Getting Digital Marketing Right

Digital marketing is the ability to promote brands on the internet, mobile and other interactive channels to let their customers know and indeed people that have not heard of them about their product or service to increase sales.

With more companies seeing the real benefit of online digital marketing it is no wonder that the field is becoming more competitive to get your message across, finding the right format to communicate your promotion is important.

Although online marketing is a transition from the traditional marketing it does require a different level of understanding and this is why a few well known brands have struggled to make the transition from traditional marketing to online digital marketing. A good example of this is Skittles who in order to generate interest and user generated content for Skittles, launched a site that used third party social media user generated content from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia to fill their site with content. It didn't take savvy social media users long to realise that they were generating the content for the Skittles site and the news spread fast. The outcome for Skittles was that they had no control of how quickly this spread and little control over the response to their brand. It is still down to opinion whether you think this was a good idea for Skittles. You could see it as a bold move for their brand and an interesting use of social media that created an increased interest in their brand but you are not in control of your brand's integrating which is produced on your the official Skittles' site which could be harmful to your brand.

Other brands that have utilised social media in a positive way include Dell, with Dell's Twitter sales double in six months ($6.5 million in Twitter driven sales) which for any marketing campaign is a success. They responded and interacted with their customer base which gave them the opportunity to reach out to more people than before.

Using social media and digital marketing requires the right understanding for your company in your industry and having a good understanding of digital marketing overall. As digital marketing and social media is only a recent development for marketing it is a good idea to get advice that will work for you in your budget level and that will improve your brand.