While traditional marketing runs on the four Ps – product, price, promotion, and place; modern marketing, also called digital marketing, runs primarily on place, place, and place. Place where you find the right audience, where prospects can find discounts, a place where people find answers to their questions.

Almost every platform gives marketers statistics of their target market, right from the number of people their posts have reached to the engagement to the best day and time to reach the prospects. E.g., Google Display Network comes with AdWords, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, SEO, to name a few.  Social media giants like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest have opened up their platforms for marketing and sales, all aiming at reaching prospects who could be turned into customers. This digital process fills our customer funnels or flywheels. Imagine the magic these analytics do when one pays for ads on these platforms!

Several parameters such as age, gender, interests, likes, searches, queries, etc., add to filling their customer funnels. While customers find something that interests them, marketers find ‘data’ that keeps their funnels filling. In most scenarios, customers are aware of this. However, they continue to be that ‘data’ as it’s a win-win situation for those who feel they are part of this inevitable digital society. Remember the famous adage “if a service is free, you are the product”? Well, in this case, every socially active account holder is the data!

It is estimated that there are about 3.8 billion social media users with an estimated market of about 48 billion U.S. dollars.

https://www.statista.com/topics/1538/social-media-marketing/

While studying ‘Advertising’ during my MBA times, we were made aware of the legalese that marketers are allowed to enlarge their product image by a certain percentage. That’s how we bought many products, for over a century, just being enticed by the colour and size of the images. In this digital marketing world, the phenomenon of using ‘testimonials’ and ‘endorsements’ is also an attribute of advertising by either the ordinary buyer or a celebrity to appeal to the potential buyers. As a digital marketer, I understand no ‘enlarging’ the actual features is acceptable in these testimonials. What customers express is what they feel. Of course,  businesses should take reviews with personal targets and biases with a pinch of salt. This feedback marketing gains prominence with the advent of paid reviews by some big giants in this field!

This is my first marketing blog. I wanted to introduce those who see all these platforms daily but didn’t know that they are actually the data that keeps this billion market marketing world on the move.

I was part of the traditional marketing world since 2002. I started as an assistant marketing manager in India, and moving to the UK began the marketing ladder right from being a salesperson. That’s where I practised the real-time interactions salespeople have with customers that form the basis for ‘relationship marketing’ and ‘customer experience management (CX)’ –precisely what marketers need to know in their careers! Of course, thus followed awards and accolades.

With a break of a few years in my career and moving to the US, I dived into digital marketing without knowing what it was about six years ago! And in these three years, I have worked on brand awareness, email marketing, content creation, and managing advertisement campaigns for different companies and events; I’ve raised their sales by over 40% at times!  

Marketing was a proven success by many stalwarts who did not have either a marketing or a management degree. With digital marketing taking over traditional marketing, we have professional degrees in place, and even coding is now a part of it. Who would have thought!

Now, the world belongs to those who are ‘masters of many trades’.