Digital marketing technically has the capability of reaching consumers all throughout the world, simultaneously. But as we’ve emphasized on this blog, most digital marketing campaigns necessarily begin with an assessment of where and to whom they will be targeted. Even the most ambitious campaigns need to lay down roots somewhere, so it usually beneficial to start with a specific locality or a specific set of demographics that can be expected to respond especially well to the branding or social media outreach you have in mind.

We stand by this description of the basic digital marketing process, but we acknowledge that as the entire world becomes more and more digitized, the task of maintaining narrow geographic focus and specific consumer profiles becomes increasingly complicated. That complication was brought to mind recently by an article in the travel website aptly called The Travel. It focused entirely on the notion of “digital nomads,” offering advice to citizens of foreign countries about the prospect of residing in the United States long term while working remotely.

The article was by no means naïve about the accessibility of this dream, but it emphasized that the digital nomad lifestyle is certainly attainable and desirable to growing numbers of people in the modern era. That, in turn, makes growing numbers of digital nomads accessible to digital marketing professionals, which may complicate the entire idea of focusing certain campaigns upon a specific location and a specific type of person who lives within that location.

Obviously, the growth of the digitally nomadic population will remain slow for the foreseeable future, so it is not as if anyone is going to have to dramatically change their approach to digital marketing so it accommodates a huge influx of people who live in a target locality but are not from there and are just passing through. On the other hand, there are certain areas of the United State that are going to see this community grow much faster than in others; and there are certain businesses that may wish to target them specifically.

Start-up web service providers, for instance, may be among the few for whom a geographically and demographically digital marketing campaign is actually not a good idea. For some of them, it may be advantageous to target digital nomads from the outset, and thus establish a client base that is capable of carrying taking the relevant web services with them whenever they relocated again, either inside the US or elsewhere in the world.

It was, of course, not long ago that any major change of venue necessitated changing one’s professional life, partnerships, consumer behavior, and so on. That still the case for most of us, but not for all of us. And digital nomadism is sure to become more and more accessible as time goes on. Thus, in the long term, digital marketing will benefit from tailoring its brand messages into something that people can carry with them all around the world. For the time being, though, a dialed-in consumer profile is still the right tool for most companies when starting most digital marketing campaigns.