Digital Marketing Five Units Notes PDF

DIGITAL MARKETING Five Units Notes Department of Computer Science St. Joseph's Degree & PG College, Hyderabad BBA (IT) / B.Com (IT) / I Year - II Semester 1|Page...

DIGITAL MARKETING Five Units Notes Department of Computer Science St. Joseph's Degree & PG College, Hyderabad BBA (IT) / B.Com (IT) / I Year - II Semester 1|Page Digital Marketing  DIGITAL MARKETING UNIT- I: Digital Marketing: Introduction to Digital Marketing. Traditional Vs. Digital Marketing, Technology behind Digital Marketing, Characteristics of Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing Strategy, Understanding Digital Consumer. UNIT-II: Online Advertising: Introduction, Objective, Where to Advertise, Online AdFormat, Search Engine Ad, Network Advertising, Affiliate Programs, Landing Pages UNIT-III: Email Marketing: Introduction, Types of Email, Email Marketing Campaign Process, Email marketing Tools, Advantages and Disadvantages, Opt-in Email Advertising, Email tracking UNIT-IV: Social Media Marketing (SMM): What is Social Media Marketing, Seven Myths of SMM, Characteristics of Successful Social Media Marketer, Social Media Marketing plan, Social Media marketing Tools, Publishing Blogs, Podcast and Webinars, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media: Facebook, Twitter. UNIT-V: Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Understanding SEO, Search Engine Optimization Process – Goals, On-Page Optimization, Off-Page Optimization and Analyze, Search Engine Result Process (SERP), SEO Tools. Lab Work: Online Advertising, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Conducting Webinars Search Engine Optimization 2|Page Digital Marketing  Unit – I Digital Marketing Introduction to Digital Marketing, Traditional Vs Digital Marketing, Technology behind Digital Marketing, Characteristics of Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing Strategy, Understanding Digital Consumer. Introduction to Digital Marketing: Today’s time of Internet has opened the gateway of tremendous digital marketing opportunities for businesses. By utilizing different channels of digital marketing, businesses cannot just share their product and services online; additionally they can gain clients for their business, entice them and can convert them to boost their business profits. The speed and straightforwardness with which the digital media transmits data and support a business is astonishing. The world is super-connected nowadays and all things considered, marketing and advertising are no more the same as they once were. This is particularly valid because of the ascent of online networking, which has changed how organizations speak with potential and existing customers. Essentially, it is an aggregate term, which is utilized where advertising and marketing meet web innovation and different types of online media platforms. Traditional Marketing Vs Digital Marketing: The debate continues as to whether digital marketing is overpowering and surpassing traditional marketing or not. Many think that for the most part, digital marketing has taken over and traditional marking barely exists, if at all. Recent occurrences such as the magazine giant, Newsweek switching to totally digital publications cause ripples throughout the marketing arena. Over the last year or so traditional marketing had fallen nearly 160% while in the same time frame expenses for digital marketing increased over 14%. Traditional Marketing: The traditional way of marketing lets businesses market their products or administrations on print media, radio and TV commercials, bill boards, business cards, and in numerous other comparable ways where Internet or web-based social networking sites were not utilized for promoting. ▪ However, traditional promoting approaches had constrained client reachability and extent of driving clients’ purchasing conduct. In addition, traditional marketing methods were not quantifiable too. ▪ There are many facets of traditional marketing and examples might include tangible items such as business cards, print ads in newspapers or magazines. It can also include posters, 3|Page Digital Marketing  commercials on TV and radio, billboards and brochures. Traditional marketing is anything except digital means to brand your product or logo. ▪ Another overlooked means of traditional marketing is when people find a particular business through a referral or a network and eventually you build a rapport with them. ▪ Because of its longevity, people are accustomed to traditional marketing. Finding ads in magazines and newspapers, or reading billboards are still familiar activities and people still do them all the time. ▪ Most of the time, traditional marketing is reaching only a local audience even though it is not limited to one. ▪ There are some aspects where traditional marketing wins over the online advertising battle, which include Target Local Audience, Materials are for keeps, More personal and Simpler process. ▪ One of the primary disadvantages of traditional marketing is that the results are not easily measured, and in many cases cannot be measured at all. ▪ In most cases, traditional marketing is also more costly than digital marketing. And perhaps the biggest disadvantage today is that traditional marketing is static which means there is no way to interact with the audience. It’s more like you are throwing information in front of people and hoping that they decide to take action. Digital Marketing: Digital Marketing can be understood as a well-targeted, conversion-oriented, quantifiable, and interactive marketing of products or services by utilizing digital innovation to achieve the customers, and transform them into clients in a sustainable fashion. The whole concept and functionalities of Digital Marketing are more competent, effective, result-oriented and measurable, which make it very different from traditional marketing. 4|Page Digital Marketing  ▪ Digital or online marketing is the marketing mode of the global village. It is only obvious that the era of the internet will have its influence in every realm of life. ▪ The world of digital marketing continues to evolve and as long as technology continues to advance, digital marketing will as well. ▪ Examples of digital marketing include things like websites, social media mentions, YouTube videos, and banner ads. Specifically, digital marketing is similar to traditional advertising, but using digital devices. ▪ However, digital marketing is considered a form of inbound marketing and its goal is for people to find you. Businesses put content (or ads) out for individuals to find. ▪ People may conduct an organic online search, a paid search, find your business on a social network or by reading content that has been published online such as a blog or an article. The more they see you or your content, the more familiar they will become with your brand and they will eventually develop a trust and a rapport with you through this online presence. ▪ One benefit to using digital marketing is that the results are much easier to measure; and another is that a digital campaign can reach an infinite audience. It is also possible to tailor a digital campaign to reach a local audience but it can also be used on the web and reach the entire globe when appropriate. ▪ Digital marketing is also a very interactive means of reaching an audience since it makes use of social outlets. There can be plenty of direct contact between the audience and the business which means that the business can get some very valuable consumer feedback. ▪ Benefits of Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing include reduced cost, real time result, brand Development, non-intrusive, higher exposure, higher engagement, Quicker publicity, Non interruptive, Good For All Stages Of Fields, Easy analytics and Strategy Refinement. ▪ One of the disadvantages to using digital media marketing strategies is that it can take some time to realize measurable success. Differences between Traditional Marketing & Digital Marketing: Traditional Marketing Digital Marketing 1. Communication is bidirectional in 1. Communication is unidirectional in Digital Marketing as businesses can traditional marketing, which means, an communicate with customers and organization communicates about its customers can ask queries or make services with its audiences. suggestions to businesses as well. 2. Medium of communication in traditional 2. Medium of communication is more marketing is generally phone calls, powerful and involves social media emails, and letters. websites, chats, apps and Email. 3. Digital marketing campaigns can be 3. Campaign in Traditional marketing developed quite rapidly and with digital takes more time as designing, preparing, tools, channelizing Digital Marketing and launching are involved. campaigns is easier. 4. It is very effective for reaching global 4. It is best for reaching local audience. audiences. 5|Page Digital Marketing  5. It is almost impossible to measure the 5. Digital Marketing lets you measure the effectiveness of a traditional marketing effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign. campaign through analytics. Characteristics of Digital Marketing: We are living in the digital age today. Outdated marketing won’t help you get profits you desire for. Digital Marketing is a necessity today of almost every business. There is no way around it. The way you dedicated a lot of your time and effort to making your product, similarly it is important to invest in a complete digital strategy to launch and show your product or services to your targeted audience and continually improve your brand presence online. Make sure that you evaluate all your options so you get aware of your digital marketing platforms and whether or not you’re really boosting the potential of your marketing campaign. When done correctly, this can help you stand out from the crowd and get succeed. Digital Marketing is a great way of increasing brand awareness, customer engagement and long-term loyalty and generating a short-term boost in sales, despite the fact that every digital marketing campaign is different in their own ways, the reality is that many of them are built on common basics and a few key elements. Successful Digital Marketing Campaign requires a lot of time following through analytics and data to find insights. But, as we have analyzed which characteristics successful campaigns share to help you. 1. Get a Quality Company Website: What was a novelty a mere decade ago is a critical requirement today. A business website is a pseudo B2B portal, allowing businesses and customers from around the world to connect with you. A business website is similar to your Company brochure, available 24×7, and projects you as a professional outfit. 2. Social Media Presence: The biggest achievement of this digital era has been the ease with which people have learnt to communicate- Social Media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube etc. are the latest methods to communicate across wide demographics of age, taste and culture. By actively promoting your company on these social media, you are getting the world to talk about you. 3. Blogging and Forums: Here is a powerful axiom- 'Content is King'. Produce powerful, genuine and compelling content as part of your Company blog. Be a regular on relevant forums and discussion panels. Learn the art of connecting your business themes into the content that you produce. In time, your content will stand up to be the biggest promoter of your brand. 4. List your business on the three biggest listing services: Register your business on 'Google Places'- this allows your business to feature on Google searches and be listed on Google Maps. Other business databases that you must be part of include 'Yahoo! Local' and Microsoft's 'Bing'. Joining these services is free; setting up an 6|Page Digital Marketing  account takes very limited time and the far reach of these services translates to free promotion for your business. 5. Email Marketing: In recent times, bulk emailing isn't a very favored promotional concept. However, if done well, and with good intentions, email marketing could be a powerful tool in your Company's online promotional arsenal. Personalized emails speak directly to the target audience, helps you get an immediate response and can aid in the opening of a line of communication with your prospective customer base. It's free and fast promotion- with an impactful feedback. 6. A Dedicated Digital Marketing Expert: If you aren't sure about pulling off a good promotional job individually, maybe it's a good idea to hire an innovative, enthusiastic Digital Marketing Consultant to handle your Company's online promotional strategy. This action will allow you to be on top of your promotional ideas while employing a professional to implement concepts that drive towards your expected results. Technology behind Digital Marketing: Developments in technology and the evolution of marketing are inextricably intertwined. Technology has underpinned major milestones in the history of marketing since its inception. The process tends to go something like this: ▪ New technology emerges and is initially the preserve of technologists and early adopters. ▪ The technology gains a firmer foothold in the market and starts to become more popular, putting it on the marketing radar. ▪ Innovative marketers jump in to explore ways they can harness the power of this emerging technology to connect with their target audience. ▪ The technology migrates to the mainstream and is adopted into standard marketing practice. The printing press, radio, television and now the internet are all examples of major breakthroughs in technology that ultimately altered the relationships between marketers and consumers for ever, and did so on a global scale. But, of course, marketing isn’t about technology; it’s about people: technology is only interesting, from a marketing perspective, when it connects people with other people more effectively. There are plenty of examples of technology through the ages having a significant impact on various markets – technology that may seem obscure, even irrelevant today. The mainstream adoption of digital technology – the internet, the software applications that run on it, and the devices that allow people to connect both to the network and to each other whenever, wherever and however they want to – promises to dwarf all that has come before it. The first global communications network: ‘the highway of thought’ To understand the explosive growth of the internet we need to look back at how early communications technology evolved into the global network of interconnected computers that 7|Page Digital Marketing today we call the internet. The story of electronic communication begins with the wired telegraph – a network that grew explosively to cover the globe, connected people across vast distances in a way that seemed almost magical, and changed the world for ever. Early Networks: The internet story really starts in 1957, with the USSR’s launch of the Sputnik satellite. It signalled that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in the technology stakes, prompting the US government to invest heavily in science and technology. In 1958, the US Department of Defense set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a specialist agency established with a specific remit: to make sure the United States stayed ahead of its Cold War nemesis in the accelerating technology race. You’ve got mail E-mail, which is still often described as the internet’s ‘killer application’, began life in the early 1960s as a facility that allowed users of mainframe computers to send simple text-based messages to another user’s mailbox on the same computer. But it wasn’t until the advent of ARPANET that anyone considered sending electronic mail from one user to another across a network. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an engineer working on ARPANET, wrote the first program capable of sending mail from a user on one host computer to another user’s mailbox on another host computer. As an identifier to distinguish network mail from local mail Tomlinson decided to append the host name of the user’s computer to the user login name. To separate the two names he chose the @ symbol. E-mail, one of the Internet’s most widely used applications, and one of the most critical for internet marketers, began life as a programmer’s afterthought. The ARPANET was a solution looking for a problem. From ARPANET to Internet : The term ‘internet’ was first used in 1974 by US computer scientist Vinton Cerf (commonly referred to as the ‘father of the internet’, and now a senior executive and internet evangelist with Google). Cerf was working with Robert Khan at DARPA on a way to standardize the way different host computers communicated both across the growing ARPANET and between the ARPANET and other emerging computer networks. The Transmission Control Program (TCP) network protocol they defined evolved to become the Transmission Control Program/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol suite that’s still used to pass packets of information backwards and forwards across the internet to this day. In 1983 the ARPANET started using the TCP/IP protocol – a move that many consider to signal the true ‘birth’ of the internet as we know it. That year, too, the system of domain names (.com,.net, etc) was invented. By 1984 the number of ‘nodes’ on the still fledgling network passed 1,000 and began climbing rapidly. By 1989 there were more than 100,000 hosts connected to the internet, and the growth continued. Making Connections – ‘birth of the Web’ It was in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee, a British developer working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, proposed a system of information cross-referencing, access and retrieval across the rapidly growing internet based on ‘hypertext’ links. The concept of a hypertext information architecture was nothing new, and was already being used in individual programs running on individual computers around the world. The idea of linking documents stored on different computers across the rapidly growing internet, though, was 8|Page Digital Marketing nothing short of revolutionary. The building blocks for the world wide web were already in place – but it was Tim Berners-Lee’s vision that brought them together. The first web page on the internet was built at CERN, and went online on 6 August 1991. It contained information about the new world wide web, how to get a web browser and how to set up a web server. Over time it also became the first ever web directory, as Berners-Lee maintained a list of links to other websites on the page as they appeared. The World Wide Web – A New Frontier Up to this point, the internet had been the realm of technologists and scientists at research institutions. But the advent of the web changed the landscape, making online information accessible to a much broader audience. What happened next was explosive. Between 1991 and 1997 the web grew at an astonishing 850 per cent per annum, eclipsing all expectations. With more websites and more people joining the online party every day, it was only a matter of time before innovative tech-savvy marketers started to notice the web’s potential as an avenue for the marketing message. In August 1995 there were 18,957 websites online; by August 1996 there were 342,081 (‘Fifteen Years of the Web’, Internet timeline, www.bbc.co.uk). It was an era that saw the birth of some of today’s most well-known online brands: sites like Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay and, in September 1998, Google Inc. Boom, Boom... Bang! For a time it seemed as though the halcyon days of the late 1990s would continue forever and that the dot.com bubble was impervious to bursting. Fuelled by speculative investment and high- profile high-tech IPOs, the Nasdaq Composite stock index continued to rocket upwards. Each new dot.com success fuelled the fervour for technology stocks, blowing the bubble up a little more. On 10 March 2000 the Nasdaq index hit an intraday high of 5,132.52 before settling to an all-time closing high of 5,046 points. Enough Technology – let’s talk about people One of the key things to remember is this: digital marketing isn’t actually about technology at all; it’s all about people. In that sense it’s similar to traditional marketing: it’s about people (marketers) connecting with other people (consumers) to build relationships and ultimately drive sales. Technology merely affords you, the marketer, new and exciting platforms that allow you to connect with people in increasingly diverse and relevant ways. Digital marketing is not about understanding the underlying technology, but rather about understanding people, how they’re using that technology, and how you can leverage that to engage with them more effectively. Yes, you have to learn to use the tools at your disposal – but understanding people is the real key to unlocking the potential of digital marketing. A huge and growing market Although internet companies suffered bruised finances and a tarnished public image in the wake of the dot.com crash, the internet itself never stopped growing, in terms both of the number of websites online and, crucially from a marketing perspective, of the number of people with internet access. In March 2000, when the dot.com bubble burst, there were an estimated 304 million people in the world with internet access. By March 2003 that figure had doubled to 608 million, and in December 2005 the global online population passed 1 billion. As of December 2007 the figure sat at around 1.3 billion people. That’s 20 per cent of the world’s population – and climbing (Internet World Stats, www.internetworldstats. com). As global and local online populations have spiralled upwards, so too have the levels of broadband penetration, which 9|Page Digital Marketing means that not only are there more people online but they’re also online more often, for much longer periods of time and can do much more with that time. All of this means the market penetration of digital channels is growing rapidly. As the potential audience grows, so too does the allure of digital marketing. Marketers around the world are sitting up and taking notice, and big name brands are starting to take the internet and other digital marketing channels seriously: loosening the purse strings and redistributing their advertising spend. Introducing Consumer 2.0 Web 2.0 is not a revolution in technology; it’s an evolution in the way people are using technology. It’s about harnessing the distributed collaborative potential of the internet to connect and communicate with other like-minded people wherever they are: creating communities, and sharing knowledge, thoughts, ideas and dreams. If you’ve ever shared photos on Flickr, read and commented on a blog, looked for friends on Facebook or MySpace, watched a video clip on YouTube, tried to find your house on Google Maps, video-called friends or family abroad using Skype or looked up an article on Wikipedia, then you’ve used Web 2.0 technologies. Analysts at Jupiter Research identified seven key ways in which the increasingly widespread adoption of technology is influencing consumer behavior: ▪ Inter-connectivity: Networked digital technology is enabling consumers to connect with each other more readily, be it through e-mail, instant messaging (IM), mobile messaging, or web-based social networking platforms such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn – or more likely a combination of all of these platforms. Consumers are interacting with like-minded people around the world, paying scant regard to trifling concerns like time zones or geography. Peer-to-peer interaction is reinforcing social networks and building new virtual communities. ▪ Technology is leveling the information playing field: With digital technology content can be created, published, accessed and consumed quickly and easily. As a result the scope of news, opinion and information available to consumers is broader and deeper than ever. Consumers can conduct their own unbiased research, comparing and contrasting products and services before they buy. Knowledge is power, and digital technology is shifting the balance of power in favour of the consumer. ▪ Relevance filtering is increasing: With such a glut of information available to them, digital consumers are, through necessity, learning to filter out items relevant to them and to ignore anything they perceive as irrelevant. Increasingly digital consumers look to have their information aggregated, categorized and delivered (whether through e- mail or RSS feeds). They use personalization features to block out irrelevant content and increasingly employ software solutions to exclude unsolicited commercial messages. ▪ Niche aggregation is growing: The abundance and diversity of online content allow consumers to participate in and indulge their specialist interests and hobbies. Aggregations of like-minded individuals congregate online; the homogeneous mass consumer population is fragmenting into ever-smaller niche groups, with increasingly individual requirements. 10 | P a g e Digital Marketing  ▪ Micropublishing of personal content is blossoming: Digital media’s interactive and interconnected nature allows consumers to express themselves online. Publishing your own content costs little more than a bit of time and imagination, whether through discussion forums, message boards, feedback forms, voting platforms, personal photo galleries, or blogs. Users are posting their opinions online for all to see and are consulting the opinion of their online peers before making purchasing decisions. How often do you check an online review before booking a table at an unknown restaurant or a weekend break at a hotel, or even buying a new car? ▪ Rise of the ‘prosumer’: Online consumers are getting increasingly involved in the creation of the products and services they purchase, shifting the balance of power from producer to consumer. They’re letting producers know what they want in no uncertain terms: the level of interaction between producer and consumer is unprecedented. Individuals are more involved in specifying, creating and customizing products to suit their requirements, and are able to shape and mould the experiences and communications they receive from producers. Traditional mass-production and mass- marketing concepts are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. ▪ On demand; any time, any place, anywhere: As digital technology becomes more ubiquitous in people’s lives, the corresponding acceleration of business processes means that consumers can satisfy their needs more quickly, more easily and with fewer barriers. In the digital economy, trifling concerns like time, geography, location and physical store space are becoming irrelevant. It’s a world of almost instant gratification, and the more consumers get of it the more they want it – now, now, now! Digital Marketing Strategy: Why you need a digital marketing strategy? The simple answer: because without one you’ll miss opportunities and lose business. Formulating a digital marketing strategy will help you to make informed decisions about your venture into the digital marketing arena and ensure that your efforts are focused on the elements of digital marketing that are most relevant to your business. It’s a crucial first step towards understanding how the constantly evolving digital marketplace relates to you and how it affects the relationship between your business or brand and your customers and prospects. ▪ It doesn’t matter what business you’re in; it’s a fairly safe bet that an increasing number of your target market rely on digital technology every day to research, evaluate and purchase the products and services they consume. ▪ Without a coherent strategy of engagement and retention through digital channels your business is at best missing a golden opportunity and at worst could be left behind, watching your competitors pull away across an ever-widening digital divide. ▪ Unlike conventional forms of mass media marketing, the internet is unique in its capacity to both broaden the scope of your marketing reach and narrow its focus at the same time. ▪ Using digital channels you can transcend traditional constraints like geography and time zones to connect with a much wider audience. At the same time, digital technology allows you to hone your marketing message with laser-like precision to target very specific niche segments within that wider market. Implemented effectively, it can be an incredibly powerful combination. 11 | P a g e Digital Marketing  ▪ It’s often stated that the internet puts consumers in control as never before. But it’s also important to remember that the internet also delivers an unprecedented suite of tools, techniques and tactics that allow marketers to reach out and engage with those same consumers. The marketing landscape has never been more challenging, dynamic and diverse. ▪ And therein lies the crux of our need for a cohesive digital marketing strategy. If you’re going to harness the power of digital marketing to drive your online business to dizzying new heights, you need a thorough understanding of your market, how your customers are using digital technology, and how your business can best utilize that same technology to build enduring and mutually rewarding relationships with them. ▪ As digital channels continue to broaden the scope available to us as marketers, so they add to the potential complexity of any digital marketing campaign. Having a clearly defined strategy will help to keep you focused, ensure that your marketing activities are always aligned with your business goals and, crucially, ensure that you’re targeting the right people. Defining your Digital Marketing Strategy: Once you’ve decided that you do, in fact, need to pursue some form of digital marketing, the next step is actually to sit down and define your strategy. Unfortunately there is no ‘one size fits all’ strategic panacea here. We don’t have a magic recipe to ensure your digital marketing success, and neither does anybody else. Basically every business needs to ‘bake’ its own unique strategy based on its own particular set of circumstances. While the available ingredients are the same, the resulting strategies can be radically different. If you sell apples to local grocers by the truckload, your strategy will bear little resemblance to that of a company selling downloadable e-books and reports on financial trading, which will in turn be very different to the strategy adopted by a sports clothing manufacturer who wants to cut out the retailer and sell directly to consumers over the web. Different products, different markets, different needs – different solutions. What it ultimately boils down to is this: the best people to define your digital marketing strategy, curiously enough, are the people who best know your business. Laying strong digital foundations: The good news is that you’ve almost certainly already started the process of defining your digital marketing strategy. Probably been thinking about digital marketing in the context of your business, about what your competitors are doing online and why, about how your customers and prospects are integrating digital technology into their lives, and about how you can best exploit these new and exciting digital channels to foster longer, more productive relationships with them. These are the components that will form the foundation of your digital marketing strategy: ▪ Know your business: Is your business ready to embrace digital marketing? Are your products or services suited to online promotion? Do you have the right technology, skills and infrastructure in place? How will digital marketing fit into your existing business processes, do those processes need to change, and are you and your staff ready to accommodate those changes? ▪ Know the competition: Who are your main competitors in the digital marketplace? Are they the same as your offline competitors? What are they doing right (emulate them), 12 | P a g e Digital Marketing  what are they doing wrong (learn from them), what aren’t they doing at all (is there an opportunity there for you?) and how can you differentiate your online offering from theirs? Remember, competition in the digital world can come from just around the corner or from right around the globe. The same technologies that allow you to reach out to a broader geographical market also allow others to reach into your local market. When you venture online you’re entering a global game, so don’t limit your analysis to local competition. ▪ Know your customers: Who are your customers and what do they want from you? Are you going to be servicing the same customer base online, or are you fishing for business from a completely new demographic? How do the customers you’re targeting use digital technology, and how can you harness that knowledge to engage in a productive and ongoing relationship with them? ▪ Know what you want to achieve: If you don’t know where you’re going, there’s a pretty fair chance you’ll never get there. What do you want to get out of digital marketing? Setting clear, measurable and achievable goals is a key part of your digital marketing strategy. Are you looking to generate online sales, create a source of targeted sales leads, improve your brand awareness among online communities, all of the above or perhaps something completely different? Your goals are the yardsticks against which you can measure the progress of your digital marketing campaigns. ▪ Know how you’re doing: The beauty of digital marketing is that, compared to many forms of advertising, results are so much more measurable. You can track everything that happens online and compare your progress against predefined goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). How is your digital campaign progressing? Are certain digital channels delivering more traffic than others? Why is that? What about conversion rates? How much of that increased traffic results in tangible value to your business? Measure, tweak, refine, re-measure. Digital marketing is an ongoing and iterative process. The process of formally defining your digital marketing strategy forces you to sit down and analyze the market in which you’re operating with a critical eye, and to really think about the different components of your business and how digital marketing can help you to achieve your business goals. Don’t get down in the technical details – remember, digital marketing is about people communicating with other people; the technology is just the bit in the middle that helps it to happen. Your strategy should provide you with a high-level framework – a bird’s-eye view of the digital marketing landscape with your business centre stage; the details will come later. Understanding Digital Consumers: There is a notion that pervades marketing circles today, a notion of mysterious ethereal creatures who exist in a hyper-connected, multifaceted cyber-world of their own. They are an enigma: they speak a different language, communicate in ways we don’t understand, and they’re turning the world of marketing on its head. These are the ephemeral, wraithlike ‘digital consumers’, who slip effortlessly through the marketer’s grasp. Digital consumers are different, we’re told – but are they really? The Digital Consumer revealed 13 | P a g e Digital Marketing The first thing to realize about digital consumers is that there’s basically no such thing. The customers and prospects you encounter online are the very same people who walk into your store every day, call you on the telephone, or order something from your mail-order catalogue. There’s nothing dark, sinister or mysterious about them. They’re people – like everybody else. ‘There is no great mystery about how [digital consumers] think and what they want’, maintains interactive marketing expert. These consumers are doing exactly what people have been doing for thousands of years – communicating with each other. The fact that technology is enabling them to communicate with each other faster, over distance, over mobiles and in 3D worlds is being perceived as something dangerous, unique and extraordinary, something that needs to be controlled and pinned down. People talk to each other – they always have. Making the Web their own Consumers, whatever their ‘flavour’, don’t care about the way marketers define what they do. Concepts like above the line, through the line, below the line, digital, traditional, experiential, linear, analogue, mobile, direct, indirect or any other ‘box’ we care to slip our marketing endeavours into are completely meaningless to them. All consumers care about is the experience – how the marketing available to them can enhance the experience and help them to make more informed decisions. People are the single most important element in any form of marketing. That’s just as true in the digital space as it is in any other sphere of the discipline. As a marketer you need to understand people and their behaviour – and here’s where the notion of the digital consumer does carry some weight, because consumer behaviour is changing, and it’s changing because of the pervasive, evocative and enabling nature of digital technology. Digital marketing allows us to build uniquely tailored ongoing relationships with individual customers. Marketing in the digital age has been transformed into a process of dialogue, as much about listening as it is about telling. I don’t know you and you don’t know me Perceived anonymity is another online trait that can have a profound effect on consumer behaviour. It liberates consumers from the social shackles that bind them in the real world; online they are free to do and say as they please with scant regard for the social propriety that holds sway in ‘real life’. In a bricks-and-mortar store shoppers will wait patiently for service, and will often endure a less-than-flawless shopping experience to get what they want. Online they won’t; they demand instant gratification and a flawless customer experience. You have to deliver, first time, every time. If you fail to engage, retain and fulfill their expectations on demand, they’re gone, vanishing into the ether of cyberspace as quickly as they came, the only trace a fleeting, solitary record left on your web server’s log file. Key traits of the Online Consumer Well, there’s something about the immediacy and anonymity of the digital experience that has a similar effect on people. It’s always risky to generalize and make assumptions about people – especially in a field as dynamic and fast moving as this one. The only real way to know your market intimately is to conduct original research within your particular target group. That said, a lot of research work has been done (and continues to be done) on the behavioural traits of online 14 | P a g e Digital Marketing consumers, and a broad consensus has emerged around the key characteristics that epitomize digital consumers: Digital consumers are increasingly comfortable with the medium: Many online consumers have been using the internet for several years at this stage – and, while the user demographic is still skewed in favour of younger people, even older users are becoming increasingly web savvy. As people become more comfortable with the medium they use it more efficiently and effectively, which means they don’t hang around for long: your content needs to deliver what they want, and it needs to deliver quickly. They want it all, and they want it now: In the digital world, where everything happens at a million miles per hour, consumers have grown accustomed to getting their information on demand from multiple sources simultaneously. Their time is a precious commodity, so they want information in a format that they can scan for relevance before investing time in examining the detail. Designers and marketers need to accommodate this desire for ‘scannability’ and instant gratification when constructing their online offering. They’re in control: The web is no passive medium. Users are in control – in the Web 2.0 world more than ever before. Fail to grasp that simple fact and your target audience won’t just fail to engage with you, but they will actively disengage. We need to tailor our marketing to be user-centric, elective or permission based, and offer a real value proposition to the consumer to garner positive results. They’re fickle: The transparency and immediacy of the internet don’t eradicate the concept of brand or vendor loyalty, but they do erode it. Building trust in a brand is still a crucial element of digital marketing, but today’s consumers have the power to compare and contrast competing brands literally at their fingertips. How does your value proposition stack up against the competition around the country and across the globe? Your brand identity may be valuable, but if your overall value proposition doesn’t stack up you’ll lose out. They’re vocal: Online consumers talk to each other – a lot. Through peer reviews, blogs, social networks, online forums and communities they’re telling each other about their positive online experiences – and the negative ones. From a marketing perspective this is something of a double- edged sword – harness the positive aspects and you have incredible viral potential to propagate your message; get it wrong, and you could just as easily be on the receiving end of an uncomfortable online backlash. Using influencers to help spread the word There is one particular category of users online that warrants a special mention when it comes to defining your digital marketing strategy. Dubbed ‘influencers’, these early adopters are the online opinion leaders. Through blogs, podcasts, forums and social networks they harness the power of the web to extol the virtues of products and brands that they like, and equally to denigrate those they find unsatisfactory. Why are influencers important to you as a marketer? Because they have the virtual ear of the online masses. People read and listen to what they have to say; they value their opinion and trust their judgment. These online influencers have already won the pivotal battle for the hearts 15 | P a g e Digital Marketing and minds of online consumers. Engage positively with them, and you essentially recruit a team of powerful online advocates who can have a potentially massive impact on a much wider group of consumers. This is the online equivalent of ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing, on steroids. Of course, give them a negative experience and, well, you can guess the rest. But how exactly will you recognize these online influencers? A December 2006 report by DoubleClick (‘Influencing the Influencers: how online advertising and media impact word of mouth’) defined influencers as people who ‘strongly agreed’ to three or more of the following statements: ▪ They consider themselves expert in certain areas (such as their work, hobbies or interests). ▪ People often ask their advice about purchases in areas where they are knowledgeable. ▪ When they encounter a new product they like they tend to recommend it to friends. ▪ They have a large social circle and often refer people to one another based on their interests. ▪ They are active online, using blogs, social networking sites, e-mail, discussion groups, online community boards, etc to connect with their peers. Identifying the influencers within your market sector, analyzing their behavior and tailoring part of your digital campaign to target this small but influential group can result in disproportionate knock-on benefits. Don’t neglect your core market, of course – but certainly consider targeting influencers as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. 16 | P a g e Digital Marketing  Unit – II Online Advertising Introduction, Objective, Where to Advertise, Online Ad Format, Search Engine Ad, Network Advertising, Affiliate Programs, Landing Pages. Introduction: Simply put, online advertising is advertising on the Internet. Online advertising encompasses advertisements on search engine results pages, advertisements placed in e-mails, and other ways in which advertisers use the Internet. ▪ Whether online or off, the main objective of advertising is to increase sales. Advertising also aims to increase brand awareness. Advertising is based on the simple economics of supply and demand. Advertisers aim to stimulate a consumer need and then satisfy that need. ▪ One of the greatest benefits of online display advertising is that the messages are not restricted by geography or time. ▪ Online advertisements are also much more interactive than offline advertising. While both online and offline advertising can be disruptive, interactive online advertising can be designed to be perceived as less so. ▪ Online display advertising began as simple hyperlinked images shown on a Web site and has since progressed to include video, sound, and many other modern technologies. Today, messages and interactions can be contained within the advertising display without ever taking consumers to a landing page. ▪ Although the Internet provides new scope for creative approaches to advertising, we see its true advantage when we realize how trackable, and therefore measurable, Internet advertising is. Or, to take it from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, “The Internet will transform advertising because of its trackability, not its beauty.” History: Online advertising rapidly followed the developing Internet. And, as consumers are increasingly spending more time online, and hours spent on the Internet start to eclipse hours spent watching television, the medium becomes increasingly important to any advertiser. According to Wikipedia, the first clickable banner advertisement was sold to a law firm in 1993 by Global Network Navigator. HotWired, an early Web magazine, was the first to sell advertising space in large quantities to a number of advertisers. One of the very first advertisers was AT&T (a U.S. telecom company), which went online in October 1994. Figure 3.1 An Early Banner Ad for AT&T This was part of a campaign that AT&T was running to promote the Internet to consumers, and included television and outdoor advertising. Believe it or not, but this was cutting edge back in 17 | P a g e Digital Marketing 1994! As Web technology has developed, so has the technology that is used to create and serve advertising online. Definition of Online Advertising: Online advertising is a marketing strategy that involves the use of the Internet as a medium to obtain website traffic and target and deliver marketing messages to the right customers. Online advertising is geared toward defining markets through unique and useful applications. Since the early 1990s there has been an exponential increase in the growth of online advertising, which has evolved into a standard for small and large organizations. Online advertising is also known as Internet advertising. A major advantage of online advertising is the quick promotion of product information without geographical boundary limits. A major challenge is the evolving field of interactive advertising, which poses new challenges for online advertisers. Online advertisements are purchased through one of the following common vehicles: Cost per Thousand (CPM): Advertisers pay when their messages are exposed to specific audiences. Cost per Click (CPC): Advertisers pay every time a user clicks on their ads. Cost per Action (CPA): Advertisers only pay when a specific action (generally a purchase) is performed. Examples of online advertising include banner ads, search engine results pages, social networking ads, email spam, online classified ads, pop-ups, contextual ads and spyware. Objectives of Advertising: Understand when best to use online advertising. Advertising, whether online or offline, has a number of objectives: 1. Building Brand Awareness: Making people aware of a brand or product is an important long-term goal for any marketer. Once customers know about the brand, the marketer has taken the first step toward gaining the customer’s trust and patronage. The better known a brand is, the more business they can do. And the ultimate goal is to do more business and sell more of the product. Online, creative advertising or banner advertising is largely visual, making it an ideal channel for promoting brand collateral. 2. Creating Consumer Demand Consumers can’t want what they don’t know about. Advertising needs to convince consumers about what they should want and why they should want it. Modern online advertising provides a great way to communicate the USPs (unique selling points) of a product, thereby helping stimulate demand. 3. Satisfying Consumer Demand: Once the consumer is aware of and desires a product, they need to find out how to satisfy that desire. If brand building has been effective, they will know that a particular brand exists. At this point, it is important for the marketer to show the consumer how their particular brand or product will best meet that need. 4. Driving Response and Sales: All forms of online marketing need to drive traffic and sales in the long term. However, the immediacy of online advertising also drives traffic 18 | P a g e Digital Marketing  and sales in the short and medium terms. Unlike traditional media advertising, online advertising can turn the potential customer into an actual customer right there and then. What’s more, it is possible to measure accurately how effectively the online advertising campaign does this. 5. The Key Differentiator: Online advertising is able to drive instant sales and conversions. Unlike offline advertising mediums, the consumer can go from advertisement to merchant in one easy click. Because of the connected nature of the Internet, online activities are highly trackable and measurable, which makes it possible to target advertisements and to accurately track and gauge the effectiveness of the advertising. Each display advertisement can be tracked for success. 6. Introducing a New Product to the Market: Online advertising is an important strategy when a new product or brand is launched, however this should often be after the launch of an online public relations campaign which includes press releases, blogs, news sites and other tactics to gain wide media coverage. Advertising before the launch of an online PR is not advisable because it loses its newsworthiness and media outlets are unlikely to accept it. Some online channels to use to announce your new product are display ads on networks like the Google Display Network (GDN), Search advertising, organic search, email marketing and others. 7. Explain how a Product Works: Advertising can help to explain the uses of a product and in what setting it is to be used. It’s often easier with video advertising which can include animation, motion, text, graphics and many other elements. It is also effective at showing the product in use and even talking heads are great for explaining how it works. 8. Reduce Buyer Fear: Video advertising is also helpful here after a purchase to reduce fear that the customer has bought the wrong product and to explain how they can use it. Buyer remorse is a major problem especially for high-ticket items that require a high financial outlay, so it’s important to allay their fears and convince them that they have made the right purchase. 9. Build Company Image: Many online channels are effective at building a company’s image but social media is one of the best and using advertising tools on sites like Facebook you can reach out to new, existing and non-existent customers. This is about raising brand awareness and reinforcing the company’s image at all touchpoints with the target market. Social media is helpful because the company can interact with followers and build a relationship outside of its own portals. 10. Build Brand Preference: There are many brands in the online space that are vying for customers’ attention and it’s important to highlight brand attributes and values and create a competitive advantage for your brand. Using advertising vehicles like PPC advertising, display advertising, social media paid advertising and others, your brand can promote its unique online value proposition and increase click through rate, conversions and brand recall. 11. Inform Market of an Offer: If you have a sales promotion and want to inform the market through online advertising, you can use text and display ads on search and display platforms. So you can include a money-off offer, a coupon or voucher, category discount and many others and these are effective at boosting CTRs for ads and also conversions. 19 | P a g e Digital Marketing  12. Encourage Switching to Your Brand: Comparative advertising is common online especially on PPC platforms like Google Adwords. So, you can bid on competitor brand names and then display ads that highlight your unique offers and how your products have a competitive advantage. Of course many competitors will be doing the same so it’s important that you bid on your own brand names too. 13. Maintain Top Of Mind Awareness: Remarketing is an online advertising vehicle that works well for a wide range of brands and companies that want to raise brand awareness, increase sales or leads, increase brand recall and be top of mind. Google Adwords, Analytics and Facebook provide remarketing features and resources to target people that are aware of your brand and then bring them back to your website and purchase from your business. 14. Remind Buyer of the Product or Brand: This marketing objective is similar to top of mind awareness and using remarketing and pay per click advertising; it is possible to effectively remind target customers of your products or brands. The benefit is that it is affordable and you only pay for clicks to your website, unlike traditional advertising vehicles were you pay even if there is no customer interaction or response. Where to Advertise? Advertising can be expensive – and way out of your budget if you’re just starting out as a freelancer or small business. But with some clever thought, there are a few ways you can promote your enterprise for free in your local area. Different ways to advertise your business: Here are 10 simple ideas for promoting your freelance services or small business for free in your local area (and beyond). 1) Make sure your website adds value Whether you’re targeting local or global customers, your website should clearly explain what you do, be easy to find and navigate, and be attractive. An article in E- consultancy suggests that you should look at the following things when building or rebuilding your website: How goal-focused it is. The quality of your content. How easy your website is to use by its intended target audiences. How well it projects and communicates your brand identity. How search engine optimized (SEO) it is. Social media channel usage and integration. Mobile internet users. 2) Make blogging a high priority It’s important to add a blog to your website because it increases your chances of being noticed, and helps with your SEO as you can use your keywords and phrases in your blog posts. Websites get crawled quite regularly so it’s always important to have new, quality content. 20 | P a g e Digital Marketing  Writing a regular blog also gives your audience an opportunity to interact with you by placing their comments about your posts. Remember to add social sharing buttons to your blog posts so readers can easily share them, and more people can discover you and your business. 3) Distribute a press release once a month It’s important to keep in touch with your local newspaper and submit press releases which have the potential opportunity to get you in print for free. These could be about anything from taking on new staff to winning a new client – it doesn’t have to be big news, just something to let local businesses know you are there. If you build relationships with editors and journalists this will help ensure that your press release is read and hopefully published. As will our quick, 30-second guide to writing a powerful press release! 4) Use email marketing software to help increase sales This method is fast, effective, immediate and easy to design. You can also track and understand exactly how your email marketing software is growing your business and see how individual customers respond so you can increase sales over time. To get full value from your email marketing, ensure that you update and grow your database regularly, and try to get people to opt-in by signing up on your website. There are many self-service email platforms available (such as MailChimp), or you may decide to get help from a specialist agency. 5) Start using videos to market your business YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, so it makes sense to create a YouTube Channel and leverage proven video marketing tactics, like ‘how-to’ style video content and response videos, to improve search visibility and potentially drive leads. One idea is to make individual video interviews on local news-makers in your niche using Skype. Once you’ve recorded the video, to maximize its benefit: Post it on YouTube. Embed the YouTube code on your website. Transcribe the video with a cheap tool. Post the transcribed content on your blog for search engines to find. Or you could host an online seminar and share it on your website and via social media networks – a perfect opportunity to gain exposure. 21 | P a g e Digital Marketing  6) List your business on popular local directories Getting clients and customers to find out where you are is crucial, and one of the best ways local businesses can be found online is by adding their company to top online business directories. There are a number of popular online directories, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Yelp, Yellowbook and Foursquare. Make sure you place your details on all of them, because if you are only posting on these top few, then you will be missing an opportunity to be found by customers and clients who are after your services. You can find a more comprehensive list of free directories on HubSpot. 7) Be active on social media It’s important to know who your target audience is, as this is one of the most popular ways to get noticed. You can promote any news, events and interact with your audience as well as post your blog content through the most common media channels, including Facebook, Google+ LinkedIn and Twitter. 8) Verify your listing on Google+ Local Previously known as Google Places, Google+ Local is a way of verifying on Google maps where your business physically is. This can be verified by anyone at the business. Google will send a pin number through to your exact business address, and as long as someone enters this pin number onto your listing it means you are verified and can receive the benefits. These include more chances to appear within Google local searchers, the opportunity to connect your Google+ profile to your Google+ Local listing, and the opportunity to gain reviews from your customers that will then show up as star ratings in your search results. The best bit about this is that it’s completely free. 9) Attend local networking events and build connections The best way to meet new local contacts (and potential customers) is to get out there and start networking. Make a point of attending events and meet-ups focused on your business topic, and participate in conversations by asking questions or volunteer to speak at a live blog conference. You can search local events by region and town or city on Find Networking Events. You can also look for networking events specifically for women, as well as workshops, seminars and business shows. 22 | P a g e Digital Marketing  10) Guest post on someone else’s site Writing a blog for someone else’s site is a great way to gain more exposure for your business, and get a reputation as an expert – especially if they’re well known in your local area. Guest posting gives you an excellent opportunity to make new contacts with bloggers and hopefully attract some loyal readers. These readers could well evolve into customers, so guest posting is going to be beneficial towards your increase in revenue. Just make sure you stay within the Google guidelines for guest posting. Other relevant directories that could increase exposure for your business include: Bing Places for Business: Only Google outpaces this free Microsoft product in visits, and you can add multiple business locations, photos, videos, and more during your fast, free, and easy registration. Yahoo Local Listing: Ranking third next to Google and Bing, Yahoo’s service draws millions of searches daily. Yelp is one of the best online sources for candid consumer reviews. Bonus: It allows you to send public or private messages (including deals) to customers and review business trends using the Yelp reporting tool. The most reviewed categories on Yelp include shopping, restaurants, and home services respectively. MerchantCircle is a free network targeted toward small businesses seeking to connect with local customers and other small businesses in their areas. Yellow Pages: This well-organized online version of the antiquated classic generates millions of daily searches. It offers advertising, lead generation, and detailed ad performance data. White Pages: This lists some 30 million companies, offering sponsored ad opportunities and a premium text message service for clients. Superpages.com: This free, easy-to-navigate service includes helpful options, including weather and lottery listings, as well as fast access to popular categories, search tips, and a Facebook sign-in option. Yellowbook allows for easily searchable business listings that include your business information, a link to your website, product descriptions, a map feature, and options for display and video ads. 23 | P a g e Digital Marketing  YellowBot provides basic contact and location info about your business similar to the Yellow Pages, with customer reviews and options that include premium listings, searchable tags, and fast sign-in via Windows Live, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or Twitter. Manta calls itself one of the largest online resources dedicated to small business. “The Manta directory boasts millions of unique visitors every month who search our comprehensive database for individual businesses, industry segments, and geographic- specific listings,” it reports. “[We] deliver helpful news and advice, promotion opportunities, and tools for small businesses. Citysearch: This free site specializes in listings for restaurants, bars, spas, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses across the U.S., optimizing them via a partner network that includes Expedia, Urbanspoon and MerchantCircle. MapQuest: This blast-from-the-past web-mapping service owned by Verizon gets searchers to your physical location quickly and easily via detailed maps. Local.com: This free directory gives searchers detailed info about events, deals, and info relevant to a given city. Its database includes more than 16 million business listings covering every zip code in the U.S., it reports. Paid ad options allow for coupons and other features. Foursquare: This combination business directory and social networking site allows users to check in via map and comment about your business, with or without the Foursquare mobile app. DexKnows: This business listing site monitors your reviews and ratings and provides data into how customers engage with your profile, giving insights to online and offline advertising opportunities. The DexKnows mobile app is available for Android and Apple and allows users to make single-tap searches, write reviews, mark favorites, and find fuel stations based on GPS locations. The Business Journals: This local option, available in most major U.S. cities, generates 8 million monthly searchers and offers four levels of listings. Its searchers rack up an average income of more than $97,000, and 84 percent shop online. Angie’s List: This respected site is known for its objective consumer reviews in more than 720 categories. More than 3 million members turn to Angie’s List to research, hire, rate, and review local service providers. Hotfrog: This free, detailed online directory can help get your website listed in Google search results. Options include coupons for your customers. The site attracts 1.6 million active users monthly across 38 different countries. Kudzu: This free database reports that it helps some 20 million homeowners a year make decisions regarding their renovations. Options include a dedicated account manager who can work to boost your website in search results. Profiles can include marketing descriptions, photographs of work performed, videos, coupons, professional affiliations, credentials, and user-generated reviews and ratings. 24 | P a g e Digital Marketing  Trip Advisor offers a flat subscription rate for any business related to the hospitality or entertainment industries in 48 markets worldwide. Calling itself the world’s largest travel site, it reaches 390 million average monthly unique visitors and so far has logged some 435 million reviews and opinions covering 6.8 million accommodations, restaurants, and attractions. Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate Marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners. Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner. In simplistic terms, therefore, affiliate marketing is the practice of driving traffic from one site to another in return for reward. Right now, affiliate marketing is very much the staple diet of adult, gaming and retail sites across the web, but it is rapidly extending its reach into other vertical markets like mobile phones and finance, which are, incidentally, the highest-spending categories in global online marketing. The affiliate marketing eco-system Affiliate marketing is still treated by many as a bit of a dark art within the overall marketing mix. Many brands are wary of the potential for misrepresentation and seek reassurances on a range of issues, including security, fraud and brand bidding. ‘Brand bidding’ is the term used to describe the practice of affiliates buying keywords on PPC programmes relating directly to brands or trademarks, with the sole objective of driving traffic towards the brand site and generating income for the affiliate. Many marketers want to maintain control over their own brand names, believing that this is, in essence, their traffic to begin with and that affiliates or other partners should stay away from these particular keywords and focus on more ‘long-tail’ keyword phrases to drive traffic. In other words, some marketers don’t want to find themselves competing with affiliate partners in the SERPs. Others are more enthusiastic about affiliate marketing and regard it as an integral part of their overall online marketing operations. On the plus side, affiliate marketing offers you a ready-made sales force operating on a reward or commission-only basis – in an age when marketers continuously seek ways to offset risk this surely has to be worth investigating, right? On the negative side there are plenty of challenges surrounding measurement, and a lack of clear communication channels between affiliates and brands. For example, say a customer clicks on a special offer on an affiliate site, only to discover on arriving at the brand site that the offer has already expired – that’s bad news for the affiliate and for the brand, because both lose 25 | P a g e Digital Marketing revenue potential, but more seriously they also alienate a customer, perhaps for good (and, remember, online consumers are highly accomplished when it comes to letting their peers know about bad online experiences). Today things are starting to hot up on the affiliate front. Early in 2008 Time Warner’s AOL acquired affiliate network buy.at, and in the travel sector Expedia-owned TripAdvisor acquired Holidays Watchdog, deals that demonstrate how seriously investors are treating the whole affiliate business model. But who are these people? Meet your affiliates: The most basic affiliates are individuals (or companies run by individuals) or larger organizations who leverage their web properties to suck traffic from around the web and then push that traffic out to brand sites in return for commission. A click on an affiliate site can pay handsomely for high-value transactions. One web hosting company, for example, pays its affiliates up to $600 for new business. More traditional affiliates, such as poker rooms and casinos, pay up to $400 for a new account and a decent share of all revenue earned too. So there’s plenty of incentive. Affiliates may be considered by some as the bottom feeders in the affiliate ecosystem, but they are a vital component in achieving any sort of scale through investment in the affiliate marketing channel. You should look after your affiliates as well as you’d look after your own sales force. Equally, the age-old adage ‘Be wary of strangers bearing gifts’ applies, and you should make sure you have controls and measures in place to monitor your affiliates: there is no point in signing up 100 affiliates who are unchecked, unmotivated and unproductive. Moving up a notch, you have what are known as super-affiliates. These would typically include price comparison sites like moneysupermarket.com and pricerunner.com as well as loyalty sites like the Irish-owned pigsback.com (the term ‘on the pig’s back’ is derived from an old Gaelic expression that essentially means someone is ‘on to something good’). Super-affiliates do pretty much the same thing as affiliates, but on a much larger scale. Companies like E-conversions, for example, operate as super-affiliates for major brands such as Dell, British Gas and SKY in the UK market. One example we encountered at the 2008 Internet World show in London was the US-owned Affiliate Response Network; their proposition is very straightforward. Once you are set up as a client and they conduct some initial testing on search terms (to find out what keywords pull relevant, targeted traffic) they connect your brand to a high-performing online network of affiliates focused on getting results. They will work closely with you to assess the optimal channels to pull targeted traffic: this could be e-mail, search, display, emerging media and so on. Typical models of business they support include cost per lead, cost per sale, etc. The network also provides clients with real-time tracking and reporting systems, an essential ingredient in understanding the power of affiliate marketing and also in allowing marketers to get a more accurate picture of which digital marketing elements really work for them. So who lives in this ecosystem? Consumers, clients, affiliates, super-affiliates, affiliate networks and not forgetting, of course, Google and the search engines (which sounds suspiciously like a dodgy 1970s rock band). Depending on your view of the world, Google with its distributed AdSense pay-per-click model is the biggest affiliate marketing player of them all. Then again, in the words of the great Jerry Reitman, former head of direct marketing worldwide for Leo Burnett’s, ‘at the end of the day... it’s all advertising’. 26 | P a g e Digital Marketing Online Ad Format: The text ads that appear alongside Google search results are just one type of ad format you can create with AdWords. You can also promote your products and services with video ads, image ads, app or digital content ads, and more. Each ad format has its own benefits, whether it's the ease and affordability of running a text ad, or the colorful storytelling that comes with video. You can run multiple kinds of ads from the same AdWords account and, in some cases, from the same campaign. Ad formats available in an AdWords account Format Description Main benefits Text Words only. * Maintain ads quickly and easily. Reach customers when they search on Google. Use Ad extensions to Boston's Best Bonsais - Spring Sale provide additional details and Going on Now contact information that can make Adwww.example.com your text ads more relevant to customers. Florist And Indoor Plant Nursery. Two Locations. Spruce Up Your Desk Today! Responsive Responsive ads automatically adjust their In a matter of minutes, create ads size, appearance, and format to fit that fit just about any ad space available ad spaces. They can transform available. Plus, responsive ads can into text or image ads. show as native ads, which boost your impact by blending into publisher’s websites. Image Static or interactive graphics. Animated Showcase your product or service ads in.gif and Flash format can be used. in a visual way. Reach customers on websites that partner with Google. 27 | P a g e Digital Marketing  App Drive app downloads and engagement Send your customers to download promotion with app promotion ads. your app from an app store, or ads include a deep link directly into your app. Note: Ads will appear only on devices compatible with your content. Video Video ads that show online. Run Deliver a rich and engaging standalone video ads or insert them in experience to customers. Reach streaming video content. customers on websites that partner with Google. Product Shopping ads show users a photo of your Show an ad featuring your product Shopping product, a title, price, store name, and to people shopping online for that ads more details about your product. product or related products. Showcase An image and description that expands Show a Shopping ad to people who Shopping when clicked to show several related are researching where to buy rather ads products and information about the store. than looking to buy a specific product. Showcase Shopping ads are available in Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Ireland, India, 28 | P a g e Digital Marketing  New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, the UK, and the US. You may create Showcase Shopping ads using the new AdWords experience and the AdWords API. If you want to advertise individual products, check out Product Shopping ads Call-only Call:(555)555-555 Drive phone calls to your business ads with ads that include your phone Adwww.example.com number. People can click on these Description Line 1 ads and then call your business Description Line 2 directly. These ads will only appear on devices that can make phone calls, and any field in these ads can be hidden to fit on smaller screens. Search Engine Ad: Search engine advertising (SEA) is a branch of online marketing and, together with SEO, a discipline of search engine marketing. In SEA, advertisements in the form of a text or images are posted on search engines such as Google or Bing. The advertisements then appear prominently in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). The posting of advertisements within the framework of SEA belongs to the main source of income for search engine providers. SEM vs. SEA vs. SEO The terms SEO, SEA, and SEM are mainly used less selectively. The following description will try to compare and contrast these marketing terminologies. SEM Search engine marketing, abbreviated: SEM Combination of SEA and SEO, branch of online marketing SEA Search engine advertising, abbreviated: SEA Posting of ads in the form of a text or images on search results pages or other websites Ad booking in the SERPs based on bids on keywords for which the ads are placed Good ranking can be achieved through optimization of text ads and offers Clear control of advertisement measures with calculable success Means to increase traffic or improve the brand Can be part of a temporary marketing campaign Many possibilities for targeting or retargeting It can be part of remarketing Acknowledged as advertising 29 | P a g e Digital Marketing SEO Search engine optimization, abbreviated: SEO Includes measures to optimize websites for crawling and indexing by search engines using on-page and off-page optimization. Good rankings can be achieved through optimization of the website onpage and off-page factors No decisive guarantee that optimization measures will lead to better positions for certain keywords Branding is more of a secondary part of an SEO strategy SEO is often long-term Targeting can only be done through tests, evaluations, and estimations that lead to the adaptation of the content or seeding Rather “invisible” for the user Objectives of SEA: Search engine advertising is usually a part of a marketing or branding strategy. One of the primary objectives of SEA is to increase the click-through rate since the number of clicks on a website can quickly be increased through the posting of advertisement space. In addition, the Conversion Rate is particularly important for the SEA, as it ultimately determines how high the advertising costs are, and thus the ROAS. At the same time, search engine advertising can also be used to generate advertising pressure through page impressions from display campaigns. For the most part, advertisements are used by customers in the e-commerce industry since SEA is aimed at persuading the user to buy. Thus, one of the main objectives is to increase conversions in the form of sales. However, newsletter subscriptions, downloads, or reviews, and leads, can be manipulated through search engine optimization. The scope of the SEA measures is thereby always dependent on the amount of invested advertising budget as well as the actual search volume of research keywords. Google AdWords: Google Adwords is a product of Alphabet Inc. that offers marketers a wide range of advertisement opportunities in the SEA field. The principle of placing ads through AdWords is based on auctioning. Advertisers bid on specific keywords or they pay for clicks and impressions on display advertisements. Factors, such as the quality of the landing page, quality of the ad text, as well as relevance of the keywords and positive history of the AdWords account, play a crucial role in the final placement of text ads or banners. Banners or text ads posted through Google AdWords are always regarded as advertising. The following forms of advertising are possible using Google AdWords: Classic text ads: An advertiser selects keywords with which his/her text ads will be displayed on a prominent position in the SERP. This entails creating the so-called campaigns that, in turn, consist of ad groups. Every ad group is categorized into advertisements based on the selected keywords. If a user searches for one of these keywords, the corresponding AdWords advertisement is displayed. Product listing ads: With the so-called Shopping Ads (former Product Listing Ads), Google AdWords offers the possibility to place product ads that are directly created from a product 30 | P a g e Digital Marketing  file generated by the customer. The modulation is done by specifying the Structured Data in the data feed. Display ads: These are ads in the form of images or text that are placed on platforms belonging to the Google advertisement network. Registration for this network can be done through the Google AdSense platform. Google AdWords offers the possibility to combine different forms of advertisement of SEA. Simultaneous placement of PLA, text ads, and display ads is, therefore, possible. The AdWords platform is one of the most used SEA tools in the world. Video ads: Advertisers in the Google AdWords program can also place ads on YouTube. Text or video ads are available for this purpose. Gmail-Ads: If you use Google AdWords, you can also book ads in Gmail accounts. Payment is made via CPM or Cost-per-Click. With the AdWords Express program, Google offers small companies the possibility to use SEA without having to create their own campaigns. The thereby required files are automatically generated by Google. The advertiser only provides his/her advertising budget. Bing / Yahoo ads: Together with Yahoo, Bing also offers its own SEA platform. Bing / Yahoo ads]] function in a similar way to Google AdWords. However, due to Google’s market dominance, Google AdWords is the platform that is mostly used for SEA in Germany and Europe. Nevertheless, a comprehensive SEM strategy should also include possibilities to advertise on Bing and Yahoo. This applies, for example, to the USA, where Bing has a significantly larger market share than in Germany. Other SEA platforms: Besides the major search engine providers, almost all larger search engines offer their own advertising programs. SEA, through specialized search engines, can also be advantageous depending on the targeting. As an alternative to purchasing ads from Google AdWords, for example, Amazon product ads can also be placed on the Amazon platform. For example, if a website also wants to be successful in Russia, SEA for Yandex, etc. should also be taken into consideration. If an online shop wants to advertise vehicle parts to specific target groups, it also has the option to place its ads on different car comparison portals. Posting models: In SEA, posting ads is done based on different provisions: CPC (cost per click): Here, the advertiser specifies how much he/she is willing to pay per click. CPA (cost per acquisition): The advertiser specifies how much he/she is willing to pay per conversion achieved through the advertising measures. CPM (cost per thousand): The advertiser specifies how much he/she is willing to pay per 1,000 impressions of his/her advertisements. 31 | P a g e Digital Marketing  Cost per call: Here, certain advertisement portals offer the possibility to specify how much an advertiser is willing to pay per visit, Google AdWords, for example. Cost per lead: Depending on the web portal, costs for leads such as subscribing to a newsletter or downloading a PDF can also be agreed upon. Impacts of SEA on SEO: Although search engine advertising is not considered to be SEO, SEA can possibly have an impact on the ranking of a website. Therefore, this makes SEA sort of an indirect SEO measure. If an online shop raises its advertising impact through SEA and thereby improves its scope and visibility, direct type-ins of the shop’s name as a brand are for example deemed to follow. Thus, the brand is strengthened and, among other things, the domain trust of a website is as well. Ever since the Vince Update, the brand plays a greater role in the SERP. For example, a website can increase its awareness with the help of SEA and, if a campaign is successful, can thus generate more traffic via the organic search, because the brand is known to many users and they decide in the SERPs for the more well-known URL, although it may even rank worse. Through SEA, Google, or any other search engine, new information on the visits to a website is received. Since the click rate and bounce rate are also considered in the evaluation of a website, successful SEA measures also lead to an improvement of the quality of a website. Another direct consequence of SEA measures is that a website or web shop can become more famous and thereby result in “offline” access through word of mouth. Network Advertising: What is an Advertising Network? An advertising network, or ad network, connects businesses that want to run advertisements with websites that wish to host them. The principle attribute of an ad network is the gathering of ad space and matching it with the advertiser's needs. The term ad network is media neutral, but is often used to imply "online ad network" since the marketplace of aggregated publisher ad space and advertisers is increasingly found on the Internet. The crucial difference between traditional and online ad networks is that online ones deliver advertisements to the public through an ad server. Delivering ads through one central hub allows the business owner to use various methods of targeting, tracking and reporting that don't exist with traditional media alternatives. How do they work? Ad networks work with publishers all over the Web, helping anyone who has unsold inventory, or ad space, and wishes to monetize their offerings. The networks then aggregate this inventory, package it and sell it to advertisers. Advertising networks provide a way for media buyers to coordinate ad campaigns across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of sites in an efficient manner. The campaigns often involve running ads over a category (run-of-category) or an entire network (run-of-network). Site- specific buys are not a major emphasis when dealing with advertising networks. Ad networks vary in size and focus. Large ad networks may require premium brands and millions of impressions per month. Small as networks may accept unbranded sites with thousands of impressions per month. 32 | P a g e Digital Marketing One of the key issues for publishers is Exclusive vs. Non-exclusive representation. Exclusive representation generally brings a higher percentage of revenue sharing, but sometimes results in a smaller percentage of ad inventory being sold. In non-exclusive arrangements, publishers may use secondary advertising options to fill the space left unsold by the primary ad network. Pros and Cons: The benefits of using ad networks are numerous for both content providers and advertisers. Content providers find them an easy and reliable way to sell inventory, although the revenue is typically less than what they could earn selling the space themselves. Advertisers also like the ease of use. With minimal effort, they can purchase a campaign that targets a specific group of consumers on websites throughout the world. Ad networks are also known for flexible payment models and cost efficiencies. The downside to advertisers is limited control over ad placements. The possibility exists that ads could appear next to inappropriate content. Many advertisers have also complained that their own campaign analytics often do not match up with the metrics provided by the networks. Despite these downfalls, many businesses find ad networks to be an affordable and efficient way of reaching consumers. Pricing Structure: Ad networks offer many different pricing models to suit the needs of different businesses. CPM - cost-per-mille (Latin for "thousand") is the simplest of ad delivery options. Advertisers pay a price for every 1,000 impressions delivered. An ad served on someone's browser is an impression. Whether or not the user clicks on the ad has no bearing on the price. CPC - cost-per-click is a performance-based model. Impressions served do not factor in cost. Instead, advertisers pay for every click they get on an ad campaign. This method of pricing often depends upon advertisers bidding on the maximum amount they will pay for a single click, a model that's become very popular on Google AdSense and Adwords. The downside of CPC is the uncertainty of how often the ad will be served, however, the low risk and focus on performance still make it an attractive option to most marketers. CPA - cost-per-acquisition, or cost-per-action, takes the performance-based model even further by guaranteeing advertisers will only pay for a specific action or conversion by the user. This ad delivery metric is often a key performance indicator for marketers when evaluating return on investment (ROI). Ad targeting capabilities Targeting capabilities for advertisers have increased dramatically over the years due to massive quantities of consumer data that have become available to the marketing community. Targeting capabilities may include: Age Gender Income Geography Behavior - displays relevant ads to users based on content they've clicked on while visiting several sites. 33 | P a g e Digital Marketing How Ad network work with Advertisers and Publishers: An ad network is essentially a middleman; it connects advertisers to websites that host advertisements. The network seeks out unsold advertising space from publishers, and then sells that space to advertisers searching for ad space with particular content. Ad networks are beneficial for all three parties involved; the advertiser pays a certain amount each time their ad is clicked by a potential customer (or a set amount for every 1,000 impressions), while the network and publisher each take a percentage. For example, if an advertiser pays $1 per click, every time the ad is clicked, the publisher might get 70 cents and the network 30 cents. There are three types of ad networks, each based on how they work with advertisers and publishers. These include: 1. Blind networks offer low prices, but advertisers generally have no control over where ads are placed. 2. Vertical networks tend to have higher quality traffic with advertising across general categories like automotive. 3. Targeted networks are the most expensive for advertisers, and focus on specific targeting like