The Digital Age: The Rise of the Internet

Hi friends,

I present to you-- My first ever blog post! (and apparently it's going to be a lot about digital marketing haha so sit tight as I bring you along with me on a little educational ride.)

After mindlessly skipping countless Wix website advertisements on youtube, I would'nt have thought that there come a day I'd be using Wix too. Fast forward to today, HERE I AM.. using Wix.

This is, digital marketing done right.

The Rise of the Internet

According to the United Nations agency that oversees international communications, more than 3 billion people use the Internet (Davidson, 2015). The internet has been a thing for many years and while the user demographic is predominantly skewed in favour of the younger generations, most older users are growing increasingly receptive to the use of the internet and are adapting relatively well to the technological improvements.

Here’s an analogy to put you into perspective of how vast the internet usage is in today’s society. Take learning an instrument as an example; the more you strum and learn the cords of a guitar, the faster and more fluently you can play your favourite song, right? And as simple as it sounds, a few clicks and you’re just about any avid internet browser there is on this planet!

As people become more well versed with the usability and interface of the medium, they use it more effectively and efficiently. However, this convenience and accessibility can be seen as a double-edged sword.

The Growing Pain Every Marketer Faces

“They want it all, and they want it now”- (Ryan, 2016).

This saying stems from the rapid advancements technology has made over the years, where everything happens at million miles per hour. Consumers have grown accustomed to attaining their information on demand, from multiple resources simultaneously. Since information can be so readily available on the internet, it shortens the their attention span and reduces their capacity to stay interested on one site.

With this knowledge, we can now comprehend why companies face a constant struggle to rise above the market and secure a foothold of their target audience. A good way to curb this disengagement is to ensure that their content caters to what users want and to deliver it quickly. This is where Digital Marketing comes into play.

So, what actually is digital marketing?

Digital marketing can be labelled as the general umbrella for the various media marketing tools available on the internet, mobile phones and other digital mediums used to sell products or services. Some digital marketing channels include social media marketing, online paid advertising, email marketing and mobile app marketing, and content marketing to keep users interested.

In order to keep abreast with today's advanced competition, companies are becoming more analytical with the strategies used to promote their brands, studying the online behaviours of their consumers.

A classic example is that companies have been utilising YouTube as a digital platform advertising their products or services. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, with more than a billion active users. An approximate 6 billion hours of videos are being watched every month, with over 100 hours worth of videos uploaded on its platform every minute.

YouTube advertisements are selectively placed on videos that may be of particular interest to the potential target audiences, giving an increased exposure to its brand and a chance for better return of investments. With its massive online market outreach, YouTube has been proven to drive large volumes of views, and strong click through rates in which companies look for when deciding on the platforms to market their brands.

Take Wix as an example, many of us may be familiar with this advertisement shown below as it appears before many YouTube videos.

Personally, I first heard of Wix on YouTube and it rang a bell when I found out I needed a site to posts blogs for this module. Since Wix is a cloud-based web development space, YouTube is a perfect place for them to market their service as online users are more likely to be tech savvy or interested in building their own content. These adverts allow users who are interested to simply click into the ad while it plays, for a more extensive review of the service being provided by the company.

In my following blogs, I will be further discussing various examples of digital marketing strategies companies and brands adopt in order to handle the heat of technological competition in today's market.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and till I write in a week's time, I'll see you then!

Cheers,

Megan