Digital Marketing

Unit 1
Internet Penetration
INTERNET PENETRATION means with respect to any country the percentage of residences in such country which have
access to the Internet.

Digital Commerce

 Digital commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services using digital channels such as the internet, mobile
networks, and commerce infrastructure.
 Some examples of digital commerce include:
1. marketing activities that support these transactions, including people, processes, and technologies to execute
the offering of development content
2. analytics and promotion
3. pricing
4. customer acquisition and retention
5. customer experience at all touch points throughout the customer buying journey

Difference Between Digital Commerce and E-Commerce

 Many people make the mistake of seeing e-commerce and digital commerce as interchangeable terms, but there
is a key difference between the two.
 E-commerce is a simple, straightforward idea: It’s the practice of selling things online.
 Digital commerce encompasses more than that. It’s about creating touchpoints for the customer’s buying journey
and working to craft the ideal connection between your audience and your brand.
 Where e-commerce is a method, digital commerce is a strategy. It’s a plan to give consumers an engaging,
interactive experience and keep them coming back to patronize your business.

Key Digital Commerce Trends

Omnichannel Content and Commerce

 Digital commerce professionals need to create meaningful engagement with consumers in every channel.
 Developing and serving the right content for the right place and time increases brand awareness and creates a
consistent customer experience across channels.
  It also maximizes the customer understanding that can be gathered from cross-channel analytics.

Personalization
 E-commerce personalization is the practice of using commerce data responsibly to get to know, guide, and impress
your customers with experiences that are so relevant and contextual, they feel like magic.
 E-commerce personalization spans cross-channel, on-site, and in-app.
 It encompasses anonymous and known customers, and includes personalized messages, content, site layouts,
products, and much more.
 It is driven by real-time, first-party data.
 This results in measurable journeys that engage and lead customers through brand awareness to product
discovery to repeat purchases.
 Personalization needs to be built into the core of the customer experience and impact every point of interaction.
 Site search, browsing data, product recommendations, landing pages, and all other interaction points should work
cohesively to build a complete picture of each visitor across their journey.

API-based Commerce
 Legacy technology, along with inflexible commerce and content solutions, is holding enterprises back from
building unique experiences and growing their business fast.
 API-based commerce (aka headless commerce) circumvents these problems by using an API as the core to
interface with separate business systems.
 Instead of monolithic architecture, a lightweight API controls the transmission of data between systems —
content, products, customer information, financials, and other systems reside in separate systems, free from any
code that limits frontend development.
 Retailers can enjoy the advantages of true omnichannel design by developing custom layouts in much less time
than it takes a coupled system to accomplish the same feat.
 This enables businesses to deliver relevant, contextual, and consistent product and content experiences to your
customer across all the sites, apps, and other touchpoints they interact with.

Artificial Intelligence
 Artificial intelligence is all the buzz in the digital commerce world right now. As you undoubtably have heard, AI is
growing exponentially and isn't showing any signs of slowing down.
 AI applies advanced analysis and logic-based techniques — including machine learning — to interpret events,
support and automate decisions, and take actions.
 Some examples of AI in e-commerce include site search optimization, product recommendations, marketing
automation, and shopping journey personalization.

Customer Analytics
 We’ve learned a great deal since the term “big data” became a hot topic a decade ago. Today there are data-
gathering practices and technologies that ensure good service while protecting everyone’s privacy.
 And this is crucial for brands to get right, because analytics is the lifeblood of successful businesses. Truly enriching
the customer experience requires marketers to step back and look at the different types of data they have. Then
they should determine the data and technologies that provide customers with the kind of experiences they expect
going forward.

Enterprise Marketplace
 People don’t just expect convenience or better prices any more — that’s become a given. Now, they want options
that take into account their tastes and preferences.
 This means vendors and service providers need to start using customer data and analytics to fine-tune their
services and compete in a fast-paced industry.
 A marketplace that can aggregate various suppliers into logical bundles of services and products, which are then
delivered to customers based on a detailed analysis and understanding of their preferences and priorities, is an
intelligent marketplace delivering additional value to both merchants and users.
Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

Web 1.0
 Web 1.0 refers to the first stage of the World Wide Web evolution.
 The era of Web 1.0 was roughly from 1991 to 2004.
 Earlier, there were only a few content creators in Web 1.0 with a huge majority of users who are consumers of
content. Personal web pages were common, consisting mainly of static pages hosted on ISP-run web servers, or
free web hosting services.
 In Web 1.0 advertisements on websites while surfing the internet are banned.
 Also, in Web 1.0, Ofoto is an online digital photography website, on which users could store, share, view, and print
digital pictures.
 Web 1.0 is a content delivery network (CDN) that enables the showcase of the piece of information on the
websites.
 It can be used as a personal website.
 It costs the user as per pages viewed.
 It has directories that enable users to retrieve a particular piece of information.

Characteristics found in Web 1.0:

 It’s made up of static pages connected to a system via hyperlinks
 It has HTML 3.2 elements like frames and tables
 HTML forms get sent through e-mail
 The content comes from the server's file system, not a relational database management system
 It features GIF buttons and graphics

Advantages and Disadvantages of Web 1.0

 The advantages of Web 1.0 include the simplicity and accessibility of the technology. This makes it easy for people
to use and access the internet from their homes or offices. Web 1.0 also allows users to share information easily
through websites. This makes it possible for people to collaborate on projects or share information with others
quickly and efficiently.
 Disadvantages of Web 1.0 include the lack of security and privacy features. This means that websites and online
identities can be easily compromised by hackers, causing significant damage to a person’s reputation or business.
Overall, Web 1.0 has pros and cons, but it remains an essential technology as it gave rise to the static version of
the internet.

Web 2.0

 2004 When the word Web 2.0 become famous due to the First Web 2.0 conference (later known as the Web 2.0
summit) held by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty, the term was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999.
 Web 2.0 refers to worldwide websites which highlight user-generated content, usability, and interoperability for
end users.
 Web 2.0 is also called the participative social web.
 It does not refer to a modification to any technical specification, but to modify the way Web pages are designed
and used. The transition is beneficial but it does not seem that when the changes occur.
 Interaction and collaboration with each other are allowed by Web 2.0 in a social media dialogue as the creator of
user-generated content in a virtual community.
 Web 2.0 is an enhanced version of Web 1.0.
 Web browser technologies are used in Web 2.0 development and it includes AJAX and JavaScript frameworks.
 Recently, AJAX and JavaScript frameworks have become very popular means of creating web 2.0 sites.

Five Major Features of Web 2.0:

 Free sorting of information, permits users to retrieve and classify the information collectively.
  Dynamic content that is responsive to user input.
 Information flows between the site owner and site users using evaluation & online commenting.
 Developed APIs to allow self-usage, such as by a software application.
 Web access leads to concerns different, from the traditional Internet user base to a wider variety of users.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Web 2.0

 Web 2.0 is a newer version of the internet that features an improved user interface and functionality. It allows
users to share content and interact with each other more interactively. The main advantage of Web 2.0 is that it
allows users to create and share content without having to leave their homes. Another advantage of Web 2.0 is
that it is faster than the older versions of the internet.

 However, there are some disadvantages to Web 2.0 as well. One disadvantage is that it can be addictive and lead
to social networking addiction. Additionally, Web 2.0 can harm privacy because it allows people to track your
movements and conversations.

Web 3.0
 Web 3.0 is a term that refers to a new era of the internet.
 It is a period in which decentralized technologies and open standards will power the web.
 Web 3.0 can improve how we use the internet and make it more accessible and secure for everyone.
 It will also allow us to explore new ways of interacting with digital content.
 Web 3.0 is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way we use the internet.

Features of Web 3.0

 Web 3.0 is a new web technology that allows developers to build more robust and interactive websites.
 Web 3.0 is a new user interface that makes it easier for users to interact with websites.
 Its features allow websites to interact with other applications and devices. Also, it can create modular applications
that can be updated and changed easily.
 It could lead to more interactive and information-rich websites, and it could also improve the performance of
websites by making them more efficient.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Web 3.0

 Web 3.0 is a new type of web that allows for more interactivity and transparency between the user and the
web. There are many advantages to using Web 3.0, including greater security and privacy. Web 3.0 also allows
for more efficient communication between different parts of the world.
 However, there are also some disadvantages to Web 3.0. For example, it can be challenging to use in areas with
poor internet connectivity. Additionally, Web 3.0 can be expensive to implement and may not be suitable for all
businesses.

Social Media
 Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange
information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.
 Social media is a computer-based technology that facilitates the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and
information through the building of virtual networks and communities.
 There are more than 4.5 billion social media users around the world.
 The largest social media networks include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Tik-Tok.
 Social media typically features user-generated content and personalized profiles.

Key Principles for Social Media Managers:

 Social media is about conversations, community, connecting with the audience and building relationships. It is not
just a broadcast channel or a sales and marketing tool.
 Authenticity, honesty and open dialogue are key.
  Social media not only allows you to hear what people say about you, but enables you to respond. Listen first,
speak second.
 Be compelling, useful, relevant and engaging. Don’t be afraid to try new things, but think through your efforts
before kicking them off.

Popular Social Media Tools and Platforms:

 Blogs: A platform for casual dialogue and discussions on a specific topic or opinion.
 Facebook: The world’s largest social network, with more than 1.55 billion monthly active users (as of the third
quarter of 2015). Users create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including
status updates. Brands create pages and Facebook users can “like” brands’ pages.
 Twitter: A social networking/micro-blogging platform that allows groups and individuals to stay connected
through the exchange of short status messages (140 character limit).
 YouTube/Vimeo: Video hosting and watching websites.
 Flickr: An image and video hosting website and online community. Photos can be shared on Facebook and Twitter
and other social networking sites.
 Instagram: A free photo and video sharing app that allows users to apply digital filters, frames and special effects
to their photos and then share them on a variety of social networking sites.
 LinkedIn: A place where groups of professionals with similar areas of interest can share information and
participate in a conversations.

Differences between online and offline marketing

S.
No. Online marketing Offline marketing
1. Online marketing is generally focus on content. Offline marketing is generally focus on product.
Online marketing includes third party like media, web Offline marketing includes mass media, phone center,
2. content, search e-mail, social media. telephone.
Online marketing communicates customers with e-mails, Offline marketing communicates with customer with
3. chat, social media. their mobile number and staff.
4. Target audience met at one place. Target audience is scattered.
5. It is cost effective. It is high marketing cost.
It helps in directly reaches out to the professionals of the It does not directly reaches out to the professionals
6. industry and market. due to some barriers.
7. Prospective buyer cannot visible. It directly visible to their prospective buyer.
8. Less people to manage. Large people to manage.
9. The tools such as Google webmaster tools, AdWords Here, is the challenging task of measuring the success
information center, and other tools, can be used to check of print, radio, and television advertising because it is
view rate, conversion rate, and overall advertising success uncertain whether an audience will make a purchase or
of internet marketing. not.
10. Using Content marketing tactics your content can reach to a
worldwide audience. Every day, content reaches thousands
of individuals, boosting your influence and coverage. This may not be possible with offline marketing.
11. In online marketing, you can sell a product all across the
world without even opening local stores. No need to keep Offline promotions have their own limitations. It never
large stocks. It ensures global exposure. ensures maximum exposure.
12. Internet marketing has no time constraints. Customers can
visit your website at any time and purchase your items or Here, you can only expect sales or clients once your
services. store is open.
13. Online marketing helps you in growing your business by
targeting a specific group of customers with a specific offer. It is quite a challenge to implement these types of
You can also target a certain group of people for strategies in offline scenarios. These tactics can only be
promotions. used by small businesses to retain clients.
 Various ways of Online Marketing
14.
 Affiliate marketing:
 Social media marketing
 Word of mouth marketing
Various ways of Offline Marketing
 Content Marketing
 Search engine optimization  Billboard ads
 Email Marketing  Business cards
 Influencer marketing  Direct mail
 Brand marketing  Telemarketing
 Cause marketing  Print ads

Internet Marketing in India

 Digital marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business today.
 It allows businesses to connect with potential and current customers through various digital channels, such as
social media, email, and search engines.
 In India, digital marketing is overgrowing, with the Indian digital marketing industry in 2025 expected to be
worth $160 billion, suggests a Goldman Sachs report.
 The current scenario is fascinating. A growing number of businesses and entrepreneurs are recognizing the
potential of digital marketing and using it to grow their businesses.
 The number of digital marketing agencies in India is also increasing as more businesses seek expert help to create
and execute effective digital marketing campaigns.
 By 2023, the number of dynamic Indian web clients will be around 666 million. As a result of lockdowns in India’s
online business industry, Global Data predicts that the market will reach 7 trillion rupees by 2023.
 Through the COVID crisis, marketers and advertisers on digital platforms have seen an increase in investment.
 Today, even the world’s largest companies are rethinking their marketing budgets to focus more on digital.
 The Indian e-commerce market is projected to reach Rs 7 trillion by 2023 due to the pandemic and multiple
lockdowns, which suggests that digital marketing is booming.
 This growth not only positively impacts businesses but also improves people’s lives.

5 D’s of Digital Marketing

Digital Devices

Digital Devices include the devices that people use almost everyday. These can be used to target an audience for
marketing purposes.
 Laptop and desktop computers
 Mobile phones
 Tablets
 Smart TVs
 Gaming devices
 Smart watches

Digital Platforms
These are the platforms users interact with on a regular basis. They can be used for marketing purposes:
 Social media
 Search engines
 Websites

Digital Media
Digital Media are paid and / or owned channels that can be used to reach your audience. They include:
 Online advertising
 Social media marketing
 Messaging
 Email marketing

Digital Data
Digital Data are data about your target audience being used to achieve a marketing goal. Generally, data about your
target audience can be captured via:
 Contact forms
 Surveys
 Apps

Digital Technology
Digital Technology is all about the technology being used with a marketing objective. Some examples are:
 Artificial intelligence (AI)
 Augmented reality (AR)
 Virtual reality (VR)

Unit 2
Digital Marketing Strategy
 A digital marketing strategy involves assessing what specific goals can be achieved through the use of online
channels.
 The successful implementation of a digital marketing strategy can be crucial to an organization's success,
particularly in an era when more and more consumers transact business on mobile devices.
 Digital marketing is a critical asset in reaching your objectives through your online presence.
 Electronic devices like cell phones or tablets keep us connected 24/7, and this kind of exposure casts the net
wide open to find your buyer personas easily.

Digital Marketing Types

1. Inbound marketing.
 Inbound marketing refers to the whole ecosystem of strategies, tools, and tactics that a marketer uses to convert
a website visitor into a paying customer.
 Inbound marketing is an overall approach to attracting, qualifying, nurturing, and delighting customers and
prospects. It is not a one-off or something that is deployed quickly or temporarily; rather, it is focused on a long-
term relationship with customers.
 It includes:
 Content marketing
 Email marketing
 Lead nurturing
 SEO
 Marketing automation
 Website optimization
 Website analytics.

Why use inbound marketing?

It's affordable. Inbound marketing can save you money while leaving you with a higher ROI. You’ll target a specific group
of people rather than anyone and everyone with the hope that you’ll be successful.
Trust and credibility. When prospects and customers do their own research and discover that your content answers their
questions, your business is positioned as a trustworthy industry expert rather than just a sales-hungry entity.
Relationship focus. Through inbound marketing, you can build trusted relationships that not only turn into sales but create
repeat customers. Inbound marketing content drives quality traffic to your website and provides visitors with valuable
content that encourages them to convert in every phase of the marketing funnel.

2. Content marketing.

Content marketing is focused on answering people’s questions and truly helping them through content rather than
interrupting them with unsolicited promotions. It includes content such as blog posts, landing pages, videos, podcasts,
infographics, white papers, eBooks, case studies, and more.
In most cases, content marketing has several goals. You may use it to:
 Increase brand awareness
 Improve brand loyalty
 Educate your target audience
 Convert and nurture leads.

Why use content marketing?

 Strong relationships with customers. Content marketing gives you the chance to build a relationship with
prospects and customers over time. It also nudges them toward the finish line, making it more likely that they'll
choose you over your competitors when they're ready to purchase.
 Better SEO. Quality content will significantly improve your website SEO, so you can enjoy more organic website
traffic that turns visitors into buyers.
 Increased brand authority. When you produce interesting, educational content, you’ll be able to position yourself
as an authoritative source in your industry. Your target audience will then turn to you for solutions to any problems
they may have.

3. ABM.
Account based marketing (ABM) is a powerful B2B marketing strategy that targets specific accounts you select. It’s
intended to help sales and marketing teams move prospects through the sales funnel quickly. With ABM, you target the
accounts that are most important to you.

Why use account-based marketing?

 Personalization. ABM does not take a generic approach to marketing. Instead, it creates personalized messaging
for target accounts. You use what you know about your customer and tailor your campaign to meet their particular
needs.
 Collaboration. With ABM, sales and marketing teams work together to identify key accounts and design
personalized campaigns for them. ABM encourages teamwork as teams focus on moving accounts through the
sales pipeline.
 Shorter sales cycles. The B2B sales process is often slow because there are multiple stakeholders involved in
making a final purchase decision. With ABM, the sales cycle is expedited because the primary decision maker, and
all other relevant prospects, can be nurtured simultaneously with content created specifically for them.

4. SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website and your content in order to achieve higher
rankings in search engines and increase the amount of organic traffic to your site. It involves a variety of tactics, like:
 Creating high-quality content
 Optimizing content around keywords and user needs
  Incorporating meta information
 Ensuring your website is optimized for search engines.
Ultimately, SEO strives to bring in the right visitors organically to drive more leads and sales.

Why use search engine optimization?

 Higher conversion rates. An optimized website is fast, easy-to-use, and compatible with all devices. Which means
it’s more likely to convert users and leave you with loyal customers.
 Increased brand awareness. If your content ranks highly in search results, you’ll be able to build brand awareness
and trust with visitors. They’ll be more inclined to purchase your products and services than they would if you
didn’t have a good web presence.
 Long-term cost savings. Once a piece of content is created, it should attract and build increasing traffic over time.
You'll still need to produce quality content on an ongoing basis, but you’ll be able to target users who are actively
looking for your products and services without an ongoing monetary investment.

5. Social media marketing.

Social media marketing uses social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to:
 Promote your content, products or services
 Build brand awareness and visibility
 Gain fans or followers
 Engage current and prospective customers
 Drive traffic to your website.

It requires an ongoing advertising spend and, most of the time, a website landing page designed specifically for users from
that ad spend. As soon as your advertising spend ends, the website traffic, likes, and followers end as well.

6. Email marketing.
 Email marketing is the practice of sending promotional and informational emails to build relationships with your
audience, convert prospects into buyers, and turn one-time buyers into loyal fans of your brand.
 These emails may discuss exclusive deals, promote website content, upcoming sales, or general messages on the
behalf of your business.

Why use email marketing?

 Traffic to your website. Your emails should contain links to pages on your website. Key performance indicators
include the open rate (how many recipients opened your email) and the click-through rate (the ratio of users who
click on a link in the email to the number of users who opened the email).
 Cost effective. Compared to other marketing strategies like direct mail, SEM or SMM, email marketing usually is
cost-effective. Your investment will include a subscription to email marketing software that sends thousands of
emails simultaneously, and the cost of someone to administer the program.
 Delivers targeted messages. Everyone on an email list has opted-in to receive information. Which means: They
want to hear from you! By further segmenting your list, you can deliver super-targeted information that is likely
to be well-received.

7. PPC advertising.
 Pay-per-click advertising or PPC is a strategy in which you (the advertiser) pay every time a user clicks on one of
your online ads. It’s often done through Google Ads, Bing Ads, or other search engines, and it can be an effective
way to reach people who are searching for terms related to your business.
 However, costs can range from relatively inexpensive, to thousands of dollars per month, depending on the size
and scope of your campaign. And, when a campaign is discontinued, the traffic generated by that campaign is also
discontinued.
  When users click on pay-per-click ads, they are directed to dedicated landing pages that encourage them to take
a certain action:
 Make a purchase
 Complete a form
 Download a report, or similar.
 If you implement a PPC campaign, your primary goal will likely be to increase sales or leads.

Why use PPC?

 Easy tracking. With a PPC platform like Google Ads, you’ll be able to track how many people view your ads as well
as how many click on them and what percentage of them convert. You'll know instantly how your campaigns
perform.
 Controlled spend. PPC advertising is pay as you go. You’ll be able to change or pause ad campaigns that are
underperforming, and you don’t have to commit to a certain advertising spend.
 Instant results. Other marketing strategies like SEO and content marketing take time to work. PPC advertising,
however, offers a fast way to set up a campaign and get results right away.

8. Video marketing.
 Video used to promote your products, services, and brand may include product demos, interviews with thought
leaders in your industry, customer testimonials, or how-to videos.
 You can add videos to your website, PPC landing pages, or social media outlets to encourage more conversions
and sales.
 KPIs may include:
 Engagement. Time spent watching the video.
 View count. How many times it was watched.
 Click-through rate. How many users clicked through to the website.
 Conversion rate. Number of leads, prospects, or customers content generates.

Why use video marketing?

 Improved SEO. Marketers are 53 times more likely to end up on the first page of Google results if they utilize a
video on their website, because including a video in a website improves SEO, which improves the page's rank.
 Increased conversion rates. When marketers include video on a landing page, it can increase conversion rates
by up to 34%.
 Improved brand association. In addition to better conversion rates, brand association increases 139% after
watching a video. When consumers watch a video, 92% share that video with others.

9. Online (and in-person) events.

 There’s nothing like an event to create buzz around a product. Of course, trade shows have always been a thing,
most notably the International CES tech show. But Apple redefined such events for an online audience with its
series of high-profile iPhone and Mac launches throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, often watched by up to
1.8 million people.
 It’s unlikely you’ll reach such engagement levels, but there are nevertheless lessons to learn, whether you’re using
an event to launch a product, service, or new business.

Why use online events?

 Build anticipation. Use social posts ahead of the live event to create buzz about what you might be launching.
Consider the way Apple teases small details of its new iPhone, such as a photo of small section of the device, in
the days before.
 Showcase your product. If you’ve dedicated your live event to one product, then that product will be the focus of
people’s attention. Use that attention to tell stories about its features in the same way Steve Jobs once did for
Apple products.
  Stimulate conversation. Run a live stream of the launch, push out a press release and create a hashtag of the
event to get people talking about your product. Consider how Apple uses hashtags like #AppleEvent to trend on
Twitter.

10. Chatbot and live chat marketing.

Chatbots and messaging apps have become more common in the past decade and are now seen as a valuable
marketing, as well as customer service, tool. Some 1.4 billion people who use messaging apps are happy to speak with
chatbots. Brands use chatbots to:
 Deal with customer complaints
 Answer questions about products
 Promote live events
But despite these different uses it’s worth considering research from chatbot platform Drift. It says the number one
predicted use for a chatbot is ‘getting a quick answer in an emergency[2] so perhaps keep your chatbots simple.

Why use chatbots?

 Provide quick answers. People go online with a task in mind. They want an answer fast. Chatbots can help people
to get quick answers and resolve complaints, which can have a positive impact on brand sentiment.
 Enhance customer experience. People told Drift they would use a chatbot to ‘get detailed explanations’ and to
‘find a human customer services assistant. Both help to improve a customer’s experience with your brand.
 Sell your products. A chatbot might seem an odd place to convert sales. But 18% of people said they would buy a
basic item through a chatbot, while 22% would use one to explore ideas for purchases[4].

11. Earned media.

Put simply, earned media is coverage of your business, products or events written by a third party and which you have
not paid for. In digital marketing, it’s best described as PR which you outreach to the media. When the content is picked-
up by a publication and written up for their own site, that’s earned media.
Examples of earned media include:
 Tactical PR, such as newsjacking topical events
 Traditional press releases on company news
 Infographics based on survey data
 Creative asset such as an interactive site.

Why use earned media?

 It’s free. Once you’ve paid your staff or an agency to outreach your content, any coverage you secure from
websites is free. This makes it a cost-effective digital strategy and frees up budget for future campaigns.
 It’s scalable. Earned media can be delivered for any budget. From a simple tactical piece, such as issuing quotes
to a newswire on a topical issue, to a bigger creative campaign, such as a site build or conducting a survey.
 It’s good SEO. Getting backlinks to your site from trusted publishers and institutions can be worth its weight in
gold. Google ranks sites by their DA (Domain Authority) and sites with higher DAs, such as colleges and news sites,
can help to improve your own authority.

Key Components of a Digital Marketing Strategy

 Use the Acronym SMART
Refer to this list with any goal you set as a reminder to keep your objectives Specific, Measurable, Attainable,
Relevant, and Timely. As you build your strategy, SMART will help you keep your metrics organized to construct
future strategies—increasing your KPIs and ROI.
 Establish an Accredited Team
Every marketer needs a digital portfolio to show credibility. Authoritative voices make your brand credible in both
your field and the digital sphere. The pace of online competition is fierce, so you must head into your strategy
prepared.
 Audience Awareness is a Must
 Once a tricky tactic, digital analytics, and resources have made finding and reaching your target audience much
simpler. Platforms like HubSpot and Google Analytics provide statistics on who is viewing your company. Now,
you can specify those you’re trying to reach through age, location, gender, interest, education, and more. Online
presence and awareness are your biggest assets.
 Refer to the Buyer Experience
Remember the buyer experience by referring to the stages of your marketing funnel. Revisit questions like:
 How and where did the customer first become aware of our brand?
 What is the customer’s interest?
 How are customers evaluating our brand?
 Build a Strategy
Reference the information you’ve compiled for the next step—building your strategy and campaign. After
evaluating your goals, like calculating lead generation, make sure they’re attainable. Now, it’s time to get active!

Digital Conversion Funnel/Digital Marketing Funnel

 The Digital Marketing funnel is a strategic model that represents the entire buying journey of the personas, from
the moment they know your brand until the time they become customers.
 This concept is widely used among salespeople but has also become a fundamental resource for the success of
marketing actions.
 The function of this funnel is to help marketing professionals learn and understand what are the inputs that they
have to give at each stage of the process.
 Firstly, in a digital marketing funnel, a customer is exposed to the product through ads on social media, search
engines, and other platforms. When a customer identifies a need, they become aware of a particular product and
then consider the product and its features.
 A customer goes through intense research about the product and other users’ experiences with the same. If a
customer is convinced by the research, they then move to the next step of making the purchase.
 After buying the product, the customer moves to the next stage of retention where the post-purchase experience
and the company’s relationship with the customer determine customer retention and future shopping.

Stages in Digital Marketing Funnel

Fig. Stages through which a customer goes through in a typical digital marketing funnel strategy. A parallel funnel can be
considered for a seller.

Importance of Digital Marketing Funnel

 Perform a better segmentation of your marketing actions.
 The productivity of your entire team tends to increase
 Helps talk to the right audience.
 Offers the most appropriate content for each stage.
 Crucial to make better use of your company’s resources and improve your bottom line.

Search engine optimization

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its
visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines.
The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective
and existing customers to your business.

Paid advertising
 Paid advertising is a digital marketing method used by advertisers who bid to participate in real-time auctions in
order for their ads to be shown on a specific search engine, platform, or network.
 This online advertising model is used to bring traffic to a website and is often referred to as Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
advertising.

Types of Paid Advertising

1. Search Ads
This is one of the most common types of paid advertising. The ads will appear at the top and at the bottom in a search
engine results page, such as Google. Search Ads don’t contain any visuals and contain only text. They appear on search
engines according to the search terms used in the search bar. Advertisers will be charged each time the ad is seen/clicked
on, depending on the bidding strategy used.

2. Display Ads
Display ads are another popular ad type used by many advertisers to promote brand awareness or a specific product.
These ads contain an image/video and text. They are placed on search engine partner websites and are used to reach
people that may be interested in your product or service.

3. Remarketing Ads
Remarketing ads are targeted at people who have visited your website previously but have not converted. This type of
advertising presents you with the opportunity to get previous website visitors to re-engage with your products or services
by sending them back to your website. The ads will focus on the product or service that the audience has previously
viewed, reminding them to go back on to your website and make the purchase.

4. Shopping Ads
These ads are popular for advertisers who sell products and make it easier for people to find your products when they
search for them on Google. The ads appear just under the search bar on search engines and show information such as a
product image, name, price, and who the product is sold by.

5. Social Ads
This type of paid advertising is the most common due to the high number of users across social media networks. Social
ads appear in social media feeds across different platforms. The ads are created on social media platforms such as
Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn and are targeted to a specific audience. Social ads are beneficial for advertisers who
are looking to grow their brand or get users to engage with their products or services on their website.
The Benefits of Paid Advertising

 The ads are affordable: Paid advertising is an affordable way to advertise or remarket your products or services
to the right audience. It’s also easy to keep track of how much money is being spent, and in order to avoid
overspending on ads, you can set a budget limit on your ad spend.

 The ads are measurable: All paid advertising platforms offer users enough data to analyze the performance of the
ads for users to make decisions on whether or not the ads are working.

 Helps promote brand awareness: Most types of paid advertising can be used to promote your brand. Creating
brand awareness helps your audience become familiar with your products and services by placing them on popular
channels such as Google and Facebook, helping you keep up with the competition.

 Ads are targets to a more specific audience: When creating ads across the paid advertising platforms, you need
to target the ads to an audience that will result in the ads being clicked on. These audiences are fine-tuned over
time but in order for paid advertising to be effective, properly defining this target audience is crucial!

 Prospects are more likely to re-engage with your products or services: Using remarketing or retargeting ads in
your paid advertising strategy allows you to re-engage with prospects that have previously visited your website.
The timing and relevance of these ads will be what turns prospects into customers.

 Easier to rank when compared to organic search: Paid advertising is a must-have for small startup businesses as
this form of advertising increases traffic to the website. Websites take some time to rank organically, whereas
paid ads provide you with the opportunity to appear higher on search engines from the start.

Developing a Paid Advertising strategy

 Identify goals - you need to know exactly what you want to achieve with your paid advertising
 Know your audience - you need to know who your paid ads will target and to understand your customer personas
 Have a budget - this needs to be established in the strategy phase once you have determined your goals and
audience
 Decide which paid media channels to invest in - this will be the final step of your paid advertising strategy and
will be based on the budget allocated to the paid advertising campaigns

Search Advertising

 Search advertising, is a marketing technique that involves placing digital advertisements inside search engine
results.
 Also known as sponsored ads, search marketing, search-engine marketing, pay-per-click marketing, and cost-
per-click marketing.
 Companies that run search advertising campaigns pay a small fee each time someone clicks on one of their ads.
 Having the ability to bid on keywords, so ads appear when people are looking for a specific product or service, is
a powerful tool for today’s business advertisers.

Tips for Measuring the Success of Your Advertising Campaigns

Negative Keywords

A negative keyword is a word or phrase that allows your brand to filter out who your ads will be displayed to on SERPs.
Negative keywords are an essential part of any search advertising campaign. After you have decided that a term is
irrelevant to your campaign, you can add that term as a negative keyword, and it will then prevent your advertisements
from displaying when those specific keywords are searched. When you implement negative keywords in your search
advertising campaigns, irrelevant impressions will drop, and your click-through rate (CTR) will increase.

Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are specific keyword phrases that consumers are more likely to search for as they get further down
the buyer’s journey and purchase funnel. These niche keywords usually consist of two to five words specific to your
business.

With shorter general keywords, competition to get the highest bid is fierce, and you may not be attracting the correct
audience. Since long-tail keywords are more targeted, they will draw less traffic to your website but will more closely align
with your product and service offerings.

CPC (Cost-Per-Click)

In the CPC payment model, advertisers pay each time a user clicks on their advertisement. Success with CPC advertising
depends on two things: Your “bid” (the amount you are willing to pay if someone clicks your ad) and your actual ad price
(what you’re paying as a result of the ad auction).

In Google Ads, CPC is calculated by taking the competitor below your position’s ad rank, divided by your quality score,
which is a diagnostic tool used by Google to determine how relevant your ad is to users’ search. Understanding how CPC
is calculated is crucial because it helps determine the value of the engagements your ad makes, and it shows whether the
ad was targeted enough to engage those users who chose to click. CPC aims to get the lowest, most efficient price possible.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click)

PPC is a metric that measures the cost paid to a host website when a searcher, a) likes or needs a brand’s product or
service, and b) clicks the local ad. One important aspect of PPC in search advertising is the need for brands to protect their
branded terms. A study found that if a brand is not targeting its branded keywords, it can lose between 10,000 and 60,000
visitors per month to competitors bidding on their branded terms.

CTR (Click-Through-Rate)

In search advertising, CTR is defined as the ratio of clicks to impressions. In most cases, the higher the CTR, the more
effective your search advertisement. Use this example provided by Google to help calculate your CTR.

Contextualization

Contextualization advertising is displaying ads based on a website’s content or keywords. For example, if you’re a
restaurant brand and someone is reading a local restaurant and dining blog, your contextual advertisement might show
up on that blog. By using the most targeted keywords appropriate for your search advertising campaign, your multi-
location brand has the opportunity to dominate the competition and drive value to consumers. The effectiveness of
contextualization is dependent on the quality and quantity of data that you utilize. Online reviews, user engagement
histories, and other localized marketing strategies can help you accurately target keywords to become locally relevant.

Display Advertising
 Display advertising is defined as a mode of online advertising where marketers use banner ads along with other
visual ad formats to advertise their product on websites, apps, or social media.
 It is completely driven by the visuals it uses to attract attention and spread brand awareness across the internet.
 They make generous use of visual media in the form of texts, images, or even videos to catch people’s attention.
 You can usually spot display ads in designated corners of webpages and social media platforms, and they are
usually showcased in the form of a banner ad (graphic or text).
  Most successful display advertising campaigns use a clever combination of images, text, gifs, and videos to stand
out on the internet and send their message across to the targeted audience.

Types of Display Advertising

1. Site placement advertising: In this type of display advertising, the advertiser/marketer chooses the website they
would like to run their display ads on.
2. Contextual advertising: In this type of display advertising, networks place ads on relevant websites, for example
showing an ad for dog food on a pet adoption website.
3. Remarketing: Remarketing display ads appear in front of users who have been on your website or post-click landing
page but have left without completing the relevant conversion goal.

Benefits and Challenges of Display Advertising

Benefits

 Increase brand awareness: The top benefits of display is where we increase our brand awareness. The thing about
brand awareness and product awareness is that consumers aren’t going to actively know they need your product
until they know about your products, so driving that awareness is key.
 Drive product consideration: When they’re in that kind of decision-making process, it helps improve the
consideration set and brings that product into what’s called the top of mind. And once you’re in that zone, then
you can start pushing a little bit forward, and maybe bring in some social or bring in some search to just convert
them on to the revenue generation piece.
 Create purchase intent: We must begin with awareness and then driving our consideration, because when we
want to create that purchase intent, it has to start somewhere, and ultimately this is what our display marketing
does.
 Increase reach: Because searchers, for example, know about your product and they actively seek it, they represent
a small slice of the overall market, whereas what display does is it branches out to many different audiences, and
ultimately increases your reach.
 Re-engage with customers: Because the reach is so broad, and targeting with different methods like retargeting,
we can re-engage with our existing customers.
 Multiple types of ad formats available: The other great thing about display that really trumps search is the fact
that display advertising formats are a lot more engaging. They’re visual, they can move, they can change shape,
you can enter details, and they’re a lot more engaging. And when it comes to social display or video, we’re bringing
in audio and moving pictures. We’re also bringing in the ability to comment, like, or share. So, the engagement
levels go right up. Our ad formats are very effective in that regard.
 Cost effective: The other thing is, comparative to traditional ad formats, TV, radio, print, or any of the other
outbound traditional formats, digital display is a lot more cost effective in the fact that you don’t have to make TV
ads or print big billboards, and if you do need to change something, it’s relatively cheap and inexpensive to do.
You don’t need to go to printers and get them put up again or anything like that, so you can see the efficiencies
being driven by digital display.

Challenges

 Ad blockers: You find that in recent years, the rise of ad blockers, the extension in Chrome, or any of the other
browsers that prevent ads from being shown. So even though you’re trying to serve your ads, there is a
preventative measure in the person’s browser that stops it from being seen by your audience. Finding new ways
to engage with the audience or sidestep ad blockers is a key challenge.
 Ineffective creative: Like with every kind of ad format, ineffective creative means that your message won’t get
across as effectively as you’d like, and can just lead to poor results.
 Poor audience targeting: If you don’t know who you’re targeting, your message won’t be received or as
understood as well as targeting the correct audience.
  Lack of cut through: Lack of cut through represents an ongoing problem across all ad formats.
 Banner blindness: We refer to it as banner blindness, when there’s so much out there, when there’s so many ads
out there, it’s difficult to actually cut through that mix and get your ad seen by the right audience, at the right
time.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the process of creating content for social media platforms to promote your products and/or
services, build community with your target audience, and drive traffic to your business. With new features and platforms
emerging every day, social media marketing is constantly evolving.

Social Media Marketing Platforms

 Facebook
 Instagram
 You Tube
 Twitter
 Snap chat
 Tik-tok
 LinkedIn

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

 Increase your brand awareness.
 Generate leads and boost conversions.
 Foster relationships with your customers.
 Learn from your competitors.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

 Research your buyer personas and audience.
 Determine which social platforms you’ll market on.
 Establish your most important metrics and KPIs.
 Get to know your competition.
 Create unique and engaging content.
 Organize a schedule for your posts.

Email Marketing
 Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that uses personalized emails to educate your email list about your
product or services.
 It can also be used to convince your email list to take a specific action like making a purchase, booking a demo,
signing up for a trial or registering for an event.
 It is a highly effective digital marketing strategy. Effective email marketing convert prospects into customers, and
turns one-time buyers into repeat customers and raving fans.
 Email marketing is the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them, and turning
them into customers, consistently winning out over all other marketing channels.

Email marketing types

 Welcome emails: This type of email welcomes customers and encourages them to learn more about your product
or service. They often offer a trial or other bonus. It is used to introduce a potential new customer to the business.
  Newsletter emails: Newsletter emails are very popular, and they often highlight new products and services. They
may also include articles, blogs, and customer reviews. Usually, there will be a call to action to move the reader
to do something, whether that is reading a new blog post or checking out a new product.

 Lead nurturing emails: This type of email targets a specific audience through a series of emails in the hope of
eventually converting them. Typically, lead nurturing emails focus on a group that is interested in a specific
product or service and then build their interest through more emails that offer additional information or relevant
promotions. The goal is to push users from the consideration stage to the purchasing stage.

 Confirmation emails: Those that have recently signed up for emails or newsletters, or have purchased an item
online for the first time may get a confirmation email. This ensures the prospect that the information has been
received and they are on the list to receive additional information. These are also a way to let users know that
their purchase has been received or that their sign-up was successful and can include more actions for them to
take.

 Dedicated emails: If you want to reach out to only a portion of your email list, this is called a dedicated email. Its
list may be based on recent purchases, inactive clients, new members, and other specific types of criteria.

 Invite emails: These types of emails often announce upcoming events, new product launches, and seminars. Most
companies use these types of emails when there is something special going on to gain attention and increase
awareness about special events.

 Promotional emails: These types of marketing emails are very common and tend to be generic and go out to a
large audience. They are usually used to maintain awareness and may tease new products and services.

 Survey email: Feedback from customers is one of the best tools for a business. Sending out these emails
communicates to your customers that you value their opinion and want to create an experience, product, or
whatever you’re offering that they’ll enjoy. Businesses can also take the feedback from these surveys and apply
them to their offerings, creating what is hopefully a better product.

 Seasonal marketing emails: Many companies take advantage of the holiday season or special occasions to reach
out to their customers and prospects with information on upcoming sales and promotions. They are often tied to
holidays like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s, and Father’s Day.

Measuring success of search engine optimization

Engagement metrics
How are people behaving once they reach your site? That’s the question that engagement metrics seek to answer. Some
of the most popular metrics for measuring how people engage with your content include:

 Conversion rate
The number of conversions (for a single desired action/goal) divided by the number of unique visits. A conversion
rate can be applied to anything, from an email signup to a purchase to account creation. Knowing your conversion
rate can help you gauge the return on investment (ROI) your website traffic might deliver.
 Time on page
How long did people spend on your page? If you have a 2,000-word blog post that visitors are only spending an
average of 10 seconds on, the chances are slim that this content is being consumed (unless they’re a mega-speed
reader). However, if a URL has a low time on page, that’s not necessarily bad either. Consider the intent of the
page. For example, it’s normal for “Contact Us” pages to have a low average time on page.
 Pages per visit
 Was the goal of your page to keep readers engaged and take them to a next step? If so, then pages per visit can
be a valuable engagement metric. If the goal of your page is independent of other pages on your site (ex: visitor
came, got what they needed, then left), then low pages per visit are okay.
 Bounce rate
"Bounced" sessions indicate that a searcher visited the page and left without browsing your site any further. Many
people try to lower this metric because they believe it’s tied to website quality, but it actually tells us very little
about a user’s experience. We’ve seen cases of bounce rate spiking for redesigned restaurant websites that are
doing better than ever. Further investigation discovered that people were simply coming to find business hours,
menus, or an address, then bouncing with the intention of visiting the restaurant in person. A better metric to
gauge page/site quality is scroll depth.
 Scroll depth
This measures how far visitors scroll down individual webpages. Are visitors reaching your important content? If
not, test different ways of providing the most important content higher up on your page, such as multimedia,
contact forms, and so on. Also consider the quality of your content. Are you omitting needless words? Is it enticing
for the visitor to continue down the page? Scroll depth tracking can be set up in your Google Analytics.

Search traffic
Ranking is a valuable SEO metric, but measuring your site’s organic performance can’t stop there. The goal of showing
up in search is to be chosen by searchers as the answer to their query. If you’re ranking but not getting any traffic, you
have a problem.
 Traffic Volume
Traffic volume should be measured based on the number of visits that come from organic search. With a
successful SEO strategy, you should see a significant increase in organic search traffic over time. How much
traffic you should expect depends on the size of your target audience.
 Traffic Quality
Measuring the quality of traffic is a bit trickier as it requires more careful analysis. Some metrics that can be
used to determine the quality of traffic include:
 Pages Per Visit
 Average Visit Duration
 Bounce Rate

Mapping search engine journey

The typical customer journey is split up into four categories and each stage has different implications for your SEO.

Awareness Stage
This is the stage where your customer has recognized their pain point, problem, or challenge, and is researching their next
step. At this stage in the journey, the buyer isn’t likely to be ready to make a purchase, but they want broad information
relating to their problem.
If someone was starting a website, this stage of the journey might result in a search query like “how to get visitors to my
website,” or “how to build a website.”
This is important information for your SEO because it can inform your content strategy and allow you to track how people
progress through the customer journey.

Consideration Stage
In the consideration stage, customers move on to searching for solutions to their problems.
They might have moved from the search query “how to get visitors to my website” to something a little more detailed
such as “how to use SEO to build organic traffic.” They’ve gone from recognizing they have a problem, to researching
specific ways to fix it.
At this stage, your content is likely to go into more detail and give people a clear picture of the steps they can take. Using
your Google Search Console, you can get a clear picture of the search queries that are bringing people to your pages, and
use this to create even more targeted information.
Decision Stage
Your customer has now recognized their problem and understands what they need to do to fix it, but they need help doing
it. At this point, they’re ready to make their decision and it’s about positioning yourself as the right person to solve their
problem.
Through the awareness and consideration stage, you should have created a great deal of trust by offering helpful
information, and now is the time where you receive the rewards. Still, it’s important that your content is on point in this
stage, and you need to be able to show the benefits of your products and encourage people into taking action.

Repeat Stage
You work hard to get new customers, so you want to keep them for as long as possible.
The process doesn’t just end when someone makes a purchase, it just enters a new stage. This is where your content
should help people to get the most out of your products and services.
It’s vital that you continue to offer value, and if you can do this, then you will find you create repeat customers that can
help sustain your business.

How Can Customer Journey Mapping Improve Your SEO?

Getting Found
 It doesn’t matter what point someone is at in the customer journey; you need them to be able to find your
business. Whether they’re at the awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, retention, or advocacy stage, you
want them to have your brand in mind, and this is where SEO is so powerful.
 Mapping out your customer journey allows you to get a much better picture of how people are searching at each
stage, and the type of content they want to see. This enables you to create valuable content that’s targeted to the
individual needs of the customer based on where they are in the customer journey.

Driving Engagement
Customer journey mapping will allow you to create content that engages your audience on more levels, boosting your
performance in the search engines, and turning more visitors into customers.

The Right Message at the Right Time

By leveraging SEO and understanding the journey your customers take, you can continue to create meaningful touchpoints
with potential customers and bring them back into the customer journey, even when it appears as if they had been lost.

Encouraging Actions with The Right CTAs

To optimize the performance of your SEO and get people to take action, you need to understand how each page fits into
the customer journey and therefore, the next actions you want people to take. When you have a clear picture of the
journey, then you can tailor your content and CTAs to guide people into taking the optimal action.

On page and off page search engine optimization

On Page SEO
 On-page SEO is everything you do to your own website in order to improve its position in search engine results.
 On-page SEO also comprises techniques that improve the experience for users who visit your website.
 It uses content and technical elements to improve the quality of a page, so the more on-page SEO optimization you
do, the more traffic you'll get to your website and the more relevant that traffic will be.
 There are many technical aspects of a webpage that can be optimized with on-page SEO to increase your page
ranking, and they include:
 Title tags
 Headings
 URL structure
 Alt text for images
  Site speed
 Internal links
 Meta descriptions
 Responsiveness

Off Page SEO

 Off-page optimization refers to the technique that can be used to improve the position of a website on a search
engine results page (SERPS).
 Off-page SEO is the collection of strategies, tactics and efforts you undertake to promote your content on third-
party sites across the web.
 This part of SEO focuses on getting your site, company and/or brand discussed on another website.
 Many people associate off-page SEO with link building but it is not only that. It is also used in promotion
methods like blogging, website design, social bookmarking, etc.

 Techniques that are used in off-page SEO.

 Influencer Outreach.
 Contribute as Guest Author.
 Social Media Engagement.
 Social Bookmarking Sites.
 Forum Submission.
 Blog Directory Submission.
 Article Submission

Unit 3
Decision making process
 These days in the era of digital marketing, the process of consumer decision making has changed beyond all
recognition.
 User behavior has been streamlined and today’s business model is a much briefer one than in the past.
 Now, when a consumer decides they need a product, they can surf the internet immediately, find exactly what
they need virtually instantly and make a snap purchasing decision.
 Researching online takes a matter of minutes or hours rather than days trawling around stores and calling
suppliers.
 Reviews are right there at the consumer’s fingertips and product demos can be viewed immediately before making
any purchasing decision.
 This accessibility has had a major impact on the standard business model. It no longer follows a linear and
traditional path.
 It has become a moving target that has digital marketing right at its heart.

Steps in Decision Making Process

Recognizing A Need
The first step of the traditional business model involved the consumer recognizing that they had a need for a product or
service. Today, there is a wealth of options that companies can choose from to facilitate this stage of the process. Social
media can have a powerful impact, reaching a targeted audience base within the brand’s most relevant demographic, with
around 3 million advertisers now using Facebook to reach consumers. Email newsletters can reach out to interested
parties and previous customers to highlight the latest products and promotional offers, encouraging them to find out
more. Banner adverts can attract the attention of web surfers… in short, the options are extensive and effective.

The Information-Gathering Phase

Once the consumer has recognised their need, they begin gathering information about the product or service that they
require. This is, arguably, the stage at which digital marketing can be most powerful. Around 89% of all consumers now
begin their search for product information on the internet. That means that when companies harness the power of a
strong SEO strategy paired with sponsored and PPC advertising they can rise up the search engine rankings to get their
brand in front of the widest possible audience.
Even local companies can benefit from taking a digital marketing approach. While they may be catering for a more
localized demographic, they can take advantage of local SEO to point customers towards their physical presence. Around
86% of shoppers search for a local business to meet their needs online so the digital marketing avenue is something that
even the smallest business can profit from. Gone are the days of relying on the Yellow Pages or locally distributed flyers.

Evaluation Of Options
Next, we reach the evaluation stage. At one time, businesses could be fairly confident that as long as they were the first
to reach the customer they could make a sale however this is no longer the case. Thanks to the internet, price comparison
is the work of minutes. Companies can harness this power themselves, however, by featuring live price comparisons on
their own website so that consumers need to look no further. By keeping the customer on the site, the chances of a sale
increase.

Assessing The Evidence

Online reviews also have a key role to play at this stage of the consumer decision-making process. Evidence has shown
that around two-thirds of all shoppers reference reviews before making most kinds of purchases. By taking a proactive
response to consumer reviews, it’s possible to create a positive brand impression for outstanding customer service and
so to sway the consumer in the company’s direction even if there are negative reviews.

Making The Decision

By this point, buyers have all the information they need to make a purchasing decision at their fingertips. Digital marketing
has done its work. It is now important to ensure that the process of making the sale is as simple and efficient as possible
with a smooth-loading, user-friendly site and a secure payment facility.
It’s clear that, regardless of the size or type of a business, digital marketing is essential in today’s modern competitive
marketplace. Harnessing its potential to generate leads, convert customers and close sales couldn’t be more important.

Post purchase behavior

We’re not done when we make our purchase, we still have to decide whether we like the product (satisfaction) and
whether we like the process we used to make our decision.
Example- you post an image of yourself in the new dress, and everyone either tells you it’s ugly or ignores your post —
because if you can’t say something nice, just don’t say anything.

Online consumer segmentation

 Customer segmentation refers to the process of dividing your customers into specific customer segments or
groups based on factors like demographic data, interests, and spending habits.
 By segmenting your customers in this way, you can create more targeted marketing campaigns and improve your
chances of success.
 In a nutshell, customer segments are groups of customers who share common characteristics.
 These characteristics can be based on demographics (age, gender, location), psychographics (lifestyles, interests),
or behavioral data (purchasing habits, engagement levels).
 Implementing customer segmentation in your marketing campaigns is a great way to improve the overall ROI of
your business.
  To segment your customers, you first understand their unique characteristics and traits.

Importance of Customer Segmentation

 Improve customer satisfaction
 Improve customer loyalty
 Builds customer engagement
 Increases customer value
 Improve marketing ROI
 Prepare for new markets and forms of competition

Consumer Segmentation Models

1. Demographic Segmentation: Examples of segmentation by demographic include: age, gender, income, education, and
marital status.
2. Geographic Segmentation: Examples of segmentation by geography include: country, state, city, and town.
3. Psychographic Segmentation: Examples of segmentation by psychographics include: personality, attitude, values, and
interests.
4. Technographic Segmentation: Examples of segmentation by technographics include: mobile use, desktop use, apps,
and software.
5. Behavioral Segmentation: Examples of segmentation by customer behavior include: tendencies and frequent actions,
feature or product use, and habits.
6. Needs-based Segmentation: Examples of segmentation by customer needs include: product or service must-haves and
needs of specific customer groups.
7. Value-based Segmentation: Examples of segmentation by customer values includes: the economic value of specific
customer groups for the business.

Customer Segmentation Strategy

1. Determine your customer segmentation goals and variables.
2. Break goals into customer-centric segmentation projects.
3. Set up and prioritize each customer segmentation project.
4. Collect and organize your customer data.
5. Segment your customers into groups of your choice.
6. Target and market to your client and user segments.
7. Run regular customer segmentation analysis.

Online marketing mix

 The online marketing Mix is essentially the same as the marketing mix.
 It is simply the adaptation of price, place, product and promotion to the digital marketing context. Of course one
could also include physical evidence, people and process when marketing planning for an online service.
 A benefit of an online marketing mix in your business model is that understanding every element of your
marketing process enables us to create better, highly functioning, and profitable businesses online.

7 P’s of Online Marketing

Product
 In the marketing mix product refers to services, brand or merchandise features around which strategy has to be
developed. Any strategies around products are primarily based on market research undertaken by organization
to asses’ customer needs and requirements.
 Online marketing strategy can segmented into two parts, decision around the fundamental features meeting
customer needs and additional features which are benefits above the core benefit.
  For the fundamental features, the internet can be used to provide additional information about the product to
existing and new customer base, for example online reviews, video, etc. Additional benefit could be providing a
new business proposition, for example e-book.
 For extended benefits, for example, in the computer industry, organizations provide instruction manual, base-
warranty and technical assistant without any additional cost to the consumer.
 The internet can be used to gather data from the customer for perception about products and service. This form
of market research is of low cost compared to traditional approaches. Organizations can do this market research
through online focus groups, web survey, feedback forms, blog etc.

Price
The internet can influence the price mix of marketing strategy through the following:
 Improved price transparency and impact on differential pricing.
 Commoditization and price pressure.
 Dynamic pricing and auction
 Different pricing methodology

Place
 Place in the marketing mix referrers to path through which products reach the consumer.
 Organizations devise channels as to reach widest customer base at minimized cost.
 The internet has changed place element in the marketing mix.
 The point of purchase can be divided into seller controlled sites, third party hosted seller oriented sites, third party
hosted consumer-seller neutral sites, purchaser controlled sites and purchase controlled sites.
 Organizations are also developing websites which cater to the specific requirements of a country. These specific
requirements can be around language, product mix and cultural difference.
 The distribution channels have also undergone changes because of the internet.
 Organizations need to decide whether they will supply goods through intermediaries, or directly deliver to the
consumers.
 Organizations can also adapt combination of intermediary and direct delivery.

Promotion
 The promotion component of the marketing mix refers to the marketing communication strategy used by the
organization for product and company advertisement.
 The promotion element consists of advertisement, sales promotion, customer contact, public relation and direct
marketing.
 The promotion element mix is chosen by the communication strategy of the organization. The internet serves as
additional and new communication channel through which it can connect to consumers regarding product
features.

People
 The people component of the marketing mix refers to interaction between staff members and consumer during
pre-sale, sale and post sales activity.
 Some of the options available for organizing with the advent of the internet are auto-email response to queries,
e-mail notification on purchase status, call back facility, online chats, frequently asked questions section, site
search section, online purchase assistance, etc.

Process
The process component of the marketing mix refers to process adapted by the company to co-ordinate all the marketing
activities which are covered under price, place, promotion and people.

Physical Evidence (Online Evidence)

 In the extended marketing mix, physical evidence refers to the different elements of service experience, such as
facilities, interior designs, livery, and post-purchase artifacts (souvenirs).
  In an online setting, these pieces of evidence will not have a physical element to them. However, the digitalization
of this physical evidence is still possible, and an important marketing decision to have.
 Online brand awareness across multiple channels is an excellent example of online evidence. How well these
channels expand service experiences, for instance, through the number of followers, likes, and other social
engagement metrics.
 A website’s design is essential online evidence as, in most cases, it’s the most important channel for an online
business. The elements of your website’s design crucially impact the non-human service experiences your
customers will face when interacting with your online business.

Consumer segments and targeting

Despite the ever-growing shift to a digital marketing focus, classic customer segmentation techniques have not gone out
of style. By segmenting, or dividing customers into categories based on similarities, marketers are able to better focus
their message, pricing, product research and development, and audience targeting.

Marketers can divide and target customers by demographics, lifestyle, behavior, and media use.
 When marketers use demographics to segment customers, they focus on the inherent traits of a person, such as
age, gender, ethnicity, and family size. If you're trying to market a new line of makeup, who is your best audience?
Likely, the demographic group of women and teenage girls.
 For marketers, lifestyle variables encompass consumer attitudes and behaviors, religious and political beliefs,
likes and interests, income, and education level.
 Marketers also use behavioral segmentation, which is based on user behaviors, such as shopping patterns, social
media likes, brand loyalty, and benefit or value to the consumer. It can also encompass purchasing based on
occasion - when a customer purchases or thinks of purchasing a particular product or service.
 In addition, marketers look at media use. Marketers know that different types of media draw in different types of
consumers at different times and at different frequencies. By targeting ads to specific types of media consumption
(such as television, radio, and online), marketers can pinpoint their ideal audience. Media segmentation can also
include social media sites, whose users run the gamut in demographics, lifestyle, and behavioral choices.

Targeting

 Once you’ve segmented your audience into the appropriate groups, you’ll then look into the best ways to focus
on the different groups and catch their attention via marketing campaigns (like Emails, SMS, SEO etc.)
 Once you’ve delivered effective messaging, you’re going to want to understand how to address and retain both
the customers that have already engaged (for instance, through customer loyalty programs) as well as how to
address the customers that didn’t follow through to make a purchase.

User Experience (UX)

 User experience can be defined as the understanding of user needs to help and create products and services that
provide a meaningful experience to the customers.
 UX is a combination of different principles such as visual design, information architecture, interaction design,
usability, user search, and content strategy.
 UX is a qualitative foundation for digital marketing, or you can say any marketing. User experience is not only
promotion of the Product. It touches the product itself.
 User experience is a research-focused discipline. It focuses on discovering and understanding real human needs
which can be solved with the well-designed product.
 Unit 4
Social Media Analytics
 Social media analytics is the ability to gather and find meaning in data gathered from social channels to support
business decisions — and measure the performance of actions based on those decisions through social media.
 Social media analytics is broader than metrics such as likes, follows, retweets, previews, clicks, and impressions
gathered from individual channels.

Importance of Social Media Analytics

Social media analytics helps companies address these experiences and use them to:
 Spot trends related to offerings and brands
 Understand conversations — what is being said and how it is being received
 Derive customer sentiment towards products and services
 Gauge response to social media and other communications
 Identify high-value features for a product or service
 Uncover what competitors are saying and its effectiveness
 Map how third-party partners and channels may affect performance

What metrics should be tracked with social media analytics?

There are six general types of social media metrics that should be tracked.

1. Performance metrics
Measuring the performance of social media marketing efforts is critical to understanding where strategic efforts are
working and where improvement is needed.
Key performance metrics to track include the following:
 interactions across platforms and over time to determine if the posted content is properly engaging the
audience;
 whether the number of followers is increasing over time to verify consistent progress across platforms; and
 click-through rate for link clicks on posts to see if they're properly driving traffic from social media channels.

2. Audience analytics
 It's important to clearly understand and define the target audience, as it is the most important element of a social
media strategy. Understanding the audience will help create a favorable customer experience with content
targeted at what customers want and what they're looking for.
 In the past, audience data was difficult to measure as it was scattered across multiple social media platforms. But
with analytics tools, marketers can analyze data across platforms to better understand audience demographics,
interests and behaviors. AI-enabled tools can even help predict customer behavior. They can also study how an
audience changes over time.
 The better targeted the content is, the less advertising will cost and the cost-per-click of ads can be optimized.

3. Competitor analytics
 To obtain a full understanding of performance metrics, it's necessary to look at the metrics through a competitive
lens. In other words, how do they stack up to competitors' performance?
 With social media analytics tools, social media performance can be compared to competitors' performance with
a head-to-head analysis to gauge relative effectiveness and to determine what can be improved.
 Most modern tools that include AI capabilities can benchmark competitor performance by industry to determine
a good starting point for social media efforts.

4. Paid social analytics

  Ad spending is serious business. If targeting and content isn't right, it can end up an expensive proposition for
unsuccessful content. More advanced analytics tools can often predict which content is most likely to perform
well and be a less risky investment for a marketing budget.
 For best results, an all-in-one platform is the preferred choice to track performance across all social media
accounts such as Twitter analytics, paid Facebook posts or LinkedIn ads. Important metrics to track include the
following:
1. Total number of active ads
2. Total ad spend
3. Total clicks
4. Click-through rate
5. Cost per click
6. Cost per engagement
7. Cost per action
8. Cost per purchase

 These metrics will indicate exactly where each dollar spent is going and how much return is being generated for
social media efforts. They can also be compared against competitor spending to ensure that spending is at an
appropriate level and to reveal strategic opportunities where an increased share of voice may be attainable.

5. Influencer analytics
 To gain a leg up on competition in a competitive space, many social media marketers will collaborate with social
influencers as part of their marketing campaigns. To make the most of partnerships, it's necessary to measure key
metrics to ensure that the Influencer marketing is achieving desired goals.
 Social media analytics can provide insights into the right metrics to ensure that influencer campaigns are
successful. Some influencer metrics that should be tracked include the following:
 total interactions per 1,000 followers to understand if they're properly generating engagement;
 audience size and most frequently used hashtags, to help determine the maximum reach of your campaign;
 the number of posts influencers create on a regular basis, to help determine how active they are and how powerful
engagement can be; and
 past collaborations, which can be a great indicator of the potential for success with an influencer.

6. Sentiment analysis
 Sentiment analysis is an important metric to measure as it can indicate whether a campaign is gaining favorability with
an audience or losing it. And for customer service oriented businesses, sentiment analysis can reveal potential
customer care issues.
 To ensure that a campaign is in sync with the target audience and maintains a strong rate of growth, interactions and
engagement rate should be tracked over time. A decline could indicate that a change of course is needed.
 Gathering and analyzing customer sentiment can help avoid guesswork in developing a marketing strategy and
deciding which content will resonate best with the audience. This type of analysis can also indicate the type of content
that's likely to have a positive impact on customer sentiment. If your social media analytics tool detects a spike in
negative sentiment, action should be taken immediately to address and correct it before it becomes a PR nightmare.

How to track social media performance with social media analytics tools

1. Gather your social media statistics, operational data, and more

Whichever of the available social media analytics tools you choose, your first step is to ensure it is canvassing data from
all the available and relevant sources.

2. Set benchmarks
Having a benchmark helps you to see where you can make improvements, and to compare yourself to your competitors.
These benchmarks aren’t just for social media performance – they’re to chart the efficacy of your social media campaigns
in business terms as well.
3. Generate a social media analytics report
Creating a social media analytics report should be a simple process with the social media analytics tool you’ve chosen. You
should ideally have options for regular reporting, one-off reporting for specific campaigns, and real-time insights on a
customisable dashboard with flexible reporting options. This will give you the most chance of pulling the best insights out
of the data you’ve collected.

4. Search for trends and customer behaviour

Your social media analytics report is a powerful tool for understanding where to invest for the greatest returns. You should
be able to find insights into customer behaviour and identify emerging trends in social data. Tracing your customers’
journey from your social media channels to the buying process should be clear to your team.

5. Take action to improve your social media performance

Ideally, your choice of social media analytics tool will be able to give you actionable insights or automate these actions for
you where appropriate. Whether it’s updating your customer experience on your social media platforms,
reducing customer effort when transitioning from social media to your website, or ensuring that you close the loop on
customer queries, you need to take steps to improve with the insights you now have.

6. Share and repeat your analysis

Once you’ve enacted these steps, you’ll need to take regular benchmarks and generate reports to ensure that you’ve
progressed. Social media trends can be leading indicators of customer needs and wants, so ensure that you can share
social media insights and repeat your analysis for the wider business.

Data type and collection in Social Media Analysis

Data Types

DATA FOR CONTESTS

 The key purpose of data is to help brands learn more about their audience, and there’s nowhere better to start than
with data gathered from social media contests. When a contest is done well, it can increase engagement and allow
you to collect vital information about the entrants.
 If, for example, your primary purpose for running a contest is to grow your follower base, you can learn the personality
types of those who entered through the data they provide. You can then use that information for targeted ad
campaigns aimed at the profile of people who entered the contest.

DATA FOR POLLS

 Polls have seen an increase in popularity over the last few years and act as a smart way for brands to learn more about
audiences. They’re a great way to get data that helps create better content tailored specifically to their needs.
 Using a poll can is social media data collection in its purest form. By asking your audience a question and giving them
several options to choose from, you can determine their interests and what excites them about your brand and the
wider industry. You should then use this information to refine the service offered to align with their interests.

Data for Viral content

 Viral content is the holy grail for any brand, as it can catapult your content into the mainstream. Some brands seem
to go viral overnight, but there’s more to it than simply making a popular video or crafting a well-written tweet.
 Data plays a vital role in the before and after of viral content. Without data, marketers struggle to get an idea of what
an audience really wants. And if you’re lucky enough to go viral, data plays a huge role in the next move. Thousands
and thousands of clicks, impressions, and interactions can be used to keep up the momentum and build on your viral
content centered around your more substantial audience.

Data for leads

 Leads are the name of the game for most marketers and salespeople, which is why it’s essential that you use data
to capture and convert leads. Customer personas play an integral role in lead generation, as they allow you to craft
the perfect buyer. But these profiles can only be built with in-depth data.
 Preparing a customer persona requires understanding your audience, preparing a campaign, reaching out to your
audience, fulfilling their needs, capturing them as leads, qualifying their suitability, nurturing them, and closing. It’s
much easier to run successful lead generation when you’re going off data rather than guessing what your audience
might like.

Data for products and services

 How are your customers using your product and services? You’ll only really know with the right data that informs you
how they choose to interact with purchases made from your brand. Social media is a great way to reach out and ask
people how they use your product or service.
 It allows you to gather data and improve future services. The result is better decision making, which helps with the
implementation of new products and services that are even more successful than the previous iteration. Data for
products and services should always be an ongoing practice, through social media, email campaigns, and by asking for
regular feedback on your website.

Data for customer service

 Customer service on social media has become a fundamental aspect of brands. Companies with an excellent social
customer service approach see a 92% retention rate. Ensuring your employees are on top of their game is important
for providing five-star customer service.
 Social customer service data is essential for understanding your employees more than it is your customers (though it
can help with that too). How fast do they respond? What is their engagement rate like with complaints? The data you
get from their interactions will help create a better, more transparent customer service.

Why is social media data collection so important?

Like any business strategy, social media marketing is most effective when your goals and plans are based on real data.

Social media data analytics provide information that helps you understand what’s working. Even more important, you’ll
see what’s not working, so you can make the right business decisions and refine your strategy as you move forward.

Social media data collection can help you customize your social media marketing strategy for each social network. Even
more specifically, you can customize your strategy by location or demographics.

Here are some of the questions social media data mining can help answer:
1. What is the demographic profile of your following on each social platform?
2. What times of day is your audience most active on social media?
3. Which hashtags is your audience most likely to engage with?
4. Does your audience prefer images or video posts?
5. What kinds of content is your audience interested in?
6. What subjects does your audience need help with?
7. Which top-performing organic posts should you pay to boost?

What social media data should you track?

Here is some of the most important raw data you can collect through social media:
 Engagement: Clicks, comments, shares, etc.
 Reach
 Impressions and video views
 Follower count and growth over time
 Profile visits
 Brand sentiment
 Social share of voice
 Demographic data: age, gender, location, language, behaviors, etc.

Structured and Semi-Structured data

Structured Data
 Structured data is the data which conforms to a data model, has a well define structure, follows a consistent order
and can be easily accessed and used by a person or a computer program.
 Structured data is usually stored in well-defined schemas such as Databases.
 It is generally tabular with column and rows that clearly define its attributes.
 SQL (Structured Query language) is often used to manage structured data stored in databases.

Characteristics
 Data conforms to a data model and has easily identifiable structure
 Data is stored in the form of rows and columns
Example : Database
 Data is well organised so, Definition, Format and Meaning of data is explicitly known
 Data resides in fixed fields within a record or file
 Similar entities are grouped together to form relations or classes
 Entities in the same group have same attributes
 Easy to access and query, So data can be easily used by other programs
 Data elements are addressable, so efficient to analyse and process

Sources of Structured Data:

 SQL Databases
 Spreadsheets such as Excel
 OLTP Systems
 Online forms
 Sensors such as GPS or RFID tags
 Network and Web server logs
 Medical devices

Advantages of Structured Data:

 Structured data have a well-defined structure that helps in easy storage and access of data
 Data can be indexed based on text string as well as attributes. This makes search operation hassle-free
 Data mining is easy i.e knowledge can be easily extracted from data
 Operations such as Updating and deleting is easy due to well structured form of data
 Business Intelligence operations such as Data warehousing can be easily undertaken
 Easily scalable in case there is an increment of data
 Ensuring security to data is easy

Semi- Structured Data

 Semi-structured data is data that does not conform to a data model but has some structure. It lacks a fixed or rigid
schema.
 It is the data that does not reside in a rational database but that have some organizational properties that make
it easier to analyze. With some processes, we can store them in the relational database.

Characteristics of semi-structured Data:

  Data does not conform to a data model but has some structure.
 Data can’t be stored in the form of rows and columns as in Databases
 Semi-structured data contains tags and elements (Metadata) which is used to group data and describe how the
data is stored
 Similar entities are grouped together and organized in a hierarchy
 Entities in the same group may or may not have the same attributes or properties
 Does not contain sufficient metadata which makes automation and management of data difficult
 Size and type of the same attributes in a group may differ
 Due to lack of a well-defined structure, it can not used by computer programs easily.

Sources of semi-structured Data:

 E-mails
 XML and other markup languages
 Binary executables
 TCP/IP packets
 Zipped files
 Integration of data from different sources
 Web pages

Advantages of Semi-structured Data:

 The data is not constrained by a fixed schema
 Flexible i.e Schema can be easily changed.
 Data is portable
 It is possible to view structured data as semi-structured data
 Its supports users who can not express their need in SQL
 It can deal easily with the heterogeneity of sources.

Disadvantages of Semi-structured data

 Lack of fixed, rigid schema make it difficult in storage of the data
 Interpreting the relationship between data is difficult as there is no separation of the schema and the data.
 Queries are less efficient as compared to structured data.

Problems faced in storing semi-structured data

 Data usually has an irregular and partial structure. Some sources have implicit structure of data, which makes it
difficult to interpret the relationship between data.
 Schema and data are usually tightly coupled i.e they are not only linked together but are also dependent of each
other. Same query may update both schema and data with the schema being updated frequently.
 Distinction between schema and data is very uncertain or unclear. This complicates the designing of structure of
data
 Storage cost is high as compared to structured data

Possible solution for storing semi-structured data

 Data can be stored in DBMS specially designed to store semi-structured data
 XML is widely used to store and exchange semi-structured data. It allows its user to define tags and attributes to
store the data in hierarchical form.
 Schema and Data are not tightly coupled in XML.
 Object Exchange Model (OEM) can be used to store and exchange semi-structured data. OEM structures data in
form of graph.
 RDBMS can be used to store the data by mapping the data to relational schema and then mapping it to a table
Difference between Structured and Semi structured data

Properties Structured data Semi-structured data

It is based on Relational database It is based on XML/RDF(Resource Description

Technology table Framework).

Transaction Matured transaction and various

management concurrency techniques Transaction is adapted from DBMS not matured

Version
management Versioning over tuples, row, tables Versioning over tuples or graph is possible

It is schema dependent and less It is more flexible than structured data but less
Flexibility flexible flexible than unstructured data

It is very difficult to scale DB

Scalability schema It’s scaling is simpler than structured data

Robustness Very robust New technology, not very spread

Structured query allow complex

Query performance joining Queries over anonymous nodes are possible

Social Media Metrics

 Social media metrics are the data you use to determine the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
 Different social media platforms provide you with lots of information about the way people are discovering and
interacting with your brand.
 By focusing on the most important metrics, you can see what you’re doing well and what you need to improve.
 This will allow you to adjust your social media strategy and have a positive impact on your brand.
 Helping you understand everything from how many people see your content all the way through to how much
money you earn from social media, metrics are the building blocks for ongoing improvement and growth.

Important Social Media Metrics to track

Awareness metrics

These numbers show how many people see your content and how much attention your brand gets on social media.

1. Reach
 Reach is simply the number of people who see your content. It’s a good idea to monitor your average reach, as
well as the reach of each individual post, story, or video.
 A valuable subset of this metric is to look at what percentage of your reach is made up of followers vs. non-
followers. If a lot of non-followers are seeing your content, that means it’s being shared or doing well in the
algorithms, or both.
2. Impressions
 Impressions indicates the number of times people saw your content. It can be higher than reach because the same
person might look at your content more than once.
 An especially high level of impressions compared to reach means people are looking at a post multiple times. Do
some digging to see if you can understand why it’s so sticky.

3. Audience growth rate

 Audience growth rate measures how many new followers your brand gets on social media within a certain amount
of time.
 It’s not a simple count of your new followers. Instead, it measures your new followers as a percentage of your
total audience. So when you’re just starting out, getting 10 or 100 new followers in a month can give you a high
growth rate.
 But once you have a larger existing audience, you need more new followers to maintain that momentum.
 To calculate your audience growth rate, track your net new followers (on each platform) over a reporting period.
Then divide that number by your total audience (on each platform) and multiply by 100 to get your audience
growth rate percentage.

Engagement metrics

Social media engagement metrics show how much people interact with your content, as opposed to just seeing it.

4. Engagement Rate
Engagement Rate measures the number of engagements (reactions, comments and shares) your content gets as a
percentage of your audience.

5. Amplification rate
 Amplification Rate is the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall followers.
 Coined by Avinash Kaushik, author and digital marketing evangelist at Google, amplification is “the rate at which
your followers take your content and share it through their networks.”
 Basically, the higher your amplification rate, the more your followers are expanding your reach for you.
 To calculate amplification rate, divide a post’s total number of shares by your total number of followers. Multiply
by 100 to get your amplification rate as a percentage.

6. Virality rate
 Virality rate is similar to amplification rate in that it measures how much your content is shared. However, virality
rate calculates shares as a percentage of impressions rather than as a percentage of followers.
 Remember that every time someone shares your content, it achieves a fresh set of impressions via their audience.
So virality rate measures how your content is spreading exponentially.
 To calculate virality rate, divide a post’s number of shares by its impressions. Multiply by 100 to get your virality
rate as a percentage.

Video metrics

7. Video views
 If you’re creating videos, you want to know how many people are watching them. Each social network determines
what counts as a “view” a little differently, but usually, even a few seconds of watch time counts as a “view.”
 So, video views is a good at-a-glance indicator of how many people have seen at least the start of your video.

8. Video completion rate

 How often do people actually watch your videos all the way through to the end? This is a good indicator that
you’re creating quality content that connects with your audience.
  Video completion rate is a key signal to many social media algorithms, so this is a good one to focus on improving.

Customer experience and service metrics

9. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score

 Customer service metrics are not just about response times and response rates. CSAT (customer satisfaction
score), is a metric that measures how happy people are with your product or service.
 Usually, the CSAT score is based on one, straightforward question: How would you rate your overall level of
satisfaction? In this case, it’s used to measure the level of satisfaction with your social customer service.
 It’s the reason why so many brands ask you to rate your experience with a customer service agent after it’s over.
And that’s exactly how you can measure it too.
 Create a one-question survey asking your customers to rate their satisfaction with your customer service and send
it via the same social channel used for the service interaction. This is a great use for bots.
 Add up all the scores and divide the sum by the number of responses. Then multiply by 100 to get your CSAT score
as a percentage.

10. Net promoter score (NPS)

 Net promoter score, or NPS, is a metric that measures customer loyalty.
 Unlike CSAT, NPS is good at predicting future customer relationships. It is based on one—and only one—
specifically phrased question: How likely is it that you would recommend our [company/product/service] to a
friend?
 Customers are asked to answer on a scale of zero to 10. Based on their response, each customer is grouped into
one of three categories:
Detractors: 0–6 score range
Passives: 7–8 score range
Promoters: 9–10 score range
 NPS is unique in that it measures customer satisfaction as well as the potential for future sales, which has made
it a valuable, go-to metric for organizations of all sizes.
 To calculate NPS, subtract the number of promoters from the number of detractors.
 Divide the result by the total number of respondents and multiply by 100 to get your NPS.

ROI metrics

What’s the return on your social investment? These metrics will help you figure that out.

11. Click-through rate (CTR)

 Click-through rate, or CTR, is how often people click a link in your post to access additional content. That could be
anything from a blog post to your online store.
 CTR gives you a sense of how many people saw your social content and wanted to know more. It’s a good indicator
of how well your social content promotes your offering.
 To calculate CTR, divide the total number of clicks for a post by the total number of impressions. Multiply by 100
to get your CTR as a percentage.
Click-through rate benchmarks:
Q1 2021: 1.1%
Q2 2021: 1.1%
Q3 2021: 1.2%
Q4 2021: 1.2%
Q1 2022: 1.1%
Note: These benchmarks refer to the CTR on paid social ads, rather than organic content. You should track the CTR for
both types of content — more on how to do so effectively at the end of this post.

12. Conversion rate

 Conversion rate measures how often your social content starts the process to a conversion event like a
subscription, download, or sale. This is one of the most important social media marketing metrics because it shows
the value of your social content as a means of feeding your funnel.
 UTM parameters are the key to making your social conversions trackable.
 Once you’ve added your UTMs, calculate conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number
of clicks.

Conversion rate benchmarks:

 Grocery: 6.8%
 Pharmaceuticals: 6.8%
 Health & beauty: 3.9%
 Travel & hospitality: 3.9%
 Home goods & furnishings: 2.8%
 Consumer electronics: 1.4%
 Luxury: 1.1%
 Automotive: 0.7%
 B2B: 0.6%
 Telecoms: 0.5%
 Media: 0.4%
 Financial services: 0.2%
 Energy: 0.1%

Note: These industry-specific conversion rate benchmarks apply to ecommerce (i.e., sales). Keep in mind that a purchase
is not the only kind of valuable conversion!

13. Cost-per-click (CPC)

 Cost-per-click, or CPC, is the amount you pay per individual click on a social ad.
 Knowing the lifetime value of a customer for your business, or even the average order value, will help you put
this number in important context.
 A higher lifetime value of a customer combined with a high conversion rate means you can afford to spend more
per click to get visitors to your website in the first place.
 You don’t need to calculate CPC: You can find it in the analytics for the social network where you’re running your
ad.
Cost per click benchmarks:
Q1 2021: $0.52
Q2 2021: $0.60
Q3 2021: $0.71
Q4 2021: $0.70
Q1 2022: $0.62
Note: These benchmarks come from search advertising rather than social ads, but the numbers give a good impression
of how CPC is trending.

14. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)

 Cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the cost you pay for every thousand
impressions of your social media ad.
 CPM is all about views, not actions.
 Again, there’s nothing to calculate here—just import the data from your social network’s analytics.

CPM benchmarks:
Q1 2021: $5.87
Q2 2021: $7.21
Q3 2021: $7.62
Q4 2021: $8.86
Q1 2022: $6.75

Share of voice and sentiment metrics

15. Social share of voice (SSoV)

 Social share of voice measures how many people are talking about your brand on social media compared to your
competitors. How much of the social conversation in your industry is all about you?
 Mentions can be either:
 Direct (tagged—e.g., “@Hootsuite”)
 Indirect (untagged—e.g., “hootsuite”)
 SSoV is, essentially, competitive analysis: how visible—and, therefore, relevant—is your brand in the market?
 To calculate it, add up every mention of your brand on social across all networks. Do the same for your
competitors. Add both sets of mentions together to get a total number of mentions for your industry. Divide
your brand mentions by the industry total, then multiply by 100 to get your SSoV as a percentage.

16. Social sentiment

 Whereas SSoV tracks your share of the social conversation, social sentiment tracks the feelings and attitudes
behind the conversation. When people talk about you online, are they saying positive or negative things?
  Calculating social sentiment requires some help from analytics tools that can process and categorize language and
context. We’ve got a whole post on how to measure sentiment effectively. We’ll also provide some tips on tools
that can help in the next section.

Social medial ROI

 Social media ROI is the return on investment a company can expect to make from the time, money and effort the
company spends on social media marketing.
 Like anything that refers to a Return on Investment, it’s the value of your social media activities divided by the
investment made.
 The formula to calculate ROI for social media is:
(return – investment made) / investment made X 100 = social media ROI
 If your ROI value is more than 0 percent, you’re making money from your social media campaigns. Anything below
that means you are losing money.
 For example, if the goal of a paid campaign on social is to increase brand awareness and influence, ROI could be
measured by growth in follower count or post-impressions.
 The metrics used to quantify social media ROI for your own business should depend entirely on your objectives.

Why it is Important to quantify and measure ROI on social media?

 Demonstrate the value of your social media marketing efforts to your brand.
 Prove that your social media marketing strategies are effective and are driving the intended results.
 Identify the areas of your strategy that are most successful, so you can double down on what works and fix what
doesn’t.
 Back up and inform budget allocations for social media.

How to measure ROI with social media.

Step 1: Calculate how much you spend on social media
Your social media costs might include:
 The cost of tools and platforms for managing social
 The budget allocated to social ad spends
 Content creation: In-house and external content creation costs, including working with creators and/or
freelancers
 The ongoing costs for your social media team (salaries, training, etc.)
 Agencies and consultants, if you use them

Step 2: Define clear social objectives that connect to overall business goals

Clear social media objectives help define how social actions align with business and departmental goals.
Can you measure the ROI of your social media marketing without these goals?
Theoretically, you could, but real social ROI meaning is only achieved when you show how social returns connect to the
bigger picture.
Think about various ways your social media investment might create value, like:
 Business conversions (such as lead generation, newsletter signups or sales)
 Brand awareness or sentiment
 Customer experience and loyalty
 Employee trust and job satisfaction
 Partner and supplier confidence
 Security and risk mitigation

Step 3: Track metrics that align with your objectives

All social media metrics can tell you something about whether you’re achieving objectives and meeting your goals. But
tracking the right metrics is important to fully understand your social ROI.
Metrics you can track to prove ROI include:
 Reach
 Audience engagement
 Site traffic
 Leads generated
 Sign-ups and conversions
 Revenue generated

When deciding what metrics to use, ask yourself how you will use the information. Consider:
1. What kinds of things does the target audience do after exposure to a campaign?
2. Does this metric align with my bigger business objectives?
3. Does it help me make decisions (what to do more of, what to do less of, etc.)?
4. Do I have the capacity to measure it effectively?

Check your metrics regularly. Ideally, you should get automated reports sent to your inbox, so you don’t have to
remember to pull them yourself.

Step 4: Create an ROI report that shows the impact of social

Once you’ve got your data, share the results with the right stakeholders to show how social media marketing affects your
organization’s bottom line. Here are some ways to make your report stand out:
 Use a template.
 Use plain language (avoid jargon and insider acronyms).
 Tie results back to the relevant business objectives.
 Use KPIs to track short-term progress.
 Articulate limitations and be clear about what you can (and can’t) measure.

Social networks and social network analysis

SOCIAL NETWORK
A social network is a collection of interconnected people.
Social networks comprise of points (people and potential customers) and connections between those points. These
connections may be manifested in many different forms. Examples include
— E-mail exchange
— SMS exchange
— Purchases
— Telephone calls.
Each of us has a personal contacts list. For instance, if we examine e-mail exchange, each e-mail I send will create a
connection between me and the recipient of that e-mail. That recipient can, in turn, forward that e-mail to his contact list,
thus creating another connection between him and his recipients. Consequently, a network of personal connections is
created or in its official title, a social network.

Fig. how a social network is formed.

Social Network Analysis

 Social media and SNSs are increasingly becoming an important and crucial part for the majority of firm’s
media and marketing mix, with organizations managing them like traditional offline and online media.
 Social network analysis (SNA) is the most important tool that can be used in order to analyse the structure of a
network.
 Freeman (2004) defined SNA by summarising the four main characteristics of the method:
a) method based on ties linking actors (nodes)
b) uses systematic empirical data
c) draws heavily on graphic imagery
d) relies on the use of mathematical and/or computational

Social media analytics with unstructured data

Unstructured Data
 Unstructured data is defined as data present in absolute raw form. This data is difficult to process due to its
complex arrangement and formatting.
 Unstructured data management may take data from many forms, including social media posts, chats, satellite
imagery, IoT sensor data, emails, and presentations, to organize it in a logical, predefined manner in a data
storage.
 In contrast, the meaning of structured data is data that follows predefined data models and is easy to analyze.
 Unstructured data is qualitative, not quantitative, so it is mostly categorical and characteristic in nature.
 For example, data from social media or websites can be used to figure out future buying trends or determine the
effectiveness of a marketing campaign.
 Another unstructured data analytics example is detecting patterns in scam emails and chat, which can be useful
for enterprises in monitoring policy compliance.
 That’s why unstructured data is extracted and stored in unstructured data warehouses (also called data lakes) for
analysis.

Types of Unstructured Data

Unstructured data comes with no limitations in type, and you can find it in various formats such as:
 Images
 Video files
 Text
 Audio file formats
 Emails

Examples of Unstructured Data

There are various examples of unstructured data assets in business usage. Below are some typical examples:
 Medical records: In health care, machines and humans generate a massive amount of unstructured data.
 Survey Responses: Survey responses do not only come in a clear-cut format. The free-form answers are indeed
unstructured and hard to get the meaning of.
 Webpages: Web Pages contain images, videos, and text. To analyze web pages, data analysts need to scrape the
data and find a meaning to every piece of the code.

Advantages of Unstructured Data

 More flexibility– The undefined unstructured data format comes in various forms, such as images, audio
transcripts, videos, web content, etc. You can also use it for different purposes, such as classifying images, text,
and sound, inputting that information into predictive models for sentiment analysis, entity and theme
classification, and other text analytics.
  Offers more insights– Although the information is harder to detect and analyze, unstructured data can provide
otherwise unidentifiable insights into a company’s customer and competitor base.
 Quickly accumulated: Unstructured data requires no predefined format, which makes it easy to collect.

Disadvantages of Unstructured Data

 Time-consuming and expensive– Unstructured data can take a long time to process. It can also be costly to
convert it into useful, practical information, as you will need AI and data scientists to structure it.
 Difficult to analyze– Business users and data analytics tools will not be able to access unstructured data as it is
text-heavy or stored in non-recognizable formats. Data analytics specialists are needed to identify, extract, and
process relevant information from the data.
 Requires specific tools– Due to the complexity of unstructured data, most data tools cannot ingest it. Specialized
Data Analytics tools will be needed to manipulate and pull insights from the unstructured content.
 Hard to store- Due to its enormous size, we generally store unstructured data in data lakes. Data lakes are storage
spaces with huge storage capacity.

Social Media handling using Unstructured Data

Here are five best practices to follow:

 Archive all social media data — Social networking platforms are constantly changing, which makes data archiving
all the more important. Social network data must be captured in real-time, archived in an immutable format, fully
searchable and presented in context to facilitate evidence review.
 Develop policies for social media use — Policies and guidelines outline the acceptable and unacceptable uses of
social network platforms. Employee training for social media use should be documented and updated regularly,
and all activity on the platforms must be documented.
 Implement retention and deletion policies for social media data — All social media data must be captured,
archived, and retained. It’s important to note that mandated and recommended social media data retention
schedules vary based on industry, company size, and whether you’re actively using social networks for marketing
and communications.
 Implement monitoring policies for social media use — Social network monitoring helps companies comply with
regulations, ensure data security, and mitigate risk. Monitoring should also be implemented to safeguard
intellectual property and confidential information, as well as monitor for harassment, discrimination and other
types of employee misconduct.
 Implement e-discovery policies for social media data — Social media data can be used as evidence in legal cases,
so it’s important to implement ediscovery policies, procedures, and tools. Since the digital trail created by social
media is often long and complex, legal teams need the ability to quickly find, extract, and act on relevant records.

Text Mining
 Text mining is a component of data mining that deals specifically with unstructured text data.
 It involves the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract useful information and insights from
large amounts of unstructured text data.
 Text mining can be used as a preprocessing step for data mining or as a standalone process for specific tasks.
 By using text mining, the unstructured text data can be transformed into structured data that can be used for data
mining tasks such as classification, clustering, and association rule mining. This allows organizations to gain insights
from a wide range of data sources, such as customer feedback, social media posts, and news articles.
 Text mining is widely used in various fields, such as natural language processing, information retrieval, and social
media analysis.
 It has become an essential tool for organizations to extract insights from unstructured text data and make data-
driven decisions.

Procedures of analyzing Text Mining:

 Text Summarization: To extract its partial content reflection its whole content automatically.
  Text Categorization: To assign a category to the text among categories predefined by users.
 Text Clustering: To segment texts into several clusters, depending on the substantial relevance.

Text Mining Techniques:

 Information Extraction: It is a process of extract meaningful words from documents.
 Information Retrieval: It is a process of extracting relevant and associated patterns according to a given set of
words or text documents.
 Natural Language Processing: It concerns the automatic processing and analysis of unstructured text information.
 Clustering: It is an unsupervised learning process that grouping of text according to their similar characteristics.
 Text Summarization: To extract its partial content reflection it’s whole content automatically.

Issues in Text Mining

Numerous issues happen during the text mining process:

1. The efficiency and effectiveness of decision-making.

2. The uncertain problem can come at an intermediate stage of text mining. In the pre-processing stage, different rules
and guidelines are characterized to normalize the text that makes the text mining process efficient. Prior to applying
pattern analysis on the document, there is a need to change over unstructured data into a moderate structure.
3. Sometimes original message or meaning can be changed due to alteration.
4. Another issue in text mining is many algorithms and techniques support multi-language text. It may create ambiguity in
text meaning. This problem can lead to false-positive results.
5. The utilization of synonym, polysemy, and antonyms in the document text makes issues for the text mining tools that
take both in a similar setting. It is difficult to categorize such kinds of text/ words.

Advantages of Text Mining:

 Large Amounts of Data: Text mining allows organizations to extract insights from large amounts of unstructured
text data. This can include customer feedback, social media posts, and news articles.
 Variety of Applications: Text mining has a wide range of applications, including sentiment analysis, named entity
recognition, and topic modeling. This makes it a versatile tool for organizations to gain insights from unstructured
text data.
 Improved Decision Making: Text mining can be used to extract insights from unstructured text data, which can
be used to make data-driven decisions.
 Cost-effective: Text mining can be a cost-effective way to extract insights from unstructured text data, as it
eliminates the need for manual data entry.

Disadvantages of Text Mining:

 Complexity: Text mining can be a complex process that requires advanced skills in natural language processing
and machine learning.
 Quality of Data: The quality of text data can vary, which can affect the accuracy of the insights extracted from text
mining.
 High computational cost: Text mining requires high computational resources, and it may be difficult for smaller
organizations to afford the technology.
 Limited to text data: Text mining is limited to extracting insights from unstructured text data and cannot be used
with other data types.

Social customer relationship management

 Social CRM, or social relationship management, is customer relationship management and engagement fostered
by communication with customers through social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook.
 Social CRM integrates social media platforms with customer relationship management (CRM) systems to provide
insight into customer interactions with a brand, and to improve the quality of customer engagement.

Social CRM metrics

Social CRM tools use the following metrics to measure the level of successful customer engagement:
 Traffic. Social CRM measures traffic and Conversion rates from social media platforms. This enables a business to
see how many customers visit sites and how those clicks convert into value.
 Engagement. Social CRM enables you to measure not just clicks, but user engagement with the sites.
 Level of followers. Social CRM helps identify active followers and how they do or do not interact with the
company's content.
 Brand mentions. Social CRM helps measure how many followers are talking about a company or brand and if
those customers are sharing their experiences via social media platforms.

Benefits of Social CRM

 Greater exposure in the places where your audiences spend their time;
 Increased engagement and deeper relationships with customers;
 Increased web traffic and conversions and higher search rankings;
 High-quality inbound leads that turn into revenue faster;
 More efficient marketing budgets with higher returns;
 Faster marketing campaigns with better targeting.

Big Data
Big Data is a collection of data that is huge in volume, yet growing exponentially with time. It is a data with so large size
and complexity that none of traditional data management tools can store it or process it efficiently. Big data is also a data
but with huge size.

The three Vs of big data

Volume: The amount of data matters. With big data, you’ll have to process high volumes of low-density, unstructured
data. This can be data of unknown value, such as Twitter data feeds, clickstreams on a web page or a mobile app, or
sensor-enabled equipment. For some organizations, this might be tens of terabytes of data. For others, it may be hundreds
of petabytes.

Velocity: Velocity is the fast rate at which data is received and (perhaps) acted on. Normally, the highest velocity of data
streams directly into memory versus being written to disk. Some internet-enabled smart products operate in real time or
near real time and will require real-time evaluation and action.

Variety: Variety refers to the many types of data that are available. Traditional data types were structured and fit neatly
in a relational database. With the rise of big data, data comes in new unstructured data types. Unstructured and semi
structured data types, such as text, audio, and video, require additional preprocessing to derive meaning and support
metadata.

Big data benefits:

 Big data makes it possible for you to gain more complete answers because you have more information.
 More complete answers mean more confidence in the data—which means a completely different approach to
tackling problems.

How big data works

Big data gives you new insights that open up new opportunities and business models. Getting started involves three key
actions:

1. Integrate
Big data brings together data from many disparate sources and applications. Traditional data integration mechanisms,
such as extract, transform, and load (ETL) generally aren’t up to the task. It requires new strategies and technologies to
analyze big data sets at terabyte, or even petabyte, scale.
During integration, you need to bring in the data, process it, and make sure it’s formatted and available in a form that
your business analysts can get started with.
2. Manage
Big data requires storage. Your storage solution can be in the cloud, on premises, or both. You can store your data in any
form you want and bring your desired processing requirements and necessary process engines to those data sets on an
on-demand basis. Many people choose their storage solution according to where their data is currently residing. The
cloud is gradually gaining popularity because it supports your current compute requirements and enables you to spin up
resources as needed.
3. Analyze
Your investment in big data pays off when you analyze and act on your data. Get new clarity with a visual analysis of
your varied data sets. Explore the data further to make new discoveries. Share your findings with others. Build data
models with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Put your data to work.

Internet of things
 The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the network of physical objects—“things”—that are embedded with sensors,
software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and
systems over the internet.
 These devices range from ordinary household objects to sophisticated industrial tools.
 With more than 7 billion connected IoT devices today, experts are expecting this number to grow to 10 billion by
2020 and 22 billion by 2025.

What technologies have made IoT possible?

While the idea of IoT has been in existence for a long time, a collection of recent advances in a number of different
technologies has made it practical.
 Access to low-cost, low-power sensor technology. Affordable and reliable sensors are making IoT technology
possible for more manufacturers.
 Connectivity. A host of network protocols for the internet has made it easy to connect sensors to the cloud and
to other “things” for efficient data transfer.
 Cloud computing platforms. The increase in the availability of cloud platforms enables both businesses and
consumers to access the infrastructure they need to scale up without actually having to manage it all.
 Machine learning and analytics. With advances in machine learning and analytics, along with access to varied and
vast amounts of data stored in the cloud, businesses can gather insights faster and more easily. The emergence
of these allied technologies continues to push the boundaries of IoT and the data produced by IoT also feeds these
technologies.
 Conversational artificial intelligence (AI). Advances in neural networks have brought natural-language processing
(NLP) to IoT devices (such as digital personal assistants Alexa, Cortana, and Siri) and made them appealing,
affordable, and viable for home use.

Unit 5
Mobile Marketing
 Mobile marketing is any marketing campaign that promotes products or services through mobile devices.
 By connecting with customers through mobile devices, you can create a cohesive customer experience.
 They use multiple channels to reach target audiences including smartphones, tablets, mobile devices, social
media, and apps.
 Most people always have their phones with them, allowing you to connect with customers in real time.
 Mobile marketing is used to attract customers in an interactive and personalized way.

Types of Mobile Marketing

  App-based marketing. Use a marketing funnel to persuade potential customers to acquire your app, then activate
it and retain it. A good onboarding flow will encourage users to discover the functionality of their app promptly.
 Social media marketing. Drive traffic with organic and paid ads that appear on mobile social feeds. Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram often boast the largest user bases.
 Location-based marketing. Mobile marketers can create ads that appear on mobile devices based on a user’s
location. For example, some advertisers may only want mobile ads to appear when users are within a one-mile
radius of their business.
 Mobile search ads. Search engines often offer specific ad types built for mobile. These can create unique benefits
to offer an improved user experience, such as click-to-call functions or instant directions.
 SMS. Text a user’s phone number with specific offers or notifications of upcoming deals.
 QR codes. A cost-effective way to leverage mobile marketing to drive customer engagement and retention. With
QR codes you can view a website or landing page, a social media profile, dial a phone number, send an email or
view a special offer.
 In-game. Game players will see ads as pop-ups or full screens.
 Voice marketing. Automated phone calls to customer mobiles.
 Mobile wallets. Offers can be sent to apps such as Apple’s Wallet, meaning customers don’t have to worry about
printing them off, and making it more likely they will be used.
 Augmented reality. Lots of potential, although still underused by many firms. Gucci, for example, allows you to
use its app to overlay a pair of new shoes on to your own feet.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages

 Accessible and Immediate – you can reach an audience from anywhere at any time, the fastest way to
communicate with customers
 Global Audience – people have mobile phones across the world, so you can reach who you choose
 Multiple Channels – provides flexibility and opportunity to reach customers through websites, apps, text, social
media, and more
 Personalization – mobile devices are an extension of the user, so any information customers receive from their
mobile devices will seem much more personal to the customer
 Viral Potential – content is easily shared creating free exposure and the potential for your content to be shared
everywhere

Disadvantages
 Little Room for Error – hard to fix any mistakes before they are seen by customers, potential for a negative first
Potential for
 Bad User Experiences – bad ads can also go viral, which can be detrimental to your business
 Navigation Issues – different devices have different screen sizes making it difficult to standardize an image, some
people may not want to or be able to go to your ad with their type of device
 Privacy and Permission – people are concerned about privacy on their mobile devices, so consider how customers
protect themselves online and offer ways to opt out of communications
 Constant Updates – technology is continually updated, so you will constantly have to educate your team on how
to use the latest updates and ensure your customers also know how to access your ad with new updates

Mobile Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

 Reach Audiences – traditional marketing reaches a more general audience; mobile marketing allows you to reach
specific customer segments.
  Engage Audiences – customers cannot directly respond to traditional marketing because it is a one-way message;
customers can interact with mobile marketing content.
 Time – when you stop running a traditional ad it is over, making it a good short-term strategy; mobile marketing
exists forever online, making it a more long-term strategy.
 Measurability – it is more difficult to measure the success of traditional marketing campaigns; mobile marketing
campaigns are easier to measure because they target specific audiences.

E-Marketing
 E-Marketing stands for Electronic Marketing.
 E-marketing includes all the activities done by a business organization to promote and sell goods & services
through the means of the internet.
 Online marketing, internet marketing, digital marketing, etc. are interchangeably used hence considered
synonymous.
 Online advertising, banner ads, Facebook advertising are some examples of e-marketing.

Features of E-Marketing

 E-marketing provides firms the opportunity for global marketing.

 It is less expensive compared to other traditional means of marketing.
 It enables buying and selling of products from anywhere making the whole process of marketing easier.
 It allows the marketer to reach its targeted customers in a broad range of ways.
 Buyers are flooded with choices of products, services, and their sellers.
 It provides a vast array of information to both the buyer and seller.
 It is interactive in nature, both in terms of eliciting a response or providing an instant response. This is a unique
quality in today’s competitive market.

Types of E-Marketing

Social Media Marketing. Today, social media is a great way to discover the world around us. It is a great source for smart
marketers to make informed and aware of the company’s different types of products and services to people. Google,
Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, etc. are some great social media channels that you can use to
market your ideas.

Email Marketing. It is considered to be one of the effective ways of marketing to the customers through email. You can
make a list of your customers and send the email to make customers aware of your products, services, discounts, new
offering, and other services directly to their inbox.

Blogging. Blogging is one of the effective ways to share your writing, passion, and offering on the online platform – helps
to communicate easily. You can write about your product, its facilities, readers read & engage which leads to sales.

Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is a process of promoting other products and services through an online platform
while earning some percent of commissions. It makes a win-win situation for everyone.

Video Marketing. Video always performs greater than word of mouth and pictures. It helps you to catch the attention of
the right customers while promoting your product and services. There is a saying “One picture worth a thousand words
and One video worth a thousand pictures”.

Webinars. A webinar is a great way to bring all the members and stakeholders of the company together regardless of
significant distances. You can make online meetings, webinars through different software such as Zoom, Livestorm, Demio,
WebinarJam, WebinarNinja, GoToWebinar, etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  SEO helps you achieve organic (non-paid) traffic from search engines like Google. Organic results appear
underneath paid results on the search results page:
 The goal of an SEO strategy is to rank as highly on the search results page as possible. That way, potential
customers will see your page first.
 Here are a few things you can do to improve your SEO:
1. Research keywords you plan to target in your content
2. Create content that addresses customers’ problems
3. Optimize for on-page SEO factors
4. Find and fix technical SEO issues
5. Earn backlinks from authoritative sites

Pay-per-click
 Pay-per-click advertising is a digital method where an advertiser pays a publisher every time the ad is clicked.
What differentiates pay-per-click from SEO is that you have to pay for the results.
 When planned strategically, PPC advertising can increase traffic to a specific page or site.
 The cost of running an ad or promoting your search results will vary depending on how competitive your
keywords are. A keyword with high competition will likely cost more, while a low-competition keyword will likely
cost less.
 Ads can be classified as pay-per-click if they appear on search results pages, while browsing the web, before
YouTube videos, and in social media.

Advantages
 Instant Response. The response rate of internet marketing is instantaneous; for instance, you upload something
and it goes viral. Then it’d reach millions of people overnight.
 Cost-Efficient. Compared to the other media of advertising, it’s much cheaper. If you’re using the unpaid methods,
then there’s almost zero cost.
 Less Risky. When your cost is zero and the instant rate is high; then what one has to loos. No risk at all.
 Greater Data Collection. In this way, you have a great ability to collect a wide range of data about your customers.
This customer data can be used later.
 Interactive. One of the important aspects of digital marketing is that it’s very interactive. People can leave their
comments, and you’ll get feedback from your target market.
 Way to Personalized Marketing. Online marketing opens the door to personalized marketing with the right
planning and marketing strategy, customers can be made to feel that this ad is directly talking to him/her.
 Greater Exposure of your Product. Going viral with one post can deliver greater exposure to your product or
service.
 Accessibility. The beauty of the online world and e-marketing is that it’s accessible from everywhere across the
globe.

Disadvantages
 Technology Dependent. E-Marketing is completely dependent on technology and the internet; a slight
disconnection can jeopardize your whole business.
 Worldwide Competition. When you launch your product online, then you face a global competition because it’s
accessible from everywhere.
 Privacy & Security Issues. Privacy and security issues are very high because your data is accessible to everyone;
therefore, one has to be very cautious about what goes online.
 Higher Transparency & Price Competition. When privacy and security issues are high, then you have to spend a
lot to be transparent. Price competition also increases with higher transparency.
 Maintenance Cost. With the fast-changing technological environment, you have to be consistently evolved with
the pace of technology and the maintenance cost is very high.

Content Marketing
  Content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing
relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media.
 This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it’s
time to buy what you sell.
 Content marketing is the development and distribution of relevant, useful content—blogs, newsletters, white
papers, social media posts, emails, videos, and the like—to current and potential customers.
 When it’s done right, this content conveys expertise and makes it clear that a company values the people to whom
it sells.

Elements of a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy

An effective content marketing strategy should have these five core elements to be successful:
 Audience personas
 Brand story
 Content marketing mission
 Business case
 An action plan

1. Audience Personas
 It’s difficult to tell your brand’s story if you don’t know who’s listening. That’s why the first step is to identify the
audience you’d like to target.
 Here are a few ways to do that:
1. Survey your existing customers
2. Research industry trends
3. Identify who you don’t want to target
4. Keep tabs on who your competitors target
 A formalized persona will help you clearly and succinctly communicate your audience to your stakeholders. And
anyone involved in brand messaging.

2. Brand Story and Positioning

 A brand story is a summary of your company’s history, mission, purpose, and values.
 Defining your brand story can help you identify the right messages and topics to address with your content. That
helps you choose the right direction in your content marketing strategy.
 Your story should focus on:
1. The hero of your story (your customer) and their goals and challenges
2. Your brand’s personality
3. The purpose of your brand and key brand values
4. The way your product and your content can help reinforce all the above and empower your hero
 Keeping your brand’s story in mind when making content will create a consistent experience for your audience
and build the right image on all your content marketing channels.
 Here are some questions to help you brainstorm your brand story and positioning in the market:
i. Who are my existing and potential customers? What are their goals?
ii. Who are my top competitors? How do they market their brands?
iii. What is my brand’s unique value?
iv. What problems does my product solve?
v. What makes my product a better choice over my competitors?

3. Content Marketing Mission Statement and Owned Media Value Proposition

 Owned media refers to any digital marketing channels that you have control over. Like your website or social
media.
  To establish your brand as a credible content publisher, define your owned media value proposition.
 In other words:
What unique value does your brand’s content provide? (This should be unique from your competitors’ content.)
This will help you create a content marketing strategy that sets you apart from your competitors.
 Another important item to include in your strategy is your content marketing mission statement. It should
summarize why you are creating content and provide information on who can benefit from it.
 Make sure your content marketing mission statement includes the following elements:
 Your audience: Who are you creating content for?
 The benefit: What information or answers will you provide?
 The outcome: How will your content help your audience achieve their goals?

4. Business Case and Content Marketing Goals

 Providing value to your audience is an integral part of a successful content marketing plan. But in addition to
attracting new readers and followers, content marketing should drive your business forward.
 Creating a documented business case will help you or your team better understand the benefits, costs, and risks
of implementing a content marketing strategy in your company.
 A business case is a project management document that outlines why particular tasks should be executed and
how their benefits outweigh their costs.
 To get started, identify the business goals your company needs to achieve and figure out how content marketing
will bring your company closer to those goals.
 Additionally, what resources do you need to invest in your content strategy? And what results do you want to
generate?
 This will allow you to come up with a firm budget for content creation and marketing.

5. Action Plan
 Finally, add your main content marketing campaigns and projects to your content plan.
 Using a formal content plan will help you think through each content marketing strategy step individually.
 Make sure to cover the following while content planning:
 Choose content topics for each campaign
 Determine which content formats you will produce
 Pick the channels for content distribution

Benefits of Content Marketing

 Increase online visibility. A content strategy can help you attract more customers and website visitors, especially
when people are constantly looking for solutions to their pain points. Offering educational and informative
content about a topic they’re interested in can help you increase visibility online through your website or social
media accounts.
 Generate more leads. You can increase leads when content marketing is used to drive traffic. Since educating
customers builds trust and helps them feel more comfortable purchasing from your business, you can generate
more leads and start to develop relationships with potential shoppers.
 Boost loyalty. Loyalty is essential in marketing and business because the more loyal your customers are, the more
repeat purchases they’ll make. Offering content that informs consumers can help them begin to build trust with
your brand and see you as a thought leader.
 Improve authority. Developing content is ideal for improving authority and becoming a thought leader in your
industry. Not only does content help you build trust, but it can position your brand as the most authoritative on a
particular topic.

Steps to create a Content Marketing Strategy

Identify your audience

To create content for a particular reader, you need to have a clear idea of their priorities, challenges, and preferences. If
you have detailed descriptions of your various segments, choose 1 or 2 to write for. Otherwise, craft profiles of your
audience members and prospects before starting.

Determine the right formats

The right format corresponds with what stage of the sales cycle you’re creating content for. Another important
consideration includes what formats will best help you showcase value. For some, this will be a video; for others, a
checklist.
An audience will judge your content on its quality, and they should. Identify the right resource, internal or external, to
create this work. Regardless of who creates it, hire a professional proofreader to review anything before it goes out the
door.

Determine how you’ll distribute

Will you post content on your site, email it to people, or print it for an event? Start with “where” you know your audience
is likely to be, and choose formats that make sense. For example, an article makes sense to send via an email, a checklist
or worksheet can be posted on social media, and a buyer’s guide is a good follow-up to a pitch.

Choose a sustainable schedule

Once you know who your target readers are and the best formats for every stage in the sales cycle, create a short-term
(3-6 months) plan. It’s easy to develop a content marketing plan that’s overly ambitious. However, the plan you design
should have content elements you can realistically make based on your budget and resources. Keep track of how long it
takes you to create each piece of content so that you can build that time into your schedule.

Follow best practices

Compelling content is clearly written and doesn’t contain jargon that only you and your peers will know. It should also
include detailed how-to advice. A short, relevant, actionable piece of content is best.