The Future of Marketing – The Cloud Or the Real World

Digital marketing is obviously the new avenue for companies to market their products efficiently to their target market. It’s fast, reliable, cheap and most of all accurate.The biggest concern in the field as of now is that the consumer is gaining control. Online ads are controllable as compared to their predecessors on TVs. They can be fast forwarded, skipped, blocked if are pop ups and if none of these, completely ignored. The time span to captivate the consumer has shrunk and the demands have increased. Even the word ‘FREE’ in an advertisement doesn’t quite do the job because it is obvious to the consumer that there is a catch to it.Even though it might sound as a threat, there is a bright side to it. It seems product placement is the new formula for a successful marketing campaign especially an online one. An example is Sony that has used YouTube as a host most efficiently where movies and viewing pleasure is the main goal and Sony shares the same vision.According to Forrester’s there is a definite increase in the expenditure of interactive and digital marketing in the US and also the ratio out of the total marketing budget. The biggest share goes to search marketing i.e. marketing on different search engines and targeting every consumer according to his/her activity on the internet. This method is quite efficient as it markets according to the query you give to the engine. This is most effective and cheap. Display advertising is an online version of billboards, posters etc, and the second greatest expenditure. The rest, Email, Social and Mobile marketing are equally as important as the first two.Mobile marketing although a young phenomenon, has taken the world by a storm. Especially since the arrival of phone like the iPhone, Smartphones, Blackberry and others, mobile marketing has opened up into a completely new avenue. Advertisements through applications from affiliations has combined all the aspects of online and old fashioned marketing in a small and compact handheld device.Social media is one of the quite obvious ones. The more people there are in a network, online or otherwise, the more potential of marketing therein exists. Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and many others generate their potential revenue from advertising sales.Email Marketing, though may not seem effective, is quite a heavy expenditure for companies. Email cold calling works in quite a few useful ways. If approached in the right manner a sale can be considered definite.The interesting fact, according to Forrester’s, is that the overall advertising budgets will decline. This is quite the paradox as there will be an average of 17% increase in the total interactive marketing expenditure. This leads us to the conclusion that online marketing is really quite cheap and will be the next milestone in the marketing world as companies will be gunning for top and be the most renowned brand in the digital world. But the right combination of these different techniques is the key.