Tag: Digital Era

BASICS OF DIGITAL MARKETING

What is Digital Marketing?

Computers and the internet have made it easy for us to do many things simultaneously. It has revolutionized our thought process. With the Covid-19 pandemic the entire world has adapted to the situation by working from home. The use of the term ‘Digital Marketing’ has increased during this time frame. It is used to promote small businesses as well as large scale businesses. We make use of it from the time we use our phones to surf social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, etc to making deals and strategies for our company or brand. Digital devices, platforms, media, data generated and technology are the foundations of digital marketing.

Milllenials are considered as ‘digital pioneers’ of technology and social media. It is the generation to be born into a world which is at its peak technological innovation. It has seen the rise of many Influencers and social media pioneers who make content and earn through brand collaborations. For a brand, an online presence has never been as important as today. Online brands like Amazon, Google, Zomato, Myntra they’re all based on keeping their online audiences engaged.  As Albert Einstein said “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity” there is an opportunity for us to seize even in a pandemic. Marketing yourself is the best strategy to follow in this digital era.

Types of Digital Marketing –

With digital marketing platform, you can gain a better understanding of what type of content resonates with the customers. This allows marketers to understand the demand of the consumers. It is entirely dependent on the engagement rate of the audience.

Digital Marketing can be branched into Search Engine Optimization or SEO Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing or SMM, Influencer and Affiliate Marketing, Pay- per-click or PPC Marketing. When the customer is looking for something to buy they will probably click on one of the first results that show up on Google. Hence SEO Marketing comes into the picture. It consists of learning strategies on how to rank your own website on Google using appropriate keywords. It is more credible form of marketing. Email marketing allows organizations to stay connected with customers and clients via newsletters and connecting employees within a company to interact formally. Social Media Marketing involves Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter for promoting brands, businesses or their skills using visual effects. It depends upon the impressions, comments, conversions, clicks, etc. Influencer Marketing requires you to choose up a specialty and create a platform and gain followers. The followers trust the influencers, which makes them likely to buy a product recommended by them. Affiliate Marketing is to promote other brands and earn a certain percentage through it. Pay-per-click or also known as PPC is one of the most common types of digital marketing. It charges you for the number of clicks that you get on your advertisement. PPC comes under search engine marketing and content or social media marketing.

Digital Marketing is cheap, measureable and has high returns. Various resources online provide insight into what digital marketing is. There are many students studying in universities who decide to take up Digital Marketing as their major and make a career in this field. The knowledge and skills are just as important as it is to keep ourselves updated with the ever changing technology.

How artificial intelligence is transforming the future of digital marketing

From smart search options and personalized messaging to being used in campaigns and marketing, AI and machine learning are increasingly being used in digital marketing.

Digital marketing relies on leveraging insights from the copious amounts of data that gets created every time a customer interacts with a digital asset. Algorithms optimize various factors and data points that influence digital marketing success.
In 2020, we anticipate a significant uptick in the mainstreaming of AI and machine learning use cases in digital marketing across several areas. 

Search will get very smart

In the past year, online search has had several AI and machine learning developments. Google is leading the pack with exciting applications in information retrieval. For example, Google’s BERT technology can process a word in the context of all the other terms in a sentence, rather than one-by-one in order. BERT also enables anyone to train their own state-of-the-art question answering system.  

Customization of search results and the results page based on learning from past interactions and preferences of a user is another application of machine learning used in search.

AI-driven personalization of messaging 

Several attach companies have been focusing on using AI and machine learning to find the right audience to write better ads than humans, and to increase conversion rates and engagement with the target audience. There are also several AI-led developments in the area of creating dynamic ads and landing pages to personalize marketing messages on the fly. 

AI has an application in content creation in terms of determining the logic of personalization as also crating content specific to an individual, using techniques such as natural language generation (NLG).

Use of machine learning in campaign operations 

Platforms such as Google and Face book have been at the forefront of AI/ML applications in marketing. Starting from smart bidding and smart campaigns to auto-generated ads, Google is making it easy for advertisers.

Smart bidding options such as TROAS, TCPA, and others use advanced machine learning algorithms to train on data at a vast scale to make accurate predictions about how different bid amounts might impact conversion or conversion value and assist advertisers in optimizing without getting into too many details. 

Google factors in a wide range of contextual signals (through search data) to predict user behavior and to influence auction time bidding as per the goal set by advertisers. Facebook has also incorporated machine learning across campaign planning and execution, as also in ad placements and ad delivery.

Similarly, on the organic search side, machine learning-based product ALPS reverse engineers Google’s ranking algorithm, and is able to accurately quantify ranking drivers, provide precise recommendations for changes, and predicts the impact of SEO actions before they are implemented.

Similar technology to drive improved ad copy testing in digital marketing exists. These help in evaluating ad copies and landing pages on various parameters like relevancy, use of action promoters/inhibitors, urgency inducers, page layout, load times, etc., to gauge the impact on ad relevance, expected CTR, and landing page experience. 

Future trends 

AI will also have additional application in digital marketing with the uptick in the adoption of technologies such as VR and AR, as commercial use cases of these technologies find wider adoption in retail and other sectors.

Many retailers are also testing AI and VR/AR technologies together to make the user experience personalized to an individual.

Other areas of impact include voice search. We will increasingly see ads about things which we just said or talked about, but haven’t searched for yet. Similarly, image search is also being used by many brands for their consumers to match patterns and identify products using image search. 

The coming years will continue to unfold newer potential uses of AI in digital marketing.

Fake News-a false alarm

What will happen if one morning we wake up and check our phone which will leave us bewildered with a notification of the demise of some famous personality and after few hours of feeling sad you realize that it was a fake news, that someone made a fool out of you. Think about that personality who will read the news of his own demise , such a strange thing right? The new digital era with modern technology has unleashed many unwanted and false practices which is affecting the individuals interpret daily developments. Now this thing leaves me in a state that whether I should watch news or read news articles or just leave everything and be unaware about the facts happening around me. Let me share some of the instances where I felt that fake news is becoming a threat to people. During this time of COVID-19, where the world is suffering from a painful time , people are still spreading fake news. They are giving false information about the number of corona cases rising in India and how the nation is in a dreadful situation with fear and suffrage. https://www.firstpost.com/tag/fake-news Second incident is from CBSE where the people were spreading rumors about the board examination of 10th&12th class. Students were confused with the dates and whether the examination will take place or not, this situation was no less than a terror for them because they were not sure with the dates and evaluation. But now the things have been settled and CBSE has warned against the fake news. https://scroll.in/announcements/958428/cbse-warns-against-fake-news-regarding-2020-board-exams There are many more examples which has threatened people and made a disbelief in media, where the people are in no state whether to believe the media or not. One of the major reasons why fake news is such a threat is the increasing difficulty for readers to identify the legitimacy of wake news websites. People are trusting blindly on everything , they are not checking the facts or they are not able to make a difference between a fabricated news or a real piece of news article. The fabricated news is creating a negative impact on the people and making the situation much more worse and entangled. This is a growing debate on how to address these issues without undermining the benefits of digital media. We should be aware about every digital platform before using it. Government should take preventive measures to combat this problem and come up with a solution so that people can actually rely on real news. Government should promote news literacy and strong professional journalism in the society.The media should work really hard in developing a real piece of news without fabricating it. Tech companies should come up with apps or other tools that can identify fake news in seconds and individuals should follow some guidelines or check the facts before believing in a news article. I will conclude this article with a quote of Abraham Lincoln “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it.”