The Changing Dynamics Of Digital Media
Digital media has been growing and making new trajectories for itself. The pandemic and the lockdown did impact our lives but eventually turned out to be a golden period for the proliferation and growth of new media. The digital media wing has turned out to be one of the wisest and best use of the digital space. Users all across the globe now prefer gaining knowledge about the happenings via the online medium rather than scanning through the hard copies. The digital media has indeed changed the dynamics of the media industry and has itself experienced a lot of transitions too.
The world of marketing has been truly revolutionized by the introduction of technological advancements. Marketers are now increasingly focusing on adopting winning strategies that focus on providing value to customers based on deep market insights. Customers are also proactively evaluating different brands for their products and services that they buy. Businesses looking to make profits need to shift dynamics and undertake consumer-oriented strategies. To navigate in this new environment, ideas and data insights need to be leveraged for creating unique personal experiences that make customer journey even more engaging.
The Changing Dynamics
Digital medium has drastically changed how we interact with the world around us, having shrunk the globe fundamentally. With a wide range of products & services on offer, digital has even changed how we interact with them. Thus, it is fair to say that the future is now as we are not entering a digital era; rather we have headlong plunged into it.
As smoke around the media landscape clears after nearly a decade and as digital disruption continues to pick steam with advancing consumer expectations, it’s clear that consumers do not see any difference between traditional and digital media. What the consumers want is more flexibility, convenience and freedom to choose what, when and how they consume their preferred content. New innovative digital offerings have created a huge and highly diversified content universe, wherein digital media has accelerated its delivery across myriad platforms.
These consumer-driven dynamics bring great transformational implications for stakeholders within the digital media ecosystem as they seek to earn profits from these shifts. The digital age has even altered how businesses market their products and services. The technological advancements of the last decade have led to simultaneous change in marketing to keep pace with evolving times. Along with increasing use of innovative technology, effective communication for marketing has become paramount for business enterprises. Earlier, consumers were reached via television, radio, print, billboards and direct mail. Now, emphasis is on connecting with customers through the digital world.
By demonstrating what type of product a company wants to market, one would get a better understanding of which marketing technique would suit the business and product. For instance, in older days for a business to be able to market their product or service, they had to tackle multiple challenges so as to buy ad spots in between TV shows with wider popularity or pick billboards in popular locations. But with changing dynamics, there has been a monumental shift towards buying ad spots on different search engines such as Google, Bing, Firefox and so on.
Going digital has also had a tremendous effect on how businesses function. Several properties of digital media, like better & accurate metrics coupled with interactivity, have created remarkable marketing possibilities. Not just marketing, digitization has also changed how our lifestyle as we consume entertainment in new forms – be it OTT streaming services or digital magazines and newspapers.
Rise of Digital Media: Major Developments
The new dimensions to media brought in by digitisation are:
- Insights-Driven Marketing
Consumer research is the cornerstone of effective marketing. It’s very important that the needs & preferences of consumers are understood in-depth and based on their demands, a product should be marketed to them. Traditional marketing had surveys and feedback forms to understand consumer behaviours and patterns. But in today’s digital age, data learning and data analysis help marketers gain insights about consumer behavioural patterns and optimize the result, which in turn helps in designing effective and well-targeted marketing campaigns. Employing programming languages to research consumer activities across social media networks and technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize search results have proven to be revolutionary developmentsin the marketing domain.
- Personalization
Personalization of data is one of the most effective developments for the digital era. This is achieved either by using big data or user-generated content. While big data is used for generating an innovative and unique experience for consumers, user-generated content enables them to pick and choose what content they would like to see. This kind of content marketing gives marketers an infinite supply of creative input so that they can bridge the gap between brand and consumer. Research has shown that about84% millennials say that user-generated content oncompany websites and that shared across social media platforms has some influence on their purchases.
- Data Rules the Roost
Analytics has been an incredible game-changer for marketing as well as other industries. It is going to be extremely useful even in the future. For instance, videos on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube can tell a marketing team the exact number of people who have watched a specific video. In addition, if those viewers click on the ‘call to action’ button which redirects the viewer to the website, it can be easily measured how effectively the video is capturing attention of the user. Analytics are also useful in gathering additional information such as on which social media channel did people stream the video, demography and other preferences of these people. In simple words, analytics is giving much more accurate user data and metrics to marketers, enabling the tweaking and optimizing of promotional plans and campaigns.
- Interactivity
Digital growth has had a huge impact on interactivity. Unlike traditional media such as television, film, and music, digital media is highly interactive. It gives people the choice to pick what they would like to consume, how they would like to consume it and with whom they would like to share it. The one-on-one communication model that developed over the years has enabled businesses to reach their intended audience by offering the content that they would like to engage in. This level of interaction with users wasn’t possible prior to the advent of digital media, and it has remarkably changed the scope and nature of how brands approach their targets.
- Video & Streaming Entertainment
Among a wide range of content, video content is seeing more progressive growth as clients’ inclination is shifting to infotainment. Heightened speed of transfer and diminishing prices of internet services have also led to more consumers spending on top-of-the-line content. Also, with the advent of streaming platforms, over-the-top or OTT platforms are touted to be the next big thing. With their diverse content and growing audience, OTT, as a subset of digital media, is gaining momentum quicklywith the rise of handset users hooked onto data. Users today like to watch content on the go, and they are drawn in by the abundant content, tailored to their liking.
Summing Up
The digital era has and shall continue to influence social trends, which directly affects the consumer behaviour and choices. Change in consumption patterns can be tricky to understand or even recognise, and so brands today need to adapt their customer service accordingly. The ever-evolving digital media has opened up new possibilities of growth for brands.
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