DIGITAL MARKETING

INTRODUCTION

           Digital marketing is an umbrella term for the targeted, measurable, and interactive marketing of products or services using digital technologies to reach and convert leads into customers.The key objective is to promote brands, build preference and increase sales through various digital marketing techniques. It is embodied by an extensive selection of service, product and brand marketing tactics, which mainly use the Internet as a core promotional medium, in addition to mobile and traditional TV and radio.

  Digital marketing concepts and practice are evolving tremendously among several industries, especially by the leading companies among each industry utilizing the mass reach of digital tools and social media platforms, benefiting from the possibility to create individually tailored approach that can achieved at a very productive cost.

   Digital marketing activities are search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) , content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, and e-commerce marketing. It also extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as mobile phones (SMS and MMS), callback and on-hold mobile ring tones, social media marketing,e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e–books, optical disks and games, and any other form of digital media.

     According to the Digital Marketing Institute, Digital Marketing is the use of digital channels to promote or market products and services to consumers and businesses.

HISTORY

     The term 'digital marketing' was first used in the 1990s. In the 2000s and the 2010s, digital marketing became more sophisticated as an effective way to create a relationship with the consumer that has depth and relevance. While the term 'digital marketing' may not have been used until the 1990s, digital marketing itself has roots to the mid-1980s when the SoftAd Group, now ChannelNetdeveloped advertising campaigns for several major automobile companies, wherein people would send in reader reply cards found in magazines and receive in return floppy disks that contained multimedia content promoting various cars and offering free test drives.

  The rapid evolution of digital media has created new opportunities and avenues for advertising and marketing. Fueled by the proliferation of devices to access digital media, this has led to the exponential growth of digital advertising.

    Digital media growth is estimated at 4.5 trillion online ads served annually with digital media spend at 48% growth in 2010. An increasing portion of advertising stems from businesses employing Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) to tailor advertising for Internet users. Though an innovative resource, OBA raises concern with regards to consumer privacy and data protection. Such implications are important considerations for responsible communications. Digital marketing is often referred to as 'online marketing', 'internet marketing' or 'web marketing'. The term 'digital marketing' has grown in popularity over time, particularly in certain countries. In the USA 'online marketing' is still prevalent, in Italy is referred as 'web marketing' but in the UK and worldwide, 'digital marketing' has become the most common term, especially after the year 2013.

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS AND STRATEGIES

     As digital marketing is dependent on technology which is ever-evolving and fast-changing, the same features should be expected from digital marketing developments and strategies. This portion is an attempt to qualify or segregate the notable highlights existing and being used as of press time.

1. Segmentation: more focus has been placed on segmentation within digital marketing, in order to target specific markets in both business to business and business to consumer sectors.

2. Influencer Marketing: Important nodes are identified within related communities, known as influencers. This is becoming an important concept in digital targeting. It is possible to reach influencers via paid advertising, such as Facebook Advertising or Google Adwords campaigns, or through sophisticated sCRM (social customer relationship management) software, such as SAP C4C, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage CRM and Salesforce CRM. Many universities now focus, at Masters level, on engagement strategies for influencers.

To summarize, Pull digital marketing is characterized by consumers actively seeking marketing content while Push digital marketing occurs when marketers send messages without that content being actively sought by the recipients.

3. Online Behavioural Advertising: Online Behavioural Advertising refers to the practice of collecting information about a user’s online activity over time, “on a particular device and across different, unrelated websites, in order to deliver advertisements tailored to that user’s interests and preferences.

4. Collaborative Environment: A collaborative environment can be set up between the organization, the technology service provider,and the digital agencies to optimize effort, resource sharing, re-usability and communications.

An important consideration today while deciding on strategy is that the digital tools have democratized the promotional landscape. 

Multi-channel communications

     Push and pull message technologies can be used in conjunction.

Self-regulation

     The ICC Code has integrated rules that apply to marketing communications using digital interactive media throughout the guidelines. There is also an entirely updated section dealing with issues specific to digital interactive media techniques and platforms. Code self-regulation on use of digital interactive media includes: • Clear and transparent mechanisms to enable consumers to choose not to have their data collected for advertising or marketing purposes; • Clear indication that a social network site is commercial and is under the control or influence of a marketer; • Limits are set so that marketers communicate directly only when there are reasonable grounds to believe that the consumer has an interest in what is being offered; • Respect for the rules and standards of acceptable commercial behaviour in social networks and the posting of marketing messages only when the forum or site has clearly indicated its willingness to receive them; • Special attention and protection for children.

Inside India's Digital Locker: What Is DIGILocker and How Does It Work?

Introduction

            Between your wallet and that locker in your house where you keep things safe (in theory; in practice you forget to put things in there safely, and then have a panic attack as you desperately search everywhere for your missing passport), how many government documents do you think you have? A quick check shows that there are several at hand - an Aadhaar card, a driver's license, voter ID, PAN card, all in the wallet, and a passport at home. Then there's old income tax returns, property tax receipts, and educational certificates from school and college, all kept "safely" archived for when they're needed.

           That's a huge number of documents to keep and manage, and the government also seems to have taken notice. As part of Digital India week on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially launched a digital locker service called DIGILocker, though the service was soft-launched sometime back.

DIGILocker 

        Very simply, it's a website where you can store your various government issued documents, using your Aadhaar card as your identification. While it hasn't been stated as such, to us, it also looks like a good way of bringing data from different government agencies together under the aegis of the Aadhaar card, potentially making the document more useful to people carrying it.

          To sign up, you need only enter your Aadhaar number, and an SMS is set out to the mobile phone number you registered at the enrolment camp. This one-time-password is the only way to get inside your DIGILocker for the first time, but afterwards, you can set your own password or link the DIGILocker to your Google or Facebook login.

       After you've signed up, you can upload your government documents to the DIGILocker - there's only 10MB of storage at present - but you can also save the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) of government documents using DIGILocker.

Working

         The idea is that this should minimise the need for physical documents; if your birth and education certificates are online, and you apply for a passport, then the Passport Office could use your Aadhaar number to request the DIGILocker for your details, without needing you to carry a large file of documents for the application.

        Or, the RTO could issue your Driver's License directly to your DIGILocker, based on your Aadhaar information alone; this way, if you need to send your new license to any agency as verification, you'll have an online, authenticated version available whenever you need it.

     There's also a planned e-Signature facility with DIGILocker, though that will be launched later; between digital signatures and government documents in the cloud, it is clear that the government wants to make it easier for people to use government services online. Today, getting almost anything done with the government requires you to produce ID documents, which requires a visit to the government offices. Few, if any, government branches allow you to mail a copy of your documents - which actually makes sense for security reasons - but DIGILocker will be a way to authentically curate your documents, and make it easy to share them to different departments.

Threats

         While the DIGILocker website looks to have the basics in place by using HTTPS (the same protocol that your bank uses to secure communication between your computer and their servers) for the main part of the website, you have to wonder how secure the backend is. You can be pretty sure that a place where everyone is keeping their official documents will be a target for hackers foreign and local.

Conclusion

       Right now, there's not too many ways in which DIGILocker is useful, but it's a clear signpost to the direction we're moving in. Some people worry that this much centralised data could lead to misuse, and also warn of the potential of small mistakes in documents now creating much bigger problems than before, but there's no denying that the convenience of having all our documents digitally accessible and easily shared to different government departments when needed is very appealing.

          To access your digital locker, visit DIGILocker and you can sign up now for free with your Aadhaar details.