their chosen career. Well let’s talk from the point of a student from any stream and not necessarily marketing—it is always a first mover’s advantage to learn what is trending in the market. As previously explained, the importance of Digital Marketing for students is scaling up, with a lot of activities to keep students interested in Digital Marketing.
Students get the required ammunition to be prepared for quality jobs and further studies by making their online presence felt through platforms like LinkedIn, Blogs, Website, or Reviews. A strong online presence boosts a student̢۪s profile and ability to crack interviews. Also, an early knowledge will always add to their skills, since every company would be keen to employ students with multiple skills than those with job specific ones. At present every business is about promotion and marketing, and they would not invest in you, unless you promote yourself online.
Now let us dive into more technicalities of the uses and role of Digital Marketing and why everyone is going gung-ho about this career stream:
- Today everything is going digital, including your simplest apps that facilitate your job require you to be aware of online methods. Would the knowledge of required tools not help you think of creating a new business in that domain? There is always a scope to create something new in an already established industry.
- Creating trends and hashtags and rolling your business online with a good initial push on Social Media platforms are the added advantage of learning Digital Marketing.
- Digital Marketing teaches you how to maintain your business portfolio through Google Business Page, so that even if you are not a renowned business, your customers can reach you.
- Today̢۪s World is all about Online visibility. Your customers or your business/professional network will take you seriously if you have a good online reputation, as explained in the blog above.
- To add to the above point, to earn your customer̢۪s trust, you need to manage your online reviews efficiently. Digital Marketing includes Online Reputation Management (ORM), which teaches you to maintain and boost the online reviews for your Brand.
- Accepting payments digitally is the latest trend, which enables you as an individual or as a business to accept payments from your customers through a variety of options viz. mobile wallets, UPI transfers, bank wires, etc.
- With the rise of new age millennials spending much time on their smartphones watching video content, the rise of OTT marketing over TV consumption is inevitable. Today a lot of OTT platforms have captivated the attention of users between the age group of 18–42, which has drastically hit TV viewership in the metro and Tier 2 cities.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)—whether it is a simple Robot easing your work or doing programming for you—is now slowly becoming a reality in Digital Marketing. The next 5 years are going to be crucial with respect to its advent in Digital Marketing.
- Today a lot of third-party integration and CRM software can be made for your customer service teams to track the status of complaints, queries, or feedbacks; manually these were cumbersome. (Don̢۪t you think?)
- With the introduction of Chatbots on websites and Social Media accounts, companies are seeing a steep rise in the amount of time a user spends on their website/social media pages with each year.
- Last but not the least, the World always needs something new to explore. You must know that you cannot create new desires, you can only leverage the existing desires in the market. And basis your creative idea in the Online space, your brand/company can take a successful turn, even if you are not the pioneer in your industry. With sufficient knowledge of Digital Marketing and tools, you can get the required push to think of many new business ideas for yourself, your business, or your company.
To sum up, Digital Marketing as a subject or as a career line can be molded in your desired shape to give you the required direction to achieve measurable success for your business or brand. The importance of Digital Marketing is far more than just a realization. Today, people have adopted to digital means for almost everything. Now the decision is yours if you could bring the next Digital revolution through your ideas. Learning the basics and advanced concepts of Digital Marketing from a reputed institute like EduPristine would add more feathers to your cap. It̢۪s only the initial (but required) push for you to set your ball rolling; which in scientific terms what we call is breaking the inertia!
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