If you believe Gartner’s latest research, traditional methods of mass marketing are on their way out and digital marketing, including social and mobile strategies will dominate. According to their report “Digital Marketing: The Critical Trek for Multichannel Campaign Management,” by 2015, 80% of discretionary buying from consumers will be driven through effective digital marketing.
“Digital marketing represents a shift in strategy and approach, not just in channels,” said said Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner in a news release. “Although traditional campaign management thinking involves executing campaigns directly to the customer, successful digital marketing must act more as a mutually beneficial journey aimed at satisfying customers’ wants and needs. This is a customer-focused strategy approach that will profoundly shift traditional campaign management strategy.”
Gartner defines digital marketing as addressable branding/advertising, contextual marketing, social marketing and transactional marketing, using channels that include the Web, e-mail, video, mobile and social applications, point-of-sale terminals, interactive television, digital signage, and kiosks.
In other words, consumers are shifting their attention away from mass market approaches like direct mail and interfacing with companies and their marketing messages in a digital context through channels like rich media and social networking. Interactivity and a two-way engagement become paramount for effective marketing in this digital context.
Gartner makes the point that this shift in marketing strategy should not just take legacy mass market approaches of interruption marketing and simply ‘digitize’ them. Rather, marketers need to embrace an evolving approach that focuses on “…two-way conversations and addressing mutually beneficial approaches to customers’ wants and needs, which a digital marketing approach can provide.”
Image courtesy of flickr user joeshoe
This will bring the little "guys" and those in under-developed countries who produce salable goods potentially to an equal footing with big players. It may be the economic revolution as Facebook served for the political one in the ongoing "Arab Spring".