Imagine this.
You’ve created a product that bakes the best brioche buns. It was built using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology, neuroaesthetics, and some magic beans. The product is so great that you’re absolutely positive that all top chefs, including Gordon Ramsay, would want their hands on the machine. However, you have no way to reach out to your stakeholders. So, how would you get chefs to notice your product?
This is where digital marketing steps in.
Here’s a look at Digital Marketing and some of the top places to study Digital Marketing in 2022.
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Creating a product isn’t enough – you need to know how to showcase to attract the right audience. One needs to understand and care about what the customers want. People go back to the same products that they have been using all along because of the amount of trust that the name generates. This trust is created by effective marketing AND good customer service.
Marketing is generally categorised into two: traditional and digital.
There are thousands of web pages and millions of active users on the Internet today, so there really isn’t a dearth of “clientele”. But first, one needs to understand what lies in the scope of digital marketing and how one can get into the sector. How does one figure which medium to be used for marketing purposes? Could one design a brochure and get done with it or is there something more to marketing on digital media? Is there a particular science to being a digital marketer?
To answer these questions, we must first understand what Digital Marketing really is.
Well, it is exactly what the name suggests – creating marketing content and creatives through various electronic media and the Internet including (but not limited to) websites, search engines, social media, video advertisements, blogs, textual advertisements, and infographics. Digital Marketing’s fundamentals are similar to the traditional marketing job – to sell, you need the skill. Armed with the right set of tools, one can target relevant consumers and offer their services. What sets it apart from traditional marketing is that this involves a lot of creativity, imagination, and the right technical skills. In fact, digital marketing is nothing short of an art.
COVID-19 has hampered the growth of several products and services and conventional marketing practices have been off-limits for a while now. Digital marketing has so far been successful in bridging the gap between consumers and producers. It has been providing the much-needed support that local businesses require. From selling products out of large spaces to selling out of smaller spaces (called cloud spaces), digital marketing has helped businesses in this transition that has helped to maximize their profits as well as their reach.
Digital marketing thrives on understanding each individual user’s online behaviour and their data. Many companies have been actively promoting digital marketing through their services. For example, Google’s free marketing tools including Analytics, Search Console, Trends, Business, Optimize, and Ads, are very helpful for digital marketers to obtain consumer data and to know how to tweak them to suit their requirements. Digital marketers do not use personal information about the users but only depend on their online behaviour and interactions with various products and services.
Digital marketing professionals require a lot of skills. They need to understand the technical know-how to address all kinds of marketing strategies to ensure top-notch advertising. Some of the top digital marketing skills to possess are listed below.
- Ability to generate and read analytics
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Ability to produce creatives (videos, posters, etc)
- Email marketing and newsletters
- Content creation skills (blogs, written content, editing, etc)
- Design and development skills (video, audio, posters, etc)
- Technical skills (development of targeted ads, optimizing web pages, etc)
- Ability to sell a product convincingly
Digital marketing has been divided into different categories based on the type of interactions each of the commands.
They are listed below.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social media marketing
- Pay-Per-Click online advertising (where users get targeted ads based on their search history and the marketer gets paid per click)
- Email marketing
- Native advertising (masquerading as part of a website but link to a secondary website)
- Advertising through videos (YouTube ads!)
- Mobile marketing
- PR marketing (seen for movies, series, etc.)
- Blogging, among others.
Now that we have seen the basics of digital marketing, let’s look at some of the best institutions across the world to study digital marketing.
As with any subject, digital marketing requires very specific skills as well. Many institutions across the world have been providing top-quality education in digital marketing. Some of the top universities/institutions to study digital marketing in 2022 are listed below.
Serial Number
|
Institution/University
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Location
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1.
|
EU-Business School
|
Geneva, Switzerland
|
2.
|
University of California Berkeley (Berkeley Extension)
|
Berkeley, U.S.A
|
3.
|
University of South Wales
|
U.K
|
4.
|
EU-Business School
|
Montreux, Switzerland
|
5.
|
Imperial College London
|
London, U.K
|
6.
|
University of Warwick
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Coventry, U.K
|
7.
|
WU(Vienna University of Economics and Business)
|
Vienna, Austria
|
8.
|
EM Lyon Business School
|
Lyon, France
|
9
|
Esade Business School
|
Barcelona, Spain
|
10.
|
SKEMA Business School
|
Paris, France
|
Metaverse has been the most popular term in recent times and for all the right reasons. It has been successful in grabbing the attention of all online consumers in such a short period of time that the future looks promising for those with the right set of technical skills. Digital marketing in the metaverse has all the intricacies of a complex ecosystem and it has begun to look like the field was specifically made for this purpose.
As the Metaverse takes off, it does look like it has the potential to become an inevitable part of our lives in the near future. With many companies already investing millions of dollars to be a part of the metaverse revolution, it becomes easy for us to picture a future where products can easily be bought and sold in the digital environment.
Several companies such as Nike, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Balenciaga have collaborated with tech and gaming companies to display their products within virtual environments where users can interact with them virtually and buy them for their online avatars. With the advent of newer technologies that allow for better interactions (haptic technology, better VR systems, advanced artificial intelligence, etc), the prospect of users getting to “physically” interact with such products is exciting.
Read more also about the future of digital marketing.