MENU SET 2– PART 2: What to fill in these blank blocks to complete your digital marketing strategy?
Discover the next blocks in a digital marketing strategy!
1.2. Social Media Marketing
Social media came to life as an answer for the very human need: connecting. In the early 2000s, web 2.0 emerged, many more people had access to the internet, and the first social media surge began, starting with MySpace, soon followed by Linkedin (2003), Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), Tumblr (2007). Social networking sites became the most popular instrument for online communications, enabling people to interact with other people.
Thanks to the connecting feature, “online information searching and sharing, content curation, content/news reception, dissemination and consumption, consumers’ reaction to content/information, brand community, among others” become much easier, faster, and cheaper. Realizing the convenience and cost saving nature that social media bring, enterprises extensively utilize these tools to dialogue, connect and promote products and services to their customers.
However, the emergence of social media has shaped corporate communications, making it more democratized. Communication and negotiations about brands happen, with or without permission of the firms. Marketers should understand the unique characteristics of social media and its dynamic ecology in order to understand their audience and engage with the customers in an effective way.
While engaging with fans on social media, there will be always a chance of receiving negative feedback. Be mindful over what you are going to respond.
Tips: Three rules of thumb for responding to negative feedback:
1. Respond quickly. Social media users expect a rapid response.
Salesforce
2. Don’t delete. You customers can view this as a sign your brand is dishonest and trying to hide the truth. Remember, if you delete feedback, it can be posted other places, which can reflect poorly on your brand.
3. Don’t engage with people seeking to create conflict. Stay focused on the constructive criticism. If someone is obviously out to get your brand and tarnish your name, it’s better not to play into their game by communicating with them via social media. Instead, send them your customer service email address or phone number and urge them to contact you directly.
1.3 Online Public Relations (PR)
The development of digital media has had crucial influence on the practice of public relations. The contribution of online PR to branding has significantly increased. Consequently, firms and organizations are spending more budget on online PR projects. The process of both online and traditional PR is similar, regarding the objectives of increasing awareness, differentiating the company from the crowds and improving perception. However, digital media facilitate the organizations’ ability to collect more information from the public in an easy and fast way and engage with them by more direct dialogue on key issues.
Traditionally, PR specialists from organizations issued press releases distributed over the news services, which were then picked up by media and published on their news outlets. This way barely allowed the audience to communicate back or to have a dialogue with the brands. Online PR, powered by the internet, on the other hands, does not only connect firms with the audience but also let the audience connect with each other. The internet distinguishes online PR from traditional PR in the way that when the audience has better access to other information, every statement or piece of information provided by the brand can be dissected, analysed, discussed, and challenged every single hour by interested individuals. Public, thus, is the one who pull information, not the brands.
Public Relations (PR)
Public relation can be understood as the management of the awareness, understanding and reputation of an organization or a brand, primarily achieved through influencing exposure in the media. The Charter Institute of PR defines on their website7 that PR is a discipline that takes care of everything related to a firm’s reputation, which means that its major goals are to support, to influence opinion and behaviour as well as to enhance the mutual understanding between the brand and its public.
Online public relations (Online PR)
In the context of the digital combustion, online public relations is understood as a process to maximize the favourable mentions of the company’s brands, product, service or website, on third-party websites, which likely draw more target audience to visit the firms’ pages. Moreover, online PR can extend reach and awareness of a brand, be it a niche or mass market, in a low-cost and fast way.
There is a strong correlation between between online PR and its roles in improving results from many of the other communication techniques such as social media marketing and search engine marketing. Often in the cases of start-ups or new online brands, if the company successfully creates the buzz around an online campaign, orchestrated through online PR, it is highly likely that additional reach and impact may also be generated by other traditional media, such as printed media or TV.
Furthermore, online PR can boost firms’ credibility, because comments made by independent parties are considered more authentic and trustworthy. This affects search engine optimization, as mentioned in the previous section, internet users tend to trust editorial content on the search page result more than company’s generated content. The backlinks created by online PR effort help increase Google rank for a brand’s search page result.
Last but not least, brand enhancement and protection can be achieved through the practice of online PR. Favourable stories through the voice of influencers or key opinion leaders (KOLs) can enhance the reputation of a brand among its target audience. However, because brands cannot control this process, it can involve high risks. Negative comments about brands can be published and easily spread through the internet, which can ruin the brands if not managed carefully (Amazon reviews and tech reviews sites like Techradar or CNET are the prominent cases).
Online influencers or KOLs can include journalists, bloggers, celebrities who have a significant number of followers. One of the crucial activities of online PR is online influencer outreach. The main task for PR specialists is to identify which journalists and influential media owners for partnerships with the brands so that they can mention, talk, discuss about the brands with their audience.
2. Email Marketing
Email marketing can be used to achieve various marketing purposes, for example to share information on or to promote products and services, to build brands, to invite customers to web sites, or to tell the status of orders. It has also proven the immense benefits as a marketing channel to get leads, to acquire new customers, or to maintain relationship with current ones. Forrester Research report shows that 86% of professionals use emails for business purposes (HubSpot, 2018). Additionally, transactional emails encourage more opens and clicks-through, eight times higher than regular marketing emails (as cited in Hubspot, 2018). It is 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. Its growth rate is estimated to be 10 percent annually up to year 2016 suggesting that marketers will still continue using this means of marketing within the next few years.
What is email marketing?
Key (2017) defines email marketing as the direct marketing technique that combines skillfully the lines of informative, promotional, and customer relationship management. Chaffey (2016) divides email marketing into two practices, consisting of outbound email marketing and inbound email marketing. As a form of direct marketing, outbound email marketing is used to encourage trials and purchases as a part of customer relationship management. While inbound email marketing manages emails that come from customers such as service inquiries. Email marketing definitely has certain advantages that brand can utilize for their strategic or marketing executive purposes.
First, its cost of fulfillment is relatively low, due to the internet dispersing news at a lower cost than physical direct mails. Second, direct response medium encourages immediate actions, because the receivers can implement a click-through to a website easily and claim an offer immediately. Third, campaign deployment is faster than traditional media. Finally, it enables easy personalization, allows options for testing and integration with other online media campaigns.
However, the authors also discuss the disadvantages of email marketing with respect to its deliverability (corporate firewalls can be one hindrance), renderability (i.e., displaying the creatives and content in limited formats of email reading system), email response decay (it is hard to keep the audience engaged after a long time after the subscription), communication preference (one might have many emails) and resource intensive (human and technology resources).
Marketers today use various email techniques, such as newsletters, reward programs and community building. Newsletters are perhaps the most common vehicles for establishing ongoing dialogue with customers, probably because they provide a terrific mechanism for communicating a highly personalized blend of information, entertainment, and promotions. The features of newsletters are unlike many promotional emails. It is a powerful tool to strengthen relationships with customers and prospects through the relevant content, meant to demonstrate a shared interest between the customers and the brands. Besides, newsletter emails can be used to disseminate expert content that can help organizations establish the voice in the industry it operates.
Email marketing has shown to be effective, yet it is not always easy to orchestrate successfully an email marketing campaign. There are also various strategic decisions required in order to deliver an effective email campaign. Balancing promotional offers (with sales focus) with relevant content to the audience in newsletter is not an easy task. Moreover, one more critical aspect in email marketing, the effective management of an email database, in which he suggested that companies should take advantage of the segmentation of potential customers to create relevant content and promotion based on criteria such as gender, age, or purchase history.
Chaffey (2016) proposes email marketing success factors, using the mnemonic CRITICAL for a checklist, including conversation, relevance, incentive, timing, integration, creative and copy, attributes, and landing page. The emails’ creatives and contents should be consistent with the brand’s image and messages.
3.3 Affiliate Marketing
Besides email marketing, affiliate marketing has also emerged as one of the fastest-growing means of acquiring customers and increasing online sales and hence, has gained significant influence in strategic marketing considerations
What is affiliate marketing (AM)?
On the contrary to the concept of “pay-per-click” in SEM, affiliate marketing is often known as “pay-per-performance-marketing”. It is a commission-based arrangement between referring sites and the merchants, in which the referring sites receive a commission based on the sales or leads generated for retailers or other transactional sites. Commission in these affiliate marketing partnerships can be either a percentage of product sale price or a fixed amount for each product/service sold (cost per acquisition), but sometimes it may also be based on a per-click basis.
Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick (2016) suggest a model to understand more about how an affiliate marketing can be made. Accordingly, when a visitor lands at an affiliate site and clicks through to a retailer’s site, through a cookie placed on the visitor’s computer, this prospect will be tracked to see if he/she later transacts within an agreed period of the cookies (which can be 1,7,30,60, or 90 days). If a transaction is made, the affiliate will be credited with a commission. It is recommended that 60 – 90 days be an ideal time for cookies to incentivize the affiliate sites, because in this competitive market with various sources of information, it takes longer time to make decision.
Affiliate marketing plays an important role in SEM effort, because it can help boost the visibility of search engine result pages (SERPs) through listings, be it paid or natural. More specifically, with generic search phrases, firms can use AM with a fairly low cost, and results from independent bloggers’ writing can be used as a form of natural listings. Affiliate marketing, therefore, can facilitate generating awareness for new brands or start-ups thanks to their available traffic on the sites.
In addition, retailers can check and track all the contributions generated by the affiliate at no extra cost. The data do not only allow the statistics of return on investment of specific marketing expenses but also provide valuable near real-time insight on consumer trends and purchasing behaviour.
However, there are potential risks and challenges inherently involved in using affiliate marketing. For example, incremental profit might be affected because of the cannibalisation, which means the company might gain those sales anyway but now it has to share some percentage with the affiliates through commission. Further, brand reputation might be affected due to the highly possible inconsistency between firms’ brand image and the affiliate sites’ image. Last but not least, the fee can be very high for some affiliate sites, some affiliates with high number of quality traffic can even take up to 30% of the sales.
With that being said, despite the potential risks, more organizations are launching affiliate marketing programs and more affiliate sites are participating in the marketplace. AM is becoming major driving force in marketing strategy for e-commerce businesses. Therefore, firms should have a clear strategy to harness this tool to achieve business goals and remember that the guarantee of a positive outcome for both parties is the key to a successful affiliate-advertiser partnership.
Reference:
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