Why Digital is so Important!

It shouldn’t take much convincing as to why “digital” is important. Indeed, the degree to which digital can deliver cost-effective benefits to a business and superior experience to customers is dependent on the market and products involved. This cannot be underestimated after all according to Ien Ang, a professor of cultural studies at the University of Western Sydney, “The internet is everywhere, but it is not everywhere in the same way.”

Digital is dependant on so many factors and experiences. The idea of different experiences forming digital is very important. Everyone has a different experience of digital. Digital Marketing has become a bad fellow to this change in consumer experience, it changed the way every brand brings products and services to market.

Unfortunately, traditional marketing channels do not allow dialogue between marketers and customers. Therefore, they tend to fall flat in this area. On top of this, the rapid expansion of the internet and social media in the developing world means real-time communication is not only absolutely critical but also feasible. Most traditional marketing channels suffer from a lag and there is no instantaneous communication. There are two examples of the shift from the past to the future.

Goodbye to the marketing funnel

It has been with us since Socrates, you get consumers’ attention, inspire their interest, overcome their objections, and get them to act. The assumptions are, the more people you put at the top of the funnel the more sales you will get out of it in the end. However, what used to be a linear process has been replaced by a continuum and that makes all the difference in the marketing world. In short, marketers need to:

• Shift from grabbing attention
• Move to hold the attention
• Acquire new skills, mindset, and organizational integration

It’s the experience that counts

In contrast to the old model, where marketers strove to come up with a big idea with which they could promote with massive advertising budget on TV & print, now marketers need to create:

• Pervasive brand experiences
• Keep consumers engaged even after-sales 
• Continuously listen to consumer conversations

To succeed in this new environment, marketers need to:

• Move away from one-way communication
• Towards a true value exchange
• Where consumers interact with the brand continuously

Because they are not just getting a slogan, but an experience that transcends the products itself. Getting creative marketers to work alongside technical staff can be a huge challenge. While traditional marketing is all about impressions, digital marketing focuses on the more important aspect of creating an experience for users and all these are the result of our changing behavior.

After all, we get up to all sorts of things that science fictions want. Today we can order customized products online, such as trainers or computers. Many people have replaced daily newspapers with online editions or online news sources. We can now skip TV ads, order on-demand shows, and sell our grandma’s antique furniture via online auctions.

All of these new ways of selling products and services became available to consumers during the past fifteen years and as a result of digital technologies. They also have another thing in common, they exist today because they reflect and understand our needs and behavior. The reality is that the future is already here and we already have many of the tools. They call them digital.