Discount Internet Marketing Assignment

7/31/2019 Discount Internet Marketing Assignment

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/discount-internet-marketing-assignment 1/7

DiscountBank.co.ilDiscount Bank is a universal bank that offers comprehensive banking services to its

clients concerning all financial activities through direct banking and online banking.

Overview of business website

The Discount Bank website – “Discount Online” - offers a variety of banking

services to subscribed members in various fields including Investments, Loans and

Mortgages, Current Accounts and Credit Cards, Foreign Currency, Securities, Funds

and Pension and General, in all of which a wide range of online available transactions

as well as attainable information is offered. Discount Bank ‟s main business goal in

creating such website is to increase consumer loyalty by saving the client valuable

time, offering high level customer service and plentiful information by which the

customer could make transactions to his account independently, not having to

consider time, location, availability, traffic, weather, parking and meetings constraints.

Discount Online targets general population, both in the private and business

sector, women and men, focusing on existing bank clients, those who are currently

using the website and those who have not yet signed up for this service, as well as the

bank‟s future prospects. As such, offerings range from general to targeted on market

segment, gender, age and service in need.

Discount Bank consumers go online to use the website for the following

reasons: Easy to join, secured, financially worthwhile, available, convenient and

offers a wide variety of banking services in various categories. In general, visitors of

the website are considered to use Directed Buying and/or Knowledge-Building of

Moe‟s 4 types of shopping strategies; Either they have a specific product/service in

mind when entering the site and are likely to exit having made a purchase or they



have no intention of buying or using the offered services and are simply visiting the

online store to gather information.

Internet advertising methodsThe goals of Discount‟s Internet marketing efforts are to Spread a Message

regarding its current and/or new available services to both existing clients and future

prospect as well as Getting Consumers to Purchase, in this case join the Discount

Bank.

Bank Discount uses, in and out its website, flashed and non-flashed banners,

videos, mini-sites, pop-ups, and landing pages posted on various websites such as

MSN, Ynet, Biz-portal, Haaretz, Tapuz, general business, news, chats, blogs and

social media networks as part of its online marketing efforts (See: appendix 2 for

examples). In addition to the alternating campaigns and media channels, Discount

holds a constant top positioned linked button on Ynet for several years now (See:

appendix 2). The media channels are selected according to the set budget as well as

the focus of the campaign- sports, electronics and business websites for men-focused

offerings, social media websites for the younger generation, and news websites for

general population displaying the various offerings of the different campaigns etc.

Businesses, including Discount, normally designate between 5-10% of its total

advertising budget to online marketing, almost always half of which is allocated to

advertising banners. Discountbank.co.il is ranked #40,679 in the world and 99 in

Israel; where over 90% of its visitors come from, according to the three-month Alexa

traffic rankings1. Visitors to the site spend about 36 seconds on each pageview and a

total of two minutes on the site during each visit2. This time span is considered to be

1 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/discountbank.net 2 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/discountbank.net



rather short and could indicate a problem that the website has in holding its traffickers

on the website.

In 2000, the website had 50,000 subscribed members and over 100,000

monthly pageviews3. Though current information on the exact effectiveness of

Discount‟s online marketing campaigns could not be found, the general trend of

increasing online marketing expenditure in Israel could suggest the worthiness of such

media channel. In the beginning of 2011, Internet advertising constituted as much as

16% of Israel‟s annual total advertising pie, estimated at ILS 630 million4

(See:

appendix 1). Figures of banner and video advertisements on websites, as well as

search engine advertising, reinforces what was clearly shown by the distribution of

the advertising pie; the scope of internet advertising is growing and companies are

increasing their online marketing efforts at a double digit rate5. Furthermore, about

60% of advertisers indicated they intend to increase online ad spending during 20116.

In my opinion, this growth in online marketing expenditure could not be accidental

and would not have accord/seen if it had no positive results to it.

The reasons why so many companies divert marketing resources towards

online advertising is that today, in Israel, over 4.7 million people surf the web, ages

13 and up7. 82.5% of households are connected to the Internet and about 82% of

online surfers use the Internet on a daily basis8. Furthermore, 76% of surfers are

members of social networks, on which they spend many hours daily. In addition,

About 80% of web surfers indicate video viewing as one of their main activities

online, of them, 25% watch online video content everyday, while the rate among

3http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-173089,00.html

4 http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//12337405 http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//12337406

http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//12337407 http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//12337408 http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//1233740



teenagers rises to as much as 55%. Despite the potential reach of customers and

regardless of the wide spread of online marketing efforts, many clients (at least 50%)

are only partially active, if at all, in using online banking services offered by the bank 9.

All of this suggests that online banking organizations might need a layered and

complex strategy for serving audiences and also for monetizing them. Advertising

may help monetize some groups, while subscriptions will work for others. Currently

the website is a joint marketing and online banking website which holds a large

amount of space devoted to in-house advertising which seems overwhelming and

mostly unnecessary for those who are already active members. Discount is right to

build numerous mini sites or landing pages, which serve different segments but

perhaps some distinction should be made between the general website as presented to

prospects and the lightly active clientele and those who often use the website.

Furthermore, the usage in rich media ads across the web should be increased,

despite them being more expensive for advertisers, to target potential consumers, who

consider them to be extremely exciting and fun, creating a higher level of

involvement with the organizations. This could also improve the short time spam

spent on the website indicated above. Though there is quite a wide spread on Youtube

and blogs, no video content is currently presented on the marketing website, which, as

stated above, is what the majority of people look for when surfing the web.

Furthermore, in the case of video advertising, commercial television dictates an

overly high coverage frequency, where the average frequency of a TV campaign is 11

times while the necessary effective frequency ranges between 3-4 times10

. Online

video submission from a unique user allows to determine in advance and control the

9 An estimation of the general usage of Online Banking Services taken from Wikipedia.10 http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//1233740



number of times each viewer is exposed to that video and as such to reduce the

amount of total exposures, becoming more cost effective.

Search Engine MarketingAccording to a Marketing Association‟s survey, approximately 21% of

Internet advertising budget are devoted to search-based advertising11

. In the case of

service based websites, such as Discount, words searched have a high potential of

matching the website‟s sponsored keywords as those are often represented by the

bank‟s offered services, and are unique to the online banking category, targeted and

focused on the consumer demographics, location and needs. A quick search of

relevant keywords at diagnostic websites revealed Discount has no sponsored

keywords. The fraction of visits to the site referred by search engines is roughly 9%12

.

Top Search Queries for Discountbank.co.il are: „israel discount bank‟, ,' '

' ' ,„discount‟, „discount bank‟ with 14.71%, 12.66%, 12.18%, 7.61% and 5.22%

respectively13

. Only when „Discount‟ keyword is present the listings are related to the

bank, displaying unique, brief but descriptive title tags for each page of service

category. The use of such titles could indicate Discount‟s efforts to optimize their

organic search using the different search engines. Since online advertising

measurement tools enable websites to profile the user according to his class segment,

consumer behavior, frequency, content consumed, this could very well serve the

company to target their marketing efforts and use technics such as Re-Marketing and

Sponsored Keyword Search to advertise more efficiently and effectively. Currently it

seems that Discount operates only in general terms of targeting, as it does not use a

more pinpointed approach in its online marketing campaigns, which could have aided

in attracting the right kind of people to its different offerings rather than just raising

awareness among general population.

11http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//1233740 12 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/discountbank.net 13 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/discountbank.net



Appendix

Appendix 1:

Appendix 2:



Documents

Discount Internet Marketing Assignment