This is the era of fourth industrial revolution. Traditional marketing platforms are rapidly receding in their stature now that we have big data-based artificial intelligence entering the realm of decision-making. Digital advertisement quotes had already begun to surpass the TV advertisement quotes since 2016, and this year, in 2020, they are expected to account for over 50 percent of the entire advertisement market.

Digital marketing refers to the extensive marketing activity of pitching products and services to consumers via digital devices.

The growth of digital marketing is enabled by wireless networks and the widespread use of smart devices leveraging it, as well as the development of video content behemoths the likes of YouTube and Netflix. Paired with the emergence of electronic payment systems and e-commerce platforms, digital marketing has pronounced itself as a necessity, not an option, for all marketing managers.


Accurate assessment


At their cores, digital and traditional marketing share similar characteristics.

They are more or less identical in that they must both set reasonable goals; build adequate strategies befitting respective situations; and decide which advertisement medium to deploy at what budget.

However, the reason why digital marketing is evaluated as superior to its traditional counterpart is because it gives tailored advertisements to individual consumers in a real-time manner. This allows for instantaneous feedback, which becomes an invaluable parameter for assessing whether the marketing program accurately reached the intended target audience.

In other words, in digital marketing, the effectiveness of the launched marketing program becomes real data which can be used to enhance accuracy and diversity of future marketing programs.

The key of digital marketing, therefore, is the availability of the acquired big data to be processed and packaged in a meaningful way for further decision making.


What is required of digital marketer


In order to translate consumer-generated data into marketing assets, there are a few factors that demand attention.

Firstly, the most important but often overlooked factor is a clear understanding of the target industry. Without the habitual effort to continuously explore and study consumers and market, generated big data would be a massive amount of useless information.

Secondly, despite it sounding obvious, it is crucial that we sufficiently understand digital media. Digital media has diversified beyond comparison to traditional ones, and therefore it is important to know their distinctive strengths and shortfalls to properly reach target consumers for a specific purpose

For example, a digital marketer must be able to see which mobile application is best to speak to an audience who would purchase a newly launched protein supplement. Digital marketers need to know what social dialogues and values will move these consumers.

Lastly, data literacy -- an ability to read, technically handle and derive a conclusion from the given data -- is necessary. Digital marketers are expected to turn data to tables, and present them in a visualized format. They should be able to design a customized marketing program and propose it.

Truth is not very different.

We have always forayed diverse paths to find the secret to a marketing program’s success. As a result, a focus was given to prioritizing the market and the consumers as the foremost value. Digital marketing must also pursue the same objective. We only require foresight in the journey, to turn the immense data and the new digital tools to facilitate better decision making.

By Park Heung-soo
Honorary professor at Yonsei University