Digital marketing – a revolution of marketing concepts

'The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything'

-------- Kevin Kelly

What first come out of your mind when you see or hear the word ‘Digital’? You may say: digital camera, digital television or you may think digital means something with electricity and internet. Well, they are “digital”, literally, but what does it means when comes to digital marketing? In order to figure out the definition clearly, both definitions have to be explained and then we can combine them together.

In my opinion, digital means something that can be sensed, targeted, understood, quantified, by monitoring, collecting, filtering, processing and utilizing digits / data interactively. Marketing is a process that firms and consumers exchange value with each other. So when we combine them, digital marketing seems to be clear: in simplistic terms, it is the promotion of products or bands via different forms of digital tools or channels. Generally, common definition of digital marketing is mostly about revolution of mechanism or technical method of marketing, many marketing / advertising guys consider digital marketing just as an online method of promotion, such as launching an interactive H5 on social media platform, in order to precisely approach their target audience. Technically, they definitely narrow the range and weaken the power of digital marketing. From a wider point of view, I would like to define it as a revolution of marketing philosophy and marketing concepts. Digital marketing is the revolution of traditional marketing mix (4Ps) and it comes into being when digital tools start to integrate with marketing philosophies and methodologies.

Totally, digital marketing has two main influence on marketing, which differentiates the innovative and traditional methodology.

First, digital marketing change the power and position of firms and consumers in the market, before the digital marketing, marketing strategies are mostly in the direction from firms’ products to consumers, firms start from their products. Now, digital marketing makes the interactive process become possible, single direction becomes double direction. Information asymmetry is weaken. For the first time, consumers gain the right to know much clearer about the company’s products, sales channels, advertising and promotions in a digital way. Consumers become powerful in the market and can even influence the firm. Some related concepts emerges such as word-of-mouth management and MOT (moment of truth), they reflect that customers have become the real ‘God’.  

Second, digital marketing can generate data, which can be used to detect consumers’ behaviour and even forecast their future behaviour. It makes CRM (customer relationship management) become possible and increase the efficiency of it. Customer-oriented marketing is the future, which is a win-win situation. It is able to rebuild the relationship between company product, customers and even non-customers. Companies need to foster a group of ally rather than just customers. If they could collect, filter, editing, analyzing and using the data generated from all digital platforms and tools, higher efficiency and lower cost will be.

Following is a simple illustration of customer-oriented digital marketing structure.

PR: public relationship

AD: advertising

OOH: out of home

SMM: social media marketing

EC: e-commerce

SEM: search engine marketing

SEO: search engine optimization

WOM: word of mouth

In this customer-centered digital marketing structure, UGC (User generated content) can be very useful for both customers and companies. It is one of the most valuable assets of a company, by co-creating with your customers, more creative and customized products or services will be made. Customers want to get social connection, so social media marketing concept occurs. Customers want to see and learn some contents on the internet, so content marketing concepts occurs. Customers want to search information independently, so SEM (search engine marketing) occurs. In total, digital tools make all these revolutions of marketing concepts happen.

Finally, even though there are many unknown spaces of digital marketing that waiting for us to explore, I still believe digital marketing will develop continuously with the society.

So let me end this by quoting a sentence said by Alvin Toffler, 'The sole certainty is that tomorrow will surprise us all', and of course the digital door will lead us to a bright future.