A successful product launch is the result of months of work. First, there is product development, an idea sparking a design and then later the final product or service, but that’s only the beginning. Once the product is ready, it takes a skilled marketing team to understand the product’s market, potential customers, and how to reach them. The team also must consider the company’s advertising budget and determine the best way to deploy videos, static advertisements, and other product placement to maximize exposure and returns.
Digital media has changed the way that marketing professionals perform their work. Traditional marketing methods are disappearing, replaced by all sorts of new revenue stream opportunities, which present their own challenges. Continue reading to learn more about how digital media affects the marketing mix and the emerging professional opportunities in the field.
What Is Digital Media?
Possibly without even realizing it, you interact with digital media all the time. It pops up on all sorts of devices, including cellphones, tablets, computers, digital billboards, and video games. Digital media is how many people consume news and entertainment, and new forms of it, such as augmented and virtual reality, are being created or developed all the time. In many ways, digital media reimagines traditional forms of media, such as newspapers, magazines, broadcast television, and radio.
Introducing the Marketing Mix
In a 1953 address to the American Marketing Association, Harvard professor Neil Bordon used the term “marketing mix” to describe the different components that constitute a successful marketing plan. Though digital media is affecting the marketing mix in new ways, there are some standard components. Price, product, promotion, and place — the four P’s — impact every marketing campaign, though emphasis on different components can create different outcomes.
Price
The price of a product or service significantly affects marketing efforts and focus. Products in a given market at the lower end of the price continuum might call for a marketing campaign that emphasizes value and savings. Marketing a more expensive item might instead mean focusing on its quality and advanced features. Price also determines marketing placement. For example, marketers might ask themselves if ads would perform better in magazines for a niche audience or in the form of commercials aired during television programs viewed by middle-class families.
Product
Of course, what the product is has a huge impact on its marketing. An advertisement for a product designed specifically for women might not create large returns if it’s placed in a men’s health magazine. Similarly, advertisements for assisted living homes don’t make much sense on a children’s entertainment network. The product’s purpose, features, or innovations also influence the marketing mix and determine how and where the product is advertised.
Promotion
Marketing professionals make sure they’re promoting a product in the right place and with the right slogans and graphics. Certain products and services require demonstration, and their marketing performs better on television or in infomercials. Some services, on the other hand, might require targeted advertisements in a certain geographic area. Should a toy’s marketing focus on children or parents? Promotion takes into account all aspects of price and product to come up with the best use of marketing funds.
Place
The last part of the marketing mix is the physical location of the good or service. A promising product can have a great price and marketing campaign but suffer from poor sales if it’s difficult for customers to find. Companies must ensure that customers can find and purchase their offerings easily.
How Digital Media Changes the Marketing Mix
The rise of digital media in the past two decades has revolutionized the way marketing professionals perform their jobs. New revenue streams, the evolving use of media, and consumers who are often weary of advertising have all caused major disruptions in the traditional marketing mix. It’s impossible to go into marketing or advertising careers without a firm understanding of digital media, including the ins and outs of social media, virtual reality, and podcasting, to name just a few emerging digital media trends.
Digital media has had the following direct impacts on the marketing mix:
- Advertising recognition and avoidance: Many digital streams have advertisement blockers or allow users to opt out of seeing certain ads. Companies must develop methods to advertise despite these obstacles.
- Customer service: Digital media, especially social media, allows customers to air their complaints to hundreds or thousands of friends or followers, as well as interact directly with brand representatives on many channels. Marketing agents consider how their social media specialists handle customer service requests, because bad experiences can significantly impact the success of a product, service, or brand.
- Influencers: Advertisers make use of social media influencers, people with thousands or millions of followers on social media channels such as YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram. Paying an influencer to recommend or showcase a brand can create immediate direct sales in a target market.
- Barrier to entry: The ubiquity of digital and social media has also lowered the barrier to entry in marketing. When advertising was only on television or billboards, it wasn’t cheap to market a product. Now, companies can place advertisements on social media channels and in the results of popular search engines at relatively little cost.
Become a Marketing Disruptor
Modern-day marketing professionals must understand digital media channels and their impact on marketing, as well as how marketing campaigns can adapt to emerging consumer trends. Explore how Maryville University’s online Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital Media, featuring an interdisciplinary curriculum in marketing and digital media, could be the perfect first step on the path to becoming a digital marketer.
Recommended Readings
Digital Marketing Trends Marketers Need to Know
11 Modern Marketing Skills for Business Innovators to Master
What Does the Future of Advertising Look Like?
Sources
The Balance Careers, “What Marketing Mix Is and Why It’s Important”
Entrepreneur, “Advertising in Digital Media”
Forbes, “Digital Marketing Trends That Are Changing the Way We Market to Consumers”
Forbes, “How the Digital Age Has Changed Marketing Channels Forever”
Maryville University, Online Bachelor’s in Digital Media
Pew Research Center, Digital Media
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Augmented reality marketing
Many industries have changed because of the internet, but only few have changed as drastically as Marketing. If you’d told marketers back in 1995 that, 20 years later, they’d be able to tweak campaigns based on their results in real time, they’d have laughed
Evolution in Marketing over years-
While many businesses still use the traditional form of marketing to attract customers which include print ads, newsletters, billboards, newspaper ads, TV commercials etc. But those who are smart enough have already realized that traditional form ain’t effective anymore. Modern marketers now use all the fresh methods which revolve around internet. Now companies use campaigns and social media platform to reach out to the customers and expand their audience and are successful in making brand awareness. Moreover companies which have online presence can also advertise on other websites by using new digital marketing tools.
The Top Trends Driving Marketing In 2017
According to Forbes these are the emerging trends for effective marketing – Good Content Marketing, ChatBots, Email Campaigns and Analytics.
Talking about content marketing, Video Marketing turns out to be most effective way to distribute content, as viewers does not have to put in any effort for reading and scrolling down the content and can just get the communication by watching a short video.
What the data says about significance of video marketing:
- According to Syndacast, “74 percent of all Internet traffic in 2017 will be video.”
- According to Martech Advisor, “In Facebook’s Q3 2017 earnings call, the company reported that 3 million businesses uploaded at least one video to their Facebook Business page per month.”
- According to The Guardian, “With online video quickly becoming a key means for people to satisfy their information and entertainment needs, small businesses that fail to include it in their internet marketing strategies will do so at their peril.”
- According to Cisco, by the end of 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic.
- Nielsen claims 64% of marketers expect video to dominate their strategies in the near future. It’s not difficult to see why.
Coming to the importance of ChatBots in Marketing:
ChatBots is more customer-centric and aims to respond to a query artificially.
What can it do for your business? Bots are ushering in one-to-one marketing at scale. What this means is that millions of people can talk to your brand without there being a human on the other end. The biggest bot platform is Facebook Messenger, which now boasts more than 900 million monthly active users, and is expected to cross a billion mark; which means that your bot can reach over a billion users through just Facebook. Kik is also one of the famous platforms to use bot which has around 200 million active users.
Businesses are now using social media as a customer service method using Bots, meaning they can quickly address and resolve issues without the customer having to send an email or make a phone call. It will make the company look responsible towards their customers.
Next is importance of Email marketing campaigns
While email was certainly there in existence since the internet was born but because of advance email marketing tools those same emails can now be converted into campaigns for email marketing. Email marketing is one of the effective ways to convert leads into prospective customers.
Email marketing has evolved to allow businesses to do a lot, such as:
- Letting customers know about special offers
- Introducing new products and services
- Making personalised recommendations based on previous purchases or searches
- Share tips to get more out of a product and service
- Encourage customers to leave reviews and refer others
- Invite people to events
and more..
And the last is customer analytics-
Analytics is needed to evaluate the potency of any campaign. Analytics is the crux and without which the right decisions can’t be taken.
Perks of using the internet for marketing is that you can exactly track the effectiveness of the marketing done from various mediums such as Email, SMS, Social Media etc and segment the customers easily. This means businesses can easily identify what activities are working well, which ones aren’t, which helps them to learn more about their audience and market to them better.
The advance marketing tools has changed the way marketing is done, the way businesses sell, and the way people buy with comparison and satisfaction. Successful businesses will be ones who keep up with the way that consumers are buying.
It’s interesting to think how marketing and internet will evolve in the coming years. That’s when the advance marketing tools like FirstHive comes into the picture. Tools like these make cross-channel marketing effective and helps in capturing the customer interaction with the brand.
So to improve the marketing process, the marketers need to put their hands on marketing automation. It is important to realize that this is the future of how marketers are going to communicate with the customers and pitch in their brands. Also, there is a lot of scope in this space for innovation which we all are going to experience in the near future.