Considered amongst the smartest men alive, Bill Gates couldn't have put things more distinctly. Digital Marketing has taken the field of marketing itself in a direction many didn't see coming some time ago. The ubiquity of internet devices and social media connectivity has made this field an indispensable today's advertising business.
On the outset, this does seem an easy enough concept. The promotion of products and services online through peer-to-peer sharing and other strategies seems simple enough to understand, but notoriously tough to implement.
Before delving Flipkart Offers into techniques and strategies, the question is- What is digital marketing?
The Essentials of Digital Marketing
The marketing of any product or service on a digital medium is called digital marketing. The medium can be computers, mobile phones, tablets or even iPods.
There is a reason why such marketing overpowered traditional advertising. On televisions and billboards, advertising is a one-way street. Customers don't have a platform to communicate with manufacturers and companies themselves. This gap in communication is eliminated by the internet.
Online platforms selling products like Amazon and Flipkart rank products based on consumer ratings and allow customers to give in-depth reviews about the product in question. This creates a direct line of communication between consumers and manufacturers as the latter is able to grasp what the former truly needs.
Strategies and Techniques
As mentioned above, digital marketing might seem straightforward but involves a large amount of planning. Some techniques used by the individuals to increase the online visibility of a website are mentioned below:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): It is a set of guidelines set by search engines which if followed, results in a higher position of a website on Search Engine Page Rankings (SERP). These guidelines include factors like keyword density, back-linking, domain authority etc.
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Though SEO is a subset of SEM, many experts use SEM while talking about paid advertising online. To get higher rankings on search engines, companies often purchase certain keywords on search engines. SEM deals only with paid results while SEO is about unpaid and organic results.
3. Social Media Marketing: Seeing a chunk of the online audience on social media websites, forming a solid social media marketing plan has become essential for digital marketing strategies of companies. Using trending posts and targeting specific groups of people online who might feel interested in a product offered by a company are only some ways of promoting products on social media.
The Legacy of Digital marketing
While there is no denying the importance of digital media, there will come a time when companies will have to change their approach yet again. Marketing is a very dynamic field. Considering the organic nature of audience online, it is safe to assume the tide will turn soon. Whether digital marketing chooses to swim or drown remains to be seen.
Online shopping was obviously very popular and common in the western countries from quite a few decades. It also just kept getting more popular in those countries, and now has probably turned into one of the largest industries in the world.
However, in other parts of the world, online shopping was far from being a popular or common term. In fact, even when some small companies did attempt to offer products and services through websites in other countries, they probably got a very bitter response. It's probably due to the fact that online shopping was considered to be very risky in many countries.
Surprisingly, even now, most of the people in the retired age-group in many Asian countries wouldn't like to shop online, simply because they either may not be having the required resources, such as online banking facilities, debit or credit cards, and the required internet skills, or may be thinking it's too risky to buy something they can't even see and touch.
However, this highly conservative approach of the older age-group people didn't let the online shopping industry from flourishing in some countries. Although many online retailers may have hit a roadblock when they tried to set up a major online business a few decades back, it's no longer as difficult to sell to people using the internet.
This seems to be primarily due to the fact that now a major part of the population in many Asian countries is comprised of teenagers and young people. They have obviously also got very familiar to using the internet, especially after modern technology was started being used by most of the Asian companies, as well as the surprising growth of social media in such countries.
Major players
As of now, the major players of the online retail market in Asia are Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal. Surprisingly, however, all three of them are operating in losses right from when they were started. They are considered successful companies all the same, though, especially given the fact that the customers' data and information they own may be worth millions of dollars.
Also, although still in losses, the sales figures of these companies are rising pretty consistently. This is probably due to the growing awareness of online shopping in the Asian countries, as well as the various steps taken by these companies for luring consumers turn to them instead of the offline retailers for all their shopping needs.
Some of the measures that have apparently turned out to be very successful include:
Mobile devices are more vulnerable
Just because nowadays smartphones can do pretty much what a desktop can do doesn't mean they are just as safe. As a matter of fact, they are not, primarily because they may not have a good antivirus software installed on them, making it easier for hackers to store malware on your device.
Similarly, visiting unknown URLs from your smartphone is a big NO, as they may lead to potentially harmful content and files.
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