How the Digital Age Has Transformed Marketing

No one can deny that with the coming of the digital age, a lot of things have changed in a lot of industries. One of the industries that has been heavily impacted by the digital age is the marketing industry. But how has the digital age transformed marketing? Here are a few ways.

Small Businesses Have Become More Competitive

Small businesses, being limited in funds as they are, could never really compete with big businesses. Big organizations usually have a sizable budget, which allows them to dominate all traditional marketing channels. But with the coming of the digital age, which brought about digital marketing, the playing field has been leveled.

For example, 93-percent of all traffic that goes to websites is directed there by search engines. And through search engine optimization, small businesses can compete with the big boys to get a piece of that organic traffic. And the best part is that SEO costs nothing in many scenarios and delivers tremendous results.

Sure, you can say the bigger organizations don’t have to worry much about organic traffic since they can always use paid ads. But guess what? On the top five search results, which are a mixture of organic and paid results, 67.60% of users always click on the organic results.

24/7 Customer Support

Customer service is an extremely important business function. It provides organizations with numerous benefits, including increased revenue, customer loyalty, positive word of mouth and competitive advantage. But the digital age has changed the way customer service, which is a vital part of marketing, is done.

Yesterday, it was perfectly okay for the customer service to clock out at the end of the business day. But the digital world never sleeps, which means today’s customer service never sleeps as well. Expectations are high when it comes to customer service because people expect their queries to be answered all the time, any time.

Traditional Marketing is Going Extinct

There was a time when having a TV or even a radio commercial was a thing. As mentioned earlier, this was when big organizations excelled where others couldn’t. But now it is official: the digital age killed the traditional marketing star. Everything and everyone is going online. For instance, these days, many people no longer sit in front of the TV to enjoy their favorite TV series due to streaming services.

Now marketing efforts are being pushed towards the digital landscape. And this comes with a number of benefits, from being cheaper than TV, radio and print media to being able to target a specific audience that will most likely resonate with your message. The latter allows you to get a significant return on investment. Plus, digital marketing has the potential to reach a wider audience more than traditional marketing ever will.

KPIs and Metrics are King

When it comes to seeing if a marketing campaign is hitting all its targets, there is a need for measures of success. That is where key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics come in, and they have never been easier to measure and analyze than in the digital realm.

There are plenty of tools online that can be used to measure various KPIs and metrics. And they can connect to almost any data source, allowing you to update your KPIs and metrics in real-time with great accuracy. Not only that, but these tools can also help you to instantly create dashboards and reports containing your most relevant KPIs and metrics so you can extract valuable insights.

Once those insights have been extracted, the organization’s key decision-makers can use them to make informed decisions. Those decisions can only make the marketing efforts yield more results.

Conclusion

We are now in the digital age and many industries are heading in the digital direction as well. Marketing is no exception. And if an organization wants to survive, it needs to go where their customers are, which is online. By knowing the ways in which the digital age has transformed marketing, organizations, especially small ones,  will be better equipped to do it right in this new age.