Digital marketing is the new normal rather than any other types or forms of marketing you want to talk about in the world we live in today.

Digital marketing is one of the state of the art inventions and need of many organisations for purposes of reducing cost, risk and time wastage. Digital marketing strives to bridge the geographical distance between two or more organisations. Other benefits of digital marketing include:

(i) For organizations, delivery costs are reduced with resultant cost benefit in terms of time, travelling and spread of resources over large groups

(ii). Delivery of full courses, lessons, enlightenment, sensitisation, awareness creation and training can all be provided to the world at large through digital marketing.

As computer and electronic technology continue to grow, many new innovations continue to flood the industry, creating machine and avenues through which human activities can be enhanced. The development of digital marketing over media (not social media) is an important aspect of this growth in technology. Such information was then able to be packaged and transmitted remotely from source to intended users of these great innovations. But this was rarely a real time scenario. The best we can get out of this was random people's engagements and feedbacks by the number of posts of products or services online by various organisations, which was usually of high cost and difficult for individual start-ups to utilise.

The advent of the internet offered better opportunity for inventors, start-ups, various business owners, organizations, et al, to think of better ways of making the communication of their firm and the products or services to be offered to their target audiences in real time and with less cost. Many platforms have been developed to this effect, such as Facebook, Tumblr, TikTok, Snapchat, Google Ads, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, WhatsApp, just to name a few of these improvements that have given birth to what is now known as social media, where digital marketing can be perfectly and judiciously executed.

Through digital marketing, two or more locations situated at a distance are connected so that the target audience can hear and see what products or services are put out. It allows the distant sites to interact with each other in the comment section by an honest user of the product or service; either by his or her comment or replying to someone inquiring if he/she can patronises them. So if the product/service rendered is good for him/her, then watch such person positively criticising the products by persuading and cajoling them to patronise the organization; but if the supposed customer never got his/her full utility on the product, then watch his/her negative comment and that can easily or possibly wade off potential customers of the said product and that is one of the major barriers of digital marketing.

The interactions occur in real time and this means that the learners/potential customers and the resource persons are present at the same time in different locations and are able to communicate with each other, and the resource persons do the most by critically analysing the statistics based on the engagements and the possible feedbacks on any post or sponsored post made.

In some situations, questions can be faxed/e-mailed or even a direct message can be sent early for response by the resource persons. Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton described the whole new technology as “an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated.” Today, it often considers the effect that people experience when they interact with a computer-mediated or computer-generated environment.

The conceptualisation of presence borrows from multiple fields, including communication, computer science, psychology, science, engineering, philosophy, and the arts. The concept of presence accounts for a variety of computer applications and web-based entertainment today that are developed on the fundamentals of the phenomenon, in order to give people the sense of, as Sheridan called it, “being there.”

Since digital marketing is actually a useful tool in organizations because it is solely used to bridge the geographical distance between two or more products, and the conceptual creativity with the way the products or services to be rendered is published on the internet for the multitudes. From my research, I have discovered that it is only big companies that can actually afford it, because you will be dealing transactional in foreign currencies and, also because, most of these platforms for advertisement on the internet are mostly American-based or other foreign-based companies.

So, my write-up is to expose the anomaly in digital marketing as currently obtained and stress the need to curb that trend, to enable smaller firms to also utilise minimal available digital marketing products to reach some percentage of the global audience.

Today so many start-ups, or let’s say individual with a bit of access to monies not earned by strained sweats, are misusing the digital marketing platforms, most especially the most popular ones around us with billions of users, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. When you scroll, you realise certain individuals or firms not really ready to showcase new products posting a picture and sponsor it by paying a couple dollars to achieve such. Meanwhile, real entrepreneurs hoping to break into the market of any industry they want to show the world lack the accessibility to such marketing tools. I find it absurd when I stumble on most of those irrelevant sponsored posts, because resources have just been wasted.

Curbing the misuse of digital marketing tools by such individuals is pretty simple: all they need to do is to help new start-ups by sourcing for them through the said medium they use in advertising their unreal products or services by publicly announcing to interested people that needs their platforms on how to showcase their products or services, and it comes with a sponsored post. These people can automatically turn themselves to marketing agencies to even make extra income, because they can charge those small firms a little amount of money to complement the little effort they put in showcasing them.

•Mike-Nifty, a social commentator, can be reached on: nifty.mics@yahoo.com

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