By Koushik Mohammad

The once unlikely duo of Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Technology Officer is now leading the future of brand marketing as the world has gone digital.

Now, Chief Marketing Officers spend a greater percentage of their budget on tech and are lauded for being data-driven. Today’s Chief Technology Officers, meanwhile, are praised for their business-acumen, ability to innovate, and to everyone’s surprise, creativity.

What happened in between, is the revolutions in internet, mobile, media, cloud infrastructure, consumer buying behavior, security that have rearranged the
corporate landscape. In connection to the phenomenon, the increasing penetration of mobile and internet gave a new dimension to the traditional marketing approachnamely, digital marketing.

Generally the basic concept of marketing is to communicate with people. Hence, digital marketing has allowed the marketers to target people very specifically and also understand the customer base like never before. The demographics, movements, interests and lot more statistics about customers are easily available to marketers now. Platforms for digital marketing are also increasing day by day. Digital marketing started simply while using emails, SMS, websites etc. during early 20s. But it has been started to flourish when Facebook use has seen a significant uprising in late 20s. People started to spend more time in social media and video content portal compared to other mode of entertainment.

Previously, marketers used only Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for running any kind of marketing campaigns. Today, we have Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google+ etc, which can be used as an inevitable source of information about targeting customers. According to these data, marketers can target and communicate their customers more precisely. Digital marketers also enables a marketer to reach a particular customer whenever he/she is available, which a conventional marketing method cannot ensure. Moreover, large number of people can be accessed within very shortest possible time with the blessings of digital marketing concept.

How Digital Marketing is different from traditional marketing?

Many small businesses struggle with deciding which method of marketing will be effective for them. The answer is, success of every marketing strategy completely depends on product type, consumer characteristics and proper communication with them. So, comparison between traditional marketing and digital marketing will not bring any positive result until these three components has been determined and analyzed. Moreover, a company also needs to set strategies before onboarding any successful campaign. In USA, considering the most technology user country 50% of their marketing budget still spent on traditional media like television, newspaper and billboard.

The world has transitioned into a very digital environment. Not only are magazines going digital, we perform many of our daily tasks such as banking online and much of our reading done on e-readers. Because of the rise of the digital age, it just seems like good judgment to invest in a digital campaign. Even though traditional marketing still has a place, it is diminishing in our digitally based world. For today’s businesses, it is imperative to have a website and use
the web as a means to interact with their consumer base. There are some successful traditional marketing strategies, particularly if you are reaching a largely local audience, but it is important to take advantage of digital marketing so as to keep with today’s world. Principles of the digital marketing differ from the traditional marketing, as it involves the use of channels and methods that enable companies to analyze marketing campaigns and understand its workability in real time. Core idea of traditional marketing was simply selling and buying efforts, but it has been changed with time.
Different creative concepts and diversified marketing techniques have already been emerged that compel the organizations to do their business in a different way. The marketing ideology is shifting towards digital marketing because of the digital marketing.

Digital marketing is considered more interactive, cheaper, effective and result oriented compared to traditional one. As this is a new concept in Bangladesh, it is yet to grab attention of most of the companies. Digital marketing has many advantages over conventional marketing system. Digital marketing campaign method is easier than traditional marketing. These marketing strategies can be planned and executed faster. It has been easier to deliver value added service to the consumers and respond to them quicker with the blessings of digital marketing. Geographical barriers to reach customers has been beaten for wide accessibility of internet. Social content can indirectly boost links to website content by appearing in universal search results.

Despite of numerous advantages of digital marketing, traditional marketing cannot be fully outperformed in the long run as it has mentionable cons. Due to online cybercrime, digital marketing still has less authenticity and reliability compared to traditional media. People have more trust if they see any promotion on television or newspaper compared to other websites. As reflection, companies are still reluctant to pay more to digital marketing agencies compared to traditional marketing. They have fear to loose market reputation for fraudulent activities done on internet via different posts by hackers. Most of the online shopping websites still offer cash on delivery, as users are afraid to share their credit card information with them. These disadvantages can be evaded if user protection is ensured on internet, which is subject to availability of skilled manpower who will eventually implement this protection mechanism. Based on some digital marketing agencies, skilled workforce required for this industry is one of the major challenges. Though, digital marketing does not require intensive technical knowhow.

Content marketing is going global

Content marketing has long been the buzz word of marketers around the globe, now the Asian market is catching up fast. Apart from Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing is the new game changer of digital marketing era, as 64% Asian companies expressed their interest to invest on this channel.

Which Digital Marketing Channels are you going to invest on during the next 12 months?

Offline marketing channels decrease

While the digital marketing outlook is largely positive in the Asian market, more traditional forms of marketingare decreasing, most likely as a direct result of increased spending in digital. The percentages of companies who use print media, conferences, direct mail, outdoor advertising, TV and radio advertising for marketing purposes have all fallen, some more drastically than others. For example radio has fallen by 12% in the past 12 months and outdoor advertising by 9%.

The right way to reach customers digitally

Dilemma of Chief Marketing Officers

In 2015, BMW advertised on WeChat, a popular messaging app in China with around 550million monthly users. But its ads were shown only to those whose profiles suggested they were potential buyers of expensive cars. Others were shown ads for more affordable stuff, such as smartphones. The campaign bruised a few egos. Some of those not shown the BMW ad complained, referring to themselves as losers.

The carmaker’s experience shows the complexities of advertising today, when it is so easy for dissatisfied customers to make their voices heard. But it was also an example of how marketing chiefs are struggling to find the right way to reach consumers on new digital platforms, where they are spending ever more of their time.

Not long ago social-media marketing was something that brand managers might ask their interns to deal with. Today it has become a pillar of the advertising industry. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have cultivated vast audiences: over 2 billion people worldwide use them, says eMarketer, a research firm. Online advertising of all sorts continues to grow, and within that category, spending on social-media ads has gone from virtually nothing a few years ago to perhaps USD 20 billion in 2015.

Advertisers like social-media platforms because they gather all sorts of data on each user’s age, consumption patterns, interests and so on. This means ads can be aimed at them with an accuracy that is unthinkable with analogue media. For example, Chevrolet, an American car brand, has sent ads to the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of people who had expressed an interest in, or signed up to test-drive, a competitor’s vehicle.

However, even advertisers can be seduced by slick marketing. Google and Facebook have built huge businesses by promising that online ads are more
effective and easily measured than traditional media, such as television, radio and print. This year the amount spent on internet advertising, globally and in America, is forecast to surpass television advertising for the first time. But a controversy at YouTube, an online-video site owned by Google, shows how digital advertising still has problems to sort out before it lives up to the dazzling sales pitch.

A slew of advertisers, including stalwarts such as Coca-Cola, Walmart and General Motors, have announced plans to suspend usage of, or move ad spending away from, YouTube because ads (in some cases their own) were appearing alongside offensive content.

Google’s own brand has suffered: the damage to the firm’s sales could be as much as USD 1 billion in 2017, or around 1% of its gross advertising revenue. Shares of its parent company, Alphabet, have fallen by around 3% owing to the controversy.

It is not the first time that brands have fretted about where their ads appear. In 2013 Nissan drew headlines when it placed an ad alongside a video of a beheading on the website Forbez DVD. There have been other incidents. But never before have so many advertisers raised concerns about what they call brand “safety” all at once and staged such a dramatic boycott.

Digital Marketing in Bangladesh Marketing Landscape

Digital marketing is showing promise in the marketing landscape as presently the companies are spending only 10%-12% on digital marketing of total marketing expenditure. The marketing ecosystem of Bangladesh has been experiencing this major shift since the last five years. Most of the companies mainly depend on outsource agencies for their digital marketing campaigns. The surge in digital marketing ascribes to phenomenon such growth in mobile phone subscribers, smartphone penetration and mobile internet subscription.

In Bangladesh, unlike other tenders digital marketing customers are procured through biding participated by several agencies. They operate creative marketing campaigns for their customers. Digital marketing involves different strategies which need to be designed to engage consumers and drive brand conversion on various digital channels, ranging from email to mobile apps. Moreover, these agencies develop various contents,  online advertising, digital media buying, digital media management, digital analytics, mobile application development etc. These solutions are provided by optimizing the client’s budget across platforms, content and media buying to get the best return. These strategies are also designed based on the client’s requirement.Most of the cases these campaigns are designed for making social awareness. Moreover, emotional story telling has become a new trend in digital marketing arena which ensures massive response from consumers. Social medial marketing can be done using four tools like: Posts, Apps, Videos and Queries. Posts are regularly published to keep the online community updated about latest product information or different communications that the brands want to share. Social media applications can be game or any service a company wants to provide to their consumers. Videos are one of the popular mode of communications via social media, as it generates good results. Another marketing tool used in social media is Queries management. As social media is the best place to interact with consumers one to one, different brands use this tool to take proper market feedback and complaints as well.

Digital marketing agencies also uses different keywords which can trigger the brand promotions to show up on the top of the lists in different search engines (i.e: Google, Bing etc.). These keywords are usually named AdWords. Google are providing such services, where the companies need to pay for appearing in the search list for particular keywords. Google AdWords is Google’s web based publicizing program that lets a company to achieve different marketing goals. By using this service of google, companies can determine where the promotions show up. Google can normally figure out where the advertisements show up by coordinating the keywords to sites on the device screen.

Marketing agencies also uses different statistics to reach specific customer for particular brand. These agencies can get statistics from different data hubs like: socialbakers.com, gs.statcounter.com etc. Users can access to preliminary data free from these websites. Hence, data provider websites charge users for detail information.

Trends that may flow to the Digital Marketing Landscape in Bangladesh

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be utilized to it’s fullest potential. Data will be highly leveraged.
• Content Marketing will gain more and more acceptability
• Apart from Facebook, Instagram and Youtube may get accelerated usage since the internet literacy will grow in people.

In Bangladesh, the prospect of digital marketing is very upright, which indicates the market of digital marketing is yet to flourish. The major platform of the
World Wide Web is social media, which comes in many forms, including blogs, forums, business networks, photo sharing platforms, social gaming, microblogs, chat apps, and last but not least social networks. The power of social networking is such that the number of worldwide users is expected to reach some 3.02 billion monthly active social media users by 2021, around a third Earth’s entire population. An estimated 750 million of these users in 2022 are expected to be from China alone and approximately a third of a billion from India. The region with the highest penetration rate of social networks is North America, where 70 percent of the population has at least one social account. As of 2017, 81 percent of the United States population had a social networking profile (information from gs.statcounter.com). According to the internet Live Stats estimated for July, 2016, the total population of Bangladesh is 162,910,864 whereas number of internet users is 21,439,070 which is 13.2% of entire population.

Koushik Mohammad is a Senior Executive Officer at CRM-SEF department and can be reached at koushik@idlc.com