Definition of digital trading.

 DEFINITION DIGITAL TRADING

A necessary step before we begin our journey in the process of Digital Marketing, is the demarcation of this concept? What exactly is it and how is it defined?

According to Kannan & Li (2017) Digital Marketing is defined as “an adaptive process based on technological means and through which companies collaborate with their customers and partners with the aim of jointly creating, communicating, delivering and maintaining value for all stakeholders of a business.

Digital Marketing promotes products and services by utilizing digital channels for contact with consumers, in a more relevant, personal and cost-effective way. It includes many techniques and practices that are also found in Internet Marketing.

It is not a branch of internet marketing, on the contrary, it extends beyond that. The reason is that it can include as digital advertising and promotion channels, mobile phones (SMS),Digital giant screens, mobile applications (android & iOS), etc., which do not require a direct internet connection. Social media and search engines are also important channels.

In 2017 it covers most areas of conventional marketing such as Direct Marketing, providing the same methodology for communicating with the consumer public, but in a digital way. This methodology is most effective when an advertiser combines multiple promotional channels in the campaigns they create.

Digital Marketing is in an ever-changing environment. A prerequisite for a digital marketer is to be informed about the constantly changing trends and to respond to the constant developments presented by the internet. They need to focus on both the ever-changing digital environment and the emergence of new and smarter search engine algorithms.

Of course there are some advantages that highlight the superiority of this new form of marketing over the traditional one. One of them is the lower financial cost required to create and promote a marketing campaign in the digital environment, compared to promoting and advertising in traditional media such as television and radio.

The advantages also include the possibility of targeting a part of the consumer public. In the digital environment, thanks to the tools, methods and practices offered, the ability to target the desired consumer audience can be done on a larger scale and with greater accuracy.

Finally, another important advantage offered by the tools of Digital Marketing, is the ability to collect and analyze the data of a campaign for the evaluation of this campaign, in order to extract the appropriate insights, which contribute to taking appropriate future actions regarding the this campaign.

This allows the marketer to realize the success of this campaign and to devote more resources and time to its further promotion, or to realize its failure in time and to stop it permanently, saving possible expenses, and utilizing the time given to it for promoting another more effective campaign.

THE EVOLUTION OF DIGITAL MARKETING

The term Digital Marketing was first used in the 1990s when the Web 1.0 system appeared which enabled Internet users to search and locate the information they needed within minutes. The first search engine to contribute significantly to information retrieval was Archie

Archie Search Engine

In 1993, HotWired was the company that decided to invest in the first digital banner, a development that essentially marked the beginning of the transition to digital advertising and digital marketing in general.

Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, originally called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". This guide was essentially a directory of other websites organized by a specific hierarchy, rather than a search engine as we know it today. The guide was later renamed Yahoo by the initials "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle", which from its first year of operation managed to collect 1 million hits on its page.

In 1997, new search engines such as Alexa, Looksmart and HotBoot appeared. That same year, MicroView launched its first social networking site, SixDegrees. SixDegrees is essentially the first social media, as through a registration form it enabled the user to register on the platform. In addition to the contacts he could make with existing SixDegrees users, the new user had the ability to invite people outside the platform to the service, such as relatives and friends.

In 1998 Microsoft decided to enter the market by presenting its own, revolutionary for the time, web portal which also operated as a search engine: MSN. Yahoo, realizing the popularity that Microsoft's search engine is starting to gain, decides to announce its own. It is the first time in the history of the Internet that the use of the Internet has shown such a boom, as users have realized the power of search engines in terms of easy and fast finding of information.

It was this event that marked the emergence of an early form of Search Engine Optimization that we know today. Many companies are realizing the growing popularity of Yahoo search engine by investing in optimizing their websites to achieve better search engine rankings.

In August of the same year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to launch their own search engine called "BackRub" which was a project they were experimenting with in college. Until recently, conventional search engines ranked websites based on how often keywords appeared in their content, BackRub used an algorithm that looked at the relevancy of a website compared to a search term by links from other pages. A few months later BackRub was renamed Google.

2006 is a milestone year for search engines and the digital environment in general: Search engine traffic has 6.4 billion hits worldwide in just one month.Realizing the magnitude of the opportunity and wanting to take advantage of the terrifying possibilities that lie ahead, Google is presenting for the first time an ad system that makes use of its search engine results: AdWords, which are essentially three-dimensional ads. , which appear at the top or right side of the results, and AdSense which is a cost-per-click advertising system. Also, by analyzing the content of the web pages through the queries it received in its search engine, Google is developing a system for displaying targeted ads based on its users' preferences history. These 2 practices were to make it one of the most successful companies in the world.

The term Web 2.0 was coined in 1998 and introduced in 2004. The revolution brought about by Web 2.0 systems is a given. The era of simply searching for and finding information was over. Users now had the ability to interact with each other - as with businesses - and share information and data. Blogs, social media, video-sharing websites, Web applications, etc., began to appear at a rapid pace. Businesses are now seeing the growing channels for implementing marketing strategies. Digital Marketing as we know it today was just beginning to take shape.

The advent of Web 2.0 systems marked the emergence of the first and largest social networking pages still in use today. First LinkedIn in 2002 and in 2004 Facebook and MySpace. That same year, Google announced its own e-mail service, Gmail. YouTube, which is revolutionizing video content, made its appearance in 2005.

Many businesses are slowly starting to realize that the emergence of social networking sites offers new opportunities to promote their products and services. In 2004, Internet marketing and advertising brought businesses $ 2.9 billion in revenue in the United States alone.

It marks a new era for business. Having new resources, it becomes necessary to find new approaches to promote their brand and the commercial exploitation offered by social networking.

Split testing (also known as A / B testing) was also tested for the first time in 2006, comparing two versions of a page to draw a safe conclusion as to which is more efficient. A / B testing is still used today, and is considered a necessary technique for optimizing a website (and not only)

2011 was a milestone year for Google as with Google+, the company's first social networking site, Google implemented significant changes to its PageRank algorithm. The part of the algorithm that was integrated into the PageRank, was named Google Panda, and is responsible for the presence of the most relevant web pages at the top of a search engine results, as well as for the relegation of web pages that were not relevant to their content, to the lowest positions of these results. Relevance is always determined by the user's query to the search engine

Cookie technology is another milestone for the digital marketing industry. Advertisers were looking for new ways to take advantage of the leaps and bounds of technology. So they tried, through a new technique, to identify and analyze the interests and habits that frequent internet users presented during their browsing, in order to promote offers and advertising content that suits their wishes and needs. The first cookie was therefore designed to record a user's habits. The use of cookies has changed over the years and today is a tool in the hands of advertisers so that they can collect useful data from potential buyers.

Products that are available digitally are now available to the buying public at any time. Marketingtechblog, through a survey conducted in 2014, claims that posting on a social media medium (social media) is one of the most common online activities in the US. 99% of digital marketing advertisers use Facebook, 97% Twitter, 70% Google+, 69% Pinterest and 59% Instagram.

70% of B2C (Business to Customers) marketers have acquired customers through Facebook. 67% of Twitter users are more likely to buy products from a company that operates on this social media and which they "follow" on Twitter. 83.8% of companies that sell luxury products have an active presence on Pinterest. The 3 most popular social networking sites used by advertisers are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

In the years 2018 Digital Marketing is a necessary approach and tactic in the process of organizing a successful marketing strategy. Many companies are looking for professionals trained and specialized in the Digital Environment. The MSc "Digital Marketing MSc" offers the graduates of the Program the necessary supplies for their excellence and distinction in the Digital Environment.