Student: Jan Jacob Meinen (S00243801)
Course: Digital Marketing – the connected space
Lecturer: Mrs Francesca Caflisch-Martin
Campus: North Sydney
Word Count: 2038 words
Marketing Essay
Digital Marketing in Contemporary Business Practises and Future Perspective
DISCLAIMER:
I hereby certify that I am the author of this document/paper. All the sources that I have used have been fully acknowledged and disclosed. Any data, ideas or words from other authors have been duly referenced.
Signature:
Date: 04-05-2018
Table of Content
Introduction 2
Digital Marketing in Contemporary Business 3
Digital Marketing 3
Paid Digital Marketing 3
Owned Digital Marketing 4
Earned Digital Marketing 4
Converged Media 5
Changes in Marketing – Traditional Marketing to Digital Marketing 6
Changes in Customer Behaviour 6
Information is Key 7
Digital Marketing in the future 8
Augmented Reality 8
Visual Improvements 8
Location Tracking 8
Conversational User Interfaces 9
Higher Data-driven Marketing 9
Higher Individual Marketing 9
Conclusion 10
Works Cited 11
Introduction
The use of marketing in business perspective has changed over the past decades, as the common use of traditional marketing campaigns shifted to use of digital marketing concepts. Traditionally, companies that spend a lot of financial means on marketing efforts where usually the ones that succeeded in spreading their message to the public. Digital marketing is completely different; it is not about only the money anymore, but more importantly about how to most attractively and eye-catching a business uses their digital channels. (Agrawal, 2016)
Digital Marketing in Contemporary Business
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is the process of marketing products and services to customers via a digital platform. (Financial Times, n.d.) There are multiple modes of digital marketing platforms that are currently used by various businesses. Besides the various types, there are three main categories; paid marketing, owned marketing and earned marketing. (Lieb & Owyang, 2012)
Paid Media
Paid marketing media are advertisements that will incur costs for the company, like pay-per-click campaigns, banner advertisements, paid influencers and social media reach campaigns. (Machin, 2017)
Owned Media
Owned media are the properties a company has online. This may include a website, blog page, mobile applications or social media channels. The company owns in this case the property, which makes it free-of-charge for them to use this type of digital marketing. (Machin, 2017) One of the widely adopted strategies nowadays, excellent customer service, is usually executed by using digital marketing platforms, like a corporate Facebook page, in order to help a customer quick. (Agrawal, 2016)
Earned Media
Earned media is the exposure a company gets by people sharing content on various (social) media platforms, via online sharing of for instance a Facebook post, mentioning a company online or writing product or services reviews. (Machin, 2017)
Paid Digital Marketing
Often, paid marketing is used to increase the customer traffic on owned media platforms. Companies can purchase a favourable spot on a search engine’s webpage in order to have more exposure to their websites, blogs or other online accessible media platforms. (Chaffey, 2012) Currently, a lot of platforms offer paid advertisement opportunities in order to generate traffic on websites or exposure of the company’s product or services.
Besides platforms that offer marketing options in exchange for financial means, influencers may be also part of ‘paid advertisements’, as they might request financial means for their influencing services. These influencers are usually people with the ability of changing people’s perception, for example on products or services, in certain groups of people. (Dada, 2017)
Owned Digital Marketing
Usually, websites and other online platforms used by a company are their owned media platforms. (Machin, 2017) Companies use these platforms to reach the customer and in some cases sell directly to the customers. In order to increase traffic on the media platforms, companies can use paid digital marketing or focus on search engine optimization.
Earned Digital Marketing
Earned digital marketing can be described best as the online word-of-mouth advertisements of customers online. (Machin, 2017) Earned digital marketing can increase the traffic on a company’s platforms, since people posted or shared something of a company online. Besides that, also product or services reviews are part of earned marketing.
Search engine optimization is part of a company’s earned digital marketing. (Machin, 2017) Search engine optimization is the efficient and correct use of content on your platforms. Websites with authentic content, efficient use of keywords, descriptive URL that fits the business purpose, creation of links with other websites or platforms and proper use of titles and tags are likely to come up first in search engines, as their search engine optimization is the best in comparison to the competition in the market.
Converged Media
Different digital marketing efforts can be combined, in order to create a strategy in which the company uses multiple or all modes of digital marketing. Figure 1 Digital Marketing Media (Chaffey, 2012)
In this contemporary business world it is considered that using multiple types of media is necessary, as the marketing world is hyper competitive. (Jacobs, 2013) Using one media type is expected to be insufficient and will most likely not lead to the desired outcomes.
Changes in Marketing – Traditional Marketing to Digital Marketing
We have seen a change in the marketing of products and services in the business world in the last decade. Former marketing efforts, under traditional marketing, were mostly focussing on mass marketing. (Wind & Mahajan, 2002) With digital marketing, we have seen a shift from this mass marketing to more personalized and individual marketing. Usually this individual marketing is based on a segment, which is derived from personal information of various people. The segments consist of people with the same interests. (Wind & Mahajan, 2002)
Besides the new way of more individual marketing, companies are focussing more on earned media in their marketing efforts. Customers that express their product or service experiences online have a significant impact and can make or break an organization. Traditionally, the customer’s opinion was not as important as it is in the business world of today. (Agrawal, 2016)
Changes in Customer Behaviour
Research shows that customers have changed due to the digital age. Technology changed the way customers relate to products and services, leading companies to use new innovative ways of communicating their offerings. (Wind & Mahajan, 2002)
One of the biggest changes is the empowering of customers. Customers are able to compare a huge amount of brands, not only local, but worldwide. (Singh, 2017) This enables customers to find the perfect product for the perfect price, somewhere in the world. Traditionally, locally operating businesses where the logical choice for a customer to buy their products, while nowadays the customers are able to do extensive research, resulting in them being more price and quality sensitive. Besides customers getting pickier, customers are demanding, and expecting, a personalized and consistent customer experience. (Singh, 2017)
One of the biggest changes that changed by going from traditional marketing to digital marketing is the never ending customer service. (Agrawal, 2016) Customers expect to be served with the highest service, something that was almost never expected before the digital age. (Agrawal, 2016) The ease of using digital platforms to complain on a company’s practises have created a massive strive for companies to solve problems quickly and serve the customer like never before. Besides the never ending customer service, companies do also gain from digital platforms by being able to communicate easier with customers, especially for smaller brands, as brand awareness online is less important than in real life stores. (Agrawal, 2016)
Information is Key
In the contemporary business world data is extremely important. Companies want to track their customers to find certain patterns in their behaviour. These patterns are based on location of the customer and their behaviour, online and offline. The patterns of behaviour allow a company to predict future customer behaviour and target only interested potential customers with their marketing efforts. This way of marketing is more efficient than the traditional mass marketing and therefore companies are so desperately willing to know all the details of our behaviour.
Online behaviour can be measured by what customers are doing online on their devices and if they use just one, or multiple devices, which advertisements customers are exposed to and what reaction that triggers in their purchasing process. (Hwong, 2017) Besides our active use of devices, companies can track the location of the phone to be able to use individual digital marketing.
Offline customer behaviour is usually the tracking of a location. An article on this matter states that large organizations use beacons that track our behaviour in their store based upon our location. (Gerstner, 2017) The beacons connect secretly to a customer’s phone when customers are in a store to find product segments they are interested in. When a customer leaves the store, the tracking via beacons switches to GPS tracking. When a potential customer comes close to a competitor, the company will know and might sent discount coupons to attract the customer back to their store. (Gerstner, 2017) Another way companies track you offline are loyalty cards. These cards give a company access to all products you purchase and the times you purchase those products. This information is extremely valuable, since the company can use digital media effectively to only advertise products that you are interested in, on times you are most probably thinking about shopping.
Digital Marketing in the future
Augmented Reality
Visual Improvements
Augmented reality will be an important aspect of digital marketing in the future. Recent drops in returns on investments of contemporary marketing efforts made room for innovative and novel marketing ideas. The main reason for the drop in return on investment is the ad-blocking systems, which are getting more widely adopted now and will most likely increase in use in the coming years. Not only the ad-blockers, but also the digital advertisement costs have increased way more than the inflation, meaning that the campaigns are getting less effective. (Bershtein, 2018)
Before augmented reality can take over current digital marketing, technology needs to catch up with the augmented reality requirements first. (Bershtein, 2018) It is expected that augmented reality will give the customer the opportunity to put themselves in another situation, to experience a product or service without actually buying it, and thus help better visual exposure products than with traditional print- or online advertisements. (India, 2017)
Currently the biggest organizations are testing augmented reality campaigns. One of the campaigns was the Coca Cola campaign, with Alipay, during Chinese New Year. (Bershtein, 2018)
Location Tracking
In regards to location, augmented reality will make a huge change in digital marketing. The Pokémon Go game is a good example of location services in augmented reality. It is expected that companies will use some sort of the same approach, by offering customers specials in certain places. (Bershtein, 2018) You will have to go there and perform a certain task.
Conversational User Interfaces
In order to collect more data on the interests of customers, companies can use conversational user interfaces, like Google Home, in order to serve the customer better. Currently, Apple’s SIRI and Googles Assistant can already record sound, without a user knowing it. (News Corp Australia Network, 2017) This is supposedly to help a customer see appropriate and suitable marketing campaigns. In the future, there will be an increase in the use of conversational user interfaces (Babich, 2018), leading most certainly to a higher use of marketing related campaigns based on the information gathered by the interfaces.
Higher Data-driven Marketing
Currently companies are already recognizing the importance of data. However, in the future this will be extremely important, as companies need to understand the full cross-device usage by their (potential) customers. (Gaines, 2017) This understanding will lead to less waste in marketing expenditure, so that companies can use their budgets effectively. It will be extremely important to really understand the customer journey, and data, gained from customers, will be the solution for that. (Sekhar, 2018)
Higher Individual Marketing
By using a data-driven approach to marketing, and thus understanding the customers, companies can apply mass one-to-one digital marketing. (Sekhar, 2018) This one-to-one marketing will feel like individualized marketing efforts by a company for the customer, but will be based on data stored of a lot of people. This data will compare the potential customers and will create segments with people that have the same interests and thoughts.
Conclusion
The current marketing field has changed a lot in the past decade, from traditional oriented marketing, that usually targeted the mass population, to an advanced digital marketing system, in which customers are targeted like individuals.
The current use of digital marketing usually consists of three major types; owned media, earned media and paid media. The highest chances of success now, and in the future, can be found in converged media, which is the combination of all three types.
The gathering of data, to understand a customer better, is extremely important nowadays, since companies need to find ways to understand customer behaviour. The understanding of this behaviour is necessary to find patterns in customer behaviour, and thereby being able to target the customer individually, based on location and individual preferences. These individual preferences can be derived by analysing online and offline customer behaviour.
Works Cited
Agrawal, A. J., 2016. How The Digital Age Has Changed Marketing Channels Forever. [Online]
Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ajagrawal/2016/02/15/how-the-digital-age-has-changed-marketing-channels-forever/#3e280aad680a
[Accessed 30 April 2018].
Babich, N., 2018. UI of the Future: Conversational Interfaces. [Online]
Available at: https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/conversational-interfaces
[Accessed 04 May 2018].
Bershtein, R., 2018. Digital Marketing In The Age Of Virtual And Augmented Reality. [Online]
Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2018/03/21/digital-marketing-in-the-age-of-virtual-and-augmented-reality/2/#706df8723477
[Accessed 04 May 2018].
Chaffey, D., 2012. The difference between paid, owned and earned media - 5 viewpoints. [Online]
Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/customer-acquisition-strategy/new-media-options/
[Accessed 03 May 2018].
Dada, G. A., 2017. What Is Influencer Marketing And How Can Marketers Use It Effectively?. [Online]
Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2017/11/14/what-is-influencer-marketing-and-how-can-marketers-use-it-effectively/#44c0f8b723d1
[Accessed 04 May 2018].
Financial Times, n.d. Lexicon Financial Times. [Online]
Available at: http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=digital-marketing
[Accessed 30 April 2018].
Gaines, J., 2017. Why data-driven marketing is the future. [Online]
Available at: https://www.salesforce.com/au/blog/2017/08/why-data-driven-marketing-is-the-future.html
[Accessed 04 May 2018].
Gerstner, L., 2017. How Retailers Track Customers Online and Offline. [Online]
Available at: https://www.kiplinger.com/article/spending/T062-C000-S002-how-retailers-track-customers-online-and-offline.html
[Accessed 04 May 2018].
Hwong, C., 2017. Shopping is Hard: How to Track a Consumer’s Path to Purchase Across Devices. [Online]
Available at: https://www.vertoanalytics.com/consumers-path-purchase-across-devices/
[Accessed 04 May 2018].
India, C., 2017. What is Augmented Reality and how will it affect Digital Marketing?. [Online]
Available at: https://www.cyberclick.es/numericalblogen/what-is-augmented-reality-and-how-will-it-affect-digital-marketing
[Accessed 04 May 2018].
Jacobs, G., 2013. The Role of Media Convergence in Digital Marketing. [Online]
Available at: http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/5-things-all-retailers-should-know-about-their-data/all/
[Accessed 04 May 2018].
Lieb, R. & Owyang, J., 2012. The Converged Media Imperative, United States: Alitmeter Group.
Machin, E., 2017. What is earned, owned & paid media? The differences explained.. [Online]
Available at: https://www.titangrowth.com/newsarticles/trifecta.html
[Accessed 03 May 2018].
News Corp Australia Network, 2017. How Google is secretly recording you through your mobile, monitoring millions of conversations. [Online]
Available at: http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/how-google-is-secretly-recording-you-through-your-mobile-monitoring-millions-of-conversations/news-story/8089bf3084a430f4c4be46b81710c158
[Accessed 04 May 2018].
Sekhar, A., 2018. Data Driven Marketing - The Future of Marketing. [Online]
Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/data-driven-marketing-future-adri-sekhar
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Singh, A., 2017. Impact of Digital Marketing on Consumer Behavior. [Online]
Available at: http://intelliassist.co.in/impact-digital-marketing-consumer-behavior/
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Wind, J. & Mahajan, V., 2002. Digital Marketing*, Milan: Symphonya.
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Digital Marketing – the connected space – assignment 1
