Why digital marketing is taking over

For a long time, before the Internet, social networks and mandatory websites, marketing and communication were quite simple in a way.

There were printed ads, brochures, flyers, TV ads, public relations, and fairs.

In B2B marketing, fairs were very important: that’s where you met customers and that’s where customers came to meet you.

Today, (almost) everything is available through your screen. If human contact is still important, the Internet, digital ads and social networks have completely changed the game and its rules.

The main difference is that now you can target your audience directly at home. Not publish an expensive TV clip and hope that 1/10th of the people might be interested. Now, you can target people wherever they are and know that at least 1 in 2 is going to be interested in a way or another.

Why is that? Because people share far more information about themselves than they used to. Thank you social media! Before the Internet and social networks, you had to go in the streets, knock on people’s doors or call them on the phone and hope they would be willing to answer your questions. Today, people share this information without you even asking them: because they are used to share the most intimate details of their life on the Internet.

I’m saying that, but I’m one of the first to do that — not about my personal life, but about my professional life. You can find my complete resume online, on LinkedIn. And why do I give this information for free? Because it can help me in life. I write thoughts on Medium. Why? Because it’s a way to show my writing skills to the “world”. But I understood very quickly that I didn’t want people to know all about my private life. I show them what is — in my opinion — already “public”. But my use of social media is not naive: I want people to spot me for this or that.

However, of course, by using social media, I share private details: what I like when I give a thumb’s up on Facebook or Instagram; what are my interests by following accounts; what I do when I share a photo of my last trip.

And that’s all this data that is today’s marketing gold mine. No need to put that much money in a big TV ad that doesn’t allow you to calculate the ROI. But try and put an ad on Facebook or LinkedIn: it’s less expensive and you’ll know all. You can target someone through their location, age, gender, profession… And then you can know who saw it, who clicked on it, who interacted…

More and more people are aware of this, and some are more careful about what information they share online. But there are still so much data available!

When you read articles about the jobs of the future, they are more or less linked to data. You want to make money? Exploit the (digital) data. It’s worth so much!

All the marketing strategies should be centered towards digital marketing and communication. Yes, the Internet is noisy, so you need to be creative. But think — and you don’t need to think hard — when was the last time you saw an ad on your Facebook feed and clicked on it or it got your attention? Not that long ago, I bet.

This is true even for B2B marketing — a lot of people say that digital marketing is mostly for B2C, but reality contradicts them: between 2018 and 2019, the number of people who bought a product or service after being solicited online went fro 6% to 21%.

It is known that B2B companies are behind in terms of digital marketing and communication, but things are changing.

Because with such powerful tools as Google Adwords, LinkedIn Sales Navigator or e-commerce platforms, you can only agree with this method if you want your business to grow.