Every time I meet someone and I have to answer the obligatory question “What do you do?” I inevitably try to simplify and come to the classic, “digital Marketing stuff.” what follows, most of the times, is that as a rule my new friend assumes that I am a Community Manager; in fact, half of my friends believe that I am a CM, the other half believe that I am a designer. Quite flattering and curious, but a little different from reality.
This above makes a personal question very clear to me: Do we really know what Digital Marketing is? The answer is as broad as it is uncertain, I believe is both YES and NO.
And it is that just as conventional Marketing is everywhere in our Off line daily life, Digital Marketing is part of us from the moment we turn on the cell phone and get on the internet. When we carefully choose and edit our profile photo we are doing Digital Marketing. Also from our computer when we send our CV to apply for a job.
Not only that, when we spend hours and entire nights thinking about how to have contact with someone whose Facebook profile has attracted to us, trying not to be invasive, or looking desperate or clumsy, but not disinterested or insensitive; at the moment that all this is between our mind and the keys of our computer, we are doing Digital Strategy.
Hundreds of thousands of platforms around the world tell us specifically and very academically what this very fashionable concept is about, and certainly most of them theoretically coincide in a very specific definition of what this concept should be, and a basic formula that … There is no need to talk about it, it is enough to google: What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is as diverse and flexible as digital users exist in the world, but the foundation is basic and perhaps the only thing we need to know: Digital marketing involves having a goal, achieving it, and all the things we do to make that happen. And the moment we understand that, Digital Marketing becomes very interesting.
Retouching our profile photograph, uploading an instagram status, or choosing the right words for the info on our WhatsApp is digital mkt. Think about how you want other people to perceive you. Do you want to look fun or do you prefer to be taken seriously? How do we reach people we don’t know, but we know they are there? What do we think every time someone knocks on the door of our house to sell us something? What kind of videos do we like to see on YouTube? All this and more are simple questions, but they are also answers that make something very clear: there is nothing actually written in digital marketing.
