What is digital marketing and how is it used?
Part A
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is the marketing of goods and services on digital platforms on the
internet.
Digital marketing is all about creating brand awareness, getting customer retention
and to get new customers interested. They can do this on a number of different
platforms.
Some of the most common platforms are: emails, blogging, social media, video
marketing, ebooks and magazines and visual content. There are also platforms such
as search engines, where there are paid auctions to get the top spot on the ads and
there is search engine optimisation.
When it comes to finding the target segments, the business needs to look at the
demographics of the customers they are trying to target or of the customers they
already have.
They will need to look at things like; age, gender,interests, geography and their
behaviours - like online shopping. By doing this, then the business can see what are
the best platforms to use for digital marketing, because if they are targeting a
younger generation, then some of the social media platforms would be better.
Traditional marketing is different from digital marketing in a number of different ways.
One of the major differences between the two types of marketing is the cost.
Traditional marketing can cost quite a bit because not only do you have to pay for
the campaign itself to be put on TV, radio, magazines etc, you have to pay to keep
them running, which can add up to quite a bit of money. Whereas, digital marketing
is relatively cheap, because platforms like social media are free, and you can pay
what you want to promote the campaign.
Another difference is that digital marketing allows you to track the performance of the
campaign a lot quicker and easier than tracking the traditional marketing campaign.
This means that, when using digital marketing, you can easily see the reach of the
campaign and how effective it is, meaning you can see if you should promote it more
or stop running the campaign.
One of the major differences between traditional and digital marketing is how many
people they reach. Digital marketing can reach a wider audience, and there is a
higher chance for the campaign to be seen. Whereas, with traditional marketing,
there is no guarantee that people will see the campaign.
The role of Digital Marketing
,The role of digital marketing is to reach new potential customers to generate more
sales, as well as to widen the reach of an advert.
Traditional marketing is advertising on platforms such as: TV, radio, newspapers,
flyers, etc. However, these adverts only reach a certain amount of people, and it is
very difficult to analyse how effective the advertisement has actually been. So the
role of digital marketing is to follow up the traditional marketing platform, to make
sure you get the customers coming to your website/shop and actually buying
something. Digital marketing makes it easy for you to see all the statistics, so that
the business can see if their campaign has worked.
With both traditional and digital marketing, the business will need to use the 7 ps, so
that they can create an efficient and effective strategy.
(1)The 7 ps - or the marketing mix - consists of: price, product, place, people,
promotion, process and physical evidence.
For traditional marketing, price is just about setting the price and what type of
method the business will use to get that price- cost plus pricing,etc - however, digital
marketing means that you can digitally send out discount codes and online voucher,
which will gain the attention of the customer, as they see that they have been given a
voucher/discount, so that they might do to the businesses website, or they might go
to their actual store and use the discount. For example, one of my chosen
businesses is spotify, and they do discounts for families and students, which bring
these demographics in, because they have been given a discount.
Another way digital marketing supports the price, is that you can easily do
comparisons of prices, to make sure that you get the best value for money.
Normally if you wanted to see a product, you would have to go into the shop that
sells that item. However, with the support of digital marketing, it means that people
can go online and see the product there, and they might also be able to see
someone on social media- youtube - doing an unboxing or a review of the product.
This means that the customer can easily see the product and see reviews of said
product, which would help them make up their mind if they would like to purchase it
or not. For example, One of my businesses is greggs, and one of their products is a
vegan sausage roll, and a lot of people have been posting reviews of the vegan
sausage roll on all the different social media platforms. This will bring more
customers, because lots of people are watching this one person - who could be an
influencer - try and review one of their products.
The place of the product is about the distribution of the product and where it can be
seen. Before digital marketing was used everyday, people had to physically visit a
shop. However, now people can do online shopping, which means that businesses
need to make sure that they place their product in the right place. This means that
people can buy a product from home or when they are out and about.
, One of my businesses is Greggs. They sell their product from their own stores.
However, they are now selling on Just Eat - which is a delivery app. This means that
if someone wants to buy a product from Greggs, then they no longer have to
physically go out of the house to buy that product, they can now order it via an app,
and it is delivered to their front door.
(2)With traditional marketing, the ‘People’ part of the marketing mix is about the
people who work for the business - the staff. With digital marketing, ‘People’ means
the people that organises the marketing of the business. This could be the people
that operate the chat bots or the people that run the businesses social media
accounts. For example, Greggs has a massive presence on social media, where
they reply to people's tweets in a joking way.
With the aid of digital marketing, businesses can now promote their business in a
number of different ways, to make sure they reach as many people as they can.
Spotify is an example of a business that advertises but also has people advertising
on Spotify. Spotify is a music service that gives the user access to millions of songs,
and businesses can advertise on it. By allowing businesses to advertise on Spotify, it
means that not only does the business advertising get awareness, but so does
Spotify.
The process part of the marketing mix is about the customers experience, and how
to make it the best it can be. As online shopping becomes more and more popular -
with the help of the always improving digital marketing. Online shops need to make
sure things like website speed is good otherwise you might lose customers, as it is
taking too long to load the website.
The process for Greggs used to be that people would go into the outlet, and choose
the item they wanted, they then would either eat the food in the outlet, or they would
take it away. However, people now can order the item they want from Greggs on the
Just eat app, and then the delivery driver for just eat will pick up the item that has
been ordered from Greggs, and then they will deliver it to the customers door.
The last part of the 7ps, is the physical evidence. In the sense of traditional
marketing, physical evidence meant things that the customer could physically
see/touch in the shop - shopping bags, badges, lanyards. For digital marketing,
physical evidence is the reviews that customers leave on places like: social media,
TripAdviser, TrustPilot etc. Many people will now go online and search for reviews on
the product they are thinking of buying, instead of actually going into the shop and
physically seeing the product and touch it.
(2)For Greggs, reviews on social media have played a big part in building brand
awareness for Greggs. When Greggs released their vegan sausage roll, many
people took to social media to see what people thought of the product. This has led
to hundreds of social media posts and youtube videos being made about trying
Greggs vegan sausage roll. Greggs released their vegan sausage roll early 2019,
