The Impact of Digital Marketing on Customer Buying Behaviour

The report demonstrates the importance of the digital marketing landscape and discusses of how digital technologies affects the buying behavior of customers. Over the past decades, the marketing strategy in the digital industry has undergone several changes. It has enhanced the buying behavior of the customers that proved to be beneficial for most of the organizations. Digital marketing solves the problem of customers at a rapid speed.  As digital marketing is fulfilled with all the modern technologies so that the customers choose to prefer this type of marketing strategy. It provides with the difference in traditional and digital marketing that affects the buying behavior of the customers. It also presents customer touch point and Omni channel customer journey that reflects upon the strategies of the organizations. Also, it provides with the role of data and analytics in the digital marketing.

Digital marketing creates a huge difference within the market. Through digital marketing people are getting engaged in purchasing products through online. In today’s context digital marketing helps customers to have their own choice, offers online shopping and banking, also the consumers are not afraid of experimenting. This clearly shows the fact that digital marketing affects the buying behaviour of customer. Digital marketing and traditional marketing focuses on the media and internet like television, print, and radio respectively (Chaffey and Smith, 2017). Both the processes of marketing possess similar targets but the method towards achieving those targets are different. This difference in the methods towards achieving the goals makes difference between the techniques of marketing. Digital marketing is entirely a different way of viewing the world and involving the audience. Whereas, traditional marketing is defined to be any kind of campaign, advertising, and promotion that is utilized by the organization for achieving the targets. It can be seen that by 2021 in U.S. spend of the digital marketing will increase by $332 billion. As per the reports of the marketing charts of 2018 there has been 50% increase in the budget of digital marketing in comparison to 2016. The campaigns of Google display has reached to 80% of international internet users (Insights, 2017). It is observed that traditional marketing provides strong branding effect and wide reach without the internet connection. Whereas, in digital marketing reaches to the customers those who possess internet connection. In traditional marketing, the significant information related to the business could not reach the marketplace (Lamberton and Stephen, 2016). On the other hand, as digital marketing is facilitated with analytical data hence, the information’s could reach to the target market. The ad placement in traditional marketing is unchangeable and static (Xu et al., 2016). As digital marketing provides with new analytics that increases the marketing spend hence, the ad locations could be revised. In traditional marketing messaging is forwarded towards the customers (Grishikashvili et al., 2014). In the process of digital marketing with the help of interacting and targeting the audience, the engagement is achieved. Traditional marketing needs a large amount of investment to acquire adequate expressions (Chaffey, 2016). In digital marketing, in order to redirect or redesign the campaigns, it provides with the immediate analytics. Hence it is observed based on customer buying behaviour it is best to adopt the process of digital marketing as compared to traditional marketing. This is due to the fact that if the organizations choose the process of digital marketing then it will attract more number of customers within the market (Kannan, 2017). The following figure shows the difference between traditional and digital marketing. It presents different sources used by the customers while purchasing products through digital and traditional marketing.

Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing

                                                                                       (Source: Tiago and Veríssimo, 2014)

It is observed that most of the organizations makes good use of the digital marketing strategy (Leeflang et al., 2014). For example West Coast Infotech in UK comprise of experts in order to solve the problems related to digital factors such as development of mobile app, web, software, paid and AdWords marketing and social media (Tap et al., 2014). On the other hand digital marketing strategy is also adopted by the company Surge Stream in UK that focuses towards website conversion and traffic growth. For this companies digital marketing is proved to be beneficial as 82% of the audience prefers online research and 79% of people prefers online shopping. It is a most cost-effective way to market the business. With the help of social media a small business could attract 1,000 people to its services and products (Ganis and Kohirkar, 2016). It is believed that the benefits of digital marketing includes real time results, brand development, non-intrusive, higher exposure, non-interruptive, quicker publicity and many more.

Omni channel marketing generates a seamless consumer experience all over the channels (McKinsey & Company. 2018). The strategy of Omni channel marketing makes the use of digital interactions like e-commerce purchases and social media and with the interpersonal interactions, it integrates it (Kumar et al., 2017). As Omni channel makes the use of digital marketing hence it affects the buying behaviour of the customers. Every touchpoint that is possessed by the customers with the organization is unified. The Omni channel approach comprises two significant factors they are, making it easier for the customers and across all the customer interactions having a unified message (Pappas, 2016). Omni channel marketing notices the experience of the customers based on the similar channel more than once on the journey. A customer journey that is linked with the non-linear and fluid is supported by the Omni channel marketing (Taiminen, 2016). It is observed that the customers want an easy process within the organization thus, 64% of the consumers seek to pay more amount in order to get easy experience. As long as customer journey is concerned in order to get the better information required to purchase a product the customers should not work hard (Ramanathan et al., 2017).

Benefits of Digital Marketing for Businesses

In the digital industry, most of the people present the data in front of the audience and the customers (Stone and Woodcock, 2014). Whereas, in the last five years the tools of the data analytics have made a faster growth that understands the different types of data in the marketing and utilization of those data (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). In the process of digital marketing once the data is gathered it is easy to gather the insights of a wide range of customers. In digital marketing managing, the systems of data analytics are the major factor (Royle and Laing, 2014). It measures business metrics such as sales, leads, and traffic to influence the customers. With the help of the analytics, the potential customers are targeted and it helps in focusing upon taking a risk and high-end target market (Wedel and Kannan, 2016).

Conclusion

In today’s business world the organizations are adopting various strategies in order to understand the buying behaviour of the customer. For this, the best way to attract customers by providing them with all the facilities the process of digital marketing is implemented by the organization. It is observed that digital marketing has shown faster growth in the modern era that is beneficial for the organization to achieve their desired targets. As the customers are more connected with social media hence digital marketing provides the customers with all the facilities that could be accessed through digital marketing. The report provided with the comparison between traditional marketing and digital marketing where it is observed that digital marketing is easier as compared to traditional marketing. It discussed the customer touch point and the Omni channel customer journey and the role of data analytics where the customers want easy access to purchasing any product.

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