Entrepreneurship thoughts on modern marketing: How critical is digital? 

One of the greatest progresses of communication in the modern era is the spread of the web or social media around the globe. The express evolution of cybernetic platforms has substantially reformed social behaviour and significantly transformed the characteristics of human activity, behaviour and ways of interaction. Internet surfing day or night has become a common phenomenon for most people around the world. Business activity, as well as business communication, being one of the essences of our day to day life, has also changed its' approach keeping aligned with this global virtual movement. As an entrepreneur accepting, adopting and exploiting this cybernetic transformation is the key to achieving success in today's competitive environment.

Digital marketing is based on online channels with the highest frequency of use. They are dynamic, and they can change from time to time and are always predisposed by market drifts. The Institute of Digital Marketing (DMI) defines digital marketing as "the use of digital technology to create integrated, targeted and measurable communication that helps to acquire and retain customers in building deeper relationships with them". The impact of this type of unconventional marketing has been great, affecting sales and the number of customers, with a lot more result-oriented technique.

Launching a business for any entrepreneurs has become reasonably easier at present time with the wide offering of digital marketing than it ever was when we had to set up a business physically. Apart from the establishment, we all know traditional marketing along with required logistical support needs a handsome amount of budget to implement. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television air time costs, and other traditional marketing expenditures are always high. They also give us less control over our target audiences. However, digital marketing primarily gives us enormous leverage on the cost side. Side by side, it is also very much result oriented if it is placed in order in front of its target group. The use of time management in both ends (target group and seller) of digital marketing is extraordinary because both are sending and receiving the required information at their convenient time. With digital marketing, result monitoring is also simple.

Digital marketing software and platforms inevitably track the number of desired conversions that we get, whether that means email open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases. When we post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (provided we haven't limited your ad geographically). This makes it easy to grow our business's market reach as well. Moreover, online channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter help us to get the required visibility of our product. It introduces us to a new set of audiences who can turn into our customers through targeted advertising of our product online.

Building the brand of our company or product on the internet is one of the most important things that we should focus on carefully. Digital marketing allows us to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can't. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise.

The evolution of the social media platforms especially Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram has evolved the relationship approach between customers and sellers into a more refined and sophisticated approach. Digital marketing lets us communicate with our customers in real-time. More importantly, it lets buyers communicate with us. If we think about social media strategy, it's great when our target audience sees our latest post, but it's even better when they comment on it or share it. It means more buzz surrounding our product or service, as well as increased visibility every time someone joins the conversation. The strong impact of digital marketing ensures us to get results quickly for our advertising campaign, and gain new customers in a short time with rapid speed. Digital marketing lets our customers take action immediately after viewing our ad or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result we can hope for is a phone call shortly after someone views our advertisements.

For so many reasons, in recent days digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of most businesses' overall marketing strategy. Never before has there been a technique to stay in such a consistent connection with our customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalisation that digital data can provide. The more we embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more we'll be able to realise our company's growth potential. The reason why so many new entrepreneurial ventures have been formed over the past few years is the low cost of acquisition compared to the high profits due to digital marketing. It has become an extremely indispensable part of the marketing process for modern entrepreneurs.

The writer is a senior banker.