Module 1: Introduction to DIGITAL MARKETING

 Evolution of Digital Marketing

The 90s

Archie, the first search engine, debuted in the early 1990s, heralding the birth of
search. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, quickly followed.

The first clickable web-ad banners were introduced in 1994. The first identifiable
social media site was launched in 1997, with 3.5 million users. In the 1990s, a slew
of websites still in use was found, including Google and Yahoo's web search, both
of which debuted in 1998.

The Millennial Generation

A massive economic bubble grew in the new millennium. However, the bubble's
peak and burst between 2000 and 2002 harmed many businesses. Many new sites
were launched in the 2000s as the economy recovered from the boom, including
the beginnings of LinkedIn in 2002, Myspace and WordPress in 2003, and
Facebook in 2004. In the early 2000s, mobile text messaging marketing became
increasingly popular.

The Mobile Era

The latter half of the decade saw increased marketing and sales, with Amazon's e-
commerce sales surpassing $10 billion. Over the next few years, mobile app
culture expanded with the introduction of Whatsapp, Instagram, and Snapchat to
the digital world.
 The Present

Today, 65% of an individual's digital media time is spent on a mobile device. The
digital advertising industry is now valued at around $200 billion, with Google Ad
Words accounting for 96% of the company's revenue. With an estimated 3.1 billion
online users, social networking has led the digital marketing revolution. The rise of
bloggers and Instagram has resulted in a $1 billion industry for influencers, which
are anticipated to grow. Digital marketing is expected to grow in the coming years,
with many new developments and changes in this exciting industry.

 Difference between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing

Traditional Marketing Digital Marketing

In this marketing technique, traditional modes of In this, digital channels are used as the mode
conversion are used. of marketing.
The nature of this marketing technique is
The nature of this marketing technique is static.
dynamic.
The conversion rate is less. The conversion rate is high.
Engagement is higher than in the traditional
Engagement is less or low.
model.
ROI is less. ROI is high.
It is more expensive than digital marketing. It is less expensive.
Tracking is not possible. The tracking is possible and done easily.
Have local reach. Have global reach.
Results are delayed. Results are instant.
Communication is only a one-way process. Communication is a two-way process.

 Consumer Decision Journey

1. Awareness
Awareness involves spreading general information about your products and
services to your target audience.
During the awareness stage of the journey, consumers search for solutions
and encounter multiple brands and products.

2. Consideration
a. Brands focus on promotion during the consideration stage of the
journey.
b. This is where customers begin to look for alternatives to past
purchases.
c. During this phase, your business strives to convince potential buyers
to include you on the list of available options.

3. Purchase
a. This stage prompts visitors to take a particular action. Using a
dedicated call to action (CTA), we encourage customers to make a
purchase, subscribe to a mailing list, or sign up for services.
b. You should use this phase to sell our product as the best fit to solve a
visitor’s problem.
c. Once potential customers are satisfied with researching and
comparing their options, they will eventually decide.

4. Retention
 The customer uses the product, sometimes seeking guidance from provider
or a user community, and perhaps being contacted by the provider to
encourage brand loyalty.

5. Advocacy
The customer spreads the word about the product.

 The P-O-E-M framework

Paid Media

The first part of the POEM framework—paid media. It is the most common type of
marketing channel. Any avenue or space that requires payment falls under this
category. Most advertisements are also part of paid media, including sponsorships
and publications.

In the context of digital marketing, paid media offers a variety of channels that you
can use to expand your reach. Paid media is one of the quickest and most efficient
ways to connect with your target audience. By promoting your products or
services on paid media channels, such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads—you can
grow your audience and build a sizable customer base.

Examples of promoting your brand through paid media channels cover

television commercials, radio announcements, print, pay-per-click (PPC)
advertising, advertising platforms (e.g. Google Ads, Bing Ads), and search engine
marketing (SEM). Even specific aspects of social media, mainly sponsored ads for
Facebook and Instagram, are a part of paid media.

More examples of paid media include:

o Search ads

o Shopping ads
 o Display ads

o Retargeting

o Paid influencers

Gaining exposure by way of paid media is an excellent digital marketing strategy

for raising brand awareness. The price of displaying your ads might be concerning,
but the rewards are worth your investment. Your ads will eventually reach your
target audience, allowing you to attract traffic, gain leads and boost sales.

Owned Media

Owned media is the second part of the POEM framework, and it is about
everything under the ownership of your company, organisation, or brand. When it
comes to owned media, you can use your assets and possessions for marketing
purposes. You control your digital marketing channels, allowing you to promote
your business online in any way you see fit.

Owned media consists of various assets under your ownership, such as your
website, blog, print ads, and other promotional materials. You can use these assets
to promote your products or services.

Examples of owned media include:

o Websites

o Content

o Blog posts

o Social media pages

Cost-effectiveness is your main advantage when it comes to owned media. Since

you already own assets and possessions, there is no need to spend as much money
as paid media marketing. However, maintaining your digital marketing outlets and
channels will lead to incurred costs, so you still have to include your owned media
expenses in your return on investment (ROI).

Versatility and longevity are additional benefits of owned media. You have total
control over the way you handle your marketing assets. It allows you to maximise
the effectiveness of your owned media marketing strategies as long as needed.

Earned Media

Earned media is the latest term in the POEM framework. It refers to the exposure
and recognition your business is receiving due to organic publicity and awareness.
With earned media, you can interact, connect, and communicate with your
audience through third-party channels, such as social media, public relations (PR),
and referrals.

You should know that most marketers classify earned media as inbound
marketing. It is a process of gaining leads by distributing valuable content and
securing conversions. Know that earned media is highly effective for digital
marketing—as long as you continue to deliver quality and relevant content and
engage with your target audience. Any hindrance to your marketing efforts may
prevent your earned media from making substantial progress.

Managing your earned media is vital for establishing credibility and authority. If
done right, you can analyse the impact of your marketing on your brand. It will
help you think and plan better strategies to attract more traffic, gain leads and drive
sales.

Examples of earned media include:

o Word-of-mouth marketing
o Viral marketing
o Press releases
o Publicity
 o Brand awareness

Good thing you can promote your business through earned media channels in
many ways. One excellent example is search engine optimisation (SEO). With
SEO, you can improve your website’s online presence on organic search results.
To do so, you have to optimise your website for SEO by getting quality backlinks
and creating relevant content.

Similar to owned media, you can gain publicity without having to pay for ad space.
Your earned media marketing efforts should extend your online reach. Once you
have established your credibility, you can reach more people and build trust—that
allows you to gain more exposure and recognition.

 Segmenting & Customizing Messages:

Segmenting Messages

It is the process of taking a single, general audience base and dividing it

according to specific groupings or characteristics. For instance, you are
marketing for a group of parents. You may want to segment your audience
between moms and dads, what age their children are, the type of household and
etc.

Once you have segmented your audience, each segment or group can now be
targeted differently depending on what they need from your brand. For instance,
you are running a digital campaign for a bank. Banks serve a wide range of
customers. However, it does offer different services that may resonate well with
different segments so segment the audience between young high-income earners,
retirees, business owners and etc.

The digital world now offers an abundance of user information. It also offers the
ability to target users based on their information, of course, the availability of
technology for creating and managing large databases.

Through segmenting your audience in digital marketing, you can reach a wide
range of communication channels depending on your customer’s preferences and
needs. Again, you should not focus on separate channels, but you should pay
attention to how digital channels can enable and work with the strengths of what
may be considered as ‘traditional’ marketing media. Traditional includes TV or
billboards.

In today’s world, the digital part often plays the role of a bridge for customers
between different marketing media. This allows the customers to respond to a
broadcast message on TV by bringing it up through a social media property. By
doing this, the customers can obtain a deeper, richer and more interactive brand
experience.

Customising Messages

After segmenting your audience, the message you want to send or relay to them
can also be customized. With today’s technology, it is now easy to create
customized templates for your audience segments. The necessary information
and a wide range of digital tools are now available for easier customization.

Customizing your messages can be as small as adding your customer’s name to

an email greeting, or maybe do something big like tailoring the whole email for a
specific person. Some create templates where the email or message greeting is
already set to change depending on the customer’s name.
You can also use templates to show a customer’s full buying history, their
connection to your brand and their interactions with the brand. It’s the little
things like these that make the customers feel extra special when they receive a
message from you.

Take Amazon, for instance, the billion-dollar company provides product

recommendations to their users based on the items they have brought previously
and similar products purchased by others.

Providing customized messages can help make your audience feel like they are
an important part of the brand and a huge part of the community. In return, it
helps create brand loyalty and long-term relationships with your customers.

 Digital Landscape

The digital landscape is the total collection of hardware, software, and content that
interact with digital advertising.
This includes email services, websites, computers, smartphones, videos, blog posts,
and so on.
Things that exist on the internet but are fundamentally irrelevant, such as hobbyist
websites that focus on unrelated areas and host no ads, are not part of the digital
landscape.
In many respects, services like Facebook and Google are fundamental aspects of
the digital landscape.
Google has an outsized role for one company thanks to its near-total dominance of
digital advertising, but small services using new technologies can also offer value
to businesses.
The digital landscape is constantly evolving based on the collective actions of all
potential customers.
If some advertisements don’t work, companies create new ways of showing ads. If
content doesn’t reach people, companies make different types of content.
In the broad sense, the digital landscape is a wide-ranging application of iterative
marketing.
Companies tend to do more of what works while occasionally trying new things, so
the marketing we have now is considerably more valuable and effective than past
strategies.
Innovations are helpful when you can create them, but for most companies, it’s
fine to just understand the best practice for a particular scenario and follow that.
The digital landscape is what works, so you don’t need to reinvent social media or
digital marketing from the ground up to get good results.

 Digital advertising market in India:

The Indian digital marketing market reached a value of nearly USD 4.5 billion in
2022. The market is further expected to grow at a CAGR of 32.1% between 2023
and 2028 to reach a value of around USD 24.1 billion by 2028. The market’s
primary driver is the growing global population’s increasing affinity towards the
digital channels of media.

 Digital Marketing Skills

 SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

It can be explained as when you make changes in your web

page and try to rank on the first page of search engine that is SEO.

 Social Media Marketing

 Most of the business units are getting their business from social
media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

 Social media plays an important role in establishing the brand as

it is the best platform to get feedback and directly connect with
the customers.
  Major corporate giant companies only target social media
platforms as their main source to attract the attention of their
potential buyers.

 Data Analytics

 A digital marketer should have the knowledge to view reports in

analytics and make improvements in the campaigns by analyzing
analytics reports properly.

 Analytics show how well your ad or website is performing. From

the number

 Google Ads and PPC

 Google AdWords and PPC is required to get instant traffic and leads
to your website through paid advertising.

 Campaigns should be both creative and relevant according to user

queries.

 Should have knowledge about analyze campaigns results and make a

report of them to present to the company.

 Creativity and analytical abilities

 Digital marketing needs both creativity(content, images, and titles)

and analytical ability(analytics, search console).

 Creativity helps to make attractive and impressive content, titles,

and headlines. Whereas analytical ability is needed to analyze data
and report of your campaigns and performance.
  Writing and editing skills

 The core of digital marketing is content. It’s not just about writing
content, making landing pages but it’s about writing quality content
which is relevant and useful for the user.

 Content should be attractive to influence the user to perform an

action.

 Keyword optimization is important to understand and to implement

what is necessary for content.

 Digital Marketing Plan

A digital marketing plan is one in which you strategically map out your digital
marketing objectives, as well the actions you’ll take to achieve those objectives.

1. Define your digital marketing goals and business objectives

a. Clear, measurable, and attainable digital marketing plan objectives

help you define exactly what you want to achieve and measure.

b. You should also include specific numbers and timeframes to

benchmark your progress.

2.Define audience segmentation and buyer person

a. For any digital marketing campaign to be successful, you need to

know who you’re targeting.

b. A key reason why digital marketing is important is because it allows

you to target your audience with great precision.
 c. For any digital marketing campaign to be successful, you need to
know who you’re targeting.

d. Your goal in creating personas is to get inside the minds of your

target customers and to see things from their perspectives.

e. When you understand what matters most to the audience, you can
make a digital marketing plan that speaks to their deep desires and
big challenges.

3. Conduct a competitive analysis

a. A competitive analysis allows you to identify your competitors,

calculate your market share, and determine the marketing strategies
they employ.

b. A thorough competitive landscape analysis will give you insights

into how you can use online marketing to surpass your competitors.

4. Conduct a SWOT analysis

a. It offers a framework to analyze your business against other forces

in your market.

b. The data from your SWOT analysis will help you develop your
digital marketing plan.

5. Calculate your digital marketing plan budget

a. The budget will define how much you have available to spend on
digital marketing activities.

b. The amount you budget for digital marketing will vary based on a
number of factors, including:

i. Revenue
 ii. Position within the industry

iii. Previous results

iv. Goals

v. Location

vi. Profitability of a strategy, or campaign

6. Define your digital marketing channels

a. When defining your digital channels, consider where your audience

spends most of their time.

b. Focus on how you can deliver value to your audience within the
channels they favor most.

7. Create a marketing calendar

a. A marketing calendar allows you to map out exactly when you’ll

implement your digital marketing campaigns and initiatives.

b. It creates accountability, ensuring that you hit deadlines and

effectively execute the plan throughout the year.

c. A calendar also helps ensure that you are consistently reaching each
of your various audience segments throughout the year.

8. Measure the results and KPIs of your digital marketing plan

a. Measure your results through the definition of metrics and key

performance indicators (KPIs).

b. You need to compare the outcomes of your marketing efforts to the

baseline as well as original goals.
c. Measure each channel so that you, as a marketer, can identify what’s
working most successfully for your brand, and what may need to be
cut.