Probably when you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is to grab your smartphone and check your social media or your favourite pages. It is also very probable that an advertisement has caught your attention and you decided to click on it and navigate the company’s website, finding yourself some minutes later looking at something completely different from what you initially wanted to check out. If you wonder how this happened, the answer is very simple, digital marketing.

Our lives are flooded with advertising on websites and social media. This is the new means of communication and whoever ignores the power of Web 2.0 tools is doomed to fail or at least not have the same profits. In our times, and increasingly so in the post- Covid19 era, social media have become even more powerful. Facebook has more than 1 billion users, Instagram has more than 300 million users, LinkedIn has more than 250 million users to give just some examples. Having a great, well-designed website that offers an excellent UX has become a key factor in the success of a company.

Web 2.0 provides us with more interactive tools, it offers cheaper tools, it includes software that can operate on multiple platforms, like smartphones, tablets, computers, and of course the cloud. It also has as its tool the Internet of Things (IoT), which is going to be the future of communication and digital commerce. All these tools have significantly transformed the way we communicate, moving from a vertical model of communication to a horizontal one. Now communication is multimodal and towards all directions and the way a company designs its website must be re-considered.

Marketing is the activity and the sum of the procedures to communicate, deliver, and exchange offers and information that are of value to the customers, the consumers, and society in general. Up-to-now, the classic marketing theory was based on the marketing mix, which is represented by the 4Ps, namely Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. Nowadays, this model is not enough anymore as it ignores, on the one hand, the new tools offered and on the other hand the invention and dominance of social media. Some researchers suggest that because of this change, a fifth P should be added, namely Participation. Users can now change the way a product or a service is promoted and communicated to the customers/ consumers. Share on X

Traditional digital marketing was based on push messaging, a kind of vertical communication, where one source sends the message to multiple receivers. This way massive numbers could be reached, who nevertheless have few opportunities to interact with the company or organisation. Usually, these opportunities are served by the boundary spanners who are responsible for answering these messages.

E-commerce has changed this environment. Suddenly, marketers have access to micro-markets which used to be very difficult to reach in the past with lower costs and greater speed. Tradigital marketing has improved interaction and measurements and consumers were allowed to react to digital ads just by clicking on the website of the organisation. Paid and Organic Search have also become massive and now the vast majority of companies invest in this. This interaction and the horizontal communication channels are a field that companies should invest on and they should design their websites and manage their digital presence carefully if they are to survive in this new era.

Peter Drucker, the Marketing guru, once said that the ail of a company is to create a customer. In these new times, with the power of the Internet, the tools available, and the knowledge concerning digital marketing, this definition could be expanded and we could claim that the goal of a company should be to create customers that create other customers (Tuten & Solomon, 2015). This is the fifth P, Participation, that allows an organisation to exist in a digital world, based on carefully selected measurements and data.