Digital Marketing, Evolution And Advantages Of This New Model

Every year, when we come to the subject of marketing in class, and I ask the students of the Higher Degree in Marketing and Advertising who can tell me exactly what it is, I receive an astonishing variety of different definitions, on many occasions totally opposed to each other and even more, when students of very different ages coincide.

This is so because the concept of marketing has evolved, coming to be understood today in a very different way from how it was done a few years ago. This is a fairly broad concept. To understand and interpret it in its entirety, it is necessary to review how it has changed over the last decades, giving rise to the appearance of what we know today as digital marketing.

Evolution Towards The Concept Of Digital Marketing

Traditional marketing has evolved in parallel with the development of the market itself, focusing its strategy on the product to concentrate on its needs to impose itself on its mind against the competition. Likewise, the development of this concept can be classified into different phases:

• Marketing 1.0: It is the most traditional. It is marked by mass production, where competition was more petite, and everything the market offered was consumed. For companies, the product was the most important thing. They were in charge of manufacturing it according to their criteria, without listening to the client or thinking about their needs. Later, they put their efforts in making the product’s attributes known to the market and attracting their attention as much as possible, inciting the purchase. The most commonly used methods were television or radio advertisements, newspapers, and billboards.
• Marketing 2.0: With the evolution of technologies and their implementation in our day to day, brands are beginning to focus on knowing the needs of consumers and developing products that help them satisfy them. There is more and more competition in the market, so companies are no longer just focusing on attracting customers and retaining them. To do this, they begin to use technological tools to collect information about customers’ tastes and needs and obtain valuable feedback.
• Marketing 3.0: It is no longer enough for consumers to satisfy their needs or that it has attributes that differentiate it from the competition. Still, instead, they seek that entities share specific values. Aspects such as brand image and corporate social responsibility become essential, helping the client choose between the different market possibilities. Companies must thus stand out for specific values that attract the customer’s attention.
• Marketing 4.0: In an increasingly competitive market globally, customers have less time and are much more demanding. Faced with this, technological tools allow a continuous flow of communication. Companies are concerned about having a constant relationship with the consumer to know them as much as possible and predict their behavior.

After analyzing all this evolution in understanding consumers, tastes, and needs, it is concluded that it is no longer enough to offer a new or attractive product today to retain customers. Still, instead, you also need to get to connect with them. For this reason, companies are currently maximizing their efforts in using digital marketing, which consists of applying a series of strategies for marketing, promoting, and selling products through internet media and channels.

What Is Digital Marketing?

As has been observed, society has evolved towards a reality marked by the inclusion of technology in the consumer’s day-to-day life. In parallel, traditional marketing has been moving towards new tools that allow you to know how the customer thinks, what they need, which products are successful and which are not successful.

The consumer marks the new online marketing model since they are no longer a passive agent to have honest communication with brands, telling them what they need from them. In this context, digital marketing offers companies tools to measure their audience’s behavior, discover how they interact with the campaigns and actions that are launched for a specific product, and implement them progressively.

In this way, the new marketing model has allowed entities to perfect their business plans according to the profile they are targeting. It has also become a tool that will enable you to reduce costs in campaigns, offer new ways of organic positioning (free), and allow you to know in real-time what is not working on modifying it successfully, adjusting the established budgets.

Advantages Of Digital Marketing

As has been observed, online marketing is a novel model adapted to the market’s needs that significantly benefits the business strategy of any company. Likewise, all companies with digital resources require a marketing department capable of implementing the different aspects that this methodology encompasses. Among the many advantages of digital marketing, we can highlight the following:

• More Affordable Costs: With the number of resources and tools available, the prices of an online marketing campaign are much lower than those of a traditional marketing campaign.
• Measurable Results: The wide variety of analytical tools allows precise and detailed monitoring of the results obtained with each investment, allowing strategies to be refined.
• Global Reach: Digital marketing allows you to reach people from anywhere globally, allowing them to know consumer behavior according to their location and origin.
• Greater Segmentation: With online marketing, it is possible to establish a much more detailed and precise differentiation of the target audience and develop individualized strategies for each of the targets of a company.
• Immediacy: Digital media allow you to obtain real-time results from campaigns and make modifications on the fly.

Undoubtedly, the evolution of the marketing concept has also led to greater complexity in applying practical techniques and tools that provide benefits for the company. All of them can be learned in greater depth through a Higher Degree in Distance Marketing and Advertising or the Master in Digital Marketing and Ecommerce that offers a global vision of this strategic field and provides the keys to carry out a digital marketing strategy with success.