A Deep Dive Into Digital Communication
Last update: 7 September 2023 at 10:11 am
5.00/5Let us guess the device that you are using currently to read this article. It’s most probably a digital screen.
Zoom in, and you will soon bump into molecules and then into atoms. There are electrons and neutrons, which is again a group of three quarks.
Next, you will find tiny energy filaments that vibrate to produce what we know as matter. That is string theory in a nutshell, and this screen is but a large array of perfectly orchestrated energy that is helping us communicate.
We are slowly transcending to such concepts, but today, we will try to have a retrospective look at digital communications tech that we use in our day-to-day life. Let’s dive deeper into digital communication.
What Exactly Is Digital Communication?
Digital communication includes an organization’s online communication efforts. Today, most organizations use a broad range of online communication channels, from their website to mobile chat to blogs, to connect with current and prospective clients, employees, and other stakeholders.
All these individuals need digital marketing professionals who understand how to leverage this convergence of technology and texting to their advantage. Businesses and companies can use digital communication to expand their reach and build valuable relationships with their audiences. Businesses may try to launch digital communication campaigns for various reasons such as –
Creating Awareness: Campaigns can cast a wide net to let potential and loyal customers know about services, products, and values.
Generating Customer Experiences:Digital communication campaigns can be customized to build unique experiences and brand affinity through one-on-one messaging apps, targeted social campaigns, or Livestream videos.
Constructing A Brand: Businesses can create a brand image for a company’s startup or change the brand image for a legacy organization pivoting in a new direction.
Providing Customer Service: Community managers can answer real-time questions to solve follow-ups or issues with satisfied customers to go the extra mile.
Essential Digital Communication Platforms And Strategies For Boosting Brands
So how can you leverage different channels based on your goals?
Contact Audiences Through Emails
Marketers can use email to reach customers directly through their inbox, where they visit every day.
Emails, as the most mature digital communications channel, can be accessed by a variety of devices. It is most effective for providing a broad range of content, including behaviourally triggered, promotional, and newsletters.
It can also be used as a digital identifier and driver for numerous forms of social media. While most email communications move one way, from companies to people, it also should enable customers to respond.
Strategies to build brand includes –
- Choose attractive Subject line – It grabs the client’s attention, and your email will not end up in the spam folder or get lost in the inbox.
- Segment your email list – Segment your audiences by the level of engagement, their interests, or demographics. For instance, brands can send one type of welcome email to new customers. Then, they can send the second type of email to the customers who are loyal to their brand.
- Provide them with a direct call to action – Use words like “Visit Website,” “Subscribe,” “Shop Now,” or “Learn More.”
Include Social Media Campaigns
A social media campaign is a coordinated digital marketing effort to assist or reinforce a business goal using one or more social media platforms. These campaigns differ from everyday social media efforts because of their increased focus, measurability, and targeting.
Several social media platforms to build brands are –
Facebook – It is the most popular social networking site in the world. After all, it has more than two billion users. As a result, you can find almost anyone on Facebook, provided that you both have access to the internet, which means almost everyone in your customer base has a Facebook account; that is why it is the top social media site for businesses.
With this, you have a chance to turn your customer base into a community. And you can also use Facebook to promote new content that you have created to get visitors to your site.
Twitter – It provides you with a uniform stream of information and new content from all over the internet. It has millions of engaged users every month, and practically every brand on the globe has a Twitter account to update its customers.
This social media for businesses may not have the same large audience as Facebook, but it is easily one of the most used social tools on the planet. Basically, when you want to expand awareness for the brand, Twitter is one of the best social media platforms.
Instagram – It is the youngest social media platform as a majority of its users are under 25. That makes it a perfect fit for social networks for your companies and brands that target young demographics.
Short videos and photos with a small amount of text do exceptionally well on Instagram. It also integrates with your Twitter and Facebook accounts so you can use the same photos and videos across multiple platforms.
Linkedin – No social media can beat Linkedin in terms of professionalism. It is a community of workers and business owners who share and connect on the professional levels, making it much more formal than other social media platforms.
Because of that, its users tend to respond more to B2B content than B2C, and LinkedIn advertising agencies in the United Kingdom have started to help businesses work through this platform.
Apply The Power Of Mass Media
We can define mass media as:
a technology intended to reach and communicate with a mass audience.
Mass media communication traditionally encompassed radio, TV, and movies, and outlets that reach a larges number of people with universally consumable content. Meanwhile, digital communication platforms, including Hulu and Netflix, have somewhat replaced TV, and podcasts have emerged as an alternative to radio.
Brands can make use of mass media communication with these strategies –
Advertise on podcasts – It allows experts to share their knowledge and communicate with people worldwide. Audio content is booming and podcasts are a game-changer since people can hear them on mobile phones or computers.
Shift to digital video platforms – TV budgets are more efficient when combined with Facebook budgets and YouTube. Brands can advertise in digital video or buy pre-roll ads on YouTube and Facebook.
Get inspired by traditional mass media content – Try producing your digital content inspired by traditional mass media content. Brands can switch on traditional media reach by creating videos, articles, and social content based on trending books, movies, and TV shows.
Opting Digital Communication As A Career
One of the main benefits of getting a degree in digital communication is that it gives you the freedom to try your hand at numerous different aspects of the field.
Digital communication is a wide area and most professionals in the field at last focus on a specific area instead of acting as a generalist.
Visually oriented individuals might gravitate towards a career in videos. Part of choosing a career in digital communication understands your main interests, but it is also about getting why you are doing the work.
In 2021 and beyond, digital communication is only going to be more rewarding than ever before.
Advantages Of Digital Communication
- In digital communication, the video, speech, and other data may be merged and transmitted over a common channel using multiplexing.
- Digital communication is cheaper and much simpler.
- While the transmission is digital and channel encoding is used, the noise does not accumulate from repeater to repeater in long-distance communication.
- As the transmitted signal is digital in nature, a large amount of noise interference may be tolerated.
- While digital communication involves channel coding, therefore the errors may be detected and corrected in the receivers.
- Digital communication is adaptive to other advanced branches of data processing such as image processing, digital signal processing, and data compression.
Origins Of Digital Communication: Digital Communication Before The Internet
The internet is a platform for global communication. All you have to do is plug a device into any internet connection, and you can communicate with any other point on earth.
There were communication devices even before the internet. Let’s look at some of the best digital communication technologies which enabled people to communicate in the pre-internet world.
The Five Needle Telegraph:The five-needle telegraph is amazing in its simplicity. It only requires a single pair of wires for enabling communication.
The Telegraph: The five-needle telegraph worked, but it was the Morse telegraph which would link the world. Morse system allowed an operator to press the key to send a signal over the telegraph wire. This system was fast and simple with a skilled operator and required the correct minimum amount of infrastructure investment.
Baud:The telegraph worked fine, but it requires trained operators. But they were limited by their speed and human perception. While Baud requires fewer wires and is easy to operate compared to telegraph, you can still send only one message at a time over any given wire.
The Hush-A-Phone: It was a device that was originally invented in the 1920s to allow individuals to have more private conversions in a bid to improve customer experience and to have less noise pollution over the home phone service.
Dataphone: It was the first-ever commercially available modem capable of moving data over the phone system at 110 bits per second.
Ethernet:Ethernet has some amazing characteristics, including the ability to plug additional computers into the network whenever required without difficult reconfiguration and the ability for nodes to drop off the network without other failures. They are also able to achieve 98% throughput, much higher than others could achieve.
Wi-Fi: The Wi-Fi was invented for cash registers by the NCR (National Cash Register) corporation. The Wi-Fi system was made possible through historic government deregulation.
In 1985 the FCC had released the famous 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 8.5 GHz frequency bands for use without a government license. It made it doable for innovators to build all of the ad-hoc wireless technologies we consider ubiquitous today, like cordless phones, Bluetooth. By 2005 over 100 million Wi-Fi chipsets were delivered annually.
From 2005 till the present digital communication has been widely spread in many advanced ways through social media, smartphones, broadband internet, cloud computing, the transition from analog to digital television, and much more.
