What is Digital Marketing?

I really like marketing. My mother worked in market research for years, and even though I only had a glimpse of her work, I thought that the subject and her job looked interesting and a lot of fun. From my perspective, marketing represents a relevant way to find out and explore what are the needs and wants of groups of people, and what are the things that have value for them.

In this blog I will be specifically talking about the recent and extremely popular branch of marketing that we call digital marketing. This area is becoming so broad and it's developing so fast (it might be expanding as you read this post), that it is hard to define.

Let's start from the beginning. In the past, we use to have analog technology, which was rougher and allowed a limited flow of electronic information. Nowadays we use digital, which means in essence, technology that generates, transfer and store information in terms of 0 and 1 (searchcio-midmarket.com, 2001). One of the most impacting effects that this change had was on the Internet, but we can also find this technology in most electronic devices – computers, cell phones, TV and phone signal, etc. – presently. Moreover, we now call digital media all kinds of media content that reach the audience through these devices: Online newspapers, advertising emails, smartphone applications, DVDs, and many, many others.

This situation has been developing further in the last few years. In the beginning, the internet was used by the audience in a passive, exclusively receptive way. Only some time ago, what we know as the Web 2.0 was born when authors, advertisers, producers, distributers and all kinds of publishers of digital content realised that a strong new trend was happening widely around the internet users community...interaction!

Just as we’ve discussed in our 9:00am Digital Marketing class, in the present world we define big part of ourselves and our actions by the way we relate to each other; those relationships can only be created and kept with interaction, dialogue. This is what makes digital marketing so meaningful and relevant to understand current human relationships; within it there is the potential to reach the audience in a completely different way and reshape the way relationships are made. The new digital marketing approaches the audience as a participant, not a receptor, so the content is being co-created by the public itself.

With this interesting and intriguing new concept, I hope to be posting soon more interesting material on the subject. Through exploring, sharing thoughts, knowledge and findings, I hope to make a journey out of this blog.