The fabric of society is changing and what interests the younger generation is changing even faster. If we talk about the future virtual world: Digital Marketing is about to enter a more challenging territory. Digital Marketing is an umbrella term used for all of your online marketing efforts which includes digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, Ad world, Google search, social media and many more.
Building on the vast increase in consumer power brought on by the digital age, marketing is headed towards being on-demand; not just always “on”, but also always relevant, responsive to the consumer’s desire for marketing that cuts through the noise with pin-point delivery.
What is fuelling on-demand marketing is the continued, symbiotic evolution of technology and consumer expectations. When a consumer decides to make a purchase, he/she will venture online to search for information. Marketers have learnt to pre-empt consumer expectations and his/her search behaviour. By optimizing search positioning for their products, companies can make sure their products end up in the consumer choice set. Search marketing is becoming one of the biggest media outlays. Companies have well-directed digital marketing campaigns in place, making perfect use of websites and social medial channels, by trying to promote consumer advocacy and evangelism through the proliferation of positive consumer-generated content.
Companies are creating new and improved ways for engaging and involving their consumers. Marketers have been smart to capitalize on the consumer’s desire for more urgency and ubiquity, a desire for greater convenience and value for money.
Companies need to focus on identifying the best influence pathways for companies while also triggering new personalized experiences for consumers. Appropriate use of digital information technologies will be the key to these endeavours. The following two key digital technologies that are taking the world by storm are:
- The Internet
- The Mobile
Every digital interaction represents an opportunity to provide something extra-ordinary to the consumer, through vigorous software development, programming, increased data access and retrieval, and interface possibilities.
Digital Impetus: Digital marketing courses, classes and training traverses a course, which commences with investigating the rising power of social media and how organizations can benefit from the world of corporate blogs, Facebook, online communities, social networks, and Wikis and proceeds to explore the domain of the Internet, its characteristics and features, the power of individuals online, and subsequently the realm of the online brand. E-marketing serves as a significant apparatus to build credibility and trust and enhance the value perception of the consumers for a particular organization, product, or brand. It explores the upcoming domains of Facebook marketing and the digital revolution, gaining momentum through the world of Apps and gamification.
The Business Drivers in the future virtual world: Digital Marketing
Here we addresses the realm of social media, social media analytics and software tools used for analytics in the virtual world, and concepts pertaining to online branding- intricacies of online brand architecture, enriched with strategies directed towards establishing brand resonance, reinforcing brand salience, creating brand identity and meaning and many more.
Digital Impetus: Digital marketing courses, classes and training focuses on how organizations can leverage the Internet for greater marketing profitability and revenue generation. By developing the relevant Web business model, organizations can utilize the Web for generating revenue and visibility and by developing the right keyword management strategies and investing in suitable Web traffic plans; they can maximize returns from their online presence.
1] Social Media
Social media refers to the means of interaction among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. Social media is a group of Internet-based application that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Furthermore, social media depends on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platform via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content.
Despite its low cost, social media accounts for about 10% of the advertising budgets worldwide. Consumers care about what other consumers think, and those with the widest reach have the potential to sway lots of friends and followers. According to the survey, blogs were considered more likely to influence an Internet user’s purchase decision than any other social channels, including Facebook; only brand and retailer’s sites ranked higher. Blogs are the primary place where influencers engage with online fans.
Social media nowadays has a great impact on the social behaviour of people and their behaviour as a consumer. Its journey started from digitally empowered desktop computers to super-fast laptops and now mobile phones. This has affected the way brands and consumer’s communicate, which has given birth to a new technique of marketing, namely, inbound marketing. Inbound marketing focuses on producing relevant, audience captivating, high-quality content that attracts consumers towards the online presence of a specific organization, brand, or product. It is a way to earn attention organically.
2] Online Branding
The best way to spark a consumer’s imagination and then activate their wallet is to combine the physical and the digital experience, meshing data, online connections, and an on-ground experience. Used with imagination and innovation, digital communication allows organization to work better.
Push strategies in marketing use marketing communication to motivate the customer to buy. While the traditional media can be used to push products towards the consumer, once awareness reaches a certain threshold, it starts to plateau. Marketing then needs to engage and immerse the consumer to give him/her a compelling reason to buy. This is where online brands need to be fashioned.
In recent years, the offline and online spheres of strategic brand management are becoming more and more inter-connected. Firms are increasing their online spend on digital marketing in the realms of social media, mobile applications, customer relationship management [CRM], customer analytics, tablet applications, content management, collaboration tools, predictive analytics, campaign management, search engine optimization[SEO], e-mail marketing, single view of customer, score cards or dashboards, and reputation management.
Branding is an on-going process of monitoring brand perception to ensure that a brand is always meeting consumer expectations and evolving with customers’ changing needs. A brand’s growth is severely limited if it lacks an emotional connection with consumers. It is up to an organization to create branded experiences that allow people to become emotionally involved with their brand.
Online media with low-cost archives and flexible formats provide an inexpensive setting to expand brand imagery. The website of a brand can serve as an authoritative source to share information regarding the brand and serve as a reasonable solution for problems pertaining to the brand.
Organization need to establish online brand identity. This involves – establishing brand resonance and reinforcing brand salience, creating brand identity and online domain names, enhancing brand meaning, reinforcing right brand responses, and forging brand relationships.
3] Traffic Building
To draw and analogy with the Internet, online content is growing abundantly and so are the number of users; however, what is scare for organizations is – user attention. With the proliferation of diverse typologies of online content, the four major challenges before companies are as follows:
- creating the right set of keywords,
- advertising and content,
- driving users to the website, and
- Making them stay on the website.
Significantly, companies need to have well-defined online traffic plans in place and also need to spend on traffic building online. It is building the right online advertising ecosystem and leveraging the appropriate Web business models that companies will be able to grow in the digital space.
Search engine marketing [SEM] is the form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in the search engine results page. It may use search engine optimization [SEO] that adjusts or rewrites website content to achieve a higher ranking in search engine result pages or uses pay-per-click listings.
Companies need to have a detailed Web traffic plan in place to use concepts related to digital marketing more effectively. The three components of an Internet traffic plan are as follows:
- Traffic-building sources
- Traffic volume and quantity
- Traffic-building goals
An Internet traffic plan is developed using a series of e-marketing strategic and tactical choices. It is vital for a company’s website presence to generate consumer traffic, as it is the traffic that builds visibility and subsequently consumer engagement.
Traffic sources can fall into eight major categories –
- Branding decisions
- Search engine marketing
- e-commerce
- lead-based websites
- affiliate marketing
- online banner advertising
- publicity and
- word-of-mouth
Companies make use of several search marketing methods and tactics for Web visibility and competitive analysis. The traffic-building goals of any organization should aim at the following:
- maximising short-term/long-term profit,
- minimizing cost-per-action and
- maximizing actions, subject to spending capacity.
4] Content Marketing
Information overload in the Internet age can force people to become passive receptors of information. It is hence important for an organization to make sure that the right information reaches the right people at the right time. A higher perceived value by the customer in the organizational information will stimulate consumer interest leading to a desire to interact, achieving ‘engagement’ from the organizational perspective.
Organizations can build relationships with their prospective and current consumers through posts on a corporate blog and encourage consumers to participate by commenting on the blog, thereby stimulating consumer involvement. It is important for companies to analyse the impact of content and volume of brand communication hosted in the virtual medium on the degree of consumer engagement it is able to generate.
It is important for companies to analyse the impact of content and volume of brand communication hosted in the virtual medium on the degree of consumer importance it is able to generate. Organizations use corporate blogs to post content for consumer consumption. Objectives range from catering to exploratory consumer browsing, aiding a consumer’s quest for information, helping consumers gain access to organizational promotional campaigns to responding to controversies regarding endeavour and eventually achieves consumer engagement for the organization as the consumer commences participation. Content categorization is achieved to enable organizations to post consumer-relevant content to induce greater consumer participation.
The key idea of a content marketing is to cater to a long-term brand impact, attracting consumers and motivating regular visits through appropriate content are the simple methodologies. Customers will devour the content only when they provide perceive value in the same. This can happen only when the organizational objectives for content creation match the consumer expectations at the time of contact.
5] Web Planning & Development
Website Planning is a process for identifying the Business Objectives and User Needs that drive the Development Cycle. This is the first step for building a successful website. It allows you to explore some of the most fundamental issues of site development. For example:
- Why are we doing this?
- What value will our website produce (from the investment we are making)?
- Who is our audience?
- What do they want?
Website Development is a process for creating a new website or implementing changes to one already in use, e.g. adding a significant new section to a live site.
In simple terms, the process represents a framework within which all activities—from inception to review (and eventual demise, if necessary)—can take place.
There are 8 steps in the development process. These are:
- Planning: Decide why you want a website and what to create.
- Content: Create a list of the content you want.
- Design: Create a design for displaying the content.
- Construction: Write the code and load up your content.
- Test: Make sure everything works properly.
- Hosting: Choose a domain name & find a place to put your site on the internet.
- Publicity: Build traffic via publicity the site.
- Review: Review the site at intervals it to make sure it succeeds.
And to master yourself in the Digital marketing, join Digital Impetus: digital marketing courses, classes and training. Digital Impetus is a world knowledge bank for Internet Marketing & Business. One can approach and reach us easily for certified training, and enter into the world of Information Technology (IT), the most prominent and growing industry in today’s & future world too.
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