Why digital marketing is the must-have skill of the future

“The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife.”

David Ogilvy, the Father of Advertising, Founder of Ogilvy & Mather

This is especially accurate today when we have IOT-enabled devices which are constantly monitoring every move that we make and feeding this data back to corporations. The consumer is able to see the insights that are gained from this analysis and make decisions about how they can change certain things in their lives. For example, there is a certain insurer who uses your IoT-enabled phone in order to monitor your driving patters according to pre-determined criteria. They award your points based on the information that they receive. Because you can redeem these points for physical goods, you strive to earn as many points as you can. The company also wins because its reducing your risk profile and, as a result, is lessening the possibility of them having to pay out for your claims.

The consumer is now an active participant in the marketing process whereas previously he was merely a passive spectator and was served messaging.  If he wants to buy something, he will go out and research it. This is backed up by statistics which state people make 63 000 searches on Google per second.

He won’t wait for the company’s marketing to land in his inbox. In fact, if he feels that he is being marketed to too aggressively, you’ll lose him as a potential lead. This is why digital copywriters and content marketers have opted for soft-sell copy as opposed to the hard-hitting sales letters that were popular in the days of direct mail.

Your consumers are online

Your consumers are spending more and more time online. Be it researching information on Google or checking out their friends’ latest social media updates, they are preferring to spend more time glued to their phones. This means that if they are preferring the virtual world over the real one, you need to communicate with them where they are. This means that you and your company needs to have a digital presence and you need to have a solid digital marketing plan.

Although the term ‘digital marketing plan’ may sound quite onerous, it doesn’t have to be. There is no specific format or sections that you need to fill out in order for you have ‘finished’ the plan. Your digital marketing plan can be as long or as short as you like. The length of it will obviously depend on the size of the company that you’re running: the bigger it is the more detailed the plan will be. The opposite is true for a smaller organisation.

The bare bones of the plan must address:

• What is your digital marketing objective?
• Why are you deciding to market digitally?
• When are your digital marketing campaigns going to run?
• Where are you going go market? In other words, what platforms are you going to use in your digital marketing campaign?

Once you’ve answered these queries you can then flesh out your digital marketing action plan. However, don’t wait too long. We did say that digital marketing is the skill of the future but the future is now. People are online and they’re going to stay there. This doesn’t mean that we’re going to forgo personal interaction in favour of interaction via our cellphones. What it does mean is that people are going to be relying, more and more, on the Internet to facilitate their lives.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

We highly recommend that you do a digital marketing course to find out how you can market your business digitally. The Digital School of Marketing’s flagship course – the Digital Marketing Course – is just such a qualification and will teach you everything that you need to know about digital marketing. For more information, please follow this link.