Online Marketing, as many of us know, is the new muse in the marketing sector worldwide. And now, even Bangladesh has jumped into the bandwagon with the motto of developing a “digital Bangladesh”. Everyday we are progressing towards more and more digitized ways of living and online marketplaces is an important part of that.
At this point, we have more than a few platforms that are highly used for online marketing in Bangladesh by both large and small brands. But with anything that’s good, there are always some problems.
The very first issue to address is the security concerns. There is always a frequent risk of cyber attacks that can affect both the company and its consumers alike. These attacks grow in frequency as a company starts exposing itself more in digital formats and begins reaping the benefits of online marketing. Identity theft, phishing attacks, malware and many other forms of attacks are posed on the marketers to steal personal and confidential information of the company along with their customers and misuse that.
This information breach can happen in many of the platforms used for online marketing in Bangladesh. Content marketing is vulnerable to cyber attacks through content management systems by malicious attacks to access customer database or other confidential information. Identity theft is a major risk factor in social media marketing whereas email marketing is still vulnerable to phishing attacks. Even though these problems can be resolved and prepared for by a lot of planning, time and effort, lack of education in terms of online marketing is not really helping the cause which brings us to another problem with the implementation of online marketing in Bangladesh.
Traditional marketing has been an important and “popular” major among the university-goers for a long time. But online marketing? Not much. No university or institutions in Bangladesh provides a major course on online or digital marketing. According to an article published on The Daily Star, North South University provides the highest credits that focuses on digitized methods of marketing to their Marketing majors and that’s a mere 3 credits among a total of 130 credit scores provided to the students. Even if the course benefits the students in learning useful techniques such as management of ad placements, content management, SEO etc., it’s limited to a very small number of students every year. In order to optimize and reap the benefits of our online marketing platforms, specialized individuals are needed to employ to these tasks by the brands which is not possible without extensive training even after the employment and that takes investment of both time and wealth resulting into falling behind in this fast paced online marketing world. Decades of reliability on traditional marketing methods have left most of the brands’ employees with very little expertise on online marketing strategies and that poses higher risks of falling victim to security breaches and many other possible problems.
Another problem with online marketing platforms is the ever growing competition. With the high availability and cost efficiency of marketing, sparingly saying, anyone can promote almost any business or idea. This phenomenon not only risks the creative uniqueness of business masterminds’ ideas but also makes it really hard to compete and get noticed. It’s often too hard for consumers to tell which Facebook page will provide high-quality products and which one is here just to make them waste their money and time. But many times, this problem can easily be resolved by the larger brands with creating a legitimate website or even an application software and achieving customer reliance with time.
The bottom line is that with the increasing popularity of online marketing, there has to be an introduction of problems surrounding it. But with proper planning and some involvement by the government, these problems can be worked around. Online marketing, with a solution to the mentioned problems, can be an amazing opportunity to the financial development of Bangladesh.