Nearly every business today is a “digital” business. Even before the pandemic, brands were rapidly expanding their operations online. As we go into a more digital era, brands need to adapt. What’s more, marketing is made more convenient and affordable in the digital space. Yet, marketing is now more competitive. In the U.S., digital marketing and advertising expenditures are expected to increase by more than 100% from 2019 to 2024. By the end of the period, the country will have spent roughly $279 billion, accounting for more than half of the global digital ad spending.

Brands don’t spend huge sums of money on initiatives that don’t guarantee a return on investment. Since digital businesses are more than willing to spend these amounts on online marketing, you can be sure that they’re poised for success.

There are now more people online than ever

Throughout the pandemic, more and more people are turning to the digital space for all their entertainment and retail needs. For brands, this indicates an already captured market. Online there are many potential customers that are within easy reach, all businesses need to do is craft the right strategy to appeal to them.

This is a huge advantage over traditional marketing where businesses had to physically reach out to consumers. Digital businesses can bypass several traditional marketing hurdles such as geographic limitations and high costs for direct marketing. To contextualize, traditional marketing channels like direct mailers and hard copy brochures are expensive to produce. Social media posts, on the other hand, can be done by a single person on a computer – and they can reach millions of people online.

Marketing Trends in Education and Practice: Going Digital

The development of new technology has led to a number of new marketing trends. There’s image and video search engine optimization, live streams, social selling, and influencer marketing, to name a few. This online revolution has necessitated a surge in demand for digital marketers.

It is a surge that is being met by universities across the country through online degrees. Many institutions are now offering online marketing programs that blend established business principles with digital technology. These online graduates are adept at all the newest marketing tools and trends, including content and interactive marketing. These new trends come at a time where marketers are also becoming increasingly more digitally savvy. Plus, these marketers are also trained to analyze consumer behavior online to help businesses create the most effective digital marketing strategies.

The digital space provides more data

Before businesses went digital, marketing efforts were put out without the assurance that they’d be successful. There was a lack of high-quality and actionable data to gauge their performance. Brands wouldn’t know how many people saw a poster on the bus station or how audiences reacted to TV commercials.

Leveraging Data for Accurate Marketing Insights

With data from the digital space, these questions can all be answered through quantitative information. And businesses need this to make marketing and operational decisions. This way, digital businesses can accurately measure which initiatives were effective and which weren’t. Thanks to data, they can also see how people interact with their marketing materials – views, engagement, reach, and all those metrics provide insights. Digital brands can then tailor-fit experiences to customers based on the type of content they enjoy and engage with. This drastically reduces the margin of guesswork in traditional marketing, not to mention boost customer satisfaction.

Digital brands can be confident in their marketing efforts because they can get more reach and brand awareness, and they have data to prove it.