Digital marketing is THE field to get into. A report released in February this year states that the demand for digital marketers far outstrips the supply of people – with these types of skills – in the market.
In this digital era – where the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Internet of Things and Big Data – are commonplace, the marketplace for goods and services has moved online. This means that for you to be competitive, you need to be accessing customers where they want to shop – and this in online.
In order to contact your customers in the digital world, you need to be up to speed with digital marketing in addition to marketing in the traditional sense. You may wonder why we say that you need to be clued up on both forms of marketing – surely you just need to know about digital marketing? Yes, knowing about online marketing is incredibly important however you need to be extremely familiar with the principles that make up traditional marketing because these underpin what digital marketers do.
Being a digital marketer
Today’s word is incredibly fast paced
This is owing to the fact that our world is almost totally reliant on technology and tech changes incredibly quickly. For example, if you can get five years out of your laptop, this is a lot. Experts in the IT field say that you should be replacing your laptop every three years in order to keep up with the evolutions that are happening. Software providers are ceasing to provide support for programs that are older than a certain date, which is prompting users to change to the latest versions of technology.
The world of digital marketing is evolving equally as quickly. And, as digital marketers, we need to pull all tricks out of the book in order to keep up with demand. Some traditional marketers have not made the leap over to the world of online marketing as they’ve seen the rapid pace that is necessary in this field and have shied away from it because they feel that they just don’t have the time to get in touch with this new way of working.
However, in order to remain relevant the traditional marketers are going to need to get up to speed with the world of digital marketing extremely quickly. This goes for business owners as well who do not have the budget to employ a marketing department. If they don’t make the transition to digital, they may find – extremely quickly – that they lose their customers to their competitors.