Digital Marketing – Collaring the Beast

Marketing has always been about understanding the consumer’s needs & psychology and tapping into them to sell products. Its most effective and crucial component is research – research about what attracts the end user, where and how she spends most of her time, when and how long she gets onto some interactive medium. This information the goldmine that offers insights into the consumer’s mind.

From what started out as a word of mouth activity, grew into physical feedback and then static advertisements, marketing has developed into a hyper-intelligent digitally powered monster, capturing imaginations, threatening to put veterans into the obsolescence bin, and claiming to unveil magic gateways to success for “truly futuristic” organizations. It’s called “Digital Marketing”.

The graph above, courtesy the excellent Mary Meeker, shows the growth in internet activity in the USA. Take 7 hours for sleeping, 4 hours for travel plus food plus essential daily activities and 8 hours for work. Literally every remaining minute is being spent on the Internet, except for some other activity on weekends. Of course, India and China are not nearly at this level of adoption yet. But that’s the scary thought – what when they get there, with their 2.7 BILLION population? Clearly, it is a digital world, and the dinosaurs are in danger!

But, what activities really constitute digital marketing? Perceptions vary. In a survey conducted by Smart Insights, 1500 respondents gave the following interpretations of “digital marketing” in terms of how they use it.

Most of the activities scoring over 5% are cleanly defined lines of activity, with specific expertise needed for each of them. Experts now understand that the core marketing strategy of a progressive organization has to contain MULTIPLE elements from the ones listed above. 

We at GLC have a firm grasp of these emerging realities and know that a prospective entrant today needs to cover all these areas to become a relevant, state-of-the-art marketing professional. The broad skills required are:

1.     Ability to write crisply

2.     Ability to understand data and trends

3.     Social media savyiness

4.     Comfort with Internet and mobile platforms

5.     Broad cultural understanding of the world

The BBM at GLC tackles each of these aspects. The liberal arts foundation, along with the global exposure of a University of London degree, provides multi-cultural sensitivity; the core business fundamentals enhance analytical skills required to understand data and derive valuable inputs from them. The cherry on top is the digital marketing specialization that provides an in-depth understanding of implementation of marketing and data analytics over digital platforms such as Facebook and Google.

In coming posts, we will talk briefly about each of these major items, and touch upon the details of requisite skills as they will be built in the GLC BBM program.