Digital Marketing Strategy

• 5Ds of Digital Marketing encompasses digital devices, platforms, media, data, and technology.
• Digital marketing's defined as the application of digital media, data, and technology, integrated with traditional communications, used to achieve marketing objectives.

Purpose of Strategy

• Establishes the future direction of an organization.
• Determines how to create value for customers.
• Establishes where the company will invest resources.
• Identifies methods to outperform competitors.

Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

• Identifies customer needs and wants through listening, monitoring, and analytics.
• Provides multiple channels for customers to access information and make purchases.
• Increases convenience and creates frictionless purchase experiences.

Key Features of Digital Marketing Strategy

• Alignment with business and marketing strategy.
• Clear objectives for business, brand development, and digital channels' contribution.
• Consistency with target customer types.
• A compelling value proposition, communicated effectively to the customer.
• Use of a mix of online and offline tools
• Support for the customer journey
• Management of online customer lifecycles

Digital Marketing Objectives

• Sell: Increase sales through wider distribution, product range, and lower prices.
• Serve: Add value- giving customers extra benefits online or improve product with online feedback.
• Sizzle: Extend brand online with a new proposition and familiar experience.
• Save: Reduce costs through online communication, sales, and service.
• Speak: Get closer to customers via two-way dialogue and influencer outreach.

Analysing The Digital Environment

• All resources are limited, all competitors react, and all customers change
• Environmental scanning helps detect and collect information through observation and secondary sources.
• Environmental analysis assesses and interprets information from market intelligence.
• The analytics landscape includes descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.

External MACRO Environment

• Micro trends are shifts changing the business environment in the short term.
• Macro trends are significant shifts affecting the business environment long-term.
• The PESTLE model evaluates Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, Technological, Legal, and Environmental factors.
• PESTLE can be used for scanning, analysis, prediction, anticipation, and adaptation.
• Apply PESTLE variables, provide a brief events description and explain the implication for the organization.
• Score on a 1 to 5 scale, how certain the company is that the event will happen.
• Score the event’s impact on a 1 to 5 scale.

Scenarios

• Useful with PESTLE to handle the external marketing environment
• Scenario analysis helps firms assess the effect of changing variables.
• The process plots certainty/importance scores on a matrix.
• Bottom-left quadrant: Low importance/certainty = No action.
• Upper-left quadrant: High certainty, low importance = No action.
• Upper-right quadrant: High importance/certainty = Take action.
• Bottom-right quadrant: High importance, low certainty = Prepare scenarios.

External MICRO Environment

• The Microenvironment refers to the industry in which an organization competes.
• Industry consists of different sets of companies satisfying customer needs.
• Porter’s five forces model defines profitability via competitive forces.
• Buyers seek lower prices.
• Suppliers want higher pay, deliver less
• Substitutes increase the likelihood that customers will switch to alternatives.
• New Entrants increase competition.
• Existing Rivals reduce profitability.

Strategy

• Strategy involves building competitive defenses or finding weaker industry spots.
• Ecosystem Competition benefits success by helping other firms and innovation.
• An Ecosystem is a network spanning multiple sectors with shared standards and platforms.
• Competitor benchmarking compares a company's online services capabilities vs. competitors.
• RACE framework helps manage digital marketing activities and informs benchmarking.
• Plan: Manages digital marketing as a strategic/execution process.
• Reach: Effectiveness in reaching and influencing online audiences.
• Act: Encourages audience interactions on a company's site.
• Convert: Effectiveness in achieving leads or sales after interaction.
• Engage: Longer-term engagement leading to repeat sales.

Internal Environment

• A resource-based approach focuses on internal resources for a competitive advantage.
• Resources include tangible and intangible assets.
• Examples:
  • Financial, human, Physical, Intangible
• Capabilities include skills, learning, knowledge, and processes.
• Digital Marketing Capabilities Assessment evaluates a firm’s performance via
  • Strategic approach, performance improvement, Management buy-in
  • Resources, data, infrastructure, Integrated communications and customer experience

Strategic Fit

• Must identify a fit between environment needs and the organization capabilities.
• Must identify a fit between organization needs and environment possibilities.
• SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) evaluates these fits.

Digital Marketing Strategy

• Setting a strategy involves determining
  • Long-term goals and objectives
  • Allocation of resources
  • Integrated plan of action to exploit resources
• Hierarchy of Strategic Decisions includes decisions about the environment, resources, and skills.

Corporate Level Strategy

• Involves decisions planning the company's future, vision, and mission.
• Assesses portfolio analysis and resource allocation.
  • BCG Matrix with Stars, Dogs, Cash Cows, and Question Marks
• Business Portfolio Analysis deals with the collection of goods and services provided by a company.

Competitive Marketing Strategy

• Corporate strategy: overall scope and direction of a firm and marketing strategy.
• Decisions/actions on building advantage and targeting the minds of customers.
• Deciding on a competitive approach:
  • Cost leadership: Achieve high productivity at the lowest cost.
  • Differentiation leadership: Stand out from the crowd.
  • Focused strategy: Focus on a highly selective segment.
• Porter’s Generic Strategies- Cost, Differentiation and Focus

Marketing Strategies

• Thinking first analyzes a problem and develops a solution logically.
• Seeing first relates to the whole picture, relevant for new ventures.
• Doing first experiments and learns from mistakes.
• Simple rules involve selecting key strategic processes.
• Ansoff’s Matrix options
  • Market penetration strategy: Increase share
  • Market development strategy: New markets
  • Product development strategy: Modifications
  • Diversification: Brand moves into new businesses
• Companies do not always need a strategy/keep changing

Campaign Marketing Strategy

• Must have a clear strategy that guides content creation and media activation.
  • A brand’s creative platform represents a theme to target customers
  • Positioning is how the brand is communicated.
  • Meaningful and distinct competitive position.
• 3C’s model - Context, Customer, Company = Strategic fit

Managing Customer Heterogeneity

• Customer heterogeneity is variation in needs, desires, and behaviors.
• Digital marketers must segment markets to take advantage of customer heterogeneity.
• Segmenting involves dividing a market into similar customer groups.
• Targeting involves choosing the best customer group to sell to.
• Positioning involves improving your advantage in the minds of your target customers.
• Involves leveraging scarce resources.
• Ensures a marketing mix addresses the needs of specific customer groups.
• Criteria to segment Markets for relevant digital marketing include Geo-demographic.
• Housing/location and purchase behavior relationship

Customer Profiling

• Segmentation identifies groups, and personas enrich these.
• Segmentation forms the basis of personas.
• Personas provide a picture of a typical customer.
• Ways to develop personas:
  • Data your business collects
  • Marketing research by companies
  • Data from on-line tracking:

Targeting

• Mass marketing era
• Niche marketing era
• One-to-one marketing era
• Segment characteristics
• Competition
• Company fit
• Must be identifiable
• Must be substantial
• Must be accessible
• Must be stable
• Must be differentiable
• Must be actionable
• Retargeting = Increase conversions, Introduce new products, and Move inventory faster
• Different approaches for the best customer group:
  • Undifferentiated
  • Differentiated
  • Focused/concentrated marketing
  • Customized marketing

Value Propositions

• Describes the bundle of products and services that create value for a specific segment.
• Developing a value proposition involves considering:
  • Products and services to host the proposition
  • Gain enhances: a benefit for the target customer
  • Pain reducers: Alleviates a pain for the target customer
• Value depends on usefulness, symbolism, and exchange value
• Elements of value affect Brand loyalty and revenue growth
  • Functional, Emotional, Life-changing, Social impact

Positioning

• Process to improve the relative advantage in the minds of your customers
  • Designing the company’s distinct image
  • Based on Differentiation
  • Leads to customer-focused value proposition
• Effective positioning includes physical attributes and how it’s communicated.
• Requires that marketers define and communicate similarities and difference
• To determine frame of reference and identify ideal points-of-parity and points-of-difference brand

Brand analysis

• Differentiates brands from competition
• Competitive Frame of Reference defines competing brands.
• Competitive frame of brands position
• PODs (Points-of-difference) should be unique
• POPs (Points-of-parity) shared with other brands

Consumer Empowerment

• Freedom of consumers to control and shape their experiences.
• Brand shifts from broadcaster to facilitator.

Brand Hijacking

• Consumers take control.
• Fake news is more likely to be shared.
• Deep-fakes spread misinformation.

Brand Equity

• Brand activation: brand… DAKR = brand equity:
  • Development, Activation, Knowledge, Response
• Brand Identity- Expresses specificities of the brand and helps customers differentiate brands

Brand identity

• Successful brands are meaningful, different, and salient
• Brand physique: it is made of a combination of either salient objective features or emerging ones.
• Brand personality: the way in which it speaks of its products or services shows what kind of person it would be if it were human.
• Brand culture: a brand should have its own culture, from which every product derives Brand relationship: how the brand wants to establish relationships with its customers
• Reflection: the brand’s perceived client type
• Self-Image: how the target feels as a result of owning/using the brand

Brand Knowledge

• Affects consumers through awareness and brand image
• Brand Awareness involves:
  • Recall or recognise the brand
  • Strength of the brand in memory
  • Recognition and recall performance

Brand Recognition

• Brand recognition involves confirm exposure to as a cue Brand Recall requires generate the brand.
• Brand image is the set of ideas about the brand.
• Brand equity relates to if brand name result from marketing a product
• Brand equity is the effect that brand knowledge has on consumer response.