Is Digital Marketing overrated?

Many marketers may argue that traditional media is dead, and with the world progressing globally with the internet and the emergence of the 21st century, meant that the bifurcation of ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ media became more evident.

Digital has changed the world so much that it has become the world. Marketers now view digital marketing as the only effective outreach to their target market through the use of social media. However, is ‘digital marketing’ solely just making use of social media platforms or is it really just marketing in this current digital world?

“It’s not about doing ‘digital marketing’, it’s about marketing effectively in a digital world.”, Diageo’s CEO Ivan Menezes answers the question.

It is becoming abundantly clear that the bifurcation of ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ media is inaccurate. Around 60% of Americans listen to radio using a digital source during an average week in 2019. Even a third of Americans are subscribed to digital editions of the daily newspaper. This digital trend evidently shows that traditional media has progressed and adapted to changing times. So, should we include outdoor, radio and ad prints as digital media? And vice versa?

Most ‘digital’ brands are not reluctant to the idea of the traditional approach if it best suits their marketing strategy. One example is Amazon opening bookstores in America which sparked mystery in the air as to why a multinational e-commerce company would move into brick-and-mortar.

“Our goal of Amazon Books is to help customers and readers discover great books,” an Amazon spokesperson said. The purpose of physical stores is to allow consumers to hold the books in their hands and offers readers a connection “to a community of millions of booklovers”.

This proves that above print ads and digital marketing, the age-old selling point of visual merchandising and service are the vital media for attracting and retaining customers. When coming up with a decent marketing strategy, it comes down to three key factors: target segment, objective and marketing position. All three of which are not associated with digital issues. Target segment = people, positioning = benefits and objective = behaviour. Once these strategic issues are resolved, then the digital issue comes to play in the tactical strategies used.

The world of marketing journalism has over-represented digital marketing at the expense of bigger strategic issues that marketers are struggling with. As much as marketing has changed by the digital evolution, the strategic plane of marketing is very much business as usual. Even with new digital marketing tools, the age-old questions of marketing – creativity, positioning, engagement and effect remain ambiguous as ever.

Privacy ON or OFF?

Ever wondered why certain advertisements keeps following wherever you go on your social media platforms?

Every wondered why when you recently search for a product they get advertised at every social media platform you go to?

Our personal data is scattered all over the internet, places like our social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Data such as ‘frequent places we visit”, “recent purchases”, “age”, “favourite type of music” and many more. 

These data have been used for good, like to understand consumer insights to better develop marketing campaigns to be specific consumer segment. But on the other end, these data have also been used to track individual’s spending habits and then targeted to spam e-mails such as illegal loan activities or illegal marketing for gambling activities through SMS push notifications. 

However some might find these uses of personal data to market, intrusive to their personal space and it would seem unethical of social media companies to make use of these informations. 

Apple Inc.

Apple have built their products like their Iphones with security at its core to its users. They have built in “password attempts” into their phone which after 10 failed attempts would delete the entire phone’s data. They make regular security updates to their softwares to prevent bugs or scammers to penetrate the users data via online.

Their most recent update to their safari web browsers prevents third-party cookies which prevents advertisers from reading the users web patterns.  It also provides tracking reports to the users to show which websites are tracking them and have the options to prevent sites from tracking their usage. This provides user a sense of protection of the personal information such as their “purchase patterns” online to be safe.

At the core of Apple’s business mission is to protect customer privacy which is an ethic they believe in. Their Ads also emphasise on the fact that “privacy is built in”, to ensure their consumers on having the safe space while using Apple Devices. 

Facebook

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach was one of the most controversial topic that led to Facebook making changes to their policies to protect customer data. The data breach involved leaking millions of facebook users data without their consent.

A congress meet was arranged to question the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to further investigate and question the privacy of Facebook user’s data. The CEO himself mentioned that “all apps that had access to large amounts of information” would be investigated and third-party developers would not have informations of Facebook users who are not active.

These changes were made to immediately rectify the governments legal concerns on protecting the user’s data and also to ensure Facebook was not Spying for the beneficiary of targeting consumers for advertisements. 

Conclusion 

Privacy can be seen in the light and in the dark. With the advancements to technology in recent days, users of the web are better able to educate themselves to prevent cookies or websites from tracking should they feel the need to protect their informations and maintain their personal space. However, there are some who still lack the ability to better protect their information. But to those who do not find this an ethical issue and benefits from web advertisers, they would not feel the need to understand the importance of protecting their information. 

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How important is Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)?

Many companies and brand have various integrated marketing communications (IMC) to communicate to their target market and consumers, which helps them build consumer bond with the brand and/or build brand value.

Various promotional tools such as advertising, social media marketing, sales promotion and public relations are some examples that makes up the IMC as a whole. These efforts work hand in hand to ensure the effectiveness of the brand’s IMC campaigns.

Let’s look at Adidas and how they have instilled their IMC campaigns!

1. Target Audience:

Adidas has over the years built strong customer relations and build up loyal customers. Their target segment includes people aged from 18 to 35 years old. They include high-income groups, athletes and also the daily fashion goers. By strategically pricing at a higher point adidas has built the hype for their consumers that their products are of premium quality. Their collaboration on sneakers with famous celebrities like Pharrell Williams has also built the hype amongst millennials and teenagers, which is way they have communicated to their target consumers.

2. Their Channel:

They truly understand the consumer base and where they actually spend most of their time. As such adidas has strategically marketed themselves through social media platforms like instagram and youtube. Their advertisements on Youtube dominate most of the advertisements pauses within videos when they release new products. Their instagram carries over millions of followers, where they also share and educate their consumers on their latest collaborations and releases.

3. Consistent theme and The right message:

Their consistent theme of the three stripes have all along been Adidas’s trademark and they have ensured this is carried across all their marketing platforms. This way they have built bond with their consumers where they can associate the stripes to their brand. This symbol also acts as a personal value to their consumers.

Their messages to their various product carries different taglines that helps consumers better understand their message. The “all in or nothing” tagline focuses on athletes to for basketball and soccer and their “impossible is nothing’ tagline sends the message across that they have a gear for everyone, be it fashion or sports.

Their marketing campaigns across digital platforms and traditional platforms are all unified, and this ensures that the message is effectively received and at the masses.

In conclusion, IMC campaign is more than just a single effort to ensure its effectiveness. A combination of all the promotional tools at its own effective and creative message delivered will ensure the effectiveness of its campaign.

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An Introduction to SEO

Search Engine Organisation (SEO for short) is simply put as the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search results in search engines such as Google or Bing.

The primary search results that are produced by the major search engines are ranked based on its relevancy to users. They are called organic results because they are not driven by paid advertisements.

SEO helps to maximise the number of visitors on a particular website by ensuring that the site appears at the top of the list of organic results produced by the given search engine.

How exactly do search engines work?

Search engines automatically create website listings by using software, often called spiders or spiderbots, that “crawl” web pages. They follow a site’s links to other pages and index the information into a database.

The process of regular crawling of the internet is how the most relevant websites are chosen to be displayed in the search engine results page (SERP) when you use Google or any other search engine to find information online.

Below you can see the search engine results page where it is organised into ‘paid results’ and ‘organic results’ which are influenced by SEO.

Why SEO is important to any business nowadays?

1. Creates a stronger relationship with the audience

If your business managed to get onto the first page of the search engines, it means that you have gained the trust of Google or Bing which should lead to gaining the trust of your audience.

Content marketing is the most effective SEO strategy. Websites with blog content have 434% more search engine indexed pages than other business sites that do not publish content.

2. SEO pulls out traffic

Search engines drive 300% more traffic to sites than social media. If used properly, SEO can pull your website onto the first page which brings in a lot of traffic. Hence, the better optimised the website on-site, the higher the chances of attracting users to your website.

3. SEO increases brand awareness

As users move through the buying funnel, they conduct a lot of different searches of which if your company continues to appear in their search results, it would increase the brand awareness of your business. With content marketing and SEO strategy, you’re demonstrating to your users that you’re not only a product/service provider but also a valuable resource for industry information which increases your brand equity. Ever wondered why it’s always there?

In a nutshell…

The ultimate objective with any search engine optimisation strategy is to get more exposure and traffic for your business.

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Internet of Things and BIG DATA in Today’s World

What is IoT?

We are in living in a world where majority of companies or industries would not have prospered without the internet of things. There are various components to this system, where objects are internet-connected and working in interrelation to collect and transfer data over a wireless network. 

Here’s the catch, it requires no human intervention. These have over the years created endless opportunities and possibilities to for many industries around the globe. In this day and age, technology and internet are developing in vast speeds, due to meet demands in markets of industries. Such industries will be cars, logistics and smartphones which we will be looking at below.

What is Big Data?

Big data involves the collection and analysing of huge data computationally to study the patterns and trends that help better understand human interactions and behaviour. 

Various studies through collection of big data has drove SME’s and small companies to foresee failures and defects in near time to save a fortune and develop their businesses.

Are Internet of Things and Big Data the same?

Both IoT and Big Data are huge at their own extremes, with complex ideas, however their interrelated even though they are different. 

We can better understand how they work hand in hand yet different when we look at industries that incorporate these two and how they function. 

TESLA 

Though there are many other companies that started R&D in automated self-driving cars, TESLA Inc. are pioneers in having automated cars to the markets first. 

The way it’s made possible is with analytics of big data and internet of things such as “artificial intelligence” and “automation” that were incorporated into the development making of these cars. 

Sensors and cameras built around the car are components working hand in hand that enables these cars to better understand their environment and navigate without human intervention at least for a period of time. 

Data as much as 40 terabytes of data are being collected as they drive to understand electric motors and fossil fuels so as they could make wise decision. 

however, to scale the industry in autonomous vehicles,industries have to create transparency to collect data and allow data-sharing to further innovate. However these are security concerns which acts as barriers to growth of this industry. 

NINJAVAN

NinjaVan was a company started by three individuals that saw problem in courier services, when parcels went missing and proper tracking services were not a available. They also saw the opportunity in the growing e-commerce market in Singapore and decided to get piece of the pie from it. 

With real time data analysis, they collected big data to keep track of parcels and build the company to be data driven which helped withe their logistic and fleet services. 

With data analysis with Sisense Cloud Data, their businesses scaled to a million dollar business and expanded across regions in just 4 years. 

With growing demand e-commerce, they were able to grow with this demand. The market solely depending on internet purchases and mobile phone purchases (internet of things) NinjaVan tap into supporting this e-commerce merchants that were the reason for their vast growth. 

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, IoT and Big Data are far more important to existing industries and new entrants, as they are very important for an industry’s growth and it changes the game of competitiveness for them in their respective market.  

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What is Mobile Marketing & Why is it so important?

What is mobile marketing?

First off, a quick definition: Mobile marketing is any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device (Kaplan, 2014).

In recent times, consumers have started to pay more attention to mobile in which marketers are following and adapting in order to create true omnichannel engagement. When it comes to mobile marketing, this means utilising SMS/MMS marketing and mobile apps. From email to search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing and social media marketing, there is a mobile marketing channel to reach out to every one of your target audience where they are most comfortable.

As you can see in the graph below, the number of mobile consumers are growing steadily and we are to expect this trend to surge in the future!

Figure 1. Number of smartphone users worldwide from 2016 to 2021 (Statista, 2020)

Why is Mobile Marketing important?

Let’s explore some of the reasons:

1.Reach

There is nothing more accessible than a mobile phone to reach your target audience. An average mobile phone user spends 143 minutes on their phone daily as seen in the figure below. This average time is increasing every day.

Figure 2. Daily time spent on the internet per capita worldwide from 2011 to 2021, by device, in minutes (Statista, 2020)

Therefore, there could not be any other easier way to reach out to your target audience anytime and anywhere as long as there is an effective marketing strategy in place.

2. Personal

Mobile phones are personal devices. According to a research study, 9 out of 10 people have their phones within reach 24 hours a day (Morgan Stanley, 2011).

People tend to connect better with brands that establish a more personal engagement with their consumers through mobile marketing.

3. Time Relevant

If you had to instantly send a text message to your customers, which channel would you choose?

According to a report from MobileSquared, 90% of SMS marketing messages are read within 3 minutes. Unlike email marketing where the open rates are just 20%, SMS open rates are as high as 98%.

Therefore, with text messages being delivered instantly with a high open rate, it produces staggering results for brands using mobile marketing.

Types of Mobile Marketing strategies

Here are some of the types of mobile marketing strategies you can test out:

1. App-based marketing

This form of marketing uses mobile apps. Creating your own app is efficient as 92% of the time spent on mobile phones in the US is spent in mobile apps as seen in the figure below.

Figure 3. US Time Spent by App Category (Flurry, 2016)

Having a dedicated app for your brand reaps benefits such as:

• Customer engagement
• Brand awareness

2. SMS marketing

Sending offer updates to your customers via text is known as SMS marketing. As mentioned previously, SMS messages have a whopping 98% open rate. When used correctly, SMS marketing can be a game changer.

3. Location-based marketing

This form of marketing are ads that are triggered when the targeted consumer is in a specific location. For example, you can set your ads to be sent through when someone is within a two-mile radius of your business.

This mobile marketing strategy is effective for kinds of businesses as 88% of mobile users do a local search on their phones before purchasing something.

In conclusion,

Janice H. Reinold, strategist at Rosetta Marketing, once said,

“In today’s modern world, people are either asleep or connected.”

So, engage with your customers when they are not asleep. Now that you know how mobile marketing works, use it to grow your business!

Do leave a comment down below about how you have used mobile marketing for your business!

All about Viral Marketing

What is viral marketing?

Light of speed, speed of god or be it Covid-19, they all share some similarities in the meaning of viral marketing. When information about a particular brand or type of service spreads like a virus or at enormous speed, from person to person, it is considered to be a form of viral marketing. The usual culprits that complement this type of marketing are the social media platform that all of us are very familiar with such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. At most cases, contents that are creative are the ones that intrigues the audiences’ attention, through emotional connect, comedy and surprising elements or all of them together. Some viral campaigns get viral due to accidents or some through creative campaigns designed by the brand or company’s marketing team.

Is Viral Marketing campaign good or bad?

Depending how the audience perceive the message of the campaign, determines it’s success. We have to take into consideration that contents that get viral is highly dependent on the audience interacting with it, as they hold control over how the content gets across to other users, whether it being misinterpreted or seeing it to be epic.

A good example of viral marketing campaign would be from a company called ‘Old Spice’. Their marketing campaign in 2010 called “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” became a huge hit through their video content.

They had message carried about their brand influencing both males and females. It took huge hit on Youtube, and continuing the success of it they made a series of the ads responding to their audiences which further boosted their social media followers and improved sales remarkably.

The key success to this ad was how well the company engaged with their audiences through various social media accounts and how promptly they communicated with them, following the success of the campaign.

An example of a viral marketing campaign gone wrong would be from the company ‘Dove’. In order to associate positive body image with their female consumers, Dove released 6 different bodily shaped bottles to its line. However it backfired on them as consumers felt that they need not be reminded of their body even when they shower and that they look perfect the way they are. It went viral on social media accounts and consumers weren’t happy. Though intentions of Dove were out of goodwill, the message was misinterpreted and took a huge fail.

Conclusion

In conclusion, viral marketing campaign could take a big turn towards success or failure depending on the type of content created and how well the message is perceived by the audience. Though viral marketing is cost effective, gets the fastest reach possible and builds brand image vastly, it is a campaign that needs very careful design and well thought planning before execution.

Thank you for reading! Do comment and share your thoughts!