The Digital Marketing Revolution. Is Sri Lanka Ready?

According to Wikipedia Digital Marketing can be defined as follows.

“Digital marketing is marketing that makes use of electronic devices such as computers, tablets, smartphones, cellphones, digital billboards, and game consoles to engage with consumers and other business partners. Internet Marketing is a major component of digital marketing or it is a marketing process which leads to the development of any organization or brand by using a variety of digital channels such as email, social networks etc.” 

In the global context Digital Marketing has created a huge trend and is growing at a much faster pace. The Digital Marketing Revolution is initiated through the increased usage of Digital equipment. It is when the Marketers identified a much easier way to reach their target audience than traditional marketing, with the use of advanced digital technology. With the introduction of Smart Phones Digital Marketing Stepped into a new era, where the Marketing efforts can be expanded to a mobile device that would be more of a personal assistant to the customer.

Sri Lanka as a country moving towards Digital world. Since Sri Lanka’s internet penetration is 15% and it’s further growing it is apparent that in few years time Sri Lankan consumer would response more actively to Digital Marketing than to traditional marketing.

When discussing about going Digital, Social Media plays a huge role. Facebook is the most popular social media network in Sri Lanka currently. There are 1,526,360 Facebook users (SL Digital media Fact Sheet – March 2013), out of which most of the users happens to be teenage and youth crowd. Most of the young people in Sri Lanka considers having a Facebook account as a necessity and this trend is slowly reaching the matured population too.

Therefore Sri Lanka would be an opportunity for Digital Marketing to count on since today teenage, young crowd would replace the target audience of most businesses in a few years time.

The companies established in Sri Lanka are also have identified the trend towards Digital Marketing. Many multinational companies have already stepped into extensive Digital Marketing Campaigns. Not only that most of the companies maintain a creative website to attract and communicate with their target audience taking it’s 24x7x365 availability feature into consideration.

For an example Unilever maintain a popular and active Facebook pages for their individual brands as well as to communicate career opportunities at Unilever's (Careers at Unilever Sri Lanka), While maintaining a website and launching successful Digital marketing Campaigns for their Brands. 

Further Companies including medium and smaller scale businesses maintain at least a Facebook fan page to communicate with their target audience since ‘just one click on share tab and you have reached your target audience , which can be identified as a positive sign towards Digital Marketing.

Even though Sri Lanka is slowly moving towards Digital Marketing, still there is a few companies/marketers who prefer Traditional Marketing to Digital Marketing because of the risk factor. Here is little thought for them,

Today Sri Lanka's Internet penetration is 15% and it might be 75% in a few years time at the rate it’s growing. Therefore if it is a Digital Marketing Campaign failure, isn’t is OK with 15% rather than with a whole 75% of your target audience???