Marketing Goes Digital – By Thomas Typinski
The world of marketing is going through drastic changes. Like almost everything else, marketing is going digital, it is providing great benefits to businesses small and large, and the way they build and maintain relationships with their customers.
Large corporations have successfully been using the power of the internet for years now, and in this recent recession, small and medium businesses are turning to the internet to create a personalized marketing message to their prospective customers. Traditional forms of advertising have seen huge losses; yellow pages scrambling to bring their customers into their online database, and newspapers losing 2.8 billion dollars in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2009 alone. Meanwhile advertising online is seeing steady growth, in fact, more growth this past year than ever before.
The reason for this transition is the flexibility and reliability that online marketing offers. Businesses are able to use different forms of media; video, news, press releases, and articles online, and they are able to track their results the very next day. This is almost impossible with other forms of marketing, providing businesses with a more targeted approach, spending their advertising dollars only on that which provides a positive return on investment, and cutting out anything that is not.
Online advertising completely changes the way that customers receive these marketing messages. Traditional forms of advertising are based on what is called “interruption marketing”. These are marketing messages that are compelling enough to distract viewers from what they are currently watching or reading, to pay attention to what businesses are trying to market.
Online marketing is much more targeted and focused. This type of marketing is called “permission marketing”. People turn to the Internet for information about a product or service, and use search engines to do so. The searcher will only find exactly what they are looking for, and if marketed correctly, will receive marketing messages written specifically for them, precisely when they are actively looking for it. You can imagine the difference in conversion rates by using these methods, sending the return on investment sky-high compared to the traditional shot-gun method of traditional marketing.
Another benefit to online marketing is the fact that it is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and is fully trackable throughout the entire process. If for some reason a marketing message that you’ve posted is not successfully converting, you can simply change this message instantly, and you will be able to monitor the reactions of the viewers to know if you’re message is effective or not. When your online marketing system is sufficiently optimized you will have a system in place that automatically brings leads into your business, or sells your product with little additional effort, creating a predictable positive return on investment every single time.
It is predicted that online marketing will see very large growth in 2010. As more and more businesses start to realize this phenomenon, they too will be marketing their business on the Internet to capture the attention of customers actively searching for them. As you can imagine, as more businesses enter this space, competition in these markets will become more and more saturated, and prices of advertising will go up. As technology and innovation increase, you can also expect to see small businesses becoming local celebrities in their market just by using simple video cameras and posting to YouTube, or writing articles about their product or service, something that was literally impossible with the budgets of small local businesses.
The Internet is giving the power back to the people, allowing the customers to cut down on the chatter of untargeted marketing messages, and small businesses the chance to gain the success that they first went into business to achieve.