Introduction
The main theme to be addressed is the fact that digital marketing presents opportunities and challenges to organisations. The study will list and explain the five element formula for digital marketing and provide a description of two opportunities and two challenges for organisations when using digital marketing.
The analysis will describe three ways organisations can learn to use digital marketing. Lastly, the study will recommend the main reason why organisations should adopt digital marketing and justify the preferred choice. In general, digital marketing is an outward sign of the intention of an organisation to promote itself globally.
Importance of Digital Marketing
Digital media provides markets with custom frameworks and models of interaction, which coordinate operations from location of consumers including their activities at that present time. Therefore, digital marketing enhances all these moments in order to foster success at all levels (Klososky 2012).
The other issue is that digital marketing promotes social connectivity. Therefore, as brand engagements stretch across platforms, it starts to create a forum for focused consumers’ interaction where they get to socialize with the brand itself.
Moreover, it provides an environment whereby consumers get to share more information with others regarding the brand. In this respect, consumers act as brand ambassadors. This is because it provides tools and mechanisms which influence customer’s behaviour across existing social networks, such as Facebook or MySpace (Martin & Todorov 2010).
However, digital marketing has its peculiar challenges of organisations. The most obvious reason is that it is expensive since it requires stronger e-Marketing components. Therefore, small businesses, for instance, may find it very expensive to have a sustainable web presence (Parkin 2009;Ryan & Jones 2012).
The other challenge may refer to intellectual property issues whereby firms risk having their products manipulated by other malicious businesses in the process of advertising. Well, this may be controlled by having sound internal controls but then governed by cyber laws which would prevent violation of cyber rights for a given business (Schmid 2007; The CIM 2011).
Digital Marketing in Organisations
It is essential to stress that social technology for enterprises involves more compared to networking. People commonly indulge in using social facilities such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Therefore, a good comprehension on its underlying concepts including how to integrate them to investment processes or strategies can be of paramount importance today (Klososky 2012).
There are growing concerns as to why the public should care so much about acquiring shares with Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn under the IPO pact. It is the case that it is not appropriate for any company to disregard social technology in 2012.
Social networking promotes collaboration, interaction and effective communication thus enabling companies to stay linked to one another. Thus, Facebook and Twitter among others offer such possibilities for businesses. In addition, social media creates a platform with the help of which people can easily access videos, files, documents, films or presentations. The main tools for this are You Tube, Flickr and Slideshare.net among others (Klososky 2012).
Social relevance defines the online reputation of an organisation or individual. Additionally, through social tools or what would be referred to as the “eWord of Mouth”, new ideas can be propagandized, this will help a lot of companies to economize their finances with the help of updated design of interface (Klososky 2012).
Research indicates that social technologies are popular due to their ability to assist in driving revenue in new directions so that they can be in tandem with the wider scope of marketing (Weber 2009).
The next subsection will provide more analysis on the five-element formula involved in digital marketing.
Five-Element Formula:
- Development of Useful and Reliable websites: These refer to the destinations where people obtain access to stored information or carry out other processes. The other thing is that people will not visit such properties without a specific rationale; additionally, websites do not capitalise on providing ongoing relations (Klososky 2012).
- Establishing technologies across social networks: This sustains mechanisms that ensure remote relationships with clients. Also this builds trust with prospects towards sharing vital information (Klososky 2012).
- Mobile Tools: It Recently, it has become possible for businesses to connect 24/7 across networks; this facilitates a good link between them and their clients all over the world. It is vital for any company to be linked with its clients randomly and from any place of origin. In this regard, an organization must be in a position to achieve such connection (Klososky 2012).
- Driving Online Traffic: The other consideration is to have a heavy traffic across the relationship net, which can be attained with the help of traditional advertising, pay-per-click campaigns and search engine optimisation (Klososky 2012).
- Measurement Systems: The essential point here is that what undergoes measuring also gets done. Therefore, upon fulfilling the first four strategies mentioned above, the next thing will be to establish an overall measurement which can be used to understand what functions properly or what requires improvement (Klososky 2012).
Organisations may learn how to use digital marketing by training their own personnel. This can be focused on the marketing department thus, pick a few professionals to be trained on digital marketing processes. Secondly, organisations can learn digital marketing processes through benchmarking.
This is where they may seek ideas from other companies that have successfully used digital marketing. Last but not least, an organisation can invite experts to conduct training on the benefits of digital marketing, including their applications across the organisation.
The essential reason why companies ought to adopt digital marketing is because they can target a wide group of clients all over the world. Digital marketing actually means conducting a world marketing campaign without limitations of boundaries (Wind & Mahajan 2001). Therefore, it would be possible for an organisation to have a global presence through digital marketing processes.
Conclusion
It can be seen that digital marketing is the way to go for any business which hopes to capture global interest on its products. As such, digital marketing may not be easy to sustain but with the emergence of social medial tools, such as Facebook or Twitter, organisations can still achieve the best.
It is not necessary to struggle to have in place a website in order to have a web presence; but the aforementioned tools can be effective to achieve this end. The parting note would be to have strong and reliable legal provisions that will make digital marketing beneficial to organisations that depend on it.
Reference List
Klososky, S 2012, Social Technology, Financial Executive.
Martin, K & Todorov, I 2010, ‘How will Digital Platforms be Harnessed in 2010, and How will they Change the Way People Interact with Brands?’, Journal of Interactive Advertising, Vol. 10, No.2 (pp.61-66).
Parkin, G 2009, Digital Marketing: Strategies for Online Success, New Holland Publishers.
Ryan, D & Jones, C 2012, Understanding Digital Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Engaging the Digital Generation, Kogan Page Publishers.
Schmid, V 2007, E-Marketing Strategy for Reg Vardy, GRIN Verlag Publishers.
The CIM, 2011, The Marketing Century: How Marketing Drives Business and Shapes Society, John Wiley & Sons Publishers.
Weber, L 2009, Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business, John Wiley & Sons.
Wind, J & Mahajan, V 2001, Digital Marketing: Global Strategies from the World’s Leading Experts, John Wiley & Sons Publishers.