Let’s move to the period where the term ‘digital marketing’ had not yet been conceived. Now, ask a couple of questions – First, what was the mode of promotion? And second, what media platforms were used to convey the brand story?

The answer would lie in different modes of advertisement such as print, radio and TV. See below one of John Wanamaker’s famous quotes which rings true in advertising. He was a merchant from the late 1800s,until the advent of digital marketing.

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” 

The above statement held because advertising was alien to your typical target audience. Precisely, the target audience was vague, and there was limited consumer awareness. The introduction of digital marketing changed this. Now, business administration has brought in a better awareness of their consumers’ cultural and socio-economic backgrounds (What does business administration mean here?

The clarity in understanding the audience immensely helped businesses of all shapes and sizes, thanks to digital marketing. With time, several digital marketing companies sprang to the surface. The ones who understood how to leverage digital marketing to perfect business administration survived while others sank.

The trick lies in understanding the role of digital marketing in different business ecosystems.

Role of digital marketing in startups and small scale business house

Startups and MSEs do not have the luxury of surplus funds. They work under a shoestring budget. Hence, they cannot set aside funds for advertising especially, because traction generated by traditional methods is hard to translate into numbers (both figuratively and otherwise). Thus, the ROI calculation goes for a toss.

Digital Marketing comes into rescue for such business houses. Various analytics tools of digital marketing help to streamline the funds most effectively. The targeted social media campaigns hit the right audience, and interactions help to attach numbers to leads generated.

The process of providing an online presence with digital marketing is game-changing. Promoting a small business house to a niche based sectoral audience is possible through local SEO. However, the usual SEO approach will get the job done, but it will take twice the resources and time.

Role of Digital Marketing in medium and large business houses

Medium and large scale businesses have different sets of visibility goals. For them staying at the top of the visibility game becomes a prerogative. The challenges for the think tank are completely different here. It is about consistently putting out an ‘A’ game in terms of branding.

With the availability of surplus funds, digital marketing approaches like paid advertising becomes a reality. The conceptualization of each campaign with number predictions based on past trends.

Managing a paid advertising approach like PPC with Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, being the front runners, at times becomes difficult. It is where digital marketing companies save the day as a natural extension of the organization.

Some of the Google AdWord stats showcase the importance of proper management of paid advertising.

A well crafted PPC model has more than 50% conversion rate per click. Further, nearly 76% of the search engine load is handled by google. It is said more than 63,000 search queries are made on Google in a second.

Role of Digital Marketing in E-commerce management

It is fascinating how both e-commerce and digital marketing grew parallelly feeding off each other. If not for eCommerce, we would still be alien to major sections of social media marketing. For instance, driving sales through mobile devices would have been magical realism.

Any eCommerce platform requires the perfect balance between visibility, reach, and conversion. Digital marketing tools like SEO, SEM, content marketing and social media campaigns help in attaining the balance.

Let’s get the elephant out of the room- SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It is a process that helps in ranking the pages in the top 10 results. Thus, it helps in increasing visibility. But it is not all black and white.

SEO itself is a process that has a lot of nitty-gritty, and navigating through just the keyword barriers would require assurance of a digital marketing company.

Next in line is SEM or Search Engine Marketing, which is paid promotion through mediums like GoogleAdwords, which has been discussed earlier. But the role of a PPC campaign is more inclined towards creating leads alongside enhancing visibility.

The last element is influencer marketing, an evolved version of social media marketing. Influencer marketing helps in keeping the audience engaged and tracking changes in behavior. Influencer marketing indirectly leads to an increase in sales through mobile devices.

Ending notes

To cut a long story short, digital marketing squares out the triangular field business ecosystem. It provides the power of social consciousness to each player, and at the end of the day, it boils down to how you use that voice.

Author Bio: Alice Martin is a software developer at Carina Softlabs Inc, Where she develops mobile apps including website development, Game development and Software development. Apart from her work she is a blogger and loves to write on Technology and social stuffs.