Marketers & PR Professionals: How to keep up with the Digital age

How many of us in Marketing Communications roles or specialities that have been focused on traditional touch points are now seeing them turn digital? Are we feeling left out? Keeping up with times seems necessary, whether we are in Marketing, Advertising, Digital, Events or Public Relations. Integrated has now taken a central point in Digital. So we have seen how point of touch between organisation and customer has taken a dramatic shift online. That's me below on the left handing out gift vouchers to customers on the floors of fahrenheit88 shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur where I was Manager, Marketing and Communications. To push the retail stores in the shopping mall including Parkamaya Asian Fashion Store, we ran an annual marketing calendar of initiatives that included:

1. holidays, celebrations and special day thematic marketing campaigns that suited the Asian Jpop Kpop theme in the busy shopping metropolis of Bukit Bintang Kuala Lumpur Shopping District, and our touch points were very much on ground, and around Malaysia's premier valuable shopping space

2. we also engaged magazines for fashion spreads

3. created our own monthly marketing hard copy brochure with retailer promotions which we circulated around the vicinity, and targeted schools and related events, whilst posting the visuals on facebook and instagram

4. media relations around our campaigns to gain coverage in traditional media

5. grew communities in the mall

6. This was 5 years ago. We did our best to promote on-ground, but also began growing our social media following, and also posted tenant product promotions as posts. But at that point we still hadn't gone into facebook advertising yet.

Kesh Sandhu emceeing Parkamaya fahrenheit88 KL Shop & Win marketing campaign

But it is for certain that ourselves as consumers have realised where the attention is falling to. Even my mother who is not digital or online savvy can now clearly see how it is true that the world is being digitized whether we like it or not.

To give us a clearer picture, let's have a look at facts that should rev our drive as Marketing Professionals to ramp up our Digital Marketing skills.

What are the predicted Marketing Trends in 2018 and How to keep up wit the Digital age?

Here are some of Marketing Analysis Consultancy Winterberry Group analyses on the upcoming marketing trends in 2018:

• 2018 is the year digital marketing takes dominance

• Measured digital media spending to reach $117.4 billion

• Offline and marketing spend 97.8 billion

• Digital Media Spend $100.8 billion

• Increased spend on Display advertising

• Continued trend in the shift in marketing advertising spend from Offline to Online, and the decline in mail, print magazines and print newspapers.

• New money is in Digital and Data

So I guess my key takeout on ow to keep up wit te digital age Marketing has surely evolved in the palm of our hands, with our smartphones, with our increasing connected Internet of Things , where all of us now are content creators and sharers, causing marketing to explode like the aftermath of the Big Bang, but on the digital sphere.

And with this explosion comes the management of and in ways where Big Data is captured and analysed. Where do we suddenly fit in this sphere, with Big Data and Analytic specialists coming in to grab the advertising spend? Some alignment is certainly on the cards in our roles and opportunities that present itself in this industry.

To put things into perspective, here's a video of the Evolution Of Communication: