#Marketing is as essential to a business as is breathing for living as it allows the business to expand and acquire more customers in the shortest span of time. Marketing contain the word ‘market’ and ‘ing’ which in my opinion means the act of reaching your customers. Marketing as a domain is a vast domain and digital marketing is clearly a subfield of this as the key objectives are as follows; building customers, building the brand and thereby building sales with the available resources. This article is mainly for entrepreneurs, marketeers and professionals who want to understand the nuances of digital marketing and how they vary from traditional marketing.#DigitalMarketing #Marketing #DigitalDeepak

The fundamentals of marketing: Clearly this is based on science and is based on understanding the customer and targeting all the communication accordingly and if the -product is customised as per a deeply felt customer need then the product will sell itself. It also involves regular information and communicating with the customers so that they ‘stay’ loyal e.g. if we look at Portea and how it went about communicating via digital marketing initially it clearly achieved brand awareness and recall but then fizzled out after that. A brand which remains in touch even after establishing its first set of customers is Pepperfry.

Having started working in the mid 1990s, I have seen how the advent of internet based businesses which sell digitally and how digital marketing is a key driver in their marketing strategy. Start-ups like Swiggy, Zomato, Flipkart, Big Basket (the list is extensive) have spent mega-bucks on digital marketing to acquire their customers. While sectors like established retail (offline) are heavily based towards media spends in magazines and suchlike marketing activities which are combination of Above the line (ATL) and Below the Line (BTL) marketing initiatives and in these cases Digital Marketing is part of their ‘marketing armour’ and not the only one.

According to Ratish Bhat (Co-Founder of #Vigocare which is a leading health tech company); ‘For digital online businesses, digital marketing has to be a key driver in their marketing strategy’.

Brand Endorsements of products by icons such as Amitabh Bachchan and Virat Kohli have their own role to play (low hanging products in the FMCG space) and exhibitions, seminars, conferences even if they are held digitally due to lockdown on account of the pandemic cannot be replaced by digital marketing – in fact digital marketing beautifully complements these traditional marketing routes.

Digital Marketing lends itself to a lot of analytics on Consumer Buying Behaviour and results in Leads which can then be channelised to result into sales for any scalable business more than Traditional Marketing except for Mass Media eg. IPL where the event becomes primary and digital marketing becomes an important complement.

Digital marketing vs. Traditional marketing: This has been a constant point of discussions in many forums and I would like to refer to submit that rather than both being different from each other, I feel that they complement each other with varying strengths as and when required based on the product and target audience.

https://www.educba.com/traditional-marketing-vs-digital-marketing/ – this gives a good synopsis of some of the salient variations and there are many points of view on this!

CATT Marketing Funnel: This shows how an individual user goes through all the stages from finding their niche to creating wealth – here ‘C’ means Content, ‘A’ means Attention, ‘T’ means ‘Trust’ and the second ‘T’ means Transaction. The emphasis is on converting leads into customers through natural sales methods and that will create wealth. I feel a prime example of this is Amrapali (jewellery) which has used this method very well.

For business like Talent Acquisition Companies (#Carpe Diem Resourcing), positioning and personal branding become more important drivers and these help in establishing the firm and its resources as knowledge evangelists across the sectors that they recruit for. In Leadership hiring it becomes even more important to demonstrate domain expertise and thereby delivery capacity therein in terms of hiring top talent without doing a direct hustle. Here, Content Marketing and Email Marketing within the domain of Digital Marketing become more valuable tools in my opinion in combination with thought leadership events.

Personal Branding: MassTrust Blueprint – This simply means that the best known will always beat the best and clearly implies that people want to hear from people and not brands. Personal brands can become strong influencer and a brand ambassador for the companies that they run e.g. Ratan Tata.

‘Streaming services in entertainment are doing to private TV channels what the latter did to Doordarshan two decades ago. Data is telling us what people really want. Fissures and fault lines are appearing in what was, at least to the public eye, a homogenous society. Indian and foreign brands vie side by side in the tumultuous Indian marketplace. The marketers’ ideal of a single predictable identity is breaking down faster than ever under the influence of new technology and new life values. More to the point, Indians are changing—in some regards quietly and below the surface, while in others loudly and publicly.’ Bharat Bambavale in ‘Nine Timeless Nuggets’ (https://penguin.co.in/book/nine-timeless-nuggets/)

Integrated Digital Marketing; This shows the how ‘content is king’ and how it is important to run all the initiatives in the digital marketing canvas in order to make maximum impact and acquire customers robustly or any scalable business.

The point I am trying to make via this article is that with the advent of E-commerce, the very essence of the Indian family is changing with basic daily activities like cooking a meal altering (food delivery resulting in lesser home cooking on the whole), life partners are being found from portals which do matchmaking based on attributes which are gathered online and the basic DNA of the Indian family is being fundamentally impacted with activities like grocery shopping outings becoming replaced by online delivery and suchlike. It is to be seen how this shapes the Indian diaspora and creates new paradigms of living.