by The evolutionary journey of Business
The evolutionary journey of business from traditional marketing to digital marketing channels
Businesses have leveraged traditional marketing channels for decades and harnessed their power for marketing and promotion of their products. With the advent of the internet and robust online marketing solutions, the business has been adopting digital marketing techniques for advertising their marketing communications.
For any business, marketing has been a fundamental par. Every entrepreneur has a separate budget of marketing alone. The issue here is, a large chunk of customers are spending their time online, which leaves the business with the dilemma of how to use their marketing budget. Hence the question arises in mind should it be digital marketing or traditional marketing, let us have an in-depth look at these channels and their journey.
How business used traditional marketing channels
- Fliers and Billboard by the Roads and Highway
Fliers are paper advertisement designed for wider audience distribution. These leaflets are distributed widely in a public place, pasted on the wall or sent via post to the prospect customers. They can be expensive, coloured or inexpensive black and white. Historically they have been used by many brands such as Hindustan Unilever to promote Surf excel with contemporary Lataji educating the concept of Surf to their customers or Ambassadors message of the ideal family car
The evolved form of fliers is billboard advertisement; these are big print advertisements that are used by firms to promote their product, services or campaign. Billboards are placed in high traffic areas, along the highways and cities and high-density population.
These are effective broadcast mediums, but their monthly cost is dependent on their location, traffic of their site and number of people seeing their advertisement.
- News Papers and Magazine Advertisement
Newspaper marketing is another form of print marketing strategy where product advertisement is displayed in the newspaper classified section, according to the product category, which is relevant to the customers. You can target your ads in the page section that relates your product, which can be sports, business or lifestyle.India’s first newspaper advertisement that appeared in Hickely’s Bengal Gazette, in 1912 by ITC for the launch of Gold Flake brand Magazine page ads are published through different magazine publications, which are widely read and distributed national and regional magazines. They can provide high-quality images in the hand of the customer.
- Radio : Radio assists in about providing audio advertisement, where audio commercials are filled between every break in radio programs. Radio is a broadcasting medium where ads are distributed across the large audience base of radio channels. Currently, in India, there are 369 operational radio stations across 100+ cities across India. Even as today radios are famous and listened across mass audience internet radio channels are cropping up, also known as a podcast. Currently, 40 million Indians are listening to podcasts, and the number is increasing as the ease of podcasting is becoming more straightforward with internet democratization.
- Television : Television commercials are short promotional messages that are conveyed to customers in between TV shows. They are significant revenue generators for many network operators. Advertisement on television includes a wide variety of goods, services, and ideas ever since its invention. Television ads are effective in capturing customer’s audience and build an emotional link with the customers. TV ads are effective brand building as customers perceive brands to be of superior quality when they see the commercial for product on their TV sets. Coca Cola is a perfect example, where the market widely receives product without any tangible benefits. The psychological positioning in 1999 with Amir khan, HrithikRoshan and AishwaryaRai with “ThandaMatlab Coco cola” campaign targeted the youth and appealed emotionally to the audience. Currently TV sets are also becoming smart with IOT technology engrained in them. Today in the world of internet Netflix, Host star and other mediums have become medium for brands to attract urban youths.
- How business used digital marketing channels
Digital marketing is a cluster of techniques that encompasses electronic devices or internet for marketing efforts of the organisation. Businesses can utilise the host of digital channels such as search engine, social media marketing, email marketing, and websites to connect with existing and prospective clients. Digital marketing platforms include social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Brands use email marketing to send email marketing coupons, SMS coupons which is customised to retail customer’s preferences. The business has successfully gained B2B clients from LinkedIn. Companies use content marketing to target customers in different stages of the customer life cycle. Let us have an in-depth look at digital marketing techniques. Current internet penetration of India is around 50%, and retail customers are rapidly getting online. With cheaper data cost and low-cost smartphones, consumers are quickly exploring the internet for making purchase decisions. As of January 2020, India has 687.6 million internet users and of which 629.2 are smartphone users. These figures represent how the internet game in India is shaping up.
- Affiliate Marketing : Affiliate marketers promote companies products via their online digital channels where they have gained an audience through personal branding. They act as your brand ambassador for products and services and promote your products online. Affiliate marketers can earn commission through affiliate links or make money when brands directly approach them for promotion. Affiliates share reviews about these products on social media, blogs, and websites.
- Email Marketing
More than 600 million email users are there in India, and cell phones are the most preferred platforms to access the internet across the country. Marketers are leveraging this vast opportunity to send advertisement, request business or ask for donations. Organizations use customized emails for enhancing the business relationship with current or previous clients. This email engagement with customers helps build a swarm of loyal customers, encourage repeat purchases and share new product developments with digital coupons for business growth.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You can imagine the search engine as a window to the online world, and it could be your gene to answer your entire question. They can be in the form of Google, Yandex, Yahoo!, Baidu, Bing or any search engine which replies to your wishes with the long list of webpages the answer.
Have you ever stopped and imagined how does this gene answer to your wishes?
Search engines have a crawler which collets all the content they can find on the internet. Crawler brings in all these 1s and 0s back to the search engines to build an index. This indexed data is passed through an algorithm, which tries to match all the indexed websites with your query.
Search engine optimization is all about science of garnering quantity, and quality leads with organic search results. With SEO, you can attract the right customers who are genuinely interested in your product and are potential customers. They come to your website when Firefox or Google tell them to visit you. Search engine results pages (SERPs), guides customers to your website where you can be apple fruits distributor and not apple computers.
- Content Marketing
Content marketing is all about how you present your brand story to your customers; they can be attention grabbers to your valuable audience. Content marketing is a useful tool used for sustaining brand loyalty. It helps in market development and educating customers about the brand. Content marketing grabs customer’s attention who are in different stages of the product lifecycle. Content marketing helps create a willingness to purchase, though it is not a direct sales technique. Content helps build brand awareness, improve search engine ranking and grab the audience. Content marketing is continuously evolving, as online space is getting cluttered brands to need to differentiate themselves and engage with customers.
- Social Media Marketing
India, with the 400 million social media users, is the world’s second-largest social media user community. India currently has 280 million Facebook users, 88 million Instagram users and 62 million LinkedIn users give us a significant advantage for social media marketing. From large corporations to small business, everyone can reach out to his or her customers with social media marketing. Marketing is a powerful technique to speak to reach your customers directly through different social media channels. Social media advertising spending is US$772m in 2020 and is expected to grow more than 1 billion in 2023.
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay-per-click, advertisements are banner advertisements where ads are displayed on search engines sponsored links. It’s a paid way to buy visits on your sites rather than visiting them organically. Advertisers bid for placing the ads in the sponsored link when someone searches keywords that are related to business offerings. When a customer clicks these ads and visits your webpage, the marketers are charged for these ads.
