The other day while watching the television, the Ad for ‘Go Daddy’ appealed to me instantly. The Ad was about a professional yet traditional furniture maker’s urge to have a website for his business. The intention behind this Ad was very clear; the business owner wanted to go online, in order to widen his business prospects.

Now you might question

How Do Digital Marketing Shape Online Businesses?

The answer to this simple, digital marketing is the promotion of brands or products through various electronic advertising techniques such as Web design, SEO, Branding, Web design, Blogging, SEM and many more.

This type of marketing is done on the internet through desktops, tablets, mobile devices and so on and reaches the larger audiences swiftly and widely.

Digital media has rapidly brought in power for anyone to create and share information with everyone.

The above statement is perfectly structured and in one line describes the uniqueness of digital marketing. The new era that the digital media has created, has surpassed beyond imagination. It literally connects people across the globe, enabling them in business transactions in an effective & efficient way.

Not very long ago, businessmen depended on mass media communication such as print, television, and radio for their product promotion but the reach was limited. Global businesses could not thrive with traditional marketing strategies. And adding to this scenario, even customers had sparse and limited access to information.

A Change in marketing strategies was quintessential to expand the business horizons and that’s when the digital marketing took over the reins from traditional marketing.

Although there are businesses, who still opt for traditional marketing, their numbers are dwindling. While this is the status of traditional marketing, digital marketing is spreading its wings across an array of media channels.

The adjacent image is an extract from a book titled ‘Digital Marketing- the essential guide’ by Kent Wertime, which shows the basic distinctions between traditional and digital marketing.

The digital channels are now a mass, catering to global audiences and are extremely targeted, allowing direct interaction with the customers. With digital marketing, all promotions and business communication, as well as transactions, can be personalized.

As marketers or business owners, you must know your clients better, so that you can interact with them; and to do that, you need to have a consolidated view of customer preferences and expectations across all channels – Web, social media, mobile, direct mail, point of sale, etc.

This collected information can be used to anticipate a coordinated customer experience and enable you as a marketer, to provide a solution that will move customers along to perform an action. The deeper your insight into customer behavior and preferences, the more likely you are to engage them in lucrative interactions.

To sum it up, all that can be said about digital marketing is that it has managed to create a revolution, in the field of marketing; from managing complex customer relationships across a variety of channels – both digital and traditional, enabling better decisions swiftly, to responding and initiating dynamic customer inter-actions, the digital marketing trend has come a long way and is here to stay.