Marketing in the Digital World

Avinash Kapoor

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781948580052
• eBook ISBN: 9781948580069
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

The author explores and analyzes the digital and social media dynamics for virtual world, including the mechanism involved in bringing targeted traffic and increasing brand awareness in the real-time programmatic and algorithmic world of communication, where the new digital world is progressively being propelled by the blockchain-enabled social media platforms.

The intelligent corporates are becoming data-driven and AI-powered enterprises to compete, differentiate, and successfully reach consumers. This book develops a critical understanding of the digital marketing landscape. The author explores and examines the various aspects of digital marketing process and their implications. It takes an in-depth look at what firms can do to pioneer and successfully execute the digital marketing innovations in a mobile-synchronized and mobile-optimized world for building and sustaining the online customer relationship and loyalty.

The author explores and analyzes the digital and social media dynamics for virtual world, including the mechanism involved in bringing targeted traffic and increasing brand awareness in the real-time programmatic and algorithmic world of communication, where the new digital world is progressively being propelled by the blockchain-enabled social media platforms.

In this connected world, the consumers are connected with portals of interactive multi-smart shared interfaces. Kapoor discusses and demonstrates that the practitioners should direct their endeavors more toward fostering the positive brand image and the consumer-based brand equity than short-range transactions. This book is intended for a broad audience including students and professors in graduate business schools, and practicing business executives.

The goal is to inform management practice and help current and future business leaders navigate through the competitive storms unleashed by digital technology for reaching market segments, for conducting market research, and for managing content, no matter what industry it is.

CHAPTER 1

Digital Marketing Landscape

Introduction

Digital marketing comprises all marketing efforts that use digital technologies and electronic gadgets or the Internet connectivity. Businesses are using their websites and digital possibilities like the search engines, social media, and e-mail to engage with current and prospective consumers. The digital landscape extends beyond Internet marketing as it also includes alternative options even without the use of Internet like social media marketing, search engine marketing, mobile phones marketing, and various additional other genres of digital media. Using such alternatives of digital media, customers can get any desired information at any time and at any particular place. Utilizing different media not only has an access to brand communication by the corporates, but also offers an opportunity to follow and engage with what the other media channels, acquaintances, societies, business associations, colleagues, and so on are communicating and sharing as well. Digital marketing represents a comprehensive range and assortment of product, brand, and service marketing tactics. For example, Canon iMage Gateway offers the facility of sharing digital pictures. The L’Oréal’s brand Lancôme utilizes newsletters to communicate and engage with consumers for further strengthening customer bonding and brand loyalty.¹ Likewise, McDonald’s employs the online channel network to fortify the engaging brand communications and interactive relationships. They have created an online brand community for children, such as the Happy Meal website for educating and involving the customers to play entertaining and interactive games and as such promote and strengthen the brand customer relationship.² This has facilitated and supported to extend to such consumers who may not be accessible due to time and location constraints of existing distribution networks. As such, digital marketing is being used for communicating, connecting, engaging, and encouraging real-time interactive communications on company’s own website or through its social media manifestations. Companies are utilizing the various social media platforms to dispense their posts to target audience organically without any involvement of the publishers or distributors that is characteristic for any conventional marketing process. Thus, this is the age of marketing online whether via websites, online ads, opt-in e-mails, interactive kiosks, interactive TV, or mobiles.³ In addition, marketers these days within a multichannel buying environment and customer buying journey context are attempting to improve their customer knowledge by using digital technology and online channels like web, e-mail, databases, plus mobile/wireless and digital TV⁴ and are analyzing the customer profile, buyer journey, sales funnel, marketing funnel, behavior value, and loyalty drivers. The interactive consumer market is evolving as the Internet availability and connectivity continues to make waves in the digital marketing industry. The technological, demographic, and market forces are shaping a new digital media culture and as such the rich array of innovative websites are also being created for all the visitors. Many companies are developing online creative and innovative content for visiting customers, extending them occasions and reasons to explore the world, form communities with others, and create their own content and reviews of products and services. Through the use of digital marketing strategies, firms have been able to not only identify and target market needs accurately, but deliver information to clients in real time, as well. Because of the unique interactive features of the Internet, companies are able to integrate and amalgamate the advertising and website content to advocate and promote brand awareness and brand reliability. Online marketing environment⁵ thus offers a plethora of opportunities and also challenges for digital marketing landscape. The digital marketing landscape has progressed and advanced now and it offers a multiplicity of high-tech and cutting-edge formats and mechanisms to marketers. This has ultimately resulted in new business models and a plethora of value-enhancing opportunities for digital marketing practitioners. However, not only is there a need for the businesses to further keep pace with evolving online consumer journey, consumer behavior, and the digital landscape, but also businesses are required to recruit, train, and empower proficient professionals for using efficient processes and technologies to shape the interactive and innovative connect with the consumers. There is also a continuous and consistent need for producing an updated quality content for websites, social media platforms, mobile sites, and customer relationship management.⁶ The issue remains to develop a unifying strategy, governance, or system to create cohesion, reuse assets, or measure effectiveness across the company’s complex value chains. Therefore, in order to develop a critical understanding of the digital marketing landscape, this chapter explores and examines the various aspects of digital marketing process and the implications along with the mobile marketing phenomenon. More specifically, the chapter examines and analyzes the mobile marketing and the technologies associated currently with mobile marketing practices. Finally, the chapter concludes that mobile-synchronized and mobile-optimized websites are not sufficient enough for building and sustaining the online customer relationship and loyalty. There is a need to enhance the mobile experience by utilizing key tools and functionality to build into various social media platforms to end up in-store or on a call leading to real-time conversions.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the process of advertising and promoting the products and services online and building long-term and sustainable customer-engaging relationships in order to add value for the customer and the company.⁷ Digital marketing comprises online advertising, direct marketing, e-mail marketing, and mobile marketing.⁸ Whereas the e-commerce term is utilized when a company offers a creative and engaging platform to sell their products or services online,⁹ the digital marketing landscape represents multiple sophisticated digital technologies that offer a personalized experience to target audience through social media, blogging, content marketing, lead management, paid search, and search engine marketing. Marketers can adopt an omnichannel approach that would not only leverage the unique benefit of print with the convenience but also include the accessibility of digital interactive tools on different digital platforms to get real-time consumer insights.

Digital Marketing Process

The digitalization of business processes for enhancing the value for the consumers is the hallmark of any digital marketing process. It involves a strategic application of digital technology in business processes like procurement, payment production, inventory, marketing, sales, and distribution. For a strong and robust digital marketing process the marketer should clearly define the digital strategy with a focus on integrating search engine marketing and consumer engagement and conversions by striving for omnichannel presence. As such, the focus of any digital strategy should be to convert digital processes and endeavors into meaningful results and to develop, maintain, refine, and update the processes and technologies in a business context. For achieving desired outcomes from the adoption and usage of digital efforts, firms are using multiple digital marketing options where social media marketing, website marketing, online advertising, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and mobile marketing are the most used digital marketing tools¹⁰ for reaching out directly to the customers. Remember that, using relevant and appropriate keywords, people search goods and services through search engines.¹¹ These search engines accordingly produce two categories of results: the one that appears on the top along with the related links and are presented on the right side are called as the paid search results and the one that are ranked lower in order are termed as organic or unsponsored results. There is a strong role of search engines in digital marketing and e-commerce as these engines rank-order the searches. It is believed that for higher returns on the investment and for increasing the quality traffic for your brand higher page ranking is required. Search engine searches are also predictive of sales, that is, there can be a parallel drawn between Internet search activity and sales, because having a high ranking in search also results in enhanced and improved branding and this increased brand awareness and a strengthened and sustained positive brand image eventually result in increase in sales. Firms can think of optimizing their websites in order to take maximum advantage of the search engine. One way is to study and understand the search engine requirement and then optimizing your website and content accordingly for achieving the high rank order for organic searches. The other approach of ranking higher in the search results could be to simply use search engine marketing. Firms can have higher rank order by adopting paid advertisement results or search engine advertising. The rank order of such paid results is as per search relevance decided by the search engine algorithm. While following this approach, remember that the search engine users typically look for and inspect only the first 10 to 20 results and as such, it suggests a strong relationship between the search rank order and the level of traffic on your firm’s website. In addition, there is another combination of strategies and techniques called as search engine optimization. This approach can be followed to attain a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search which will increase the number of visitors to a website. This simply means adjusting, modifying, and aligning your content as per the search engines to rank higher and to get more links from others. The search engines crawl and scan all the content and keywords that have external links and work out the content quality and relevance using search algorithms to rank-order that particular site. Therefore, the marketers and firms should attempt to align, adjust, and modify their websites; improve and enhance their optimized functionality; and make them more user-friendly and relevant so as to align and congregate with the prerequisites of the search engines algorithm to the extent possible. More specifically, the firms should focus more on improving their search process and the desired search results by enhancing and manipulating the content and the links as per search engine specifications and requirements wherein the firms can use the site performance test tools and dashboards to monitor and audit the site performance. Along with this, keep on improving the quality of the content on the pages and increasing the frequency of updates as per the algorithms.¹² Also, do not neglect your landing page, as this is like the appearance and doorway to a superstore that supports the obligations and conditions of any search request. As a marketer ask yourself: Are you capable and competent to respond and resolve the questions and queries of the audience...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Book Description
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Digital Marketing Landscape
• Chapter 2 Digital Marketing and Artificial Intelligence
• Chapter 3 Blockchain and Its Applications
• Chapter 4 Virtual World: Digital Strategy Advantage
• Chapter 5 Digital and Social Media Solutions for Virtual World
• References
• About the Author
• Index
• Backcover