Levers of digital marketing
For digital companies, the marketing process is the same as traditional companies, while the execution and the analysis are different because there are digital channels that provide real-time analytics, with that you can adapt your visual merchandising with real-time traffic data, and you will get an immediate reaction.
The digital ecosystem is composed of the smartphone, apps, the cloud, and broadband, and those elements have a lot of implication in marketing: it destroys the previous value chains, but more important shorten distances between company and clients, now digital levers let fix market failures that in the past was impossible to fix using traditional instruments.
First of all, we have to define the digital market, which consists of the communication of a message exploiting different levers, the search market, the display market, the emailing, affiliation programs, and social media.
Each of this segment is an ecosystem in its own right:
• Search market consists of the purchase of keywords. These keywords are bought at auction from search engines and enable text ads to be constructed, which are seen under the “sponsored link” heading of results pages Purchases are made through the Google Adwords program and also include a network of partners (websites, blogs, partner search engines), the so-called “display network”.
Text ads benefit from a rather favorable investment environment, for the following reasons:
- The number of searches is growing globally
- Text ads are becoming more effective, particularly through better use of investment feedback levers, such as the call-to-action buttons that encourage internet users to click and the landing pages to which users are redirected after clicking;
- Mobile connections open up new development prospects for the search market. For example, in many developed ad developing economies, people access the internet via their mobile phones.
- Geolocated searches era growing rapidly.
• The display market is the segment covering traditional advertising or branding. Two factors account for this vitality. First, the purchase is increasingly made by auction. Real-time bidding (RTB) allows one’s advertising to be seen based on the auctions one agrees to. These auctions focus on behavioral targeting and are generally based on the cost per thousand impressions. Second, the creativity of formats is an important factor in the dynamics of the market. The use of these formats varies according to their capacity to create interaction with internet users. Video is booming and is driving growth in the market since advertisers are constantly looking for interactivity and greater audience commitment.
• The email market is the most threatened market segment but is also the segment that has historically been the most “effective” for “tracking” consumer behavior. Emailing needs to adapt to marketing management objectives:
- Homogenize the company’s overall communication.
- Strengthen proximity between the customer and the brand.
- Be consistent across all channels.
- Communicate in a personal and relevant way with every customer.
- Increase the ROI of marketing actions.
Nevertheless, a revolution in usage and congestion of the emailing market is threatening it.
• The affiliation market allows any website or blog that has an advertising space to be monetized. As with display, an intermediary is inserted between the affiliate who wants to advertise and the affiliate who wants to sell the space.
Mobile telephony like the Internet, it is a medium that embodies all the others: tv, radio, augmented reality display, Internet, cinema, with the major characteristics of mobility and its corollary, geolocation. In addition, is the first medium that is always handheld, that is mostly switched on, making the consumer reachable at all times, the most effective medium for developing user-generated content, the best medium for tracking consumers: tracking their navigation, their purchases, their consumption habits through geolocation, their age and gender, and even their virality potential and finally probably the most “measurable” of media.
In this mobile environment, a crucial role is played by social media.
Once considered millennials’ territory, social media is now being used by everybody. No matter who a company's target buyers are, they’re using social media, making it more important than ever to develop an effective social media marketing program. Social media marketing should always be conducted through the lens of corporate objectives.
Some campaigns may be intended to drive brand awareness, other campaigns may be designed to support a product launch, which means that different social media campaigns will be directly linked to different evaluation models to measure their success.
Talking about overall media, a possible classification of that media is to divide them between owned, paid, and earned media.
- Owned media are the communication media directly managed by the company, the institutional website, the mobile site, the organization’s blog, the official Facebook or Twitter account, and so on. In that kind of media lies the total control of the message that a company has to communicate. The main targets are the existing customers and the potential ones.
- Paid media are the medium that is bought by the company to reach the desired visibility. Among these, there is the display ads, network, TV, and radio campaigns, and the paid search on Google. The main target of that media is strangers, the aim is to reach potential new customers.
- Earned media are all the communication channels in which the company is involved through quotations, reviews, and conversations among users. Review on TripAdvisor, Facebook’s shares and likes, and so on. On this channel is important to listen to and monitor consumers’ conversations, ideas and judgments. The role in earned media is something that companies can’t buy but has to be gained. However, it can be boosted by pr digital action, word of mouth, and viral marketing.
A good media mix must consider a well-balanced use of their paid, owned, and earned media to perform better in the digital context.
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