Digital Marketing — Preview

As marketers embrace digital marketing, they need a multi-pronged strategy to attract, convert and retain customers. They must draw customers on the web, by serving useful, relevant and interesting content, as they continue also to rely on conventional media to push products to customers.

This chapter imparts an understanding of how to succeed in the digital era. It covers a wide range of topics relating to the digital tools, techniques, processes, as well as the opportunities and challenges. These include:

• The new perspectives and imperatives that marketers must embrace.
• Assets/platforms for creating, maintaining and spreading content online, such as websites, social networks, blogs, internet forums and apps.
• Challenges facing low involvement categories, and the challenge of reaching out to the masses.
• Advertisement formats, including mobile advertising formats.
• Search advertising, Google’s ad auction and search engine optimization.
• Social media advertising, with special attention to the Facebook and LinkedIn networks, and to the YouTube brand channels.
• Web analytics, web traffic, web intelligence, and controlled website tests.

From the viewpoint of market research, the section Benefits and Limitations of UGC, in Chapter Qualitative Research provides an understanding of the benefits and limitations of UGC (user-generated content). In the same chapter, the case example, iSnack 2.0, vividly illustrates these benefits and limitations.