Digital Consumer and Digital Marketing Overview

Digital transformation is the need of the hour for every firm to stay relevant in today’s world. For a firm, it is important to extend its efforts beyond traditional marketing and towards digital marketing. To do this as well as possible, it is important to understand how the consumer behaves online and then commence or optimize the digital marketing efforts, leveraging the advantages that this kind of marketing offers.

The Digital Consumer:

Customers, both in the digital and traditional landscapes, follow similar journeys that look something like this:

Although the customer journey in both the traditional and digital landscapes is similar, the consumers are more informed, communicative, and connected in the digital landscape. This means that consumers who have experienced a stage of the journey can influence the decisions of other consumers. This can be visualized through the following diagram:

As more and more consumers have started accessing the internet, companies are increasing their efforts in digital marketing. One of these instances was GSK, when it introduced a video-neutral strategy, moving away from traditional TV commercials. Under this strategy, their investments in video marketing were divided between YouTube and television depending on how the consumers behaved in a region. For instance, their investments moved from 80% in television to 80% in YouTube within 18 months.

Typically, B2B buyers go through much research before engaging with sales representatives of a prospective vendor. Based on this, HPE scaled its marketing communication through digital marketing. Also, they could personalize these combinations through the use of digital marketing. Since B2B buyers were doing much research online, HPE targeted its audience at various digital touchpoints, such as through social media marketing, video marketing, display marketing, and search marketing.

P&G used mobile marketing to promote one of its primary products, Pampers, to its next billion customers in the African market. The huge mobile penetration in Africa motivated the use of mobile as a digital platform. All the online resources of the P&G Pampers website were optimized for mobiles, and SMS alerts were sent to the potential clients. The campaign’s communication strategy was around healthy birth practices to resonate with the primary target audience, pregnant women. Since P&G was there to advise these women as they went through different stages of their pregnancy, this helped build brand equity in the African market.

Opportunities in Digital Marketing:

Digital marketing offers many advantages over traditional marketing. Some of these include

1. Better measurability
2. Real-time monitoring
3. Easier troubleshooting
4. Personalization
5. Improved efficiency

Bajaj launched its Bajaj V campaign on Facebook, and based on insights, it was concluded that the campaign spurred significant interest in the southern parts of the country. Based on this result, Bajaj launched videos for the same campaign in languages spoken in South India, such as Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil. Similarly, a recent ad by Dove was immediately labeled as racist by the online community. Since digital marketing offers the advantage of real-time monitoring, it was taken down, and Dove issued an apology via its Twitter handle.

Just like Bajaj and Dove were able to benefit from the better measurability and real-time monitoring that digital marketing offers, HPE was able to improve the outreach of its flagship event, Discover. Traditionally, the event was limited by space and budget, thereby limiting the event to only the most available customers. As a result, the company should have taken advantage of many opportunities. With the incorporation of digital marketing, however, HPE was able to reach out to many of the otherwise untapped opportunities. Today, HPE identifies the key messages from its events’ agenda, sent out through digital platforms such as mobiles and computers. The event was broadcast live on HPE’s different channels, such as YouTube. Even after the event, snackable content was created and promoted across the social media platforms, increasing its online presence.

Digital Marketing Framework:

For any company to establish its online presence, it becomes crucial to be clear about its digital marketing framework. Here are the key components of any digital marketing framework

1. Digital content: Different tactics are used to expose your potential customers to your company’s promotions, such as blog posts, website promotions, digital ads, and more. All this falls under this component.
2. Digital devices: The devices such as mobiles, computers, and tablets, where the users consume a firm’s digital content, are called digital devices.
3. Digital platforms: Digital platforms are places where the company’s digital content can be consumed. This includes Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and all the online social media channels where the firm is present.
4. Digital analytics: Digital analytics is one of the most important components of the framework. A company must assess the performance of its digital content on various devices and platforms.

Paid, Owned, and Earned Media:

There are three forms of digital media through which potential customers can be reached.

1. Owned media: Any digital content that reaches the audience through a firm’s website or pages it owns falls under owned media. For instance, if Amazon shares a Facebook post on the Great Indian Sale through its Facebook page, it will fall under owned media. Similarly, if Salesforce posts a video ad describing one of its services on its YouTube channel, it falls under owned media.
2. Paid media: There are instances when a post reaches a potential customer not through the owned pages or a firm’s website but through other methods. If the firm has paid for these promotions, it falls under paid media. For instance, when a customer needs market research services and looks up the same on Google, the first result is an ad. The ad falls under the paid promotions of the market research service provider. Similarly, if a customer is reading a blog post on how to click the best photographs and encounters a display ad of a DSLR camera being sold on Amazon, it falls under Amazon’s paid promotions.
3. Earned media: A firm needs to own the digital content and reach a potential customer without paying to avoid falling under earned media. This is one of the most effective forms of promotion. For instance, a happy internet influencer customer may share his story of association with the firm.

Here’s a table summarising the different ways that these digital content can reach a firm’s potential customers:

Do you have a question for us?

We would be glad to answer any questions you may have for us.