Digital marketing

The In Thing

Submitted By:

Vivek MehtaVivek12@micamail.in

9717719191/8128929474

Ankita DattaAnkitadatta12@micamail.in

8511112796

Digital Marketing is the new age form of marketing which utilizes database-driven electronic channels to reach customers in a relevant, personal and cost-effective manner. It sits right at the core of Marketing 3.0, the modern approach to marketing where social, collaborative and human facets of the customers are given prime importance. It offers a lot more than the traditional forms of marketing in terms of pre-campaign research information, instant campaign analysis and conversion statistics. This is possible because of the real-time and durability features inherent in the digital channels. While the channel most closely associated with Digital marketing is Internet, other also include mobile text messaging, Bluetooth messaging, podcasts, electronic billboards, digital television and radio channels. In order to analyse Digital marketing from a marketer’s perspective, let us try and differentiate it by the marketing techniques it employs to reach out to the customers. Although there are many ways of categorization, but broadly these marketing techniques can be classified into the following:

Web Advertising Push Messaging (Email, SMS, App Notifications, Bluetooth messaging) Search Marketing Social Media Marketing

Let us look at each of these in some detail and understand how they have contributed in transforming the way brands reach out to their customers in modern times, through some examples.

Web advertising refers to putting up graphical ads next to the content on websites. These ads are called banners and include text, image, audio, animations, video or interactive content in them. Although the banners are creatively similar to the traditional banners, Web advertising offers great options for interactivity, targeting, retargeting, redirecting and tracking the customers. It is a push marketing technique that helps to improve reach, perception and generate leads for brands. The age-old British postal service Royal Mail utilized this through their award-winning ‘Campaign Gold’ created by the London based agency UM during the 2012 Olympics. The aim of the campaign was to reinfuse the excitement for stamps in the younger generation who mostly use emails, text messaging and social media for personal communication. It was also meant to reposition Royal mail as a contemporary brand instead of a slow fuddy-duddy postal service. Royal mail decided to print Special Edition stamps in tribute to each Gold Medal winner from the British team in order to capture the public mood of Olympic celebration sweeping the country. The only difference was that the special stamps were made available by lunchtime on the next day - changing the regular 24-month production process into an 11-hour turnaround. Within minutes of a British Gold medal announcement, dynamic advertisements were run across popular news, sports websites, social media and ecommerce websites. The campaign was hugely successful and the sales targets were beaten by 45% with 90% of the sales coming from new customers meaning that Royal mail was able to reach the new generation.

Figure 1 Royal Mail's Campaign Gold

Push Messaging is defined as any content sent by or on behalf of advertisers through a wireless channel at a time when the subscriber has not requested for it. The channels include SMS, e-mails, MMS, audio, surveys, app notifications, and Bluetooth messaging. Although it offers the benefits of being low-cost but it needs to be delicately handled as too rare messages could make the brand forgotten while at the same time too frequent could irritate the customer. Creating or procuring a list of target customer contacts and information is key to a push messaging campaign. The customer information can be used to segment them and create more relevant content for the message. Digital sources like social media, webmail and indexed customer databases allow such segmentation of customers which can help in personalising the message for different types of customers. The more personal the message, the higher would be the conversion rates. The American athletic merchandise brand Finish Line for example, had been using email marketing every year to promote the merchandise of “Final Four” teams in the Men’s Division 1 basketball championship (also called March Madness). For the first time in their 2013 campaign, Finish Line sent emails which were personalised based on location where the email was opened using geo-targeting technology. So if the email was opened by a person in or around Michigan, it would display the merchandize related to the Michigan team which the person was more likely to be a fan of. This made a huge difference to the campaign results with click-through rates 80% higher than the previous year.

Figure 2 Finish Line’s e-mail marketing campaign – Different messages displayed based on where the email was opened.

Search Marketing refers to the use of search engines in order to drive traffic to a company website. This can be done through search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and contextual search. Search engine optimization involves improving the content of the website in order to attract more search traffic. The traffic which is attracted through SEO is termed as natural search traffic. SEM and contextual search involve a third party which displays the content with the link to the website in for a fee. In case of SEM, the third party is the search engine which for a fee,

displays the site link at the top of the search results based on the search keywords input by the user. In case of contextual search, it is another website which has content contextually related to a brand and displays the site link next to such content in exchange for a fee, which may be paid directly or through a network operator like Google AdSense. E.g. Mashable.com is a member of the Google AdSense network, hence a lot of mobile phone and e-commerce search ads are displayed in the content of its mobile phone blogs as it is quite likely that those who are reading them are potential customers or influencers for mobile phones.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) outlines all the efforts to create content that attracts the attention of users and encourages them to share it across social networks. It is highly driven by the word of mouth and rides heavily on the earned media. The measurement of success in SMM is a debatable subject, but principally in order to be successful, a social media marketing program needs to have the merits of 3 R’s – Real, Relevant and Responsive. By Real, one means that the core message of the campaign should be true without any hype. The social media space is so vast and full of specialists that a slightest manipulation is bound to be counterproductive. Next comes the Relevance of the message to the audience. The empowered users of social media cannot be interrupted with an insipid brand message. The brands have to rather tell them what they want to hear about. Lastly, the Responsiveness of both the message and medium is essential for a conversation to get viral. Without it, the communication remains a monologue. The ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ campaign created by Dove a few months back fares very high on all these and is by no surprise one of the most viral social media campaigns ever with close to 4 million shares on Facebook and 114 million views on YouTube. The campaign video shows a former forensic artist meeting a series of women who are asked to describe how they look. He was unable to see them behind a curtain, prompted them to detail their most prominent features and sketched each participant from their self-description. Each woman was asked before the study to get to know one of the other participants. The forensic artist then asked each woman to describe the other's face and created sketches. The differences in the two sets of sketches were remarkable. This struck an emotional chord with the viewers as the women were real (next door ladies) and it showed how women tend to underestimate their looks.

Digital Marketing as illustrated above, is one of the most advanced, popular and promising forms of marketing today. In their 2013 survey on Digital Marketing Spending in the US, Gartner found out that Digital spending accounts for an average 2.5% of the company revenue while the total marketing spend is 10%. Around 40% of these companies plan to increase their Digital spending even though the overall marketing budget is not increasing. Zenith Optimedia analysts claim that by 2015, around 24.6% of the total Global Ad spend would be on the Internet.

Figure 3 Dove Real Beauty Sketches Campaign

Zenith also predict that the mobile ads would be growing by 77% in 2013, 56% in 2014 and 48% in 2015, driven by the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets. They found out that almost half of the Digital budget is currently allocated to Search advertising closely followed by Web display advertising. This is understandable as push messaging and social media marketing are relatively cost-effective forms of Digital marketing.

Figure 5 Digital Ad spend by Category

India has a great market potential for Digital given its 150 million internet users and the all-pervasiveness of the medium which suits the vast extent of the country. Out of the $5 billion Indian advertising industry, $900 million go to digital marketing currently. The share of digital is poised to grow larger every year & expected to touch 30% of the total market by 2015.

Figure 4 Zenith Optimedia analysis of Global Ad spend

The Digital space is fast changing with most of the companies trying to come up to speed with its technological and innovative growth. New ideas and paradigms are being formed and reformed regularly making definitive changes in the industry. Content Marketing for instance, had been around in the traditional space for a long time since companies started distributing free magazines to their customers, has made a comeback with even more prominence in the digital world as it is much more convenient and cost-effective to publish and access content digitally. Native advertising in the form of sponsored facebook stories and promoted tweets, is a novel innovative concept whereby the brands are trying to integrate themselves into the lives of their customers rather than coming across as foreign intruders. Also, an effective use of Big Data is expected to be a game changer for many companies. If they are to remain market front-runners, they need to integrate their digital, transactional and social marketing channels into one customer journey. Shoppers Stop, for example, recently found out that very often when middle-aged women shopped for Indian clothing, the other item on their list was men’s innerwear. Today Digital Marketing is essential across sectors for every forward-looking company aiming to attract, serve and retain customers or businesses. It is throwing new challenges on to the marketers and technologists to improve the way value is communicated and delivered to customers. It has also made the customers more aware, powerful and curious about what they buy into. This trend is going to stay and grow with technology, and the market would be led by those who are able to accelerate innovation and tailor Digital meaningfully into their marketing mix.

References Digital Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success by Vipin Mayar and Geoff Ramsey

http://www.sas.com/software/customer-intelligence/digital-marketing.html

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http://www.mmaglobal.com/wiki/push-messaging

https://movableink.com/case_studies/finish_line

http://www.umww.com/um-london/work/delivering-history

http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-spend-report.jsp

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http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/30/digital-ads-will-be-22-of-all-u-s-ad-spend-in-2013-mobile-ads-3-7-total-gobal-ad-spend-in-2013-503b-says-zenithoptimedia/

http://www.imediaconnection.in/article/1838/Blog/digital-marketing-trends-for-2013-in-india.html