Digital marketing

LO1: Digital environments’ opportunities, challenges, and impact;

Digital marketing

Digital marketing refers to all efforts that are done in marketing using the internet or electronic devices. This includes efforts to connect with existing and potential customers using emails, websites, social media, and search engines. On the other hand, traditional marketing involves physical marketing, phones, and print ads to appeal to customers. Digital marketing may be more complicated than the traditional market, but it gives the business a much better chance of reaching many customers, both existing and potential, easily and faster, and it covers a large area in its reach. In the modern age, many businesses have developed a digital ad strategy and media awareness and presence (Chaffey,2019). This has led to the easy development of digital content, which has driven consumers to significantly rely on digital marketing and information to obtain information about brands that they are interested in or are willing to visit. Therefore, an organization operating in the modern business environment needs to adopt digital marketing to place itself in a competitive position against its competitors.

As a company’s consultant on digital marketing my priority would be to change the strategy that is being used by the marketing department to incorporate more channels and ensure that there is a balance that works for the organisation. It is evident in the business scenario that has been given the reliance of the organisation on traditional strategies in their marketing campaigns is affecting their sales negatively and the expected results are not being met. The consultants work in this case will be to combine both the methods and ensure that a wider range of potential customers is reached and converted to achieve the desired results, which translates to increase in sales revenue. This will involve the development of excellent strategies to use digital and traditional marketing methods together to reach a higher number of customers and achieve more conversions. Also, this will involve working together with the marketing department to eliminate or significantly minimize the marketing strategies that are traditional and which the company greatly relies on and introduce and strengthen the existing digital strategies to ensure the return of an upward trend in sales. As the consultant, I will also focus on identifying the marketing methods that will be more effective and a variety of digital technologies that marketing department of the company will need to adapt to achieve the desired results. Moreover, I will prioritize on developing strategies in digital marketing that will be customized and work with the department to improve the strategies that are already in existence.

Differences between offline and online marketing concepts

Online and offline marketing concepts are quite different as in online marketing, the focus is generally on the content, whereas offline marketing focuses on the product. Also, in terms of the cost involved, online marketing is cheaper and therefore cost-effective, unlike offline marketing, which involves a higher marketing cost. Moreover, online marketing is more efficient as the people who need management are few compared to offline marketing, which involves the management of a large group of people (Opreana & Vinerean,2015).

Importance of insight for customers

Customer insight is critical as it helps optimize the customer’s journeys and helps to explain customer behavior and what leads to the particular behavior. Thus, marketers need to put significant efforts into generating insights and translating the insights into accessible and readable insights to make conclusions and decisions driven by the data. This is the most effective way of understanding the customers and providing the services and products they need, which is a sure way of retaining the existing customers and attracting new customers. The digital age has brought in advanced technology in telecommunication, which has led to the transformation in the marketing tools used to reach consumers and business operations in general. The needs of the consumers are no longer based on segments and groups of people in the digital age but are rather much more personalized as there is easy direct communication and feedback on the online platform. This is one of the major reasons that a firm needs to shift to digital marketing to have the ability to identify consumer needs and to strive to meet them and create better relationships. However, various impacts and challenges are faced by firms that use digital marketing to reach their customers.

Impacts and challenges of digital marketing

One of the challenges is that the company’s market reality will change as they will have to adapt and operate according to their expectations. The company’s strategy gets dictated by the customers’ actions, locations, and electronic devices that the customers are using at a particular moment and time. Also, the customer is always connected, which also demands the business to invest in technology to give a customer experience that is unmatched. Otherwise, the company risks losing customers to their rivals who may be at a better place technologically to adopt toan unmatched customer experiencevel. Moreover, in the digital age, the need to know and understand the customers has become a compliance matter adaptirms that need to keep their reputation and survive in the competitive world of modern business (Yasmin et al.,2015). The customer expects the business to know them, understand their needs and preferences, have a high level of respect for them, listen to them, and be always ready to respond to them regardless of where they might be or the time, they need the response.

 There is also a challenge for businesses to analyze a digital footprint as they have become moving targets due to digital technology. They are available on various digital platforms at different times of day depending on where they are, but at the same time, businesses are expected to keep track of the customers and always be ready to offer services and responses at their request. Another challenge involves a firm ensuring that it stays above all the noise that is in the digital platforms and sending its message to its potential customers. The business must have updated information about its target customers, the social networks that they use, and their messages on those networks, which may be quite challenging amidst all the noise made by other competing brands and the network users. The firm will need to discern the platforms where its potential customers pay attention to avoid wasting time. A company may also find challenges in the digital marketing arena caused by micro-moments that are a new trend and have a huge influence on buyers’ behavior in the online platforms.

The handling of the micro-moments by businesses is critical to a business’s digital marketing concept as it is one way of attracting potential customers and retaining the existing customers in the business. These micro-moments include the moments where buyers are interested in knowing, going, doing, or buying, which are seen as buyers search and scroll on their devices. A business faces a challenge in ensuring that customers take the least time possible to have the information they are interested in without any doubts or questions on the validity of the source they obtain the certain information from. There is also a challenge on the firms ensuring that they are always present to serve their customers in the instances that the micro-moments occur.

LO2: Key digital tools, platforms and channels, bricks and mortar, and other physical channels

The businesses’ conversion rate to sales will be highly increased when it turns to use digital marketing compared to the traditional market. Digital marketing will help create a revenue stream that is healthy as it will reduce the costs that the business will incur. Also, the business can check what works for them and take action without any delay. Moreover, the company becomes more impressive to prospective customers while using digital marketing as followers and consumers can explore its site. The communication in digital marketing enables the business to develop proper strategies when pricing their services and products based on the expectations of the online customers and what they are ready to pay. Also, the available options in digital marketing enable the business to identify the right strategies for placement (Yan et al.,2018). Thus, it can offer products to potential customers in time without using any form of guesswork. Besides, the business can offer customers the right products, which minimizes failure, especially when launching new products.

On the issue of promotion, the business is put in a position of using a flawless strategy as they understand the channels to use for various products. Moreover, digital marketing promotes understanding people as businesses get the understanding of their customers’ desires. It also provides a good platform for execution and measurement because its automation and improvisation of methodologies are easy. Also, digital marketing enables digital use of the physical environment, which helps increase the conversion rates as customers become more loyal to the business. One of the most common digital marketing tools that a business needs are social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, which provide a superb way for engagements between audiences and marketers on its brand issues. These platforms are endowed with specific features designed for marketing for running ads and tracking performance. Design tools also represent a critical part of digital marketing, especially in creating content and creating ads. They help simplify digital marketing that is otherwise designed heavy by introducing programs such as Photoshop and Canva.

Moreover, analytical tools include analytics for social media, including Twitter analytics and Facebook insights used to provide metrics that relate to helping and engaging marketers in the optimization of campaigns and google analytics for tracking statistics related to web traffic in specific sites. There are also tools for content marketing, including HubSpot and schedule used in curation and content creation. These are useful in identifying content opportunities and engaging posts on social media platforms and blogs to understand and communicate with the audience. Another type of tool is email marketing tools, which help create email campaigns to amplify content and encourage more engagement with the user. These include Iterable and Mailchimp, which enable the building of email lists by marketers and email campaigns’ automation. The first stage involves a consumer becoming aware of the availability of digital resources. This is followed by developing an interest in the resources, making the consumer seek more information and evaluate the digital resources available. The next stage involves trying the resource on a small scale and determining whether it is sensible. Also, the consumer looks at how the resource meets their needs. Then, the consumer conducts a trial for the new digital resource and considers the resource’s value. In case the customer is satisfied, they adopt the use of technology.

E-commerce has created an opportunity for businesses and customers to buy and sell any service or product at any time and place. Although brick and mortar stores still exist, they are being taken over by e-commerce at a high rate. This has seen the transformation of brick and mortar stores to e-commerce stores. This has been greatly contributed to by the increasing use of mobile devices, which enable people to buy and sell more passively and flexibly on the internet. Tasks that are repetitive in the sales process are normally automated due to the advances in technology.  Automation makes sales processes more efficient and eliminates human error. It also affects the sales revenue that is generated in the business positively. However, whereas some tasks require automation, tasks cannot be automated or done more effectively by people in the sales process. Tasks that are ripe for automation include sales and other report generation. Updating managers, taking and passing calls, assigning tasks, and passing information to interested leads are tasks that need not be automated.

LO3: Organisation of activities in digital marketing and multichannel building capabilities in organizations

Activities in digital marketing

The organisations’ comprehensive campaign, which uses both digital and traditional methods, is quite workable though challenging. Digital marketing offers various opportunities to the businesses, including an easy reach to potential consumers as a large number of targeted consumers can be reached simultaneously. Also, it provides an opportunity for the business to advertise directly and on different channels, thus improving performance in terms of sales. Digital marketing is also cost-effective and cheaper as compared to traditional channels. Besides, it provides a platform to monitor and account for marketing activities more easily as it is easy to audit and evaluate. However, it is also challenging as it is difficult to reach consumers who do not have internet access or with poor internet connections. Also, it limits the link between the business and its customers, and there is a challenge in making more comprehensive advertisements. Digital marketing is also prone to hacking by competitors who may take advantage of its strategies and use them for their purposes. It only benefits the company when marketing consumer goods, which makes it limited in terms of products that can be marketed.

 To confront these challenges, the company needs to create an effective multichannel marketing strategy. This involves building a customer view that is similar across all the channels. This makes it easy to track customers’ communications across all channels and gives the marketing department the ability to track customer purchases. This will ensure that the business can run multiple channel campaigns coordinated from a central place. This enables marketers to have easy access to digital marketing, Advanced analytics, campaign management, and response attribution (Herhausen et al.,2020). Also, emphasis needs to be made on having a consistent marketing experience in all channels to avoid conflicts and confusion on potential customers. Consistency should be delivered in all aspects across all channels to ensure that everything matches, including personalization and color scheme. This ensures that the customer experiences across every channel of the business is similar and there are no inconsistencies. Also, to maximize conversions, the business should use post-click landing pages to convert prospective customers through the coordination of various channels, which makes the multichannel marketing strategy even more successful and effective.

Digital marketing strategy

Working as a consultant in digital marketing with Twinings tea an iconic company in the UK that deals with tea and which aims to improve on its sales revenue by using digital marketing this is how I will lead the team in developing a coherent marketing strategy. The first step will be to build the personas of the existing and potential customers of the company. This will help the marketing team to know who the targets are. It will be done through interviews, surveys and research done on the company’s target customers.  This will be followed by identifying the goals that the marketing team aims to achieve and the tools that will be needed to carry out digital marketing successfully. The goals will be aligned with the goals of the company. The third step will involve the evaluations of the digital assets and digital channels that are available in the company. This will help the team to identify what needs to be incorporated to ensure that the plan succeeds and to avoid confusion. This will be followed by auditing and planning media campaigns that are owned by the company. This will be to ensure that the content available to the visitors on the company’s online platform is effective in turning visitors into customers and leads. It will involve evaluation of the content that already exists, what need to be kept and what need to be improved or changed. The step that follows will going over the marketing strategy and agreeing on the timelines within which each action will be executed and how the success of each step will be determined. The final step of the strategy will involve analyzing and measuring the results. This will involve the use of key performance indexes to determine the level of success of the strategy that the team has developed.

Application of omnichannel marketing to ensure consistency in consumer experience

Management of multiple channels and increasing customer information will be more efficient in using various automation tools. Using omnichannel marketing ensures that customers are provided with a shopping experience that is fully integrated. This is due to the unification of customers’ experiences from mobile browsing to brick and mortar and all the channels between them. The customers are better understood, and their specific and immediate needs are easily met. Also, it enables easy classification of customers without ignoring any group or segment of existing and potential customers thus development of successful marketing strategies.

LO4: Methods for effective measuring and monitoring the effectiveness of digital marketing

Techniques for measuring and monitoring

Teams involved in digital marketing create specific KPIs to measure the campaigns they are involved in. This enables them to determine goals and targets and know how well they are performing. The most common KPIs for digital marketers include cost per lead, online conversion rates, web traffic sources, and lead conversion rates. Measuring a digital campaign’s success or failure should start by going through the marketers’ objectives to achieve through the plan. This is followed by deciding which metrics to use to determine the success or failure of the campaign. The data obtained is analyzed, and the failures and successes are explained, followed by the action plans that should be considered. Measuring online performance is critical in keeping track of the objectives that have been set. The set’s online goals should be measurable to ensure that progress or implementation can determine success or failure. The number of people who visit a business website or the lead numbers shouldn’t be the sole determinants of how digital marketing is faring.

KPIs are the best to measure and evaluate because they reference data, which is critical as it brings out the big picture, which is more important in gauging the performance. KPIs are vital because they focus on the important aspects of online performance and thus are more reliable. They focus on the conversion rate to gauge the effectiveness and success of the strategy used by a business on the online platform. However, it is important to note that a business can rely on the conversion rate for measuring digital marketing performance.  However, the conversion rate of digital marketing although being an important aspect of determining the success of a strategy need to be considered alongside other aspects of the marketing campaign to be absolutely sure how effective a particular strategy has worked or failed (Kerzner,2017). It is also critical to evaluate the generated leads and their quality to come to a substantive conclusion on success. Therefore, although the quantity matters, it is important to consider that it is the quality that carries more weight in determining how successful a marketing strategy or campaign is. Thus, any marketing strategy that the marketing team decides to adopt should have goals and objectives that can be measured and analysed to determine its success.

Reference list

Chaffey, D., 2019. Digital marketing. Pearson UK.

Herhausen, D., Miočević, D., Morgan, R.E. and Kleijnen, M.H., 2020. The digital marketing capabilities gap. Industrial Marketing Management, 90, pp.276-290.

Opreana, A., & Vinerean, S. (2015). A new development in online marketing: Introducing digital inbound marketing. Expert Journal of Marketing, 3(1).

Kerzner, H., 2017. Project management metrics, KPIs, and dashboards: a guide to measuring and monitoring project performance. John Wiley & Sons.

Yan, Y., Zhao, R., & Liu, Z. (2018). Strategic introduction of the marketplace channel under spillovers from online to offline sales. European Journal of Operational Research, 267(1), 65-77.

Yasmin, A., Tasneem, S. and Fatema, K., 2015. Effectiveness of digital marketing in the challenging age: An empirical study. International Journal of Management Science and Business Administration, 1(5), pp.69-80.