As the Internet goes mainstream and customers spend more and more time online, marketing dollars continue to migrate to digital channels. This trend is not new and from the earliest days of the commercial Internet, unsophisticated banner ads and then search advertising gained traction and turned into large markets. Over time, Internet Advertising began to cannibalize offline marketing spend in areas such as print, radio, TV and other mediums, although offline marketing continues to dominate the marketing budget and digital channels make up well less than 50% of marketing and advertising spend.
As we look forward, we see a landscape that will ultimately drive digital marketing to be the primary channel, indeed in some countries in Europe and Asia, this is already the case where various programs within marketing (branding, product launches, promotions) are “offline first”, with digital as an after-thought. This will not only flip spending trends, fueling further growth in digital channels, but also cause a ripple across related areas, including software, media and staffing / external services
Why Digital / Internet Marketing Works Better than Rest ?
This re-orientation to “digital first” brings forth a number of benefits that didn’t exist in the offline world and exploiting these benefits is key to driving value in digital marketing. Many of these benefits come from the fact that the digital market uses and generates massive amounts of data and it is this data that differentiates digital marketing from traditional offline marketing. The result is a highly personalized experience for a consumer across all channels in an experience that the prospective or current customer appreciates and they in turn encourage through greater access to their personal data.
A Case Study of Building Digital Advertising from Scratch
Consider a modern digital marketing campaign that begins with “anonymous” prospects coming to a website through search. If they can be uniquely identified by an affiliated network (through a cookie or other means), they can be narrowed down in demographics to no longer be anonymous. From there, if they reveal more information about themselves (signing up for an email or “following” the brand on Twitter or “liking” the brand on Facebook), their identity and more importantly key marketing attributes can be gleaned. If they search to make a purchase, but then
don’t complete the purchase, the brand can better understand price sensitivity and the specific attributes of the attempted purchase (for example a certain style of clothing) can be used to target the prospect later with promotional or other follow-up communications.
In the next Article we’ll have a look at the impact of Digital / Internet Advertising & Marketing.