Digital Marketing is all around you.

Look, if you’re not a member of the Millennial generation – if you’re just a business owner wanting to keep on top of the twice-a-minute changes in marketing of your product – then the careful explanation the techies give you as to “how it works” is just so much gobbledygook.  Digital marketing. Targeted audiences. Real Time. Opt-in … stop!

There’s a simple way to learn how it works.  Follow me to yahoo.  See those little “information” boxes at the right?  Let’s click on one.  Mine has a photo of Julia Roberts, one of my favorite actors, and her young daughters.  It promises to compare ‘Famous Celebrities and their Star Kids at the Same Age.’  Interesting, no?  I click on it.

And for 80 pages, I see side-by-side photos of  celebrities, from Clint Eastwood to Elvis Presley and Goldie Hawn (none of Julia, by the way) with their offspring. Almost without fail, the grammatically sloppy text touts the hair products each uses, the anti-aging secrets each harbors, and whether or not the kid will inherit mom/dad’s vast estate

You must click after each photo to see the next slide. And on every page (there are 80 on this one!) are advertisements. Each refers to financing, health and beauty products, and/or investments.

Are you surprised to see that the sponsor of this huge site is called Refinance Gold, and it specializes in debt, luxury & lifestyle, and investments and savings? You shouldn’t be.  You told them you were interested in all that when you chose to open the site.

That’s targeted marketing.

Here’s another example:  You’re interested in a cordless weed eater. You navigate to the Sears page, check out the Worx models.  You decide to think it over.

Almost immediately, your Facebook pages will be flooded with ads for Worx weed eaters. That’s targeted marketing, too.  And it works.

Put that to work combined with tracking to see who responds, and you can clearly see why traditional marketing is a thing of the distant past.