“Digital Marketing” has changed the whole concept of traditional marketing or long time practiced marketing approach. As a business owner you need to understand the value of digital marketing and exploring another medium of increasing business revenue.  

According to (Source: The Hindu News Paper) D. Shivakumar, Pepsico India chairman and CEO said: “The shift to digital has transformed the way people do business, and the old linear way of marketing concepts is gone now. If you are not geared up for the digital world, it will hurt your margins, market share and brand equity,”

Let’s understand, how the shift happened?

If you look into early 2000, people used hear about Internet. A very limited set of people were familiar with computers and internet. The number of mobile users were also less in India. Thenafter, the technology shift started slowly, even nobody noticed the shift but everybody witnessed it.

According to the report, in the rural India, 48% (around 78 million) are daily Internet users, while about 140 million (83%) are estimated to use Internet once a month. The report points out that 77% of urban users and 92% of rural users consider mobile as the primary device for accessing the Internet, largely driven by availability and affordability of smartphones.

On top of it, telecom players are going cheap and reducing the rentals for calls and browsing data. And now we are at a time, where you don’t pay for some months for calls or internet. Or pay very less amount for it.

So there is too much competition among ISPs and too much anxiety among users, drives an excellent business opportunities for businesses.

The factors involved in the major shift:

There  are so many factors are responsible for this major shift.

The technology push, short TLC (technology life cycle), new technology innovations, awareness and interest of going digital among people and support by Government, and other organizations are playing major roles  in this digital shift.

The evolve of Google’s search engine concept, Facebook’s sharing moments, Linkedin’s professional connect, Twitter’s sharing thoughts etc, played and have been triggering the shift in making the virtual market place over internet.

Santosh Desai, Managing Director and CEO, Future Brands Ltd., noted that social media has helped a lot of individuals create their own market and audience.

Creating the business opportunity, google giving a search engine presence to all type of business and helping user to make their choice by comparing, seeing the reviews, and all other type of facilities.

Where as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin are not far behind. Facebook is known as for its info-graphic and getting attention of users and driving them for choose, select, shop around. And the cost involved in the marketing effort are less for entrepreneurs. B2C marketing works fine for all on facebook. Linkedin is covering all type B2B business opportunities and it makes it in very professional way. To get connected with all professionals in one platform and giving scope of new ventures, or service engagement.

And, who does not like to tweet? If it is a great thought, moments, complaints, grievances, whatever, it reach all, triggers a good presence of your brand. You get connected with all businesses, politicians, governing bodies, even to our beloved PM (Mr.Narendra Modi). .

Are you ready for the shift?

Hope, as a business owner, now you understand, how “Digital Media” is making changes to the existing marketing strategies and going virtual.

Mr. S K. Swamy, Chairman and Managing Director of RK Swamy BBDO, pointed out how firms like IKEA and Nike have used digital marketing strategies and derived huge benefits.

By concluding, in confident I can say, yes, now you are ready for the “Digital Shift”. Who does not like to go with the market trend, compete among top players, accept the challenge.