One thing about Marketing is that it is the most evolving field. This means if you aren’t into trends or can’t look around and monitor what’s happening around you, you will be left behind.

If we were in 1919, 100 years ago, a simple Newspaper advert would have been enough to keep your salespeople busy.

50 Years ago, in 1969, a simple television ad would help your business expand, helping you hire a dozen employees and get ahead of your industry.

10 years ago, in 2009, getting a website and spamming it with keywords related to what you are selling would have been more than enough to get you ahead and help you win.

There is one fact that still astounds me to date and it is the fact that marketing has changed more over the last 10 years than it did in the last 100 years combined.

Consider Africa, Zimbabwe to be specific. The internet research organization, internetworldstats.com places Zimbabwe’s Internet penetration rate as of December 2018 at 39.3 %. This means out of the total 17 million Zimbabwean’s existent today, about 7 million have access to the internet.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Social Media Market Share

What’s awesome is not the fact that the above people have access to the internet, it’s the fact that ZBC does not hit those kinds of numbers, prove me wrong!

If we are going to drill down on the above, there are some interesting stats that you will learn.

Hackernoon, one of the best Research organizations and sites says the average person spends 6 hours a day staring at their smartphone. This amounts to an average of 180 hours a month. What this effectively means is that the average person now spends most of his/her free time staring at their smartphone.

You are probably wondering what they will be doing? Well, Social Media, Mobile Gaming, Reading the Bible, YouTube Etc.

Now, this gets more interesting because if we drill down the numbers we’ll learn that a third of the time spend online by Zimbabweans and Africans, in General, is spent on Social Media and browsing Social Media Sites.

Internet Usage Times

Why are these numbers necessary?

I wanted you to get an appreciation of how much people are addicted to Digital Media, Social Media, and the internet in general.

The power of this is, you can show these people ads anytime whenever you want.

You can show them your ads as they browse the internet.

You can show them your ads as they watch videos on Youtube.

You can show them your ads as they play Games on their Phone.

You can show them your ads as they read the news online on websites like the One for the Herald and Newsday

You can show them your ads as they browse through their timeline on Facebook.

You can show them your ads as they Prepare to respond to a Facebook Message.

You can show them your ads on the lock screen of their phone.

You can show them your ads when they search on Google.

In short, you can show them your ads, anywhere, at any time as long as they are holding a mobile phone.

So what is Digital Marketing then? It’s the art of showcasing your products and services to people whilst they are relaxed and in the middle of doing what they love the most.

There is much to say when it comes to Digital Marketing and I’m going to make this a 3 month-long weekly series where we are going to cover the complete A-Z of Digital Marketing.

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