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JNTU (H)
M BA
II Year III Semester

DIGITAL MARKETING
 STUDY MANUAL
 SHORT NOTES
 SOLVED MODEL PAPERS

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 JNTU(H) MBA
II Year III Semester

DIGITAL MARKETING
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 DIGITAL
MARKETING
C STUDY MANUAL

O Unit - I

Unit - II
1 - 32

33 - 83

N Unit - III

Unit - IV
84 - 98

99 - 129

T Unit - V 130 - 171

SOLVED MODEL PAPERS

E Model Paper - I 172 - 172

N Model Paper - II

Model Paper - III

173 - 173

174 - 174

T
S
 SYLLABUS
UNIT – I
Understanding Digital Marketing: Concept, Components of Digital Marketing, Need
and Scope of Digital Marketing, Benefits of Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing
Platforms and Strategies, Comparison of Marketing and Digital Marketing, Digital
Marketing Trends.
UNIT – II
Channels of Digital Marketing: Digital Marketing, Website Marketing, Search Engine
Marketing, Online Advertising, Email Marketing, Blog Marketing, Social Media
Marketing, Audio, Video and Interactive Marketing, Online Public Relations, Mobile
Marketing, Migrating from Traditional Channels to Digital Channels.
Marketing in the Digital Era: Segmentation – Importance of Audience Segmentation,
How different segments use Digital Media – Organizational Characteristics,
Purchasing Characteristics, Using Digital Media to Reach, Acquisition and Retention
of new customers, Digital Media for Customer Loyalty.
UNIT – III
Digital Marketing Plan: Need of a Digital Marketing Plan, Elements of a Digital
Marketing Plan – Marketing Plan, Executive Summary, Mission, Situational
Analysis, Opportunities and Issues, Goals and Objectives, Marketing Strategy,
Action Plan, Budget, Writing the Marketing Plan and Implementing the Plan.
UNIT – IV
Search Engine Marketing and Online Advertising: Importance of SEM, understanding
Web Search – keywords, HTML tags, Inbound Links, Online Advertising vs.
Traditional Advertising, Payment Methods of Online Advertising – CPM (Cost-per-
Thousand) and CPC (Cost-per-click), Display Ads - choosing a Display Ad Format,
Landing Page and its importance.
UNIT – V
Social Media Marketing: Understanding Social Media, Social Networking with
Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogging as a social medium, Microblogging with Twitter,
Social Sharing with YouTube, Social Media for Customer Reach, Acquisition and
Retention. Measurement of Digital Media: Analyzing Digital Media Performance,
Analyzing Website Performance, Analyzing Advertising Performance.
 Contents
Topic Page No.
UNIT - I
1.1 Concept of Digital Marketing 1
1.2 Components of Digital Marketing 7
1.3 Need and Scope of Digital Marketing 8
1.4 Benefits/Advantages of Digital Marketing 11
1.5 Digital Marketing Platforms 14
1.6 Digital Marketing Strategies 23
1.7 Comparison of Marketing and Digital Marketing 26
1.8 Digital Marketing Trends 28
 Short Question and Answers 30 - 32
UNIT - II
2.1 Channels of Digital Marketing 33
2.2 Website Marketing 34
2.3 Search Engine Marketing 37
2.4 Online Advertising 39
2.5 Email Marketing 41
2.6 Blog Marketing 43
2.7 Social Media Marketing 45
2.7.1 Difference Between Social Media Marketing and
Digital Marketing 48
2.8 Audio, Video and Interactive Marketing 49
2.9 Online Public Relations 49
2.10 Mobile Marketing 50
2.11 Migrating from Traditional Channels to Digital Channels 52

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Topic Page No.

2.12 Segmentation 55
2.12.1 Importance of Audience Segmentation 59
2.13 How Different Segments use Digital Media 59
2.13.1 Digital Media by Organizational Characteristics 59
2.13.2 Digital media by Purchasing Characteristics 60
2.14 Using Digital Media to Reach of New customers 62
2.15 Using Digital Media for Customer Acquisition Process 68
2.16 Using Digital Media Retention of New Customers 73
2.17 Digital Media for Customer Loyalty 77
 Short Question and Answers 80 - 83
UNIT - III
3.1 Digital Marketing Plan 84
3.2 Need of a Digital Marketing Plan 85
3.3 Understanding the Elements of a Digital Marketing Plan 86
3.3.1 Executive Summary 86
3.3.2 Mission 87
3.3.3 Situational Analysis 87
3.3.4 Opportunities and Issues in Digital Marketing Plan 88
3.3.5 Goals and Objectives in Digital Marketing Plan 89
3.3.6 Marketing Strategy 91
3.3.7 Action Plan 92
3.3.8 Budget 93
3.4 Writing the Marketing Plan and Implementing the Plan 93
 Short Question and Answers 97 - 98

II
Topic Page No.
UNIT - IV
4.1 Search Engine Marketing 99
4.2 Importance of SEM 100
4.3 Understanding Web Search - Keywords, HTML Tags,
Inbound Links 103
4.4 B2B Online Advertising 107
4.5 Online Advertising Vs. Traditional Advertising 109
4.6 Payment Methods of Online Advertising 112
4.6.1 CPM (Cost-per-Thousand) 112
4.6.2 CPC (Cost-per-click) 114
4.7 Display Ads 116
4.7.1 Examining Rich Media Ads 119
4.7.2 Choosing a Display Ad Format 120
4.7.3 Creating Effective Display Ads 121
4.7.4 Custom Landing Page and its Importance 123
 Short Question and Answers 126 - 129
UNIT - V
5.1 Social Media Marketing 130
5.2 Understanding Social Media 132
5.3 Social Networking with Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn 136
5.4 Platforms of Social Media 138
5.4.1 Blogging as a Social Medium 139
5.4.2 Microblogging with Twitter 140
5.5 Social Sharing with YouTube 140
5.6 Social Media for Customer Reach, Acquisition 144

III
Topic Page No.
5.7 Using Social Media for Customer Retention and Loyalty 146
5.8 Using Specific Social Media 151
5.9 Measurement of Digital Media 159
5.9.1 Analyzing Digital Media Performance 162
5.9.2 Analyzing Website Performance 163
5.9.3 Analyzing Advertising Performance 166
 Short Question and Answers 169 - 171

IV
UNIT - I DIGITAL MARKETING (JNTU-H)

Understanding Digital Marketing: Concept,

Components of Digital Marketing, Need and Scope of Digital
UNIT Marketing, Benefits of Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing
I Platforms and Strategies, Comparison of Marketing and
Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing Trends.

1.1 CONCEPT OF DIGITAL MARKETING

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Q1. What is digital marketing? Explain the concept of digital marketing.

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Ans :

i c a
In simple terms, digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via

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one or more forms of electronic media. Digital marketing is often referred to as online
marketing, internet marketing or web marketing.

P u
“Digital marketing” is the process of building and maintaining customer

ul
relationships through online activities to facilitate the exchange of ideas, products, and
services that satisfy the goals of both parties.

a h
Definition of Digital Marketing

R
Digital marketing can be defined as the process of promoting of brands using
digital distribution channels comprising internet, mobile and other interactive channels.
The basic advantage in this form of advertising lies in its low cost model.
Objectives of Digital marketing
One way to make sure you are found on the web is with an optimized digital
marketing strategy. Most digital marketing strategies and campaigns have following 5
objectives.
 Reaching the right audience
 To engage with your audience
 To motivate your audience to take action
 Efficient spending on your campaign
 Return on investment (ROI)

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Why Digital Marketing ?

1. Cost
Digital marketing is very cost efficient compared to traditional marketing channels
like TV and print media. In fact, the cost of digital marketing campaigns will be a
fraction of traditional marketing channels like print and tv.
2. Tracking
In digital marketing tracking the results is easy compared to traditional marketing
channels. There are many analytics solutions which offer us a detailed report of
the campaigns and these are real time reports tracked hourly and daily basis
which assists you to revise your campaigns and strategies if outcome is not up to
your expectation.

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3. Target Audience

i c a
Targeting audience for your brands, products and services is very beneficial in
digital media channels, like ads are a show based on age, profession, likes and

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dislikes region, sex and many other categories. Also ads are shown to people
who have requirements like say a bookstore ad is shown to a person who is

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planning to buy books and searching for them on search engines. Digital marketing
campaigns are inbound which increases the chances of conversions.
4.
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Interactive

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Most of the traditional marketing channels are static and one-time production,
where as digital marketing is an interactive channel where customers can engage
with the brands, data can be shared effectively and using advance digital marketing
techniques we can even influence them to get converted into potential clients.
5. Digital Revolution
One of the most important factors is rise of digital media platforms like search
engines, social media sites, online portals, blogs etc in past few years, and the
rate at which digital media is over taking a traditional medium. You might be
aware that many print magazines and news papers media user base has decreased
and in fact few of them are even out of business today. If you get into digital
marketing first before your competitors you will have first mover advance and
you will get ads at a very reasonable rate.

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Classification of digital marketing

Digital Marketing can be classified into Pull and Push marketing.
1. Pull
Pull digital marketing technologies involve the user having to seek out and directly
grab (or pull) the content via web searches. Web site/blogs and streaming media
(audio and video) are good examples of this. In each of these examples, users
have a specific link (URL) to view the content.
2. Push
Push digital marketing technologies involve both the marketer (creator of the
message) as well as the recipients (the user). Email, SMS,RSS are examples of
push digital marketing. In each of these examples, the marketer has to send (push)
the messages to the users (subscribers) in order for the message to be received.

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Major Factors Affecting the Digital Marketing
a)

c a
India’s literacy rate is at 74.04%. Kerala is the most literate state in India,
with 93.91% literacy. Six Indian states account for about 70% of all illiterates

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in India: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh

growth in India .
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and West Bengal. Thus increasing literacy positively effecting the digital marketing

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b) Expensive technology: The mobile and internet rates are very competitive
and now it is in reach of a common man also.
c)
a h
Cost of advertising: The cost of advertising is very low. One can have its own

d)
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website in just Rs. 5000 in India. One can promote his product on Google with
Google Adsense with just Rs.1000 a month.
Inherited limitation of Technology: In India the youth is very adaptable
towards technology but still large population is not so friendly with the electronic
gadgets.
e) Unavailability of Infrastructure facilities in India : The internet
connectivity is still not available in Indian rural areas.
f) Believe in Traditional business practices : The small businessman having
running its business in a small area and quite focused on that area only then he
prefers Traditional ways of Promotion as it he finds it is more visible to the people
around.
g) Lack of Online Business Experience: Lack of awareness about the digital
marketing is also a major limitations in the growth of the digital market.

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Q2. How B2B Companies Can Use Digital Marketing.

Ans :
As you can see, there are a lot of current activities you can migrate online. But
should you?
Here’s where it pays to know your customers. If you understand where and how
your existing and potential customers look for information, you’ll know that they’re
increasingly turning to online sources. It’s a simple maxim: Go where your customers
are. When your customers go online, you need to follow them.
1. Precision, Scale, and Marketability
Moving your marketing online also has some very real benefits for your business.

see gains in both efficiency and effectiveness.

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It’s not just about lower costs (although there’s probably some of that); you may

c a tio
I like the way Jennifer Howard, head of Google’s B2B Markets Group, put it:
“The value of digital marketing to a B2B marketer is about: Precision, Scale,
and ultimate Measurability.”

bl i
P u
Looking at digital marketing in these terms, precision results from the use of
search marketing, PPC advertising, and display advertising. These digital

money.

a h ul
market­ing tools result in more precise lead generation—better leads for less

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Scale results from those digital marketing tools that have very little per-piece
cost. This includes email marketing, social media marketing, and interactive
marketing, in the form of webinars. It’s kind of a publish-once (or create-once),
distribute- many model, and lets you ramp up your business without increasing
your costs correspondingly.
The measurability thing is inherent in almost all digital marketing vehicles. You
can use various analytics tools to precisely track the number of leads you generate
and what those leads end up doing. You can track visitors to your website, time
spent there, conversions, you name it, all a lot easier and more accurately than
you can track performance in traditional media.
2. Understanding the Digital Marketing Process Flow
So, how can your company use digital marketing? In most cases, you end up
decreasing your existing marketing expenditures and shifting that spending to

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corresponding digital marketing vehicles; you don’t have to increase your overall
budget to go digital. You can then plan your activities according to the digital
marketing process flow detailed in Figure, and described here :

Understand Acquire Engage Convert

Fig. : The digital marketing process flow

i) Understand
Before you do anything else, you have to understand your B2B customers—

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who they are, where they are, what they’re look­ing for, where they’re looking
for it, and so forth. You can do this via a variety of methods, including but
not limited to online research.

c a tio
ii) Acquire

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Next, you need to attract those customers into your orbit. With digital

u
marketing, that means using various outbound marketing tools - search

P
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engine marketing, PPC advertising, display advertising, and public relations
- to draw them to your website, or to provide their contact information.

a h
iii) Engage

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Digital marketing offers various ways to engage potential customers. Your
website is the primary vehicle, of course, but you can also use social media,
audio and video, interactive media, and email anything that keeps customers
in your orbit and provides them with the content they require to make a
purchasing decision.
iv) Convert
This is the endpoint of the process, your ultimate goal - converting lookers
into buyers. (Of course, a conversion can be some­thing other than a sale;
obtaining contact information for lead perusal can also be a conversion.)
But if you can’t convert them immediately, you can lead back to additional
acquisition activity - or even leverage the process to better understand your
customers’ behavior.

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3. Choosing the Right Digital Marketing Tools

Which digital marketing tools can you use to further your goals? It will vary from
business to business, of course, and evolve over time. But Figure shows those
activities that B2B marketers today find most effective. As you can see, website
and search engine marketing are generally regarded as the most effective tools
(much more effective than traditional marketing vehicles); social media brings
up the rear, along with several more traditional media.

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c a tio
bl i
P u
a h ul
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Naturally, you need to make your own decisions and monitor your ongoing
effectiveness. Unlike traditional B2B marketing, which has remained virtually unchanged
for decades, digital marketing is in a constant state of change.
Consider, for example, that neither social networks nor online videos existed a
half-dozen years ago, and they’re both now established parts of the digital marketing
mix. You have to stay on top of the trends, and be willing and able to adjust your plans
to changes in technology and the marketplace. With digital marketing, it’s survival of
the fittest and the fastest; you have to evolve or get left behind.

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1.2 COMPONENTS OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Q3. What are the components of digital marketing ?
Ans :
Digital Marketing is an effectual way of promoting services and products through
electronic gadgets like Smartphones, desktops and tablets. Organizations can outspread
themselves to reach the targeted audience with Digital marketing. Companies can choose
numerous ways to get in touch with people.
Digital Marketing can help companies to analyze and run various marketing
strategies and campaigns that are gaining outcome. It is one of the cost-effective ways
to optimize ROI of organizations. As an organization, you can interact with your targeted

s
customers without any intervention, anytime, anywhere to provide complete information

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tio
regarding your products, brands and services. With Digital Marketing, businesses can
build their brand value and people trust-flow in the market.
Components of Digital Marketing
i c a
u bl
Digital Marketing consists of multiple elements. Organizations utilize these
components to achieve high productivity. The basic and crucial elements of Digital

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Marketing are discussed below:
1. Search Engine Optimization

a h
SEO is the list of activities that are carried out to boost the volume of traffic on a

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website through search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN etc. Search
Engine Optimization assures that a particular website can be found, for the
keywords or phrases that users are searching in the search engine and that are
relevant to their products and services, they offer.
2. Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing consists of paid methods that help in increasing visibility
of a business or a brand. Paid approach indicates various methods like PPC
(pay-per-click), in which search engines imposes cost to a company whenever
their website is clicked by user.
3. Social Media Marketing
Nowadays, social media is a good way to reach to the audience. Using social
media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn etc, companies

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can acquire one fourth of the internet users and can share their offerings with
them. Acquiring is not enough; Customer engagement is also very important to
gain customer loyalty. So, engaging them with different offers can get more
business for organizations.
4. E-mail Marketing
E-mail Marketing is an eminent way of targeting audience. Organizations can
send newsletters, commercials and various offers related to their business, to
their targeted audience as well as their old and existing customers.
5. Affiliate Marketing
In this method, organizations pay one or multiple affiliates for each lead or
conversion, depending on the model they prefer. Affiliate marketing basically

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involves two or more companies in which one is paying other for the lead
generation or any conversation. This can be considered as CPA (Cost Per Action),

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that the affiliates get for each conversation.
6. Mobile Marketing

i c a
bl
Mobile marketing involves the process of promoting the products and services of
an organization via mobile phones in the form of SMS, MMS, OR codes and

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VVR. It is a great approach because it can increase brand awareness easily.

ul
7. Web Analytics

a h
Web Analytics is an approach for tracking the user activity and traffic on a website.
Using this approach, companies can easily track their consumer behavior, their

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interests, their geographical locations, number of new as well as the returning
visits on their website. ROI of other marketing strategies can be determined with
the web analytics technique.

1.3 NEED AND SCOPE OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Q4. What is the need and scope of digital marketing ?
Ans :
Need or Importance of Digital Marketing
Today, the Internet is a boon that provides endless opportunities for your small,
medium or large business. Currently, more than half of the global population uses the
Internet. Experts say that in coming years above 80% of the world population will be
online. Therefore, digital marketing has become an integral part of marketing. In this

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blog post, we will help you understand the importance of digital marketing for your
business.
1. Cost Effective
Digital marketing is one of the most cost-effective mediums of marketing.
Traditional marketing methods such as print, broadcast, etc. require a lot of
money and provide limited output. On the other hand, Digital Marketing is cheap;
it suits all types and sizes of business.
2. Reach Mobile Consumers
Mobile users are growing day by day. Currently, a large portion of adult population
in UK uses smartphones. With digital marketing, you can easily target your mobile
audience, and convert into your customers. Reaching mobile consumers is the
key for business growth.

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3. Content Connects Customers

i c a
Digital Marketing allows you to use content to get connected with customers.
The advantage of content is that it allows you to speak more and express more.

u bl
Hence it an effective medium to convey a clear message and attract huge website
traffic for the purpose of increasing sales.
4. Get High ROI

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Return On Investment (ROI) is an important factor in any marketing strategy.

a h
Traditional marketing methods have low return on investment and don’t suit all

5.
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types and sizes of business. Where as, Digital marketing is the best method to
expand customer base and gain high return on investment.
Different Types of Digital Marketing
There are different types of digital marketing available such as Search Engine
Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC), Social Media Marketing
(SMM), Content Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, etc. You can choose any type of
marketing depending on your business type, business size and business goals.
6. Tap Social Media
Social media is on the rise. Right from teenagers to old aged people, everyone is
on social media. You can improve the efficiency of your campaign by precisely
targeting your potential customers based on their age, location and interests.
Moreover, it is an effective method to improve brand visibility and brand
awareness.

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7. Build Credibility
Trust plays a vital role in converting a potential customer into customer. Digital
Marketing strategies will help you to place your brand on first page of Search
Engine Results Page (SERP). Being in the first page of Google not only establishes
trust, but also increases website traffic. As the result of which, you get new
customers effortlessly.
8. Easy to Measure Outcomes
Results of traditional marketing strategies are difficult to measure. Without
knowing detailed outcome, it is difficult to gauge the success of a campaign. This
is not the case with digital marketing. Every single digital marketing tactic you
use is measurable. You can do an in-depth analysis of present results and fine
tune to achieve another landmark.

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Scope of Digital Marketing In India
1. New to digital era

i c a
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Earlier people used to spend a lot of time on newspaper, television and radio to
get the latest updates about what is happening around the world. But nowadays

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the internet has completely changed the lifestyle of the human beings for each

ul
and everything we are depending on internet. Slowly, we are shifting from
traditional to digital media.
2.
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Easy to learn and implement

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Yes..! what you have read is right. The digital marketing course is easy to learn
and implement. First, a person should have patience and passion to learn and
ability to think out of the box. But, initially no one can do wonders; as you gain
experience you will be an asset to the organization based on your skills.
3. Flexible
As the complete tasks are done using internet one can work from anywhere. But,
most of the companies won’t provide access to it because as digital marketing is
in the booming stage. One has to have good laptop and internet connection to
do the work. As we see most of the tasks are done in a digital way. For example:
to pay electricity bill; to book train or flight tickets; to order food; to book a cab;
to book movie tickets; everything is done through online. So by this, we can say
that we are entering into a digital world.

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4. Fast Reach
Earlier the only way to get latest news or updates which are happening around
the world are radio, newspaper and television. Today’s scenario is completely
different when something is posted on social media it is going viral because
most of the people got used to it.
5. Job opportunities
As we observe the demand for digital marketing is increasing and at the same
time even the job opportunities also increasing. To promote any software product
or a service these days even software companies are hiring a separate team for
digital marketing. This shows that how much impact it is going to show in the
market and to sustain from the competition.
6. ROI

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In olden days most of the companies used to spend a huge amount on traditional

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marketing i.e newspapers or TV ads. But when digital marketing came into play
the companies are investing less amount on marketing and at the same time, the

c a
return is more when compared to traditional marketing. So, even top brands are

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switching from traditional to digital.
7. Results are measured

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In every platform (SEO, SEM, SMO, SMM and Email Marketing) of digital

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marketing the results are measured without waiting for a long time. With the help

a h
of a variety of tools the campaigns can be measured i.e from were the lead or
conversions happened.

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So, by considering the above eight parameters we can say that there is a lot of
scope for digital marketing all over the world.

1.4 BENEFITS/ADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Q5. What are the benefits/advantages of digital marketing ?
Ans :
Advantages of digital marketing in B2B :
1. Multi-channel
By using multiple channels, digital marketing offers many opportunities
(complementary to traditional marketing) and allows users / companies to act at
all levels of the purchasing process.

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2. Cost-efficiency
Digital marketing is less costly than “traditional” marketing; indeed ”… Even
stalwart traditional marketers know that they cannot compete the Internet’s
potential to reach thousands with just a single post”. Printing and shipment
costs are not taken into account in digital, this is the advantage of CPC (you pay
only when click).
3. Immediate and borderless
Information, communication and advertising are instant and have no borders.
This is the most efficient way to reach any customer anywhere and anytime; the
best and unique way to create traffic;
4. Targeted

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With digital marketing, it is very easy to target very precisely who you would like

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to reach; many criteria (demography, geography, function…) can be used to

5. Inbound Marketing
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refine this reach. But do not to turn into a spammer;

c
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By creating and sharing content specifically designed to appeal to your customers,

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inbound marketing attracts and retains qualified prospects to your business. This
approach is very efficient and can help you reach customers at any stage of the
B2B purchasing process.
6.
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Data Collection and Analysis

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With digital marketing, B2B companies can collect a lot of data (pages visited,
products downloaded, basket average, time spent on which page, what keywords,
what queries) about their customers. They can track all their actions online –
provided the right trackers are in place. The collection and analysis of these data
represent a major asset for the sale forces and the marketing teams; especially
in the perspective of very targeted marketing addressed to specific segments,
and the improvement of customer experience and satisfaction.
Benefits of Digital marketing over Traditional Marketing
1. Enlarged engagement with stakeholders
A well- sought and publicized website would aid potential clients, prospects and
followers in viewing your website, looking at other available products and services,
buying them, rating them as well as providing feedback. All of this, while

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enhancing the prospects of the business. A good website, is the equivalent of a

online visiting card, with much more print space.
2. Instantaneous publicity
Digital marketing allows businesses to instantaneously publicize online within a
matter of few minutes as compared to the time- consuming traditional methods
such as distributing sales flyers. Usage of social media may be the most effective
for sharing breaking news and enabling your messages to be communicated on
a larger scale and quicker, through mere ‘share options’.
3. Concurrent results and High measurability of efforts
It helps to track the traffic coming to the website, almost simultaneously, measuring

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important facets such as the conversions, demographics of the audience, their
locations, peak trading times and much more, all offered by Google analytics.
4. Reduced costs

c a tio
bl i
High advertising costs for both visual and print media can be replaced for more
effective and marginal costs by using digital marketing by establishing successful

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online marketing strategies.

P
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5. Brand development

a h
Targeting the needs of the target audience becomes easier by maintaining a
website which contains quality worthy content. This gives a boost to the value

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generation and leads to the generation of newer opportunities. The same can be
achieved via email marketing and/or social media channels.
Leveled field for competing
Strong digital marketing strategy allows diverse businesses to compete with each
other on similar lines irrespective of the size. A website with good repute, which
entitles its customers to a smooth customer journey, is unparalleled. Also, in
most cases , a small company can use the very same tools and techniques as a
big company to play out in the same market.
7. Simple to measure
Google Analytics makes it easier to measure specific goals. It provides more in-
depth reports of the data while making large chunks of consumer data
comprehendible to all businesses. Google analytics has integrated with AdWords

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and launched real time analytics, all making the process even more manageable
and aiding in value creation.
8. Non intrusive communication
Email marketing is a non – intrusive way of communicating commercial or fund
raising messages to an audience, usually potential customers while giving them
an option of opting out of the regular email alerts as per relevance, opposing the
traditional marketing gimmicks such as calls and messages at inconvenient times.
9. Greater exposure
Digital marketing opens up doors to an international platform for businesses
because even a single marketing campaign can be viewed worldwide. Costs of

n s
launching a campaign against traditional methods, is considerable. However,
one should view it as a long- term investment and can also optimize the key word
search content.
10. Scope for refinement of strategy
c a tio
bl i
Whilst gathering and analyzing chunks of consumer data, strategies can be

P u
upgraded accordingly. This method allows businesses to refurbish their strategies
at any point to maximize efficacy at the fraction of cost of traditional marketing.

a h ul
1.5 DIGITAL MARKETING PLATFORMS

R
Q6. Discuss briefly about digital marketing platforms.
Ans :
Digital marketing is opening windows of opportunities for B2B marketers to
promote their companies on a wide range of channels including websites, email, social
media, organic search, paid search, mobile and display ads, for example. With so
many options, a common question B2B marketers ask is: Which digital channels should
I use? Before planning an effective digital marketing strategy, marketers need to
understand the different channels, including the pros and cons. With this insight, they
can identify which channels are most likely to work best for their businesses.
A 2017 Digital Marketing Plans study found that B2B marketers find seven digital
channels to be most effective: websites and blogs, email, social media, organic search,
paid search, mobile and display ads.

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n s
a tio
To help you answer the question-Which digital channels should I use? - we’ve

c
bl
tips on how to optimize their marketing value. i
prepared an overview of the pros and cons of each of these seven channels, along with

1.
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Website Marketing and Blogging

ul
Websites and blogs aren’t just nice-to-have marketing tools. They are essential

a h
digital channels for every company operating today. They are workhorses for
communicating and selling to prospects and customers. Prospects today expect

R
companies’ websites and blogs to provide copious amounts of content that answer
their specific questions. Also, when they care about a brand, they expect to receive
regular blog posts that provide them with news, insight, offers and more.
Pros
 Flexible platforms with multimedia capabilities for distributing content in a
variety of formats
 Low barrier to entry with minimal technical or IT skills required
 Attracts new prospects, while engaging with existing customers
 Excellent for brand awareness, authority building, story telling and passive
sales messaging
 Provides the ability to measure and track performance
 Boosts SEO

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Cons
 Creating sites that attract and retain visitors requires strategic, design and
content creation expertise
 Creating relevant content on a regular basis can be challenging and time
consuming
 Requires a publisher mindset from brands possibly not used to this model
 Requires planning, organization and editorial control, particularly if there
are multiple authors
Tips
 Create websites and content that serve your prospects’ and customers’ needs
and answer their questions

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tio
 Understand your audience by creating detailed buyer personas
 Give away your knowledge

i c a
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 Deliver a compelling call-to-action throughout the customer journey

u
Consistently publish new content

P
ul
 Be true to your company’s voice and tone
2.
h
Email Marketing

a
B2B email marketing is an effective way to build and maintain rapport with

R
potential clients and maintain relationships with existing customers. As the
prospects progress through the sales funnel, companies can focus on helping
them solve specific problems and achieve specific goals, rather than abruptly
pushing them toward sales. Some companies send a weekly or monthly email
newsletter to keep their businesses top-of-mind, so that prospects and customers
will look to them when they’re ready to buy.
Pros
 Cost-effective way of engaging an audience on an ongoing basis
 Helps build relationships by regularly sharing valuable information
 Can be customized and tailored to specific buyer personas
 Relatively fast to create and send

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 Allows consumers to grow into their decision to make a purchase

 Provides many segmentation options
 Companies retain complete control over the content prospects and customers
receive
 Can micro-track and analyze everything from open rate to click-throughs
Cons
 Building a customer email database can take time
 Risk irritating customers by sending too many emails
 Customers can easily unsubscribe or mark emails as spam
 So saturated that many people ignore emails

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tio
 Spam filters kill some emails
 Competing with other email marketers

i c a
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Tips

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Track what works well and what doesn’t to improve your email results

P
ul
 Find the right balance for sending emails to prospects and customers
 Invest in a good inbound marketing application to manage email operations
3.
a h
Social Media Marketing (Organic)

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Social media has grown from being merely a digital channel for socializing into
one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for brands and businesses. All
forms of social media, from Facebook to LinkedIn to YouTube, have built large
networks and communities by allowing users to interact with each other, share
opinions, participate in discussions and engage in real time. Today, businesses
can leverage social media platforms to create brand awareness organically
(versus advertising) for their products and services. Also, they can reach out to
highly targeted potential customers through person-to-person engagement.
Pros
 A social media presence makes your company more accessible and keeps
your clients in the loop with your business
 Allows you to react or respond in real-time to relevant news or conversations

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 Nurtures brand loyalty through targeting and consistent, relevant presence

 Great for customer service, including praise, suggestions and complaints
 Can be inexpensive if managed well
Cons
 It’s hard to break through the noise and get your potential customers to
focus on your posts
 Takes a large time commitment to grow and maintain a following
 Must engage in continuous communication to keep customers’ and
prospects’ attention


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Attracts spammers, scammers, trolls and all other sorts of malicious individuals
Reach is declining on many platforms due to changing algorithms

tio
ROI for organic social media efforts is hard to measure

c a
Tips

bl i
Identify your company’s goals and targeted audience before you get started

P u
Choose the right platforms for your industry, company and consumers


a h
awards, etc. ul
Regularly post links to new content, articles, company events, industry


 R Observe your consumers’ pain points, and address them in real-time
Always think and review content before posting
4. Organic SEO
Every day millions of people use search engines to hunt for information about
brands, products, services and the pain points they experience. It still rules as
one of the best B2B marketing channels, because it’s the most popular medium
for locating any and all information.
Marketing masters understand that SEO is the lifeblood of a thriving, effective
digital marketing strategy. SEO involves several activities to boost rankings,
including keyword research, making use of both on-page and off-page
optimization, linkable asset creation, organic link building and more. Optimizing
SEO in your content will dramatically improve your search rank and make it that

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much easier for customers to find you. For example, you can publish original
content related to your industry and include the keywords in strategic places like
your title tags, headings and content.
Pros
 Practically everyone uses a search engine to explore products and services
before buying
 Supports a cost-effective marketing strategy
 Ranking well for your chosen niche can pay off for years to come
 Scales up over time for the maximum reach of a niche
 Delivers a continuous flow of targeted traffic

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Gives businesses exposure to people actively looking for solutions


c a
Supports making you an authority in your niche tio
Generates traffic that has a good chance of converting

Cons
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
P u
Can take years to match the scale of your competitors

ul
 Requires a big investment for a competitive niche

h
No control over search engine algorithms’ updates and changes

a

Tips R Potential for penalties if you stray into gray or black hat arena

 Rank better in the search results by being the first one there
 Reach out to other reputable websites to earn links to your content
 Know your keywords and incorporate them into high-quality, engaging
content
 Work with your tech team to ensure your website is high-functioning, fast-
loading and delivers the quality content your customers are seeking
5. Paid Search (aka Pay Per Click Advertising)
Paid search is like SEO except companies pay for it. There are two key differences
when considering SEO or paid search. The first is that paid ads appear at the

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top of the page, above the organic listings. The second is that traffic from organic
is free, whereas traffic from paid search has a cost for each click. Essentially,
paid search dominates above-the-fold. With typically four ads on desktop and
three on mobile, users will always see the paid search ads, even if they choose to
scroll past them.
Ads can be targeted by search keywords, time of day, day of the week, geography,
language, device and audiences based on previous visits. Some of the options
for creating ads are calls-to-action, locations, site links, pricing and bullet points.
Pros
 Laser-targeted visibility
 Fast deployment and results
 Testable and trackable
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 Granular control, including budgets

c a tio


bl i
Unrestricted access to keyword data, which can inform all advertising
Easy to conduct AB tests on ads, landing pages and call-to-action buttons

P u
to find the best results

ul
Cons


a h
Requires constant investment, so costs can quickly add up

 R No staying power, unlike good inbound marketing
Poor management can deliver poor results
 Requires ongoing work to test results and continually optimize ads
 Competitive keywords are expensive
 Lots of competition and keyword bidding wars with other advertisers
 Easy for competitors to copy your strategy
Tips
 Learn more about your audience
 Focus on quality keywords
 Create landing pages that match your ads’ visuals and content

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 Focus on the ads’ images

 Optimize ads for mobile
 Set up conversion tracking
6. Mobile Marketing
In the B2B marketplace, mobile is growing rapidly. More and more buyers are
using smartphones, and mobile’s influence is reshaping the B2B purchase
pathway. Effective mobile advertising means understanding your mobile audience,
designing content with mobile platforms in mind and making strategic use of
email marketing, mobile apps and geofencing advertising using GPS and radio
frequency identifiers.

s
This is creating substantial opportunities for marketers who get it right, while

n
tio
companies that aren’t engaging customers on their smartphones risk losing sales
and market share. However, many B2B marketers are dissatisfied with their

c a
current mobile marketing strategy, hampered by a lack of data, ineffective

i
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measurement and inadequate mobile capabilities, skills and tools.
Pros

P u
ul
 Speeds up sales, which both accelerates revenue and reduces costs


a h
Positive mobile user experiences build customer loyalty
Impact extends beyond the smartphone to the desktop or laptop, tablet and


R
offline sales
Provides a treasure of data to build comprehensive views of customers
Cons
 Lack of direct evidence of mobile’s impact
 Insufficient customer insight, marketing performance measurement and
conversion rates
 Aggressive companies are establishing customer relationships that will be
difficult for latecomers to dislodge
 Slow-moving companies are in danger of being eliminated from consideration
 Difficulty of tracking its impact across channels and devices.

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Tips
 Take a test-and-learn approach to expanding mobile marketing, adjusting
your strategy as you go
 Invest substantial time to understand customers’ purchase behaviors and
the role that mobile plays
 Develop mobile-friendly experiences designed expressly for smartphone users,
i.e., less text and more graphics
 Take advantage of the unique capabilities and features of smartphones,
such as location data, camera and phone
7. Display Advertising

s
This channel involves designing graphical ads and placing them next to content

n
tio
on websites, emails and other digital formats. Display ads help promote new
products or offers, increase online presence and reach out to customers to help

c a
drive leads and increase brand awareness. Ads can be banners, boxes, interactive

i
bl
ads, video ads, overlays and other similar ads that are linked to a landing page
or website. They can include text, images, audio or video clips, animation or

P u
other interactive content.
Pros


a h ul
Extremely targeted and flexible

 R Pay only for relevant impressions received
Choose from a large number of advertising options
 Target ads according to consumer behavior, demographics or geographic
location
 Create brand awareness as well as highly targeted traffic that may convert
into leads or sales
 Track everything from numbers reached, clicks, action and conversion ratios
 Easy to manage budgets
Cons
 Difficult to reach the right demographics without detailed targeting
 Fewer people click on display ads than in the past

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Tips
 Create display ads to emulate magazine and billboard ads, including eye-
catching visuals and concise content
 Make your ads relevant to what your buyer personas are looking for
Clearly, digital marketing channels offer today’s marketers multiple opportunities
to get their names and messages out in front of a larger targeted audience in
ways that build brands, create conversions and boost profits. However, the vast
number of options can also be overwhelming, leading to poor choices and wasted
investments.

1.6 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES

Q7. Discuss about Digital Marketing Strategies.
n s
Ans :

c a tio
bl i
Digital marketing is essential in today’s world. With both competitors and potential
customers constantly online, digital marketing is the only way to stay ahead. When

P u
you’re a small business owner the online world can seem intimidating. Here is a list of
five simple digital marketing strategies that any business owner can implement to help
their business grow.
1.
h
Setting a Goal

a ul
R
You’re looking for ways to help your small business grow. You might want more
customers, more recognition or maybe you’re looking to get ahead of the
competition. Whatever the case may be, starting with a solid goal in mind greatly
increases your chances of success. Digital marketing is a great way for small
businesses to prosper, but going into the process blindly can leave you with a
jumbled mess. A lot of strategy and precision goes into digital marketing and
having a goal helps you know what to focus on.
2. Creating a Marketing Funnel
The most successful businesses have an effective marketing funnel in place. A
marketing funnel is when you map out a customer’s journey from when a customer
is a complete stranger to when they become a lead, and then put certain strategies
in place that will encourage them to move through this funnel. Things like lead
magnets, calls to action, options and offers are all effective pieces of a funnel.

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You can think of a marketing funnel in four parts: Awareness, Interest, Desire,
and Action.
 Awareness: The potential customer is aware of your product or service.
They’re still a stranger, but they’ve come to your website for a reason. They’re
looking for something they need. At this stage you want to attract the customer
by showing them that you have something they’re looking for. Use a lead
magnet or call-to-action to give the customer a valuable resource related to
your product or service (i.e: what they need) in exchange for more information
about them like their email address, phone number, profession and current
needs. Find out who they are and why they came to your website.
 Interest: They are actively expressing interest in a certain type of your

n s
products or services. At this point you’ve given them some information and
they’re interested in what you have to say or the services you provide. You’ve

tio
used your lead magnet or CTA in stage one to gather more information

i c a
about them. At this stage it’s a good idea to supply them with further
information that is more tailored to their specific needs. Showing them that

u bl
you not only took the time to get to know them, but also have something
that’s specific to their needs will show that you’re attentive to and care


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about your customer’s wants and needs.
Desire: They’ve taken an interest in a specific product or service. Now that

a h
you’ve supplied them with information specific to what they’re looking for,

R they’ve found a product or service you provide that might be a good fit for
them. Invite them to schedule a consultation using an email or a call-to-
action. At this stage you want to tell them more about the product or service
they’re interested in. Show them why they need it and exactly how it will
benefit them.
 Action: Taking the next step towards purchasing. This is when you’re able
to turn your potential customer into a lead. You’ve given them valuable
information, shown them you pay attention to your customer’s needs, and
shown them that you have something they need that will benefit them. All
that’s left is discussing things like price, payment and other aspects of your
product or service that are relevant to a buyer.
Having an effective marketing funnel won’t just get you more leads, it can also
help you turn leads into repeat buyers. If the customer has a good experience they

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might return to purchase from you again or even tell others they know about your
business. The elements of a marketing funnel can seem like a lot to put together, but
they’re simple concepts when broken down. You’ll see that numbers 3,4 and 5 help to
break down and explain the different aspects of having a marketing funnel in place on
your site and how to put together some of the most important pieces of it.
3. Developing a call-to-action
We talked about using a call-to-action in the second step as a part of your
marketing funnel, but what is a call-to-action exactly? A call-to-action (CTA) is
an image or text that prompts visitors to take action, such as subscribe to a
newsletter, view a webinar or request a product demo. CTAs should direct people
to landing pages, where you can collect visitors’ contact information in exchange

n s
for a valuable marketing offer. In that sense, an effective CTA results in more
leads and conversions for your website. This path, from a click on a CTA to a

tio
landing page, illustrates the much desired process of lead generation. In order to

i c a
increase visitor-to-lead conversion opportunities, you need to create a lot of calls-
to-action, distribute them across your web presence and optimize them. A good

your marketing funnel.

u bl
CTA should be attention grabbing and help lead a potential customer further into

4.

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Creating an Effective Lead Magnet

a h
A lead magnet can be used alone or along with a CTA. This will also be used
either within your marketing funnel or as a way to drive potential customers into

R
your funnel. Supply them with something relevant to your product or service that
they want. Use your offers as a way to gather more information about a potential
buyer while driving them further into your funnel at the same time. This brings
them closer to becoming an actual quality lead who will spend money on your
product or service. The idea behind a lead magnet is to trade information. You
supply something like a free download of a white paper, but in order to complete
the download the individual has to fill out a form that will provide you with more
information about them. You’ll use the information you gather to interact with
them more as they progress through your funnel.
5. Driving Traffic
In order for there to be people to drive into your marketing funnel, there first has
to be traffic on your website. There a variety of ways you can drive traffic to your
website. Here are a few of the ones I recommend :

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 Quality Content: Use content such as blog posts, press releases and
articles on authority websites. Insert links to various places on your website
within this content to build your brand name through exposure and drive
traffic to your website.
 Keyword Strategy: Inserting related keywords into content will help your
content and website show up in more search results, this leads to higher
volumes of web traffic.
 Website Optimization: Ensuring that your website is optimized and
functioning at it’s best is essential. People don’t want to visit a website that
doesn’t work properly.
 Social Media: Use engaging social media posts to attract more traffic to

s
your site. Using pictures, video, and other relevant media will help your

n
tio
posts get more engagement.

i c a
Try these simple digital marketing strategies out on your website and see for
yourself how much of a difference they can make. If you want your business to grow,
digital marketing is the place to start.

u bl
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1.7 COMPARISON OF MARKETING AND DIGITAL MARKETING

Ans :
a h
Q8. What is the comparison of Marketing and Digital Marketing ?

R
Traditional Marketing
There are many facets of traditional marketing and examples might include
tangible items such as business cards, print ads in newspapers or magazines. It can
also include posters, commercials on TV and radio, billboards and brochures. Traditional
marketing is anything except digital means to brand your product or logo. Another
overlooked means of traditional marketing is when people find a particular business
through a referral or a network and eventually you build a rapport with them.
Digital Marketing
The world of digital marketing continues to evolve and as long as technology
continues to advance, digital marketing will as well. Examples of digital marketing
include things like websites, social media mentions, YouTube videos, and banner ads.
Specifically, digital marketing is similar to traditional advertising, but using digital devices.

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However, digital marketing is considered a form of inbound marketing and its goal is
for people to find you.
Businesses put content (or ads) out for individuals to find. People may conduct
an organic online search, a paid search, find your business on a social networker by
reading content that has been published online such as a blog or an article. The more
they see you or your content, the more familiar they will become with your brand and
they will eventually develop a trust and a rapport with you through this online presence.
Key differences between Marketing and Digital Marketing
If you attend a social media marketing/SEO conference and mention traditional
advertising terms people might look at you with blank stares. Not because you do not

n s
understand whatever you are saying but the current generation of advertising
professionals subscribe to a different form of marketing. Traditional advertising has a

a tio
long history and has developed into its current form – digital marketing. However, it’s
important for the marketers to keep in mind that traditional advertising is not actually

c
dead.

bl i
P u
At least from the trends, traditional advertising still has a place in marketing. The
ideal situation is to integrate traditional advertising with digital marketing. Big

ul
corporations know this all too well. Some major brands have lost significant market

h
shares due to the overemphasis on digital marketing at the expense of traditional

a
marketing. For smaller businesses picking up digital marketing as the main advertising

R
platform can be excused in regards to the spending. Regardless of the size of your
business, you need to understand these differences.
1. Communication in digital and traditional advertising
Communication in traditional advertising is regarded as one directional meaning
that customers and clients do not get an opportunity to respond directly to the
advert. Furthermore, this type of marketing has one product or company targeting
a large group of people. On the other hand, digital marketing incorporates a
multi-directional approach whereby the brand will actively communicate with
the customers and clients in an actual conversation.
Traditional marketing rarely gets a direct interaction with customers while this is
possible in digital marketing.

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2. Scheduling of ads in traditional and digital marketing

Traditional marketing relies on long-term planning for their ads. This long-term
planning is rigid and rarely changes during the entire period. There are a lot of
physical inclusions that can’t be abruptly halted in traditional advertising. For
instance, a campaign that includes billboards, posters, and TV ads will be a
great loss for a business if it’s altered or halted in a major way. On the other
hand, digital marketing is flexible and allows a business to adapt to any new
developments especially responding to the customer’s voice.
For example, an ad on Facebook might change it course if there is a backlash
from clients.
3. Availability

n s
Digital marketers work in different shifts making it easier for them to respond to
the customers’ questions or feedback at any given time. The same cannot be

tio
said about traditional advertising. The response in traditional marketing takes

advantage in itself.
i c a
place during working hours. The faster response in digital marketing is an

4.
bl
Potential in tradition and digital marketing

u
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Digital marketing has a potential of reaching a wider audience than traditional
marketing. In addition, traditional marketing costs more if you compare with the
potential reach. There are fewer platforms available for traditional marketing as

a h
compared to digital marketing. This, in turn, means traditional marketing is rather
specific and targeted than in digital marketing. However, the same principles

R
can be applied in digital marketing.
In reality, statements can be thrown back and forth as arguments and counter
arguments for each form of marketing. However, that does not mean there is no
favorite. Every respectable brand has adopted digital marketing strategies which
favorably indicate the gradual superiority of this form of marketing.

1.8 DIGITAL MARKETING TRENDS

Q9. Explain about digital marketing trends.
Ans :
Organizations are implementing a wide range of digital channels so as to engage
customers in a more personalized way. Digital marketing trends that organizations are
rapidly embracing include

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1. Mobility
Business Insider’s recent report indicates that globally, one in every five people
owns a smart phone, and one in every 17 owns a tablet. That’s an increase of
nearly 1.3 billion smartphones in last four years. Therefore an increased user
base accessing the internet via smartphones has prompted many companies to
optimize their online content for mobile devices.
2. Social media
Organizations are focusing on engaging with customers through social media to
offer real-time interactions. Social media helps organizations reach out to a vast
pool of potential customers by supplying them with medical and campaign-related
information.
3. Social-Local-Mobile marketing:
n s
a tio
The growing popularity of smart mobile devices, increasing location based social
activities like experience sharing, review reading via social media and the

c
bl i
evolution of Global Positioning System (GPS) are helping companies leverage
Social-Local-Mobile marketing activities.
4.
P u
Personalized Content marketing

ul
Customer engagement, acquisition and retention have all taken on a new

h
dimension with the delivery of unique, personalized, and relevant messages

a
through identified digital channels. Email is one of the most preferred marketing

R
channel to broadcast targeted organization messages and campaigns to existing
and prospective customers.
5. Advanced analytics
Increased adoption of digital channels is generating large volumes of customer
behavioural data. Advanced actionable analytics can help organizations define
targeted marketing strategies.

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Short Question and Answers

1. Digital Marketing
Ans :
Digital marketing can be defined as the process of promoting of brands using
digital distribution channels comprising internet, mobile and other interactive channels.
The basic advantage in this form of advertising lies in its low cost model.
Objectives of Digital marketing
One way to make sure you are found on the web is with an optimized digital
marketing strategy. Most digital marketing strategies and campaigns have following 5
objectives.
n s


Reaching the right audience
To engage with your audience
c a tio

bl i
To motivate your audience to take action

u
Efficient spending on your campaign

P
ul
 Return on investment (ROI)
2.
Ans : h
Search Engine Optimization

a
R
SEO is the list of activities that are carried out to boost the volume of traffic on a
website through search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN etc. Search Engine
Optimization assures that a particular website can be found, for the keywords or phrases
that users are searching in the search engine and that are relevant to their products and
services, they offer.
3. Web Analytics
Ans :
Web Analytics is an approach for tracking the user activity and traffic on a website.
Using this approach, companies can easily track their consumer behavior, their interests,
their geographical locations, number of new as well as the returning visits on their
website. ROI of other marketing strategies can be determined with the web analytics
technique.

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4. Display Advertising
Ans :
This channel involves designing graphical ads and placing them next to content
on websites, emails and other digital formats. Display ads help promote new products
or offers, increase online presence and reach out to customers to help drive leads and
increase brand awareness. Ads can be banners, boxes, interactive ads, video ads,
overlays and other similar ads that are linked to a landing page or website. They can
include text, images, audio or video clips, animation or other interactive content.
Pros
 Extremely targeted and flexible
 Pay only for relevant impressions received

n s
tio
 Choose from a large number of advertising options

c a
Target ads according to consumer behavior, demographics or geographic

i
bl
location

u
Create brand awareness as well as highly targeted traffic that may convert

P
into leads or sales


a h ul
Track everything from numbers reached, clicks, action and conversion ratios
Easy to manage budgets
Cons
 R
Difficult to reach the right demographics without detailed targeting
 Fewer people click on display ads than in the past
5. Traditional Marketing
Ans :
There are many facets of traditional marketing and examples might include
tangible items such as business cards, print ads in newspapers or magazines. It can
also include posters, commercials on TV and radio, billboards and brochures. Traditional
marketing is anything except digital means to brand your product or logo. Another
overlooked means of traditional marketing is when people find a particular business
through a referral or a network and eventually you build a rapport with them.

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6. Digital marketing trends.

Ans :
Organizations are implementing a wide range of digital channels so as to engage
customers in a more personalized way. Digital marketing trends that organizations are
rapidly embracing include
(i) Mobility
Business Insider’s recent report indicates that globally, one in every five people
owns a smart phone, and one in every 17 owns a tablet. That’s an increase of
nearly 1.3 billion smartphones in last four years. Therefore an increased user
base accessing the internet via smartphones has prompted many companies to
optimize their online content for mobile devices.
(ii) Social media
n s
a tio
Organizations are focusing on engaging with customers through social media to
offer real-time interactions. Social media helps organizations reach out to a vast

c
bl i
pool of potential customers by supplying them with medical and campaign-related
information.

P u
(iii) Social-Local-Mobile marketing:

ul
The growing popularity of smart mobile devices, increasing location based social

h
activities like experience sharing, review reading via social media and the

a
evolution of Global Positioning System (GPS) are helping companies leverage

R
Social-Local-Mobile marketing activities.
(iv) Personalized Content marketing
Customer engagement, acquisition and retention have all taken on a new
dimension with the delivery of unique, personalized, and relevant messages
through identified digital channels. Email is one of the most preferred marketing
channel to broadcast targeted organization messages and campaigns to existing
and prospective customers.
(v) Advanced analytics
Increased adoption of digital channels is generating large volumes of customer
behavioural data. Advanced actionable analytics can help organizations define
targeted marketing strategies.

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Channels of Digital Marketing : Digital Marketing, Website Marketing,

Search Engine Marketing, Online Advertising, Email Marketing, Blog
Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Audio, Video and Interactive Marketing,
Online Public Relations, Mobile Marketing, Migrating from Traditional
UNIT Channels to Digital Channels.
Marketing in the Digital Era : Segmentation – Importance of Audience
II Segmentation, How different segments use Digital Media – Organizational
Characteristics, Purchasing Characteristics, Using Digital Media to Reach,
Acquisition and Retention of new customers, Digital Media for Customer
Loyalty.

2.1 CHANNELS OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Q1. What are the channels of digital marketing ?
n s
Ans :

c a tio
b l i
The transition from traditional forms of marketing to digital marketing has pretty
much changed the way people market brands and businesses as well. While traditional

P u
marketing is still in practice, it is digital marketing that is changing the marketing
landscape for most businesses across geographies, industries, and time zones. The

ul
digital marketing industry, therefore, has introduced various digital marketing channels

h
which helps marketers target the right audience and attract them towards the product

a
or service being marketed.

R
Digital Marketing Channels
Some of the digital marketing channels are listed below. A more detailed
explanation of these channels will be provided later in the article.
Some of the most popular digital marketing channels include the following –
 Social Media Marketing
 Search Engine Optimization
 Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
 Email Marketing
 Content Marketing
 Affiliate Marketing

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 Display Advertising
 Online PR
How do you decide the right digital marketing channel?
While the aforementioned are a list of the most popularly used digital marketing
channels, the channels your brand or business should adopt depends on multiple factors.
First and foremost, you need to understand the digital marketing channels and
platforms that are relevant for your brand or business to be on. If you are a B2B business,
it would not help much to be on all social media platforms. Similarly, for a B2C brand
or business, a platform like LinkedIn might not prove to be as useful as, say, Facebook
or Instagram or even Twitter. Next you need to understand where most of your target
audience will be on. This helps you get your basic platforms right.

n s
The right digital marketing channel for your brand or business also depends on

tio
your brand’s business goals. If your goal is to generate leads for your business and

have features that will help you generate leads.

l i a
you’re a B2B brand, it makes more sense to use platforms that are business centric and

c
u
2.2 WEBSITE MARKETING
b
ul P
Q2. Write about website marketing.
Ans :

a h
Internet marketing, or online marketing, refers to advertising and marketing

R
efforts that use the Web and email to drive direct sales via electronic commerce, in
addition to sales leads from websites or emails.
Also known as Internet marketing, website marketing is using the Internet to
advertise, communicate and sell goods and services. On an advanced level, website
marketing is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the use of targeted
keywords, crawler-friendly site architecture, Search Engine Submissions and a well-
developed link network to improve a site’s Position, page rank and Click-Through
Rate.
Web marketing refers to a broad category of advertising that takes many different
forms, but generally involves any marketing activity conducted online.
Marketers have shifted their efforts online because it tends to be significantly less
expensive. Many online advertising spaces are free to use. Companies can upload

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videos to Youtube or start a blog for no cost at all. Other outlets like official websites or
paid search marketing cost a fraction of what a major television advertising campaign
would.
Types of Web Marketing
 Display Advertising – The use of banner ads and other graphical
advertisements to market products online.
 Search Engine Marketing – Using search engines to help connect users
with the products and services they are most interested in. Companies can pay
to receive preferential ranking in a list of search results.
 Search Engine Optimization – A free and organic way for companies to
improve their visibility on search engines.

n s
Social Media Marketing – Using sites like Facebook and Twitter to connect

tio
with customers.

designed emails.
l i c a
Email Marketing – Communicating with customers through the use of carefully


u b
Referral Marketing – Using internet channels to encourage consumers to


ul P
recommend products to their friends and families.
Affiliate Marketing – Working with other businesses to make it easier for

h
consumers to shop for products online.

a



R
Inbound Marketing – Boosting the value of a company’s web presence by
adding unique content like blogs, games, and tutorial videos.
Video Marketing – Using web videos for promotional purposes.
From the initial process of taking inputs from clients, planning on the basis of
such inputs to final implementation and testing – all are done using latest web designing
techniques and skills. Our services have the advantage of offering clarity in its design
style, which is backed up with an easy and free flowing content and latest technical
know-how. Not only we provide affordable web site design and ecommerce web
development services but also search engine friendly designs. Our Service Includes
 Website Design
 Website Redesign
 Shopping Cart Web Design

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 Detailed and Advanced Page Layout

 Custom Logo Design
 Banner Ads
 Custom Graphics Design using advanced design tools.
The most important digital marketing tool is the one that virtually every B2B
marketer will utilize: your website.
I suppose that not every B2B organiza­tion needs to have a website; you can get
by, I suppose, with just a blog or a Facebook page, if you have to. It’s also possible that
your particular business is so old school that no web presence is required, although I’d
like to see just which businesses fit the no-Web mold. But for the vast majority of B2B
companies, a website is not just an important component of their digital marketing

n s
mix, it’s the hub for all your online activities, marketing and otherwise. Everything else
you do your blog, your Facebook page, your Twitter feed, your YouTube videos builds

tio
on what you do on your website. They are all subsidiary components to your website
presence.

l i c a
Thinking of it this way, it’s easy to see that your website is the most important

u b
thing you do online. Your website is the online face of your company, organization,
brand, or products. It must reflect what you are, what you do, and how you do it; it is

ul P
how current and potential customers view you and, in many cases, interface with you.
A bad website will turn off potential customers, whereas an out­standing website will

a h
create new and more loyal customers. Everything else builds from your website and
leads back to it. You can’t take it for granted.

R
Building an effective website for your business, then, is key. Both the content and
design of your site should work toward establishing or supporting the products and
services you offer to your customers. In addition, your site’s content and design should
fit in holistically with all your other marketing activities. Your customers should find a
similar experience when they visit your site as they do when they view an ad in a trade
magazine, read a direct mail piece, or receive an email newsletter. Everything should
work in concert, while also exploiting the specific nature of each medium an integrated
marketing plan, if you will.
In addition, many B2B companies use their website to take orders from
customers, so the entire process of ecommerce needs to be factored into the equation.
Not only do you have to support your brand and products on your site, you also have
to facilitate the sale of those products via ordering pages, a shopping cart, and checkout
system. It’s an added wrinkle, but an important one.

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2.3 SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

Q3. Write about search engine marketing.

Ans :
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of gaining market online by
purchasing Ads on search engines, say Google, Yahoo, or Bing. SEM involves the
promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
Steps Involved in Search Engine Marketing
These are the general steps involved in search engine marketing :
Step 1 - Define Effective Strategy
 Define your target audience.
n s
 Identify their needs and motivations.

c a tio

l i
Highlight how your product is best to serve their needs.

b


P u
Review your business position in the marketplace.
Identify your competitors.


a h ul
Identify your specific goals and benchmarks, such as search ranking, sales,
website traffic, and other ROI metrics.


R
Step 2 - Choose Right Keywords
Select most important phrases relevant to your business.
 Also select the phrases that are frequently searched by your target customers.
 Conduct brainstorm sessions for potential terms your customers use when
thinking about your products and capabilities.
 Interact with your sales and customer service teams, and best customers to
know the frequently used phrases.
 Employ a keyword research tools to compile a list of highly searched terms.
Step 3 - Optimize Your Website Content
 Focus on your website structure keep it simple.

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 The search engines looks for the underlying code of your website when they
visit your website.
 Create crisp, clear, and correct content that can retain users’ attention.
 Use your keyword phrases relevantly in pages title tags, heading tags, directory
names, file names, alt tags and meta tags.
 Pay attention to meta description. It is shown in the search results below
your link, providing a great opportunity for you to bring visitors to your
Website.
Step 4 - Submit Your Website for Indexing
To be visible online to the customers, ensure that all the pages of your website are

s
completely indexed by the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

n
tio
For speedy process of getting indexed by the other engines, submit your website
to the DMOZ.org, an Open Directory Project. Once DMOZ accepts your website, Yahoo

c a
and other search engines have no problem indexing your website.

l i
Step 5 - Add Quality Links to Your Website

u b

P
Build links to your website from valued links of other websites that are

ul
frequented by your targeted visitors.

h
The more quality inbound links you have, the more popular your website

a
is with Google and other engines.
 RMake your website content is link-worthy. Create interesting and informative
content on your website such as a library of best practices articles, blog
trends in your industry, etc.
 You can also garner links from vendors, customers, business partners, and
trade associations.
 Distribute press releases and articles online.
Step 6 - Manage Paid Search Advertise
 Bid on the most relevant keywords. Do not pick them based on only
popularity.
 Make sure your product offer is interesting to the potential customer.

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 Tie the bidding strategy to business results. In many cases a lower Ad position
will produce a higher ROI.
 Finally, include a compelling ‘call to action’ in the Ad and send traffic to a
relevant landing page tied to the Ad.
Step 7 - Measure Success of Advertise
 Check how well you performed in the past.
 Measure CPC, CPR, Clicks, Bounce rate, Impressions, ROI, etc.
 Employ Web Analytics to monitor progress and problems.
 Monitor your position regularly in the search results.
Identify problems and plan strategies to improve your results in the future.

n s
tio
2.4 ONLINE ADVERTISING
Q4. Write about online advertising.

l i c a
Ans :

u b
ul P
Online advertising is a marketing strategy that involves the use of the Internet as
a medium to obtain website traffic and target and deliver marketing messages to the
right customers. Online advertising is geared toward defining markets through unique

a h
and useful applications.

R
Since the early 1990s there has been an exponential increase in the growth of
online advertising, which has evolved into a standard for small and large organizations.
Online advertising is also known as Internet advertising or Digital Advertising.
Online advertisements are purchased through one of the following common
vehicles :

 Cost per Thousand (CPM): Advertisers pay when their messages are exposed
to specific audiences.
 Cost per Click (CPC): Advertisers pay every time a user clicks on their ads.
 Cost per Action (CPA): Advertisers only pay when a specific action (generally
a purchase) is performed.

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Examples of online advertising include banner ads, search engine results pages,
social networking ads, email spam, online classified ads, pop-ups, contextual ads and
spyware.
Benefits of Online Advertising
1. Cost
The low costs of electronic communication reduce the cost of displaying online
advertisements compared to offline ads. Online advertising, and in particular
social media, provides a low-cost means for advertisers to engage with large
established communities. Advertising online offers better returns than in other
media.
2. Measurability

s
Online advertisers can collect data on their ads’ effectiveness, such as the size of

n
tio
the potential audience or actual audience response, how a visitor reached their
advertisement, whether the advertisement resulted in a sale, and whether an ad

their ad campaigns over time.

l i c a
actually loaded within a visitor’s view. This helps online advertisers improve

3. Formatting
u b
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Advertisers have a wide variety of ways of presenting their promotional messages,
including the ability to convey images, video, audio, and links. Unlike many offline

a h
ads, online ads also can be interactive. For example, some ads let users input
queries or let users follow the advertiser on social media. Online ads can even

4.
R
incorporate games.
Targeting
Publishers can offer advertisers the ability to reach customizable and narrow
market segments for targeted advertising. Online advertising may use geo-targeting
to display relevant advertisements to the user’s geography. Advertisers can
customize each individual ad to a particular user based on the user’s previous
preferences. Advertisers can also track whether a visitor has already seen a
particular ad in order to reduce unwanted repetitious exposures and provide
adequate time gaps between exposures.
5. Coverage
Online advertising can reach nearly every global market, and online advertising
influences offline sales.

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6. Speed
Once ad design is complete, online ads can be deployed immediately. The delivery
of online ads does not need to be linked to the publisher’s publication schedule.
Furthermore, online advertisers can modify or replace ad copy more rapidly than
their offline counterparts.
To advertise with Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other major search engines, you
typically create a pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement. A PPC ad is so-named because
you pay only when the ad is clicked by a customer; you don’t pay for the placement
itself. It’s true results-oriented advertising, much more so than the typical ads you run
in trade and industry publications.
PPC advertising is also different from traditional advertising in that you have to
bid on those keywords that people are searching for. If you’re a high bidder, your ad
gets prominently displayed on the search results page for that particular key­word; if

n s
you’re outbid, your ad gets displayed lower in the search results or not at all.

tio
This sort of keyword bidding makes PPC advertising challenging for those used
to traditional cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising. Not only do you have to write

l i c a
compelling ad copy (but not a lot of it PPC text ads are typically very short), you also
have to figure out the right keywords and how much to bid on each one. It’s tricky, but

b
it’s the way the advertising game is played on the Web even for B2B companies.

u
ul P
Although targeted PPC advertising can be extremely effective for B2B marketers,
it’s not the only form of advertising available online. More traditional display advertising
also exists, typically in the form of graphical banner ads found on the top or the sides of

a h
pages on some websites. These ads are typically paid for on a CPM impressions basis,

R
although some banner ads are also sold as part of a PPC program. You can achieve
good results by placing targeted display ads on those trade or industry websites your
business buyers are most likely to frequent essentially the online equivalent of placing
print ads in trade and industry magazines.

2.5 EMAIL MARKETING

Q5. Write about email marketing.
Ans :
E-Mail marketing is promoting your business by sending overt E-Mails and
newsletters. It uses promotional letter clubbed with product and service details to deliver
the business message to audience. It is cost effective method to convey your message
to highly targeted visitors. Results of E-Mail marketing are quantifiable and measurable.

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Types of E-Mails
There are following types of Emails used for E-Mail marketing.
1. Transaction E-Mails
You get these mails after you are done with any transaction such as buying a
product. They confirm the business transaction with information such as cost
per unit, number of units bought, total cost, mode of payment, shipping details,
delivery time, etc.
2. Newsletters
They include information to keep customers involved. They foster relationship
with customer.
3. Promotion E-Mails

n s
They carry details of any promotional activity such as sale, new offers, etc.

tio
E-Mail marketing being cost-efficient and measurable, needs strategic planning

and analyze the results.

l i a
and creative execution of campaign. You need to personalize message, deploy it,

c
Setting Up an E-Mail Marketing Campaign

u b
 P
These are the general steps taken to set up an E-Mail marketing campaign.

ul
Create a database of customers. You can buy it or can generate from your website
backend. Embed the customer details such as contact information, client status,

a h
lead source, etc.



R
Create a newsletter. Put in the relevant information they may need. Set the subject
line timings and frequency. Add discounts and bonus you offer.
Make it look eye-catchy, informational, and useful.
 Mention deal expiry date and time.
 Drop a link in email if necessary.
 Buy servers capable enough to bear the load.
 Test you email before you send it. Check all details, images, and links.
 Deploy your newsletter.
 Analyze the performance of E-mail advertise. For example, E-mail delivery rate,
email opening rate, conversions etc.
Make sure you comply with anti-spam laws of that particular country.

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Tracking an E-Mail Marketing Campaign

The essential metrics you should be tracking for E-Mail campaign are:
 Click Through Rate: It gives you clear view of how many people engage with
your mail and are interested in what you offer.
 Conversion Rate: It helps you know, to what extent you are able to achieve
your goals.
 Bounce Rate: It lets you know how many consider you as a spammer of worth
time wasting.
 Subscribers’ Growth Rate: It lets you decide how much you are able to
extend your reach.

n s
Email Forwarding Rate: The more is the rate the more interested are your

tio
customers.

c a
Overall ROI: The gist of tracking is how many leads you are able to generate
through your campaigns.
l i
u b
You can also keep a track of open rate and unsubscribed rate. This may even

P
help you to predict audience behavior.

ul
ah
2.6 BLOG MARKETING

R
Q6. Write about blog marketing.
Ans :
The term blog comes from the combination of “web” and “log” or “weblog,”
and was eventually shortened to “blog.” In the 1990’s when blogs first appeared, they
were primarily online diaries, where people would provide personal accounts of their
lives. At that time, blogs were traditionally built websites that were updated and uploaded
manually, limiting the number of bloggers to only those who knew how to build and
upload web pages. It wasn’t until the late 1990s when LiveJournal and then Blogger
developed platforms that didn’t require tech knowledge, that blogging expanded.
In the early 2000s, Word Press came along and quickly grew into one of the most
used blogging platforms.

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Blog marketing is any process that publicises or advertises a website, business,

brand or service via the medium of blogs. This includes, but is not limited to marketing
via ads placed on blogs, recommendations and reviews by the blogger, promotion via
entries on third party blogs and cross-syndication of information across multiple blogs.
The Pros of Blog Marketing
The very nature of blogging makes them ideal for marketing since they provide
new content to draw people back, and offer a way for consumers and businesses to
interact. Here are a few other benefits:
1. Inexpensive to Start and Run. While there are free blogging platforms,
such as Blogger and Wordpress.com, to maintain a professional appearance
that allows for your unique brand to shine through, use a self-hosted option,
such as WordPress.org. For the cost of a domain and web hosting, you can have
a customized blog marketing for you.

n s
tio
2. Easy to Use. Most blogging platforms are simple to use. If you can copy, paste,
type, drag & drop and upload, you can have a professional looking blog.
3.
i c a
An Effective Way to have Bi-directional Traffic Come to Your

l
u b
Site. Offering tips, updates, and other new contents give people a reason to
come and/or return to your business website, which gives them the opportunity

1.
to buy.

ul P
Improves Search Engine Ranking. Google, in particular, likes to find and

a h
rank new content, and many entrepreneurs use blogging specifically for search
engine optimization (SEO)
2. R
Allows You to Show Your Expertise to Gain Trust and Credibility
with Your Market. People like to know who they’re doing business with. With
a blog, you can prove you’re an expert, provide helpful tips and other valuable
information, all of which help consumers feel good about spending money on
your product or service.
3. Connect with Your Market. While most businesses now use Twitter and
other social platforms more than blogs for engagement, blogs can allow you to
have a conversation with your market. This gives you the opportunity to build
trust and rapport, as well as get feedback and provide customer service.
1. It Can Make Money Beyond Your Product or Service. You can accept
advertising, promote affiliate products and get sponsors, adding additional
sources of revenue to your business.

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The Cons of Blog Marketing

Like just everything else in life, there is a downside to blogging, including:
1. Time-Consuming. Creating new content and updating your blog can take a
significant amount of time. Hiring freelance writers and a virtual assistant, or
using private label right content can help.
2. Needs a Constant Stream of Ideas. Along with time, having something
new blog about is one of the biggest challenges bloggers face.
3. It Can Take Time to See Results. The Internet is overloaded with
information, so getting people to your blog takes time.
4. It Needs to Be Marketed Too. You’re using the blog to market your business,
but for it to work, people need to know about it, which means you have to find
your target market and entice them to your blog.
n s
2.7 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
c a tio
Q7. Explain about social media marketing.
b l i
Ans :
P u
ul
Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through

a h
social media sites. Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide
radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let

R
people share short messages or “updates” with others.
Social Media Marketing At Marketing Land
Marketing Land is the sister site to Search Engine Land that covers all facets of
internet marketing, including these popular topics within social media marketing :
 Facebook
 Instagram
 Twitter
 Pinterest
 Linkedin
 YouTube

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The Advantages of Social Media Marketing

 Cost Effectiveness
This is the major advantage of Social Media Marketing that appeals the businesses
to go for it. Many popular social media channels are free and you can freely
interact with your audience.
 Social Media Marketing caters a Big Audience
Another advantage of SMM is that it has the potential to reach an unlimited
number of audience apart from the traditional marketing tools. This helps in
bring out more exposure to the businesses. With the use of SMM you can reach
out to people without having gender, age, social status or geographical limitations.
 Quick Response

n s
Social Media Marketing is considered the fastest way of promoting your business
or share important information to your audience. By synchronizing your website

 Faster Generation of Engagement

c tio
your users can also get automatic updates or current information at once.

a
l i
Social Media is a great platform where you can interact with your audience. It is

b
P u
an important aspect that business should maintain long term relationship with
their followers in order to flourish their businesses. This can be easily done with

ul
the help of Social Media.


a h
Brand Loyalty is Nurtured
A healthy interaction with your audience plays an important part in the success

R
of business. With this simple tool, you can build your brand loyalty. In this way
your audience will think that you do care for them which will help in building a
long lasting relationship with them.
 Customer Service is more easily accessible
With the use of Social Media, it has become easy for the customers to interact
and give their feedback regarding any brand or to the company. Here they can
give their suggestions, comments and views regarding the product or business.
This can lead to an effective interaction and positive results for business promotion.
 Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
Everything in this world have both its positive as well as negative aspects. Even
the Social Media Marketing has its negative aspects too which have its effects on
your business.

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 Requires Time to Execute

Social Media Marketing is a time consuming activity. As some research reports
suggest that a large number of users have to spend maximum time on the Social
Media Websites in order to attract users. For example, the industry reports tells
that almost 64% of digital market users spend around 6 hours on the Social
Media Marketing. Similarly, on the other hand around 37% of users spend ap to
11 hours on Social Media Marketing. Apart from this, even if you spend as much
time your SMM efforts will go waste if you have not done it correctly. If you have
not provided the relevant content, it will lack in attracting a large number of
audience.
 Might Attract Spammers and Internet Trolls

n s
Another negative aspect of Social Media Marketing is that you never know what
type of audience you have. It can attract all types of audience including the good

a tio
or bad. This dangerous audience may include the spammers, scammers, trolls,
and many other types of harmful users or individuals who are harmful for your

c
reputation that you have created online.
The Tendency to Go Viral Overnight
b l i
u


ul P
Anything you post or publish on the social media websites like Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Google+ etc. It takes no time to go viral and spread instantly like a

a h
wildfire in the internet world. If you get positive feedback from your audience,
then it can be beneficial for you. Otherwise, it can have disastrous results because

R
you do not have control on the information or post that you have published once
because it get available for everyone immediately. It can also include negative
and harmful aspects too. This information can be easily used against you. For
example, it can be used to criticize you or to spread false information in order to
affect your online reputation.
 ROI is Not Defined
ROI is an important part of any business. According to a research, around 89%
of digital marketers want to know the ROI for the efforts they have made on the
social media through Social Media Marketing(SMM). Around 37% marketers
can calculate the results of the Social Media marketing. But 35% of them are
probably not sure about measuring the ROI accurately. Finally, 28% marketers
do not even know how to calculate ROI.

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2.7.1 Difference Between Social Media Marketing and

Digital Marketing
Q8. What are the difference between social media marketing and digital
marketing ?
Ans :
Digital Marketing uses all digital channels to build awareness and promote the
product and services to the target audience. It includes online marketing, social media
marketing and mobile marketing.
Social Media Marketing is often contrasted with digital marketing, but they are
not the same, as in social media marketing is just one component of digital marketing
which uses social media as a platform to reach customers and build relationships with
them.

n s
BASIS FOR
COMPARISON
SOCIAL MEDIA
MARKETING

c a tio
DIGITAL
MARKETING
Meaning Social Media
Marketing is a
b l i Digital Marketing
implies promoting

P u form of marketing
that uses social
and attracting
customers,

a h ul media sites,
forums and blogs
to promote
through all digital
platforms
including internet

R product or brand
and create
awareness about
based and non-
internet based
channels.
them.
Reach Limited Wide
Based on Content Banners
Concerned with Engaging with the Reaching the
social media user, target audience
in the best through different
manner. digital marketing
platforms.
Speed High

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2.8 AUDIO, VIDEO AND INTERACTIVE MARKETING

Q9. Write about audio, video and interactive marketing.
Ans :
The Internet isn’t all text, of course. Much web-based communication for B2B
companies is done with sight and sound via digital videos and audios.
1. Audio marketing takes the form of podcasts, which are short audio broadcasts
that can be streamed or downloaded from your website or from a third-party
provider, such as Apple’s iTunes Store. Think of a podcast as your own little
radio show, which you can use to promote your company or products to existing
or potential customers.
2. Video marketing takes the form of digital videos. You’re familiar with YouTube,
of course, which is the Internet’s largest video-sharing community. Although

s
YouTube is a haven for user-generated videos of all shapes and sizes, it’s also a

n
tio
place where savvy businesses market themselves via videos that somehow
promote their products and brands. Up until recently, YouTube has been used

l i a
primarily by B2C businesses reaching out to consumers. But there is a place for

c
YouTube in B2B marketing, if only because more and more business buyers are

u b
looking for information about products and services in video format. Videos are
actually pretty good for presenting how-to information and keeping customers

ul P
abreast on the latest industry news; if you can tap into this need for useful
information presented in video format, you could have a one-up on your
competition.
3.
a h
Finally, there’s a more interactive form of audio/video marketing that many

R
B2B companies are successfully exploring. I’m talking about webinars, web-based
seminars that let you talk directly to groups of customers (and them to you) in
real time. Whether you think of a webinar as a group web chat or a web-based
sales conference (both comparisons are valid), it’s a great use of emerging
communications technology for B2B marketing purposes.

2.9 ONLINE PUBLIC RELATIONS

Q10. Explain about online public relations.
Ans :
Most successful B2B companies employ public relations to get mentions in a
variety of traditional media. It’s all about making the right contacts (and sending out a
few press releases) to get a favorable product placement.

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Traditional PR methods, however, are migrating to the Internet; many of the old
media people you deal with, even (and especially) for traditional publications, now
prefer to be contacted online. Instead of sending out physical press releases via postal
mail, you send out virtual press releases (and accompanying media) via email. It’s a lot
faster - and costs less, too.
Many B2B companies also find that supporting media of all types is made easier
by putting key marketing materials in a press room on their websites. It’s actually easier
to put all your product images, press releases, management bios, or whatever on your
website, where all media can access them, than it is to supply these materials via
traditional methods. A well-stocked and easy-to-use online press room will actually get
you more placements than you would have had otherwise.
For these reasons, you really need to think of online PR as a new activity in your

n s
B2B marketing bag. And unlike traditional PR, it’s something you can measure; whereas

tio
you might never know what a mention in a traditional print magazine got you, it’s easy
enough to track those visitors to your website that resulted from an online press release

l i c a
or mention in a particular blog. Old-time PR people might not like this new
accountability, but it puts the PR part of your program in the same league as your other

u
measurable marketing activities.
b
ul P
2.10 MOBILE MARKETING

a h
Q11. Write about mobile marketing.
Ans :
R
Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy aimed at reaching
a target audience on their smart phones, tablets, and/or other mobile devices, via
websites, email, SMS and MMS, social media, and apps. Mobile is disrupting the
way people engage with brands.
Design and effect a powerful mobile marketing strategy by considering the
following :
 Mobile-friendly site(s)
 Mobile-friendly content
 Deals, treats, and coupons
 Mobile payment options

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 Mobile-only social
 Maximise on your specific strategies
 Text/Short Message Service (SMS) marketing
Advantages of Mobile Marketing
1. Faster Access : The mobile marketing is faster in many ways, be it an
image or text or a video, it can be easily carried and accessed instantly when
needed. So, it helps in monitoring the works and updates can be checked regularly;
making it less expensive and less time consuming.
2. User Friendly : The working interface is easy in mobiles so people prefer more
mobile than desktop computers. Thus, it provides the information of issuing the
promotion or product ideas to the users easily. Self – Note – The screen size is
also the main key for user friendly.
3.
n
Knowledge About Device : Mobile marketing involves direct markets
tio
technique that helps the customers to interact about their preferences in mobiles.

make more effective marketing.

l i a
Also, they get to know more about the mobile. Feedback can also be given to

c
4.
b
Large Coverage : Coverage is the huge circle in Mobile Marketing. The

u
sharing of any files becomes a simple task. People share their new interest in

5.
ul P
offers or any information to others which is a good sign for the company’s growth.
Mobile Banking and Micro-Blogging : Recently, banks started encouraging

a h
mobile banking to acquire more users; and all type of payments are mostly done
through mobiles. Since, it’s more efficient and less time consuming. Even Twitter,

R
Facebook etc. has more mobile users than any other device users.
Disadvantge of Mobile Marketing
1. Huge Circle : It is both advantage and disadvantage since, getting a campaign
done in one single circle is complex. Meeting up with each ones preference is an
impossible task.
2. Security : Online privacy has to be checked regularly to prevent any distractions
or hacking. Mapping with the mobile is possible when any route is to be searched.
But securing one’s location is also essential.
3. Creative : Creative thoughts in making new mobiles should be present to
make mobile marketing to sustain in same place. Since, there are lots of
mobile in the markets people will pick out the mobile according to usage, interface
and looks of it. Adding more details in outer part of mobile is important.

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2.11 MIGRATING FROM TRADITIONAL CHANNELS

TO DIGITAL CHANNELS

Q12.Discuss about migrating from traditional channels to digital channels.

Ans :
The B2B companies have unlimited marketing budgets (and, in fact, most have
the expected budgetary constraints), it’s likely that as you add digital marketing tools to
your mix you’ll need to conversely decrease your spending on some of your existing
marketing activities. Think of it as a migration from tradi­tional marketing channels to
new digital marketing channels.
Which old school activities lead to which new school ones? It depends a lot on

s
how many of your prospect and customers are online themselves, of course, but let’s

n
tio
take a quick look at the possibilities.
1.

i c a
Migrating from Cold Calling to Search Engine Marketing
Drumming up new business is the bane of all B2B companies. In the old days,

l
u b
your salespeople had to reach out to potential customers by following a list of
potential leads. Cold calling was the nature of the day.

ul P
With digital marketing, however, at least some potential new customers will seek
you out—by clicking on your website in Google search results. Business customers

h
are becoming more proactive, which means they’re using technology (in the

a
R
form of web search engines) to seek out information and possible suppliers. When
they go searching, they’ll find your company.
Having potential customers contact you is a heck of a lot more productive than
having your sales force do a lot of cold calling. If you work your website (and the
landing pages that lead from your search results listings) correctly, you can
encour­age or require visitors to provide their contact information. You, then,
pass this contact information onto your sales force, and now they’re calling better
qualified buyers who’ve already expressed an interest in your company, products,
and services. It’s a lot better than cold calling.
2. Migrating from Literature to Websites
What do you provide when potential customers request more information? Yes,
you want to get their contact info so that your salespeople can do their thing, but
a lot of times buyers just want the information, not the contact.

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In the old days, you probably mailed inquiring customers some sort of product
literature a brochure or two, maybe a fact sheet, maybe even a white paper.
That’s all good stuff, but they cost money to design and print, and even more
money to mail. Plus, there’s a time lag between when a prospect requests that
information and when he or she receives it.
In the digital world, you can provide some if not all your current product
informa­tion and more on your website. Fewer brochures to print, less information
to mail, no more waiting for the customer to receive it all. Your customers get
immediate gratification (and potentially more information than before) and you
get lower costs.
3. Migrating from Trade Advertising to Web Advertising

n s
Many B2B businesses spend a chunk of change on advertisements in a variety of
trade and industry publications. Fine and dandy; these magazines and journals
are highly targeted and often deliver good results.

c a tio
You might be able, however, to generate similar results at a fraction of the cost by

l i
migrating some or all of your trade advertising to the Web. Instead of taking out

b
an ad in an industry-specific magazine, you place a banner ad on an industry-

P u
specific website. In most instances, you’re reaching the same or similar customers,

ul
and web ads typically cost less than print ads. In addition, you’re likely to generate
direct results (via click throughs) from your web advertising; results are much

a h
more difficult to track in print advertising.
4.
R
Migrating from Direct Mail to Email
When it comes to keeping in regular contact with your customers, direct mail
rules the roost. Whether it’s a weekly list of specials, a monthly newsletter, or a
quarterly catalog, most B2B companies have a robust direct mail operation.
Robust direct mail operations, unfortunately, are also costly direct mail operations.
Again, it costs a lot of money to design, print, and mail everything you send out-
even if they are effective at retaining customers and driving additional revenue.
You can reduce your direct mail costs by shifting your mailings to the Internet.
Instead of sending all your flyers, newsletters, and catalogs via postal mail, you
instead send them to your customer list via email. Sending an email message is
essentially free; although you still have some design and management costs, you
reduce your printing and mailing costs to near zero. Plus, your customers receive

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your mailings immediately, rather than waiting days or weeks for the post office
to its thing. There’s much benefit to this particular migration.
5. Migrating from Newsletters and Phone Calls to Social Media
If you’re like most B2B companies, you either send out a newsletter or similar
mailing, or have your salespeople take to the phones.
Those approaches are old school in the extreme. Today, cutting-edge B2B
companies are using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, to notify
customers of important events and happenings. Instead of sending out a barrage
of calls or emails to announce a price reduction, for example, you simply tweet
about it on Twitter and include the news in a post to your Facebook page. It’s
instant communication that often has more impact than more traditional methods.
6. Migrating from Trade Magazine PR to Blog PR
n s
a tio
If you have a PR department, it’s no doubt accustomed to sending out press
releases and making calls to the most important trade magazines for your industry.

c
l i
That’s good, but there are other places that your customers go for information

b
online. You need to expand your PR efforts to include websites, online publications,

u
and industry-related blogs. The effort is similar (but not identical), but the targets

P
ul
are all online.
7.
h
Migrating from Live Events to Webinars

a
Finally, consider all the live events your company hosts or attends conferences,

R
seminars, trade shows, and the like. It costs real money to send a small army of
personnel and equipment cross country for these events, and even though they’re
often effective in the whole, they might not be the most cost-effective marketing
tools in your arsenal.
Forward-thinking B2B companies are migrating many of their live events online.
Instead of hosting a seminar in a hotel or conference center, you instead host a
web seminar (webinar) online. Your staff doesn’t have to travel, and neither do
your attendees which both reduces costs and potentially increases the number of
attendees. The whole thing takes place online, using web conferencing software
and services. Your costs are dramatically reduced, as is the downtime for your
staff.

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2.12 SEGMENTATION
Q13. Explain about segmentation your audience.
Ans :
Audience segmentation, sometimes called market or customer segmentation, is
simply the act of dividing your target audience into groups that share similar needs and
demonstrate similar buyer behavior. This way you can target messages and even
products and services to specific market segments, instead of sending the same general
message and products/services to all potential customers.
In this fashion, market segmentation is the polar opposite of mass marketing. A
mass market has no (or few) segments; you send the same messages to all potential

s
customers, and market the same products and services across the board. A segmented

n
tio
market, on the other hand, allows for more targeted or even personalized messages,
and even the possibility of tailoring a unique product mix to each market segment.

i c a
This type of market segmentation is important for a number of reasons. It not

l
u b
only helps you focus on who you want to engage and shows you where the best market
opportunities lie, but also lays the groundwork for better reception to your message.

ul P
Customers who are talked to directly respond more positively than those who receive a
generic message; the more relevant the message, the higher the customer engagement

a h
and response rates.
By identifying market segments and then fine-tuning your marketing message to

R
each segment, you provide each customer with a more relevant message. Marketing
that lacks this relevance, more often than not, ends up being a waste of everyone’s
time; in this age of mass personalization, non-personalized and non-relavant messages
are simply ignored.
It’s easy to understand why irrelevant marketing messages can do more harm
than good. Not only do you waste valuable marketing resources by sending the wrong
messages to the wrong people, you might also end up offending your true customer
base. When you send out mass-produced messages to people who couldn’t care less
about what you’re saying, potential buyers may think (rightly) that your company is
clueless and doesn’t care about them.
On the other hand, when you correctly segment your customer base, you provide
target customers with information relevant and useful to their purchasing decisions.

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Done properly, market segmentation can produce significant increases in response

rates and customer engagement and ultimately conversion.
Key to this successful audience segmentation is not only identifying like customers,
but knowing what kinds of information they prefer to receive, and how. You end up
sending targeted messages to specific groups of customers, using the media that best
suit their buying behavior.

Q14. Explain about common B2B Market Segments.

Ans :
If you use the breakdown or build-up methods to create your customer segments,
you’ll end up with your own unique customer definitions. That’s great.

n s
If, however, you adopt the a priori or post hoc approaches, you have to start
some­where in defining your segment characteristics. To that end, let’s look at some of
the more common segments used by other B2B companies.
A) Hierarchy of Characteristics
c a tio
b l i
In their text Segmenting the Industrial Market (1984, Lexington Books), marketing

P u
experts Thomas Bonoma and Benson Shapiro defined the following five character­istics
that can be used to defined B2B market segments:


h ul
Demographics: These include factors such as the customer’s industry, company
size, location, age, and where the company stands in its life­cycle.

a

R
Operating variables: These include elements such as the company’s embrace
of specific technologies, use of various products or brands, and other important
capabilities. For the purposes of digital marketing, this should also include the
customer’s use of various digital media.
 Purchasing approaches: This should take into account the purchasing function
within the company, the company’s internal power structure, buyer-seller
relationships, purchasing policies and criteria, and the like. For that matter, a
company’s purchasing unit may have specific requirements that influence
purchasing decisions; there might be internal policies, purchasing strategies, and
the like that you need to take into account.
 Situational factors: These are both immediate and changing, including the
urgency of a specific order, the size of an order, product application, and the like.

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 Buyer’s personal characteristics: This is the most granular of the

segmentation characteristics, based on the characteristics of specific individuals
that person’s character, approach to purchasing, likes and dislikes, and so forth.
Bonoma and Shapiro suggest applying these characteristics in a nested hierarchy.
That is, start by defining the customer’s demographics, then the operating variables,
then the purchasing approaches used, then the situational factors, and then the personal
characteristics.
B) Organizational Characteristics
These hierarchical characteristics can be divided into organizational and buyer-
related characteristics. Organizational characteristics are macro in nature; buyer
characteristics are more micro.

n s
Organization characteristics define the type of company to which you’re selling,
in terms of size, location, and the like. These characteristics include the following:


c a tio
Company size: This can be a rough indicator of the potential business that a
company might represent, in the long term. In general terms, you’re likely to get

l i
more and larger orders from a larger company than from a smaller one.

b

u
Location: This can be used not only to assign sales staff, but also to determine

P
how best to approach a given company; where a company is located,

ul
geographically, can tell a lot about that company’s culture and communication

h
requirements. For example, you’d want to adopt a different marketing strategy

a
for an Asian company than a company in Europe. In addition, you can define

R
customer segments by geographic range - whether a company is local, national,
multinational, or the like.
 SIC code: Specific industries have their own unique needs, based on technology
usage, standard practices, and the like. You can fine-tune your marketing strategy
for specific industries.
 Type of institution: It’s important to note the culture and nature of a given
company. For example, if you’re selling office furniture, you should know that
banks like designer furniture whereas government agencies require more
functional fixtures.
 Business model: Businesses of the same type and size might still have differences
in the way they purchase; the business model assumed by a company affects
how and where it buys. For example, a company pursuing a cost leadership

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strategy is more committed to high-volume, low-cost purchasing, where a business

that adopts a strategy of differentiation is more likely to purchase unique products
at higher prices.
 Benefit segmentation:This refers to the product’s economic value to the
customer. This recognizes that different customers buy the same products but for
different reasons. How a company uses your products will determine the specific
marketing message you use when communicating with that company.
 Decision-making stage: When courting new customers, this refers to where
the company is in the purchasing process. Obviously, you need to supply different
information (and use different techniques) for each stage in the decision-making
process.
 Ongoing business potential: For existing customers, you can then segment

n s
by the ongoing revenue potential, assuming supply can be guaranteed. You might
want to segment by major accounts (your largest customers who require constant

a tio
management attention), key accounts (medium-sized customers who are more
regular in their pur­chases), and direct accounts (smaller companies who can be

c
C) Purchasing Characteristics
b i
counted on to place orders without constant handholding on your part).

l
P u
Segmenting by purchasing characteristics involves understanding and catering

ul
to the individual components of the decision-making process. It’s a more subjective
approach, one based as much on personalities as on hard facts; it also creates numerous

a h
specific segments, as opposed to the fewer, broader segments of organizational

R
segmentation.
When determining segments based on buyer characteristics, you should consider
the following:
 Buying decision criteria: These are the factors a buyer uses to evaluate
suppliers, including price, product quality, delivery time and accuracy, supply
continuity, technical support, and the like.
 Purchasing strategy: Some companies prefer to use a selection of familiar
suppliers, and place their orders with the first supplier that meets the buying
criteria. Other companies like to consider a larger number of both familiar and
new suppliers, solicit bids, and then place the order with the firm that makes the
best offer.
 Structure of the decision-making unit: You need to know how the decision-
making process works for each of the companies you sell to. This helps you

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develop an appropriate relationship with the person or people who have the real
decision-making power in the organization and not waste too much time selling
to people who don’t actually make the decision.
 Perceived importance: You also need to know how important your product
or service is to the company to which you’re selling. The more important your
product is (or is perceived to be), the more personal interaction you’re likely to
have with key decision makers.
 Attitudes toward suppliers: Likewise, you need to know just how your
potential customers feel about your company and your products. Getting on the
good side of a buyer can make all the difference when otherwise similar suppliers
are vying for a company’s business.
2.12.1 Importance of Audience Segmentation
Q15. What is the importance of Audience Segmentation ?

n s
tio
Ans :


l i a
Successful market segmentation, then, results in the following quantifiable benefits:

c
Higher response rates by providing relevant messages to each targeted segment.

u b
Higher conversion rates by targeting the right products to the right customers.

P
Lower immediate marketing expenditures by using only those media that best

ul
reach targeted segments; you don’t waste money by going outside the “sweet


a h
spot” for each segment.
Lower long-term costs by not having to follow up on lower-potential leads.
 R
Lower risk of negative feedback, on social networks and elsewhere, by not sending
unwanted messages to those uninterested in what you offer.

2.13 HOW DIFFERENT SEGMENTS USE DIGITAL MEDIA

2.13.1 Digital Media by Organizational Characteristics
Q16. Discuss about digital media by organizational characteristics.
Ans :
Digital Media by Organizational Characteristics
The type and location of a company will determine that company’s use of digital
media in the purchasing process. Although every situation is different, there are a few
major issues to keep in mind.

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First, a larger company is more likely to embrace newer technologies than a

smaller one-to a point. It’s mainly a budget thing; larger companies have larger budgets
and larger IT departments that let them adopt new technologies faster than smaller
companies can or can afford to do. That said, large IT departments often suffer from a
form of technological inertia and are less likely to embrace any change to the status
quo.
To that end, some smaller companies are faster to adapt to changes, including
technological changes, and thus may embrace new technologies before their more
entrenched larger competitors. Certainly, technology can be an equalizing factor,
especially with costs coming down; new technology can help a smaller company look
bigger to prospective customers.
You also need to be aware that many larger companies (and some smaller ones,
too) block some websites and web-based technologies that they deem to be harmful to

s
employee productivity. It’s common, actually, to find companies blocking access to

n
tio
Facebook and Twitter, along with many consumer online shopping sites; I have also
encountered a large number of companies that block access to YouTube and other

l i a
video-sharing sites. If you’re embracing these somewhat cutting-edge digital media,

c
make sure your potential customers can actually access the media at work.

u b
Location also plays a role in which technologies and sites are accessible.
Companies based in some emerging regions might not have the same access to

ul P
broadband Internet as we do here in the U.S. And some totalitarian companies might
block access to websites that are thought dangerous to the current regime; China is a

a h
case in point here, blocking access to Google and other open-search sites. Again, make
sure that the media you want to use are in fact accessible in the regions to which you
market.
R
You also need to take the type of industry to which you’re marketing into account.
Some types of companies are just more old school than others. For example, a traditional
manufacturing company might be more behind the curve than a cutting- edge advertising
agency; don’t necessarily expect a buyer of industrial supplies to be accessing Twitter
on his iPhone. You’ll need to adjust your digital media strategy to the ways your target
industries actually use the technology.

2.13.2 Digital media by Purchasing Characteristics

Q17. Discuss about digital media by purchasing characteristics.
Ans :
Beyond these company-based characteristics, you also need to determine how
individual companies and buyers use technology).’ in the decision-making and

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purchasing processes. This is going to vary from company to company, from department
to department, and from individual to individual.
For example, some companies might be completely comfortable letting employees
order supplies from suppliers’ websites; other companies of the same size and type
might frown on this, and instead dictate old-school purchasing processes involving
printed purchase orders and the like. There’s no point in building out your online ordering
capabilities if your customers aren’t allowed to order online.
There’s more than just ordering to consider, however; you can also use the Internet
to deliver important pre-purchase information. Again, how you deliver this information
depends on the embrace of various digital media by specific companies and individuals.
Take mobile marketing, for example. Although it’s unlikely that buyers are going

s
to be placing orders from their mobile phones (although that might differ in certain

n
tio
types of companies), more and more decision makers are using their phones to peruse
information about the products and services they buy. Maybe buyers are doing their

l i c a
purchasing homework at home, maybe while they’re on the road, but mobile phones
(or, for that matter, iPads and other tablets) are increasingly replacing desktop and

u b
notebook PCs as Internet access devices. For this reason, developing a mobile version

ul P
of your website (and new ways to push content formatted for mobile devices) might be
a critical part of your digital marketing strategy.

a h
Social marketing is another interesting vehicle to consider. Although this is
probably not a great medium for garnering new leads, it can be a terrific way to

R
strengthen relationships and encourage communication with existing customers
assuming those customers are allowed to access Facebook et al from work. You might
find that you can reduce your sales burden by transferring much of that interaction to
social networks, blogs, and web-based message forums.
That said, individuals at different levels of an organization are likely to embrace
digital media in different ways. It’s a bit of a generalization, but the higher up an
individual is in the management hierarchy, the less likely he or she is to use or even be
aware of emerging digital technologies. It’s stereotypical but not uncommon to find
upper management types who don’t (or can’t) access their own email; yes, some
administrative assistants still print out email messages for their bosses to read. If a
higher-up can’t be relied on to hit his own email inbox, you definitely won’t be able to
reach him via Twitter or podcast.

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Conversely, lower-echelon (and younger) staff are more likely to be familiar with
new digital media. That assistant buyer just out of college is going to be more on top of
technology (especially social media and mobile technology) than even you are, which
means she’ll be a willing recipient of all your new media marketing. In fact, if you don’t
embrace new technology in your marketing, you’re likely to lose that individual as a
customer.
It all comes down to knowing who you’re selling to being able to think like the
customer, which is one of my long-time mantras. Just make sure to define your customer
as not only the company but also the individual, and then determine just how they use
which technologies.
The Bottom Line

s
Audience segmentation is important in order to deliver the most targeted message

n
tio
in the most appropriate fashion. There are many ways to segment your customer base;
you can define your segment characteristics ahead of time, or let your customers naturally

organizational and purchasing characteristics.

l i c a
fall into appropriate segments. When defining your segments, you should consider both

u b
After you define your customer segments, you then need to determine which

ul P
digital media are most appropriate to each segment. Different types of companies, and
different types of buyers, all use technology differently. Make sure that your target

a h
customers have access to and actually use a given medium before you add it to your
digital marketing mix.

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2.14 USING DIGITAL MEDIA TO REACH OF NEW CUSTOMERS

Q18. How to using digital media to reach of new customers ?

Ans :
Using Digital Media to Reach New Customers
Digital marketing can enhance or even replace these traditional reach-based
activities, often at a lower cost. When you’re talking web-based marketing, you are
looking at more and different ways to get the attention of potential customers.
Which digital media are best for reaching new B2B customers? See Figure It’s
the outbound media that are key at the stage of the life cycle.

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REACH
- SEM/SEO
- Advertising
- Blogs/PR

Loyalty Acquisition

Retention Conversion

n s
tio
Fig. : Digital marketing activities used to achieve reach

1. Search Engine Marketing

l i c a
When it comes to getting the attention of potential new customers, nothing beats

b
Google. That is, more new customers are going to come to your website from

u
ul P
Google and other search engines than from anyplace else online.
The importance of search engine marketing for B2B companies rivals that of

a h
their B2C cousins. It’s a simple fact: More people, in the business world and out
of it, find what they’re looking for by searching for it.

R
This doesn’t diminish the importance of other digital marketing vehicles;
advertis­ing and PR and all those things still matter and still need to be part of
your market­ing mix. It’s just that search engines drive a considerable amount of
traffic to your website, and that traffic can turn into valid acquisitions and
conversions.
As you’re probably aware, the process of working to improve your search engine
rankings is called search engine marketing, and it revolves around a process
called search engine optimization. That is, you need to optimize your website for
search so that your site shows up high in the rankings when someone searches
for what you’re selling.
Search engine optimization starts with the content of your website. Your site has
to offer content that is of interest to and valuable for potential B2B customers.

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You then have to identify what topics potential customers are likely to be searching
for. This drives your selection of keywords, which are used to describe your site
both to customers and to the search engines.
Finally, you have to use those keywords and design your website in ways that
help Google, Yahoo!, and Bing recognize what it is you’re offering, and match
your site up with appropriate searchers. The better you let Google et al know
what you offer, and the more relevant what you offer is to potential customers,
the higher your site will rank on search results pages.
2. PPC Advertising
You can’t beat search engine marketing for putting your company in front of
pro­spective new customers. But there are other digital media that are also
effective, including (but not limited to) PPC advertising.

n s
tio
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising puts your message, in the form of a small text ad,
in front of people searching for the same keywords used in your search engine

l i c a
marketing. It’s not an organic listing, and thus has a lower response rate than
organic search results, but it still gets your name and message in front of interest­ing
potential purchasers.
u b
3. Display Advertising

ul P
Online display advertising might be more efficient than PPC adver­tising for B2B

a h
campaigns. Instead of targeting ad visibility by keyword, you can instead purchase

R
space on specific websites, based on any number of qualities you specify including
demographics.
This means you can target display advertising to specific industry websites and
blogs. You pick where the ad appears, rather than relying on Google’s AdWords
PPC advertising program to do the picking for you. You end up with more control
over your advertising, and ideally displaying your ad on a smaller but more
appro­priate list of sites.
In many ways, online display advertising is the digital equivalent of traditional
trade advertising that is, ads placed in trade periodicals. You reach much the
same audience, only online instead of in print.
Of course, you then have the challenge of capturing those customers who view
your ads; that’s what the customer acquisition process is all about, as we’ll discuss

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in the next chapter. This acquisition is made easier because of the ability to track
every single click and view online something you can’t do with traditional print
advertising.
4. Blog Marketing
Another effective way to get your name in front of prospective B2B customers is
to get talked about on blogs that cater to those customers. Every industry has
them; I’m talking about industry-specific blogs, run either by commercial entities
or by individuals who know the business. A mention or recommendation from a
respected blogger is the best word-of-mouth promotion any B2B company can
receive, and can result in a large number of highly targeted leads.
Naturally, you want to be able to track the traffic you drive from these blogs,

s
which is easy enough to do, so that you can determine which blogs are more

n
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effective than others. You also want to make it easy for potential customers who
visit your website or call your toll-free number after reading a sympathetic blog

place an order, if they’re ready for that.

l i c a
post to leave their contact information, download additional information, or even

5. Online PR
u b
ul P
This type of marketing through third-party bloggers should be part of your online
public relations program. That is, bloggers are just as important as trade journal

a h
editors and the like when it comes to helping to spread the word about what you

R
offer. They just happen to publish their work online rather than off.
In fact, your entire public relations program changes when you move into the
digi­tal realm. Online PR needs to target any individual, online or off, who can
reach and influence your potential customers. There’s probably less real-world
wining and dining and schmoozing involved with online PR; you’re more likely
to make contact via email or instant message than via press releases and phone
calls.
It’s not just bloggers you need to promote to. You’ll want to target anyone who
writes about your products or industry, figuring that even magazine writers today
are likely to be connected and desire information and materials be sent to them
online. The point here is to use web-based tools to make contact with influencers
in any media.

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6. Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is not a huge component of your reach marketing, but it is a
factor, if only because the people you need to reach are increasingly accessing
the Internet via mobile devices instead of PCs. To that end, you want to make
sure that all your outbound marketing activities are optimized not just for viewing
on computer monitors, but also for viewing on mobile screens. You’ll also want
to optimize your website for mobile search, and perhaps consider ptac- ing mobile
PPC and display ads.

Q19. Which Digital Media are Less Suited for Reach ?

Ans :
Those digital media that are best suited for reach are those focused on delivering

s
an outbound message in a relatively targeted fashion. Other digital media are less well

n
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suited for reaching new customers - and should be held in reserve for the later stages of
the B2B marketing continuum.
1. Email Marketing

l i c a
u b
Email marketing is an important weapon in the B2B digital marketing arsenal,
every bit as important as direct mail is in traditional B2B marketing. But it’s best

cus­tomers.
ul P
used to maintain contact with your existing customer base, not to reach new

2.
h
Here’s why.

a
R
If you use email to reach out to new customers, that email is by nature unsolic­ited.
That is, the businesses to which you send these introductory emails did not
explicitly agree in advance to receive such emails. This means you’re sending
out unsolicited commercial email (UCE), the very definition of spam. And nobody,
especially those in the corporate environment, likes to be spammed.
That’s right, unless you get explicit permission from a person or company to
send them email, anything you email them is considered spam. Now, spam exists
because some percentage of recipients actually do read, click, and purchase
from the spam messages. This percentage, however, is low—and especially so in
the cor­porate environment, where automated spam filters work amazingly well.
The bulk of spam messages, then, are either caught by spam filters or end up as
unwanted junk in recipients’ inboxes, which does not endear senders to those
recipients.

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3. Multimedia Marketing
When you think multimedia marketing, start by thinking about YouTube and
other forms of video marketing. With tens of millions of videos being viewed
every day, you’d think that YouTube would be a great way to reach prospective
new customers.
Unfortunately, you’d be wrong at least in the B2B field.
Although it’s true that many B2C customers successfully use YouTube to attract
new customers, it just doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to B2B. That’s
because YouTube is a community for the general public, not for businesses. It’s a
fun site, not one where you get a lot of work done. Because of that, YouTube just
isn’t a good place to find prospective new business customers; unlike regular
con­sumers, key company employees don’t spend their days surfing YouTube
looking for fun videos to watch. The people you want to reach simply aren’t
there—at least not in a work-related mode.
n s
tio
That doesn’t mean that YouTube shouldn’t be part of your marketing mix, just

l i a
that it isn’t well suited to the reach stage of the customer life cycle. Yes, you can

c
use YouTube to deliver all sorts of important product information in video format,
but it isn’t the place to make that first contact.

u b
Nor, for that matter, are podcasts and webcasts great for reaching new custom­ers.

ul P
Again, podcasts and webcasts are great for delivering information necessary in
other parts of the buying continuum, but just putting some podcasts out on the
Internet and launching some interesting webinars aren’t going to attract a lot of

a h
potential customers.
4.
R
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the hottest thing going today. And although Facebook,
Google+, Twitter, and the like are powerful tools for building strong relationships
with both B2C and B2B customers, they are not great media for making initial
contact.
Social networks afford a distinctive two-way relationship between companies
and their customers. This is true for both B2C and B2B companies, although it’s
taking off a little slower in the B2B world. You send out a communication via
Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and your customers not only read that
communication, they respond to it. It’s that active and near-real-time talkback
that makes social media marketing unique.
However, for someone or some company to both find you on Facebook or Twitter
and commit to following you, they have to know about you, trust you, and have

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a vested interest in you. It is unlikely that someone who is not yet a customer will
follow you on a social network—why should they?
No, most of the friends and fans and followers you get online will be existing
cus­tomers—and not casual ones, either. Your social media followers will likely
be your more loyal and vocal customers, those with a vested interest in your
company, products, and services. That’s great for solidifying that existing customer
relation­ship, but not so great when it comes to attracting new customers.
Bottom line, it’s unlikely that you’ll attract a lot of new customers on Facebook,
Twitter, and the like. It’s not unheard of, but probably not a good focus for this
par­ticular digital marketing activity. Focus your social media marketing on your
existing customer base, and turn to other digital media for reaching new customers.
5. Website Marketing
Reach is all about outbound marketing.
n s
c a tio
Your website, however, isn’t outbound at all; it just sits there waiting for people to
visit it. You have to do a lot of outbound marketing to attract visitors to your site.

l i
As such, your website is probably not a key component of your reach market­ing.

b
P u
It’s important for other stages of the buying continuum-acquisition and conversion,
especially-but it doesn’t reach out and touch anyone by itself.
6. The Bottom Line

a h ul
When it comes to reaching new customers, digital media can significantly
supple­ment traditional marketing activities and, perhaps, reach customers not

R
acces­sible via traditional media. In particular, search engine marketing, PPC
and display advertising, blog marketing, and online PR are good for reaching
potential new customers, all at relatively low cost.

2.15 USING DIGITAL MEDIA FOR CUSTOMER ACQUISITION PROCESS

Q20. How to using Digital Media for Customer Acquisition Process ?
Ans :
Customer acquisition typically involves capturing a prospect’s name and contact
information, and getting their okay to actually contact them about your products and
services. That enters you into their purchasing decision-making process; it gets you
into the game, which hopefully leads to a sale at some point in the future.

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In the B2B buying continuum, customer acquisition follows from reach and leads
into conversion. It includes the following activities:
 Generating customer inquiries
 Following up on customer inquiries
 Providing the customer with information to inform the decision­making
process
 Leading the customer into the purchase itself
In other words, the acquisition process moves beyond initially getting the
customer’s attention to entice them into further inquiries, and providing all necessary
information they need to make a purchasing decision and move to the next stage of the
customer life cycle, conversion.
Using Digital Media to Acquire New Customers
n s
c a tio
Here’s the good news: Digital marketing can enhance or even replace these
tradi­tional customer acquisition activities, often at a lower cost. When you’re talking

l i
web-based marketing, you’re looking at more and different ways to inform poten­tial

b
customers and generate leads.

P u
ul
The reach process revolved around outbound digital media - search engine
mar­keting, pay-per-click (PPC) and display advertising, blog marketing and PR.

h
Customer acquisition builds on these media in ways that provide a more in-depth

a
1. R
customer experience - primarily via use of your company website.
Website Marketing
Whichever digital media you use to get the attention of prospective customers,
the actual acquisition process can still involve human beings -your sales force,
meeting with potential clients either online or via the phone. With digital media,
however, you can actually acquire new customers online as well by directing all
interested parties to your company’s website.
Your website is the hub of all your online marketing activities. Everything you do
leads customers to your website: people searching for what you offer click to
your site from Google and other search engines; PPC and display ads, when
clicked, lead customers to your site; even mentions in industry blogs, when clicked,
drop readers on your site.

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To that end, you have to design your site with three distinct goals in mind:
 Provide the necessary information, in whatever format, for prospective
customers to make a purchasing decision - or at least to inform their
company’s decision-making process.
 Provide the mechanism to collect prospect’s contact information. After you
have that contact info, you have a lead that your sales force can follow up
on.
 Provide the mechanism to register a new account and accept customer
orders. (Assuming you’ll be selling online, that is; you might want to keep
conversion a more traditional process.) This could involve col­lecting enough
information to do a credit check, set up delayed billing or invoicing, and the

2.
like.
Blog Marketing
n s
c a tio
Perhaps the most important component of acquisition marketing is providing
enough information for prospects to want to become customers. Any way you

l
can provide that information should be pursued.

b i
P u
To that end, creating a company blog is a great way to impart all sorts of use­ful
information to prospective and current customers. You can blog about new

ul
products and services; you can blog about industry trends; you can blog about

a h
the people behind the scenes at your company. It’s all good, and it all provides
useful background for any company thinking of doing business with you.
3.
R
Multimedia Marketing
The multimedia marketing - in particular video and audio marketing - isn’t that
well suited for attracting the attention of potential customers; search engine
marketing, advertising, and PR are much better at getting the word out. But
audios and videos are great for providing informa­tion useful to the decision-
making process of potential customers researching and evaluating future
purchases.
What’s important here is the fact that different types of people - including and
especially different types of business buyers-like to receive information in different
ways. Some people like to pour over all the fine details in a product brochure or
white sheet, whereas others prefer to find out what they need to know in visual
fashion.

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4. Email Marketing
Although you shouldn’t blindly send out unsolicited emails to prospects (that’s
spam), you can send out emails in response to customer inquiries. Does a potential
customer need more information to make a purchase decision? Naturally, you
can send that information (or links to it posted elsewhere) via email.
It’s a safe assumption that the businesspeople you communicate with will all
have corporate email accounts. (That might no longer be true for the general
popula­tion; consumers, especially younger ones, are instead trending away from
email and using social media for communication.) If you can score an email
address—or just have someone sign up on your website or at a trade show to
receive more information—then you’re in the clear.
Know, of course, that there’s a limit to what and how much you can include in or

s
attach to an email message. Some spam filters and corporate filters will block

n
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mes­sages with large attachments, or with any attachments at all—even if the
customer has opted into the mailing. Unless you’re well acquainted with a given

l i c a
individual and what works and doesn’t for him, it’s probably safer to include
links to where given materials can be found on your website or elsewhere.
5. Mobile Marketing
u b
ul P
What role does mobile marketing play in the customer acquisition process? When
you note that business users of all stripes—including purchasing staff and senior

a h
management—are increasingly accessing the Internet via smart phones, tablets,
and other mobile devices, you realize that mobile marketing affects every other

R
acquisition-based digital marketing activity.
That is, everything you do online to acquire new customers has to be accessible
both on traditional desktop and notebook PCs and on the smaller screens of
smart phones and other mobile devices. That starts with creating a mobile-friendly
ver­sion of your website, and leads to optimizing your site for mobile search,
placing mobile PPC and display ads, optimizing your videos for mobile viewing,
and the like.
Equally important, all your online collateral materials—brochures, white papers,
presentations, and the like—have to be formatted to be properly viewed on mobile
devices. Even if prospective customers use traditional PCs to access the Internet
while in the office, they might be using their iPhones and BlackBerrys to do their
pre-purchase research while they’re out of the office. You have to be prepared
for that, and embrace mobile marketing accordingly.

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Q21. Which Digital Media Are Less Suited for Acquisition ?

Ans :
In the world of digital marketing, the customer acquisition process revolves around
your company’s website and the information you make available there. That makes
other digital media less important to and effective in customer acquisition.

1. Search Engine Marketing

Potential customers use search engines to find you; that’s part of the reach process.
After they’ve found you, they don’t need to search for you anymore. Which means
that search engine marketing, as crucial as it is for initial reach, becomes
increas­ingly irrelevant the further one progresses through the B2B customer life
cycle.

n s
tio
2. PPC and Display Advertising

l i a
It’s the same thing with online advertising. You use online ads to reach potential

c
customers, not to provide in-depth information. It’s simply not an important part
of acquisition marketing.

u b
3. Online PR

ul P
Public relations is great for getting in front of potential customers. It’s not so great

h
for delivering in-depth information. That’s just the way it is.

a
4.
R
Social Media Marketing
Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are great ways to connect with existing customers
- but not with not-yet-acquired customers. Acquire the customer first, and then
maintain the relationship via social networking.
5. The Bottom Line
When it comes to acquiring new customers, digital media can significantly
supplement traditional marketing activities. In this part of the B2B buying
continuum, it’s your website that’s most important, supplemented by your
company blog, multi- media activities, and email. Equally important, you should
make all your collateral material available online - and formatted for mobile devices
as well as traditional computers.

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2.16 USING DIGITAL MEDIA RETENTION OF NEW CUSTOMERS

Q22. How to Using Digital Media Retention of New customers ?

Ans :
Customer retention is what happens or what you hope happens after you con­vert
a prospect to a paying customer. A retained customer is one that places a second order
from you and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. It’s a customer that’s a loyal customer,
one who doesn’t drop off the radar screen, one that keeps giving and giving.
For B2B customers, customer retention is critical. Given the length and expense
of the conversion process, losing a customer means wasting a considerable amount of
time and resources; you don’t want to spend all that time acquiring a customer and

s
then lose him to a competitor. Indeed, business customers tend to be fewer and more

n
tio
valuable, which means you can’t afford to lose even one of them.

i a
What happens if you don’t retain a customer? Worst case, he’s gone forever;

c
you’ve wasted the initial acquisition resources and will receive no further revenues.

l
u b
You could attempt to re-acquire a lost customer, but that means beginning the acquisi­tion
process all over again, pretty much, and incurring additional expense to do so.

ul P
In short, it’s cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new
one. The impact on your bottom line can be substantial; marketing consultant Frederick

a h
Reichheld famously estimated that a 5% reduction in defections can increase per-

R
customer profit by anywhere from 35% to 95%.’ ‘That’s right, you can almost double
your profit per customer by making sure that customer stays in the fold.
Choosing the Right Digital Media for Customer Retention
There are really quite a few, as you can.
1. Website Marketing
Customer retention, like conversion, is centered on your website-and particularly
focused on the ordering function. That is, you need to make it easy for existing customers
to place new orders. You should have their ordering and payment infor­mation already
on hand, so logging in and ordering more stuff needs to be a piece of cake.
In addition, you need to design a customer-only part of your site that houses all
the support material you have. Make it easy for customers to read or download instruction
manuals and other material that help them use your products and services.

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For that matter, consider hosting (or co-hosting) instructional videos on your
site. Some customers learn better by watching than by reading, so if you have
some­thing that’s particularly difficult to do, create a series of how-to videos to
show them how to do it.
Finally, make your website the go-to point for all customer support activities. In
addition to the downloadable support materials, create a FAQ page, post answers
to the most commonly asked questions, offer a web form to post new questions,
and include email links to your support staff. If you’re into it, consider offering
live chat-based support. And don’t forget the customer message forum, where all
your customers can support each other online.
2. Blog Marketing
A company blog is a great form of indirect marketing. That is, don’t expect direct

s
results in the form of immediate reorders. Instead, position your blog as a means

n
tio
to solidify existing relationships, to create a family feeling between your company
and your customer base. Write about issues of interest to your customers,

l i c a
encour­age comments on your posts, and even consider letting selected customers
post to your blog. It might seem like a warm fuzzy, but it’s a good warm fuzzy that

b
will help to keep customers interested, informed, and in the fold.

u
3. Email Marketing

ul P
You can’t beat email for putting your message in front of your customer base.

a h
You can create all manner of email messages that you send out either en masse
or in targeted fashion to selected customers. You can send out sales notices,

R
periodic company or product newsletters, new product announcements, you name
it - and the good thing is, your cost per mailing is next to nothing.
Remember, though, that you need to get your customer’s permission before you
send out any of these emails. Email marketing, even to existing customers, is
permission market­ing. If it’s not, it’s spam - and that can annoy existing customers
every bit as much as it does anonymous prospects. Make sure your customers
explicitly sign up to receive your mailings (or voice their approval to a sales rep),
then once they do, exploit the medium as much as you can.
4. Multimedia Marketing
Multimedia marketing is made for customer retention. Here’s what I mean:
 Videos are great for showing customers how to install, configure, and use
what you sell. You can also create informative “talking head” videos that

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talk about company and industry issues; you can even do video tours of
your facilities or key customer installations. You can post your videos on
YouTube, and then cross-post to your own web­site. (This lets YouTube
absorb the hosting and traffic costs.) Video is a great way to put a personal
face on an otherwise impersonal company or product.
 Audio podcasts are another way to keep your customer base informed of
company and industry goings on. Record new podcasts on a regular schedule
and then encourage your customers to listen in.
 Interactive webinars are a terrific way to get face-to-face interaction without
anyone having to travel. Create a series of small webinars for your key
accounts, or do big everybody’s invited sales presentations online. Either
way, it’s a hip way to be personal in a new age of cur­tailed corporate
travel.
n s
5. Social Media Marketing

c a tio
When you want to establish a two-way comm-unication online, social networking

l i
is the way to go. Create a Facebook page, build a Google+ profile, establish a

b
Twitter feed—do whatever it takes to start the online conversation with your

P u
most inter­ested customers.

ul
Social media is unique in its ability to forge direct relationships between your

h
company and your customers. It’s not just about making a new post every day or

a
two; it requires constant attention to respond to all the comments and responses

R
that your customers will make. In this regard, social media marketing demands a
large time investment (not so much of a monetary investment) on your part. But
it’s worth it; there’s no other medium, online or off, that builds this type of strong
connection to your most loyal customers.
6. Mobile Marketing
Finally, don’t forget mobile. Whether it’s placing a reorder, looking for customer
support, watching a how-to video, or checking your Twitter feed, it’s more and
more likely that your customers will be doing it via their mobile phones or iPads
instead of their computers. That’s just the way it is, and you need to be aware of
and prepare for it. Everything you do has to be made mobile-friendly—and you
need to consider new activities specifically designed for your more mobile
customers.

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Q23. Which Digital Media are Less Likely for Customer Retention ?
Ans :
That’s a lot of different ways to reach your customer base online. Are there any
digital media that are less effective in retention marketing?
You bet there are. In particular, these media aren’t that suited for customer
retention:
1. Search engine marketing
Search results are meaningless after a cus­tomer has already found you. Leave
search engine marketing for the reach and acquisition phases of the B2B buying
continuum.
2. Online advertising

n s
tio
Same thing here. You don’t need to advertise to them once you’ve got them-
unless you’re a big believer in image advertising to alleviate buyer’s remorse.
3. Online public relations

l i c a
b
There might be some value of using PR for retention, although it’s minimal.

u
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Obviously, you’ll task your PR department with pub­licizing new products and
services you intro­duce, and some of these efforts might reach your existing
customer base.

a h
But it’s really an add­on effect rather than a campaign directed specifically at

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existing customers. It’s more accurate to say that there are few if any PR activities that
are exclusive to the retention process.
And there you have it. Aside from these few outbound marketing activities, digital
marketing can have a big impact on customer retention.
The Bottom Line
After you’ve converted a prospect into a customer, you then need to retain that
customer as part of your existing and (hopefully) active customer base. Although
customer retention is traditionally a hands-on activity designed to build a strong personal
relationship, you can enhance the retention process by using a variety of digital media,
including your website, your blog, email, audio and video, interac­tive webinars, and
social networks. You should also make sure that all your online retention activities are
optimized for mobile users.

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2.17 DIGITAL MEDIA FOR CUSTOMER LOYALTY

Q24.Discuss about digital media for customer layalty.
Ans :
Understanding Customer Loyalty
In the B2B buying continuum, loyalty is all about referrals. That is, the loyalty
phase goes beyond simple customer retention into building such a loyal customer that
he or she readily recommends you to other potential customers. This starts the life cycle
over from scratch for this new prospect, as a new potential customer is reached and
hopefully acquired.

n s
c a tio
b l i
P u
a h ul
Fig. : Customer loyalty is the final phase of the B2B customer life cycle

R
Loyalty is built upon a strong long-term relationship between you and the client.
It’s like planting a seed: When the seed grows into a new plant, your relationship with
the first customer has spawned a new relationship with a different potential customer.
The goal, then, is not just to convert a prospect into a customer, or even to retain
that customer over the long term; it’s to use that customer as a goodwill ambassador to
create additional business for your company. One good customer begets another; it’s
the ultimate expression of word of mouth advertising.
Using Digital Media to Encourage Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty takes a giant step forward when wedded to the Internet. That’s
because certain digital media-social media, specifically-are particularly suited for building
strong, interactive relationships between companies and their clients.

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Fig. : Use social media and email to enhance customer loyalty

1. Social Media Marketing

Social networking is arguably the best way to ensure customer loyalty and

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encour­age referrals and recommendations. Not only do social networks help

tio
you forge a tight bond with your best customers, they’re also great places for
these same cus­tomers to spread the word about your company and products.

i c a
Think about it. Social networks, such as Facebook and Google+, are all about

l
u b
friends and “liking” things. The opportunity certainly exists for your customers to
become your friends (or fans), and for them to express their like of what you do

ul P
to their other online friends. It’s all about building a big online community and
then exploiting the relationships within that community for your own needs.

h
Key here is establishing a Facebook page, Google+ profile, and Twitter feed for

a
R
your company or key products. You should promote these presences wherever
possible; this includes putting Facebook “like,” Google +1, and Twitter tweet
buttons on your website, blog, and other pages online.
You then encourage your customers to sign up for or “like” your social networking
presences, and start posting and tweeting. Remember, though, that social
network­ing is a two-way street, so be prepared for (and actively encourage)
comments from your customers on these pages and feeds. That’s where the
community and the relationship building start.
From here, you want to encourage these loyal customers to share their like of you
with their other social networking friends. (You can do this covertly or overtly;
bribery via bounty works just as well online as it does in the real world.) The
more people that your online friends bring into the fold, the more potential
customers you have.

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2. Email Marketing
You can also use email, to some extent, to encourage referrals and
recommenda­tions. This plays along with the traditional approach of rewarding
existing customers for recommending new ones. In the digital media world, you
simply communicate the rewards via targeted emails.
That’s right, you create your reward offer and put it into an email message that
you send to some or all of your existing customer base. Maybe this is part of a regular
com­munication, maybe it’s a one-off email; in any case, you let your customers know
that a reward of some sort is to be had when they bring a new customer into the fold.
You can’t overuse this particular vehicle, but it is a good way to get the word out.

Q25. What Digital Media Are Less Likely for Loyalty Referrals?
Ans :
n s
a tio
As good as social networks are for the loyalty process, other digital media come
up lacking; they just don’t have the community-building features you find in Facebook

c
l i
and Google+. Let’s face it, a passive website doesn’t do much to build relationships or

b
encourage referrals (short of promoting any referral program you might devise). Nor do

u
outbound marketing vehicles designed primarily for cus­tomer acquisition, such as

P
ul
search engine marketing and online advertising, have any effect at all on building
relationships with existing customers. It’s just the way it is; when you’re focusing on

social media.
a h
generating recommendations and referrals, every­thing else pales when compared to

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The Bottom Line
The final stage of the B2B buying continuum is the loyalty phase, where your
existing customer base advocates for and recommends you to other potential cus­tomers.
Social networking is ideal for encouraging these recommendations and referrals; email
is also useful, especially in communicating bounty or rewards-type offers.

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Short Question and Answers

1. Digital Marketing Channels

Ans :
Some of the digital marketing channels are listed below. A more detailed
explanation of these channels will be provided later in the article.
Some of the most popular digital marketing channels include the following –
 Social Media Marketing
Search Engine Optimization

s



Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Email Marketing
tio n
 Content Marketing

l i c a
 Affiliate Marketing
Display Advertising
u b
P


ul
 Online PR

2.
h
Website Marketing

a
Ans :
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Internet marketing, or online marketing, refers to advertising and marketing
efforts that use the Web and email to drive direct sales via electronic commerce, in
addition to sales leads from websites or emails.
Also known as Internet marketing, website marketing is using the Internet to
advertise, communicate and sell goods and services. On an advanced level, website
marketing is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the use of targeted
keywords, crawler-friendly site architecture, Search Engine Submissions and a well-
developed link network to improve a site’s Position, page rank and Click-Through
Rate.
Web marketing refers to a broad category of advertising that takes many different
forms, but generally involves any marketing activity conducted online.

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3. Online Advertising
Ans :
Online advertising is a marketing strategy that involves the use of the Internet as
a medium to obtain website traffic and target and deliver marketing messages to the
right customers. Online advertising is geared toward defining markets through unique
and useful applications.
Since the early 1990s there has been an exponential increase in the growth of
online advertising, which has evolved into a standard for small and large organizations.
Online advertising is also known as Internet advertising or Digital Advertising.
Online advertisements are purchased through one of the following common
vehicles :

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 Cost per Thousand (CPM): Advertisers pay when their messages are
exposed to specific audiences.


i c a
Cost per Click (CPC): Advertisers pay every time a user clicks on their

l
ads.

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Cost per Action (CPA): Advertisers only pay when a specific action

P


ul
(generally a purchase) is performed.
4.
Ans : h
Email Marketing

a
R
E-Mail marketing is promoting your business by sending overt E-Mails and
newsletters. It uses promotional letter clubbed with product and service details to deliver
the business message to audience. It is cost effective method to convey your message
to highly targeted visitors. Results of E-Mail marketing are quantifiable and measurable.
Types of E-Mails
There are following types of Emails used for E-Mail marketing.
(i) Transaction E-Mails
You get these mails after you are done with any transaction such as buying a
product. They confirm the business transaction with information such as cost
per unit, number of units bought, total cost, mode of payment, shipping details,
delivery time, etc.

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(ii) Newsletters
They include information to keep customers involved. They foster relationship
with customer.
(iii) Promotion E-Mails
They carry details of any promotional activity such as sale, new offers, etc.
E-Mail marketing being cost-efficient and measurable, needs strategic planning
and creative execution of campaign. You need to personalize message, deploy it,
and analyze the results.
5. Blog Marketing
Ans :
The term blog comes from the combination of “web” and “log” or “weblog,”

s
and was eventually shortened to “blog.” In the 1990’s when blogs first appeared, they

n
tio
were primarily online diaries, where people would provide personal accounts of their
lives. At that time, blogs were traditionally built websites that were updated and uploaded

l i c a
manually, limiting the number of bloggers to only those who knew how to build and
upload web pages. It wasn’t until the late 1990s when LiveJournal and then Blogger

b
developed platforms that didn’t require tech knowledge, that blogging expanded.

u
6.
Ans :
Social Media Marketing

ul P
a h
Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through
social media sites. Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide

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radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let
people share short messages or “updates” with others.
Social Media Marketing At Marketing Land
Marketing Land is the sister site to Search Engine Land that covers all facets of
internet marketing, including these popular topics within social media marketing :
 Facebook
 Instagram
 Twitter
 Pinterest
 Linkedin
 YouTube

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7. Mobile Marketing
Ans :
Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy aimed at reaching
a target audience on their smart phones, tablets, and/or other mobile devices, via
websites, email, SMS and MMS, social media, and apps. Mobile is disrupting the
way people engage with brands.
Design and effect a powerful mobile marketing strategy by considering the
following :
 Mobile-friendly site(s)
 Mobile-friendly content
Deals, treats, and coupons

s



Mobile payment options
Mobile-only social
tio n
 Maximise on your specific strategies

l i c a


u b
Text/Short Message Service (SMS) marketing
8.
Ans : P
Importance of Audience Segmentation

ul
h
Successful market segmentation, then, results in the following quantifiable benefits:

a



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Higher response rates by providing relevant messages to each targeted
segment.
Higher conversion rates by targeting the right products to the right customers.
 Lower immediate marketing expenditures by using only those media that
best reach targeted segments; you don’t waste money by going outside the
“sweet spot” for each segment.
 Lower long-term costs by not having to follow up on lower-potential leads.
 Lower risk of negative feedback, on social networks and elsewhere, by not
sending unwanted messages to those uninterested in what you offer.

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Digital Marketing Plan: Need of a Digital Marketing Plan,

Elements of a Digital Marketing Plan - Marketing Plan,
UNIT Executive Summary, Mission, Situational Analysis,
Opportunities and Issues, Goals and Objectives, Marketing
III Strategy, Action Plan, Budget, Writing the Marketing Plan
and Implementing the Plan.

3.1 DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN

Q1. Write about Digital Marketing Plan.

Ans :
n s
a tio
A digital marketing plan is a strategic document that takes the current situation
of a particular organisation to set some midterm goals and to determine the strategy

c
l i
and means to accomplish them. This document also describes the responsibilities, the
time frame and control tools for monitoring.
b
P u
The aims of a digital marketing plan include discussing organisations and their

ul
environment. Likewise, it needs to be a roadmap of how to manage the organisation’s
marketing strategy, so that resources are properly allocated. The plan also helps control

a h
and evaluate output and tackle any potential deviation from the organisation’s expected

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outcomes. In this line, a marketing plan becomes a flexible document that must be
adapted to the situation of the company and that must feed into the results obtained by
each of the actions developed, especially in the digital arena.
The development of an online marketing plan is similar to a conventional one in
its structure, but it also includes some variations at an operational level. In fact, this
means not only that some specific strategies and tools are to be developed, but also
that the volubility of the digital media and its capacity for immediate measurement
force organisations to develop a strategy that can be revised in the short term, as well
as the iterative process between action and control.
An online marketing plan is a document in line with the company’s strategic plan
that sets goals of an activity in the digital environment, as well as the what, how, when,
who and why (6 Ws) of Web presence.

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3.2 NEED OF A DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN

Q2. Why you need a digital marketing plan?
Ans :
Why You Need a Digital Marketing Plan

A digital marketing plan is much like a traditional marketing plan, just tweaked
for digital media; the focus is on those online activities that contribute to your overall
business goals.

A) Roadmap to Success

n s
An effective digital marketing plan is a roadmap to success. It forces marketing
personnel (and your company’s senior management) to embrace a set of common

a tio
goals, strategies, and tactics; it keeps staff from going rogue, or from undertaking
irrelevant or unwanted activities. It also encourages staff to think in terms of both

c
l i
internal and external goals, and to utilize the appropriate marketing vehicles to
accomplish those goals.
b
B)
P u
Internal Support to Online Marketing

a h ul
A digital marketing plan is also necessary to achieve internal support for your
online marketing activities. You know as well as anyone how difficult it can be to

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get some management comfortable with shifting from traditional media to digital
media; some of the old guard is naturally adverse to change. To that end, a
digital marketing plan is something you can put in front of senior management to
let them know what you hope to accomplish, and to negotiate for the resources
to accomplish those goals.

C) Measurement of Activities

Finally, a digital marketing plan is a tool you can use to measure your
accomplishments. A good marketing plan includes quantifiable goals, whether
financial (revenues or profits) or market-oriented (market share, website traffic,
and so on). How close you come to meeting or exceeding those goals determines
how success­ful your marketing activities have been.

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3.3 UNDERSTANDING THE ELEMENTS OF A DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN

Q3. Discuss about element of digital marketing plan.

Ans :
A digital marketing plan contains the same elements as a traditional marketing
plan. These elements include the following:
1. Executive Summary
2. Mission
3. Situational Analysis
4. Opportunities and Issues
4. Goals and Objectives
n s
5. Marketing Strategy

c a tio
6. Action Plan

b l i
7. Budget

P u
The plan itself should cover a defined time frame, typically one year. That is, you

h ul
plan all your activities one year in advance—and your goal is what you hope to accomplish
in the coming twelve months.

a
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3.3.1 Executive Summary

Q4. Write about executive summary.

Ans :
The Executive Summary is a one-page overview of the major points in your plan
- from your mission all the way through your action plan and budget. Even though the
Executive Summary is the first section of your plan, it’s the part you write last, after
you’ve come up with all the details in the other sections.

If the Executive Summary sounds redundant, it probably is but in a good way. If

your audience reads nothing but this one page (which is all some will read), they’ll
absorb the salient points of what you intend to accomplish with your marketing activities.

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3.3.2 Mission
Q5. Write about mission.
Ans :
The meat of your digital marketing plan begins with the Mission section. This
section provides the general rationale for your marketing activities; it explains why you
want to do what you want to do.
You can express your mission in the form of a short mission statement, or with a
longer explanation of why you’re producing this plan. This section can be as short as a
single sentence, but no longer than a paragraph.
The ideal Mission section should meet these criteria:


It must define a clear direction for your marketing activities.

n
It must define specific parameters for your marketing activities.s
 It must be achievable.

c a tio

don’t.
b l i
It must be measurable, in general terms - you either achieve your mission or you

P u
Naturally, the mission portion of a digital marketing plan should specifically address

ul
the Internet as a marketing medium.

a h
3.3.3 Situational Analysis
Q6. Write about situational analysis.
Ans : R
The Situational Analysis section of your plan presents a snapshot of where things
stand as the plan is conceived. It sets a baseline against which future action is both
dictated and measured.
What sorts of things are we talking about? You should include subsections covering
the following situations, tweaked to feature web-related issues:
1. Environment
The big-picture trends (economic, demographic, social, and technological) that
affect your company and its marketing activities. In a digital marketing plan, the
chief environmental issue is almost always technological - more and more
businesses are the web to research and make buying decisions.

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2. Market
The current size and growth trends for the B2B market in which you compete -
including key segments of that market.
3. Competition
A description of your major competitors, including their size, market share, key
product lines, and (particularly) online activities.
4. Customer base
A description of your current or target customer base, including an analysis of
customer wants and needs and how they utilize new technology.
5. Products

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A description of your company’s current products and services, including unit
and dollar sales, pricing, and contribution margin, either by individual product
or by major product line.

c a tio
This section should be a mix of hard data and qualitative analysis and comment.

l i
You put together the Situational Analysis using internal data (for the internal items)

b
P u
and external market research (for the external items).
3.3.4 Opportunities and Issues in Digital Marketing Plan

Ans :
a h ul
Q7. Write about opportunities and issues in digital marketing plan.

threats:
1.
R
This section of your marketing plan analyzes the following opportunities and

External Opportunities
These are market opportunities that your company is poised to take advantage
of. Naturally, you should focus on online opportunities.
2. External Issues
These are market factors that present a threat to your company. Special attention
should be given to Internet-related issues.
3. Internal Strengths
These are things that you do well, when compared to the competition, that can
help you achieve the external opportunities you identify.

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4. Internal Issues
These are inside-the-company issues that challenge the success of your marketing
opportunities. (If you’re not yet fully exploiting the Internet, that’s an issue; you
should examine why this is the case.)
After stating these individual opportunities and issues, you should then identify
the key issues that need to be addressed by your company. These key issues will help
you determine the strategies and tactics you pursue.

3.3.5 Goals and Objectives in Digital Marketing Plan

Q8. Write about goals and objectives in digital marketing plan.
Ans :
Goal Setting

n s
tio
Setting goals is one of the key phases in any marketing plan. Goal setting offers
an idea of where the organisation is going and it enables adjustments to the marketing
strategy.

l i c a

Goal setting must follow SMART criteria

u
Specific: simple and easy to understand. b


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Measurable: they can be measured through any kind of quantitative or qualitative
unit.

a h
Assignable: they can be assigned and implemented by a member of the company.

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Realistic: with accessible resources, goals can be achieved in a realistic
framework.
 Time-related: they must have a time frame to achieve them.
In the specific field of online marketing, such goals must also be flexible to adapt
to the changes in the company and Web evolution and reached through a consensus.
Many of the actions of digital marketing are horizontal—for example actions on social
media—and involve different departments in the company; therefore, consensus is
key.
In an online marketing plan, the most usual types of goals are as follows:
 Scope goals.
 Activity goals.

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 Conversion goals.

 Loyalty goals.

Once these goals are set, they must be implemented through key performance
indicators. These indicators enable measurement and monitoring.

Understanding Digital Marketing-Basics and Actions

 Assignable they can be assigned and implemented by a member of the

company.

 Realistic with accessible resources, goals can be achieved in a realistic

framework.

 Time-related they must have a time frame to achieve them.

n s
tio
In the specific field of online marketing, such goals must also be flexible to adapt

i a
to the changes in the company and Web evolution and reached through a consensus.

c
Many of the actions of digital marketing are horizontal-for example actions on social

l
b
media-and involve different departments in the company; therefore, consensus is key.

u
 Scope goals.
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In an online marketing plan, the most usual types of goals are as follows:


a h
Activity goals.


RConversion goals.

Loyalty goals.

Once these goals are set, they must be implemented through key performance
indicators. These indicators enable measurement and monitoring.

This section builds from the key issues identified in the previous section. Here is
where you set quantifiable goals you wish to achieve with your marketing activities.

These goals can be internal (a certain level of sales; a specific number of website
visitors or referrals) or external (a particular market share; a defined search ranking on
Google). What’s important is that they be numeric and pegged to a specific time frame
so that you can objectively state whether or not they’ve been achieve.

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For example, if you state as a goal that you want to have “the best website in our
industry,” well, that’s not very quantifiable, is it? What exactly do you mean by “best
website?” There’s no way to measure success.

On the other hand, if you set as a goal that you want to reach $100,000 in
monthly website sales by July 1st, it will be easy to see whether you’ve achieved that
goal. When July 1st rolls around, either you’ve hit that $100,000 mark or you haven’t.

In other words, your goals and objectives are those things you aspire to, and can
thus measure your success against. This is the section of the plan you’ll return to in six
or twelve months to see whether you’ve accomplished what you set out to do.

This section can contain a single goal or multiple goals. When talking about a

n s
web­site, for example, you might set goals for number of visitors, number of page views,

sales, profit margin, and the like. You get the picture.

c a tio
average time on site, and search ranking. Product goals can include unit sales, dollar

b l i
Just remember to set a time frame to measure your progress-typically six or twelve

u
months into the future. And make sure your goals are achievable; there’s no point in

P
ul
planning for the impossible.

a h
3.3.6 Marketing Strategy
Q9. Write about marketing strategy.
Ans : R
As the title implies, this section of the plan sets forth your company’s overall
digital marketing strategy. It refers to the preceding section, and describes how your
company will pursue the identified opportunity. This section should include direction
for each type of digital media, and how that ties into your overall marketing objectives.

The particularly like tying in each type of digital media to the five stages of the
B2B buying continuum (Reach, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention, and Loyalty). You
might want to devote subsections to each part of the customer life cycle; you can then
discuss the digital media strategy for each of the life cycle stages, and how they’ll help
you achieve the goals for each stage.

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n s
c a tio
Fig.: Define your digital marketing strategy for each stage of the

i
B2B buying continuum.

3.3.7 Action Plan

u b l
Q10.Write about action plan.
Ans :
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Action Plan

a h
R
The Action Plan section describes specific tactics you’ll use to implement the
marketing strategy set forth in the previous section. This is where you get down to the
nitty gritty of which digital marketing activities you’ll be undertaking, and how much
you’ll be spending on each one.
Think of the Action Plan as your marching orders, a set of step-by-step instructions
you can hand to your staff to implement. It’s the most detailed section of your entire
marketing plan.
When writing the Action Plan for your digital marketing activities, you should
devote separate subsections to individual activities website design, search engine
marketing, social media marketing, and the like. You can then link each activity to the
stages of the customer life cycle, as described in the Marketing Strategy section of your
plan.

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For each overall digital marketing vehicle, you should describe the exact activities
you expect to undertake, along with a timeline (typically by month or quarter) for these
activities. Describe each event, present its timing, estimate its costs, and then detail the
event’s goals and objectives (page views, visitors, dollar or unit sales, market share
gains, and so forth).
You can then roll up all your marketing activities into a master time­table and
master budget the latter of which demands its own section of the plan.

3.3.8 Budget
Q11.Write about budget.
Ans :

n s
The final section of your digital marketing plan is the one that your financial
people will pore over the most, so you have to make sure that everything adds up. This

a tio
section is your master marketing budget, detailing how much money you expect to
spend over the plan period typically one year. This Budget section should include all

c
l i
the normal financial reports that accounting types like to see, so make sure you work
with your finance department accordingly.
b
P u
3.4 WRITING THE MARKETING PLAN AND IMPLEMENTING THE PLAN

h ul
Q12.Explain about writing the marketing plan and implementing the plan.
Ans :
a
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Writing the Marketing Plan
First, An effective marketing plan doesn’t have to be a massive document. I know
that there’s a lot of information that needs to be presented, but (depending on the
needs of your particular company), you can present a lot of it in bullet points. It’s
important that your audience (senior management, typically) get the gist of what you’re
proposing; presenting them with a novel-length document probably isn’t the best way
to go about it.
That said, you do need to include all the pertinent information, in as much detail
as is necessary. That means doing your homework ahead of time, and a lot of it; then
you can decide how best to present each piece of data. Some information should be
presented in text format; other information can be presented visually, typically in a
table or graph. Use the format that works best for you.

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It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all these details and lose sight of what you’re
trying to achieve. To that end, I like to think of a marketing plan as a discussion; writing
the plan, then, simply entails documenting that discussion.
Here’s how I like to approach it. Imagine that you’re sitting in a coffeehouse or
bar, talking with a colleague about your marketing activities. You talk your friend through
what you’re doing and what you’d like to do, and that becomes your marketing plan. In
the course of your conversation, you cover the following points:
 Why you’re doing what you’re doing, in just a sentence or two. (This is the
Mission section of your plan.)
 What’s happening in the market, and with your company. (This is your Situational
Analysis.)
 What opportunities you think there are in the current market. (This is the
Opportunities and Issues section.)
n s

are your Goals and Objectives.)

c a tio
What you think you can accomplish with your digital marketing activities. (These


l i
How you plan to accomplish these goals. (This is the Marketing Strategy section.)

b


P u
What specific activities you want to undertake. (This is your Action Plan.)
How much money you’ll need to spend to accomplish your goals. (This is the
Budget section.)

h ul
Creating your plan, then, is simply writing down what you’d say and then filling

a
in a few blanks and making it all look pretty. It doesn’t have to be any more difficult
than that.
R
Mckinsey 7S Framework for Digital Strategy
These are the Seven ‘S’es

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1. Strategy defines the way the company will be successful. It defines what markets
and customers it will serve and how it will compete. This is the most important
‘S’ in my opinion, because marketing strategy and digital strategy should be
aligned with and support corporate strategy. Every one of the other 6 elements
should be aligned with and support the strategy.
2. Structure defines the organizational structure: divisions and departments,
accountability and responsibility, goals and metrics. Its the least ambiguous of
the seven elements because you can verify with an org chart.
3. Systems define how the team operates: processes, decision making, approval,
bureaucracy, etc. Systems are the way the business works. The rules, explicit
and implicit that must be followed to get things done. For digital strategy systems
could also include tools and platforms needed to do work.
4.
n s
Skills define the capabilities of the team. Competencies, abilities, expertise level

tio
and experience. These can be especially important for digital strategy as skills

etc.

l i a
requirements seem to be constantly evolving: social media, content marketing,

c
5.
b
Staff defines the team from a more HR perspective: how many people in the

u
team, how are they hired, on-boarded, trained, and rewarded. Especially important

ul P
during change and adjustments.
6.
h
Style defines the company culture. Style includes management style, how

a
hierarchical is the organization, how quickly it moves, how it tolerates or

R
encourages things like innovation, disagreement (diversity), discussion and
conflict. For digital marketing it could include elements like openness, transparency,
willingness to take risks, and accountability.
7. Shared Values define the values, principles, and standards that guide priorities,
behavior and decisions. I guess you can call them the mission and vision, or the
soul of the team, and therefore why McKinsey considers this element to be at the
center of the other six.
Implementation of Digital Marketing Plans
So, you spend the requisite number of hours creating a detailed digital marketing
plan, present it to your management, and get the necessary approvals to do what you
want to do. Then, in all too many cases, the plan gets put on a shelf—where it stays,
unread, until the following year, when you start the entire process over again.

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Even the best-written marketing plans are worthless if they’re not followed. If you
don’t follow your own action plan, what’s the point of planning at all?
The key to a successful marketing plan is not so much the plan itself, but rather
what you do with it. If you put it on the shelf and ignore it, you probably won’t achieve
your goals. (If, in fact, you even remember what your goals are.) If, on the other hand,
you treat your marketing plan as an active document, a set of instructions for your day-
to-day marketing activities, you stand a good chance of accomplishing what you set
out to do.
I like to revisit the marketing plan on a regular basis at least quarterly, ideally
monthly. You can then gauge your progress on an ongoing basis, and know when you
need to shift gears or reassign priorities. If things aren’t going to plan, there’s no shame

a year down the road and discover that you’re not going to get there.
n s
in changing those goals midstream; better to do this after three or six months than to be

c a tio
In other words, make your marketing plan a living document. Follow the action
plan you set forth, constantly measure your progress to plan, and adapt your plan as

l i
necessary throughout the year. This is the way to ensure success - and make the entire
planning process worthwhile.
b
The Bottom Line
P u
h ul
A marketing plan serves two purposes. First, it helps to gain approval from
management for your marketing activities. Second, it serves as a roadmap, a set of

a
R
instructions that guide you and your staff in the coming months.
A digital marketing plan should contain the same sections as a traditional
marketing plan: Executive Summary, Mission, Situational Analysis, Goals and
Objectives, Marketing Strategy, Action Plan, and Budget. Consider the creation of your
marketing plan to be similar to carrying on a conversation about your marketing activities;
what you might describe to a colleague becomes your written plan.

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Short Question and Answers

1. Digital Marketing Plan.
Ans :
A digital marketing plan is a strategic document that takes the current situation
of a particular organisation to set some midterm goals and to determine the strategy
and means to accomplish them. This document also describes the responsibilities, the
time frame and control tools for monitoring.
The aims of a digital marketing plan include discussing organisations and their
environment. Likewise, it needs to be a roadmap of how to manage the organisation’s

n s
marketing strategy, so that resources are properly allocated. The plan also helps control
and evaluate output and tackle any potential deviation from the organisation’s expected

tio
outcomes. In this line, a marketing plan becomes a flexible document that must be

a
adapted to the situation of the company and that must feed into the results obtained by

c
each of the actions developed, especially in the digital arena.

l i
2.
Ans :
Element of Digital Marketing Plan

u b
ul P
A digital marketing plan contains the same elements as a traditional marketing

1.
a h
plan. These elements include the following:
Executive Summary
2.
3.
R
Mission
Situational Analysis
4. Opportunities and Issues
4. Goals and Objectives
5. Marketing Strategy
6. Action Plan
7. Budget
The plan itself should cover a defined time frame, typically one year. That is, you
plan all your activities one year in advance—and your goal is what you hope to accomplish
in the coming twelve months.

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3. Executive Summary
Ans :
The Executive Summary is a one-page overview of the major points in your plan
- from your mission all the way through your action plan and budget. Even though the
Executive Summary is the first section of your plan, it’s the part you write last, after
you’ve come up with all the details in the other sections.
If the Executive Summary sounds redundant, it probably is but in a good way.
If your audience reads nothing but this one page (which is all some will read), they’ll
absorb the salient points of what you intend to accomplish with your marketing activities.
4. Action Plan

Ans :

n s
The Action Plan section describes specific tactics you’ll use to implement the

a tio
marketing strategy set forth in the previous section. This is where you get down to the
nitty gritty of which digital marketing activities you’ll be undertaking, and how much

c
you’ll be spending on each one.

b l i
Think of the Action Plan as your marching orders, a set of step-by-step instructions

P u
you can hand to your staff to implement. It’s the most detailed section of your entire

ul
marketing plan.

a h
When writing the Action Plan for your digital marketing activities, you should
devote separate subsections to individual activities website design, search engine

R
marketing, social media marketing, and the like. You can then link each activity to the
stages of the customer life cycle, as described in the Marketing Strategy section of your
plan.
5. Budget
Ans :
The final section of your digital marketing plan is the one that your financial
people will pore over the most, so you have to make sure that everything adds up. This
section is your master marketing budget, detailing how much money you expect to
spend over the plan period typically one year. This Budget section should include all
the normal financial reports that accounting types like to see, so make sure you work
with your finance department accordingly.

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Search Engine Marketing and Online Advertising:

Importance of SEM, understanding Web Search – keywords,
UNIT HTML tags, Inbound Links, Online Advertising vs. Traditional
Advertising, Payment Methods of Online Advertising – CPM
IV (Cost-per-thousand) and CPC (Cost-per-click), Display Ads -
choosing a Display Ad Format, Landing Page and its importance.

4.1 SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

Q1. Write about Search Engine Marketing.
Ans :
n s
c a tio
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves
the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results

l i
pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate search engine

b
optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to

u
achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC)

P
ul
listings.

a h
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the set of activities that involves Search Engine
Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SMM) and other search engine related
functions.
R
Search Engine Marketing Management (SEMM) integrates marketing management
process that promotes the position of the website’s products or services towards the
beginning of the search result in SERP which in turn increase its business. SEM relates
to the inclusion of all SEO activities but focus on return on investment (ROI), instead of
relevant traffic building. SEM also integrates organic SEO and paid SEO. Social Media
Marketing uses one or several social media channels to engage with customers, build
relationships and then sell our products or services.
Market
In 2007, U.S. advertisers spent US $24.6 billion on search engine marketing.[ In
Q2 2015, Google (73.7%) and the Yahoo/Bing (26.3%) partnership accounted for
almost 100% of U.S. search engine spend. As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster

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than traditional advertising and even other channels of online marketing. Managing
search campaigns is either done directly with the SEM vendor or through an SEM tool
provider. It may also be self-serve or through an advertising agency. As of October
2016, Google leads the global search engine market with a market share of 89.3%.
Bing comes second with a market share of 4.36%, Yahoo comes third with a market
share of 3.3%, and Chinese search engine Baidu is fourth globally with a share of
about 0.68%.
SEM Role in Digital Marketing
SEM (Search Engine Marketing )Google Ad Words is paid advertising or pay
per click (PPC) advertising on Google. Three steps simple formula for internet marketing:
 People use keywords (or search terms) to search for specific products and
services

n s
tio
 If the keywords you’ve chosen match what people search for, your paid ad
appears next to or above organic Google search results


i c a
When people click on your ad, they’ll go to your website to learn more or

l
buy.
b
ul Pu
4.2 IMPORTANCE OF

Q2. What is the importance of search engine marketing ?

SEM

Ans :
R ah
B2B advertising, both online and off, is all about reaching out to prospective
new customers and alerting them to your products and services. B2B ads, when targeted
at the right audience, both enhance brand awareness and help you generate new leads.
Online users, even those who are professional business buyers, tend to trust
organic search results more than paid placements. So, given the choice between a high
ranking on a search page and a text ad on the same page, potential customers are
going to be more influenced by the search result, and somewhat discount the paid
placement. That’s just the nature of the beast.
That does not mean, however, that online ads have no value. They do. Online
ads can reinforce your organic search results, as well as reach potential buyers via
careful placement on targeted websites and blogs.

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It’s certainly possible an online ad can reach buyers that might not otherwise
find you via search.
Online ads can also be targeted to specific purposes. For example, you can use
ads to support your current promotions, or to encourage prospects to attend a web
seminar.
And, when compared to traditional advertising, online ads have the benefit of
being a direct response medium; customers can act directly on online ads, simply by
clicking the ad. Because of this, it’s much, much easier to track the effective­ness of
online advertising; you can track not just how many people view an ad, but how many
click the ad, go to your website, and then submit an inquiry or initiate a purchase. That
introduces a level of accountability unheard of in more than a century of traditional
advertising.

s
Perhaps this is why B2B marketers continue to increase their spending on online

n
tio
advertising. In fact, B2B marketers increased their online advertising expenditures by
double digits every year from 2005 to 2010. For the average B2B company in 2010,

c a
online advertising made up 13.1% of their total marketing budget.

l i
u b
ul P
a h
R

Fig.: B2B online advertising spending from 2005 to 2010

That said, not all B2B marketers are enamored of online ads. Many have
experienced diminishing returns from their online advertising programs, especially from
the pay-per-click component; indeed, ROI from all forms of online advertising is
diminishing as many business buyers ignore the paid ads that appear alongside the

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organic search results on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. So, you should be constantly
monitor the performance of your online advertising campaigns, and be prepared to
shift funds if things aren’t working out as well as you’d hope.
Importance of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) In Digital Marketing
In a digital age, full of information, being found is what matters at the end of the
day. The reason for the success of many renowned companies is their presence on the
internet. Today, using Best of the best Online Marketing Services has become a foremost
element for a successful business.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves
advertising websites by increasing their prominence in search engine results pages
(SERPs) primarily through paid advertising such as PPC. SEO basically involves the
techniques for uplifting website’s ranking on SERP whereas SEM Services is used for

s
marketing of your website on the Google search page in paid part of Google result

n
tio
pages.
It’s not only enough to have a keyword rich website, strong back linking or

good idea to go for paid advertising.

l i c a
optimized content. But for increased chances of visibility on all top search engines, it is

u b
Talking about ads, you need to create an ad that not only lead to clicks, but also

ul P
to sales. To write an ad which are effective and mind changing, you need to find creative
ways. However, you don’t make sales. If your ads are not convertible and only getting

a h
clicks, since you pay for per click, and clicks can add up quickly, you can lose money.
Last but not least, Regardless of whether you use PPC or not, you should employ

R
SEO tactics, because it’s free and it does work. If you go for PPC Services, make sure
your paid ad not only gets clicks, but also, those clicks turn into income.
Q3. Explain about SEM Comparison with SEO.
Ans :
SEM is the wider discipline that incorporates SEO. SEM includes both paid search
results (using tools like Google Ad words or Bing Ads, formerly known as Microsoft ad
Centre) and organic search results (SEO). SEM uses paid advertising with Ad
Words or Bing Ads, pay per click (particularly beneficial for local providers as it enables
potential consumers to contact a company directly with one click), article submissions,
advertising and making sure SEO has been done. A keyword analysis is performed for
both SEO and SEM, but not necessarily at the same time. SEM and SEO both need to
be monitored and updated frequently to reflect evolving best practices.

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In some contexts, the term SEM is used exclusively to mean pay per click
advertising, particularly in the commercial advertising and marketing communities
which have a vested interest in this narrow definition. Such usage excludes the wider
search marketing community that is engaged in other forms of SEM such as search
engine optimization and search retargeting.
Creating the link between SEO and PPC represents an integral part of the SEM
concept. Sometimes, especially when separate teams work on SEO and PPC and the
efforts are not senced, positive results of aligning their strategies can be lost. The aim of
both SEO and PPC is maximizing the visibility in search and thus, their actions to
achieve it should be centrally coordinated. Both teams can benefit from setting shared
goals and combined metrics, evaluating data together to determine future strategy or
discuss which of the tools works better to get the traffic for selected keywords in the

along with optimizing both conversions and costs.

n s
national and local search results. Thanks to this, the search visibility can be increased

c a tio
Another part of SEM is social media marketing (SMM). SMM is a type of
marketing that involves exploiting social media to influence consumers that one

l i
company’s products and/or services are valuable. Some of the latest theoretical advances

b
P u
include search engine marketing management (SEMM). SEMM relates to activities
including SEO but focuses on return on investment (ROI) management instead of

ul
relevant traffic building (as is the case of mainstream SEO). SEMM also integrates

a h
organic SEO, trying to achieve top ranking without using paid means to achieve it, and
pay per click SEO. For example, some of the attention is placed on the web page layout

R
design and how content and information is displayed to the website visitor. SEO &
SEM are two pillars of one marketing job and they both run side by side to produce
much better results than focusing on only one pillar.

4.3 UNDERSTANDING WEB SEARCH - KEYWORDS,

HTML TAGS, INBOUND LINKS
Q4. Explain about web search.
Ans :
Understanding Web Search
First to better understand how search engine marketing and SEO work, you
need to understand how the search engines work - what they search for and how.

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How a Typical Search Works

Searching a site like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing is deceptively simple. The user
enters a search query, clicks the search button, and then waits for the site to display a
list of matching results.
A typical search of this type takes less than half a second to complete. That’s
because all the searching takes place on the search engine site’s own web servers.
That’s right; a user may think that he’s searching the Web, but in effect he’s search­ing
a huge index of websites stored on the search site’s servers that was created over a
period of time. Because the user is only searching a server, not the entire web, his
searches can be completed in the blink of an eye.
Of course, the user is unaware of what happens behind the scenes; he simply

s
types his query into the search box on the search site’s main web page, clicks the

n
tio
search button, and then views the search results page when it appears. Where the
results are stored and how they’re served is irrelevant.

i c a
How a Search Site Builds Its Database and Assembles Its Index

l
u b
So, searching Google or another search engine really means searching the index
to that site’s in-house database of web pages-not the Web itself. These databases hold

ul P
literally billions of individual web pages. That’s not necessarily the entire Web, but it is
a good portion of it.

a h
How does a search site determine which web pages to index and store on its

R
servers? It’s a complex process with several components.
First and foremost, most of the pages in the site’s database are found by special
spider or crawler software. This is software that automatically crawls the web, look­ing
for new and updated web pages. Most spiders not only search for new web pages (by
exploring links to other pages on the pages it already knows about), but also periodically
receive pages already in the database, checking for changes and updates. A complete
redrawing of the web pages in a search site’s database typically takes place every few
weeks, so no individual page is more than a few weeks out of date.
The search engine’s spider reads each page it encounters, much like a web
browser does. It follows every link on every page until all the links have been followed.
This is how new pages are added to the site’s database, by following those links the
spider hasn’t seen before.

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The pages discovered by the spider are copied verbatim into the search site’s
database—and copied over each time they’re updated. These stored web pages are
used to compile the page summaries that appear on search results pages.

To search its database, the search site creates an index to all the stored web
pages. This search engine index is much like the index found in the back of this book;
it contains a list of all the important words used on every stored web page in the database.
After the index has been compiled, it’s easy enough to search for a particular word and
have returned a list of all the web pages on which that word appears.

And that’s exactly how a search index and database work to serve search queries.

A user enters one or more words in a query, the search engine searches its index
for those words, and then those web pages that contain those words are returned as

s
search results. This is fairly simple in concept but much more complex in execution

n
tio
especially given that each search engine indexes all the words on several billion web
pages.

Looks of Search Engine

l i c a
u b
The goal of a search engine is to provide the most accurate results to its users.

ul P
The search engines don’t care so much about the individual websites in their databases;
they care about giving their users a more effective and efficient search experience.

a h
When a search engine ranks search results, it’s with the intent of delivering the
one best answer to that particular user’s query. Ideally, then, if someone is searching

R
for a particular topic, those sites that best cover that topic will rise to the top of the
search results.

But how do the search engines know what content is on a given page? There are
a number of things the search engines look for - which happen to be the very things
you’ll want to optimize on your site.

1. Keywords

A search engine doesn’t yet have the human capacity to read sentences and
para­graphs and understand what it reads. Current technology enables a search
engine to pull specific words and phrases from a page’s text, but that’s about it;
the search engine has no way of knowing how well those words and phrases are
used.

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To determine what’s important on a page, search engines look for keywords.

A keyword is a word or phrase entered as part of a search query; the search
engine tries to find the keyword on a web page and then determines how important
that keyword is on the page.
The search engine does this by noting where on the page the keyword
appears and how many times it’s used. A site with a keyword buried near the
bottom of a page will rank lower than one with the keyword placed near the top
or used repeatedly in the page’s text. It’s not a foolproof way of determining
importance and appropriateness, but it’s a good first stab at it.
For example, if someone is searching for “consulting” and your web page
includes the word consulting in a prominent position - in the first sentence of the
first paragraph, for example - then your page is a good match for that search. If,

s
on the other hand, you have a page about business services in general that doesn’t

n
tio
include the word consulting at all or only includes it near the bottom of the page,
the search engine will determine that your site isn’t a good match for that searcher.

high for that particular search.

l i c a
Unless you use the keyword prominently and relatively often, you won’t rank

u b
The major search engines, when they examine your pages, are going to

ul P
look for the most important words-those words used in the page’s title or headings,
those words that appear in the opening paragraph on the page, and those words

a h
that are repeated throughout the page. The more prominently you include a word
on your page, the more important a search engine will think it is to your site.

R
Conversely, giving prominent placement to the wrong words can hurt your
search rankings and provide less relevant results. For example, if your site is
about consulting but you for some reason include the words packing and shipping
multiple times on the page, it will likely be viewed as a site about shipping services.
This not only drives the wrong visitors to your site, but also lowers your search
ranking in general because you’re now one of the less useful spots listed.
2. HTML Tags
A search engine looks not just to the visible text on your site, but also to the
page’s underlying HTML code-specifically, the metadata in the code. This
metadata includes your site’s name and keyword “content,” which is specified
within the <META> tag. This tag appears in the head of your HTML document
before the <BODY> tag and its contents.

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A typical <META> tag looks something like this:

<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT = ” keyword1, keyword2,
keyword3">
It’s easy enough for a search engine to locate the <META> tag and read
the data contained within. If a site’s metadata is properly detailed, this gives the
search engine a good first idea as to what content is included on this page.
Beyond the <META> tag, search engines also examine the <TITLE> tag
in the code. The search engines figure that the words you use in your page’s title
define, to some extent, the key content on the page. For this reason, you want to
make sure that each page’s <TITLE> tag includes two or three important
keywords, followed by the page’s name.

n s
The search engines also seek out the heading tags in your HTML code
<H1>, <H2>, <H3>, and so forth. For this reason, you should use traditional

content on your pages.

c a tio
heading tags (instead of newer Cascading Style Sheet coding) to emphasize key

3. Inbound Links

b l i
P u
Google was the first search engine to realize that web rankings could be somewhat
of a popularity contest that is, if a site got a lot of traffic, there was probably a

ul
goodTeason for it. A useless site wouldn’t attract a lot of visitors (at least not

a h
long­term), nor would it inspire other sites to link to it.
So, if a site has a lot of other sites linking back to it, it’s probably because

R
that site offers useful information relevant to the site doing the linking.
For example, if your business sells security solutions, you’ll get more oomph
with a link from another security-related site than you would with a link from a
site about computer systems in general. Relevance matters.

4.4 B2B ONLINE ADVERTISING

Q5. Discuss about B2B online advertising.
Ans :
B2B advertising, both online and off, is all about reaching out to prospective
new customers and alerting them to your products and services. B2B ads, when targeted
at the right audience, both enhance brand awareness and help you generate new leads.

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Online users, even those who are professional business buyers, tend to trust
organic search results more than paid placements. So, given the choice between a high
ranking on a search page and a text ad on the same page, potential customers are
going to be more influenced by the search result, and somewhat dis­count the paid
placement. That’s just the nature of the beast.
That does not mean, however, that online ads have no value. They do. Online
ads can reinforce your organic search results, as well as reach potential buyers via
careful placement on targeted websites and blogs.
It’s certainly possible an online ad can reach buyers that might not otherwise
find you via search.
Online ads can also be targeted to specific purposes. For example, you can use
ads to support your current promotions, or to encourage prospects to attend a web
seminar.
n s
a tio
And, when compared to traditional advertising, online ads have the benefit of
being a direct response medium; customers can act directly on online ads, simply by

c
b l i
clicking the ad. Because of this, it’s much, much easier to track the effective­ness of
online advertising; you can track not just how many people view an ad, but how many

P u
click the ad, go to your website, and then submit an inquiry or initiate a purchase. That
introduces a level of accountability unheard of in more than a century of traditional
advertising.

h ul
Perhaps this is why B2B marketers continue to increase their spending on online

a
R
advertising. In fact, B2B marketers increased their online advertising expenditures by
double digits every year from 2005 to 2010. For the average B2B company in 2010,
online advertising made up 13.1% of their total marketing budget.

Fig.: B2B online advertising spending from 2005 to 2010

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That said, not all B2B marketers are enamored of online ads. Many have
experienced diminishing returns from their online advertising programs, especially from
the pay-per-click component; indeed, ROI from all forms of online advertising is
diminishing as many business buyers ignore the paid ads that appear alongside the
organic search results on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. So, you should be constantly
monitor the performance of your online advertising campaigns, and be prepared to
shift funds if things aren’t working out as well as you’d hope.

4.5 ONLINE ADVERTISING VS. TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING

Q6. How Online Advertising Differs from Traditional Advertising.
Ans :
Online Advertising

n s
tio
Online advertisements may also offer various forms of animation. In its most
common use, the term “online advertising” comprises all sorts of banner, e-mail, in-

l i c a
game, and keyword advertising, including on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and
MySpace. Web-related advertising has a variety of ways to publicize and reach a niche

u b
audience to focus its attention to a specific group.
Traditional Advertising

ul P
Traditional advertising is what most people think of when talking about advertising

a h
or marketing. This includes the “usual” venues for media placement, such as newspaper,

R
radio, broadcast television, cable television, or outdoor billboards.
Typical collateral materials needed for your business – like stationery, business
cards, or brochures – would also fall under traditional advertising. These are the products
that people normally expect from an established business, and are useful for building
your business’ brand, identity, and image.
Traditional advertising is usually well-established and easy to place. It’s also very
measurable in terms of viewership and who sees your ad. However, it also can become
expensive – especially in larger markets – and it is often more regulated. A traditional
ad must often meet the norms and standards of the media in which it is placed.
In many ways, online advertising is quite similar to advertising in traditional
print media. An ad is an ad, after all; it’s nothing more than a paid display of your
promotional message.

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With traditional advertising, you pay for space on the printed newspaper or
magazine page or you pay for time on radio or television airwaves. With online
advertising, you pay for space on a web page.
So, the pay for placement thing is pretty much the same. What’s different about
online advertising is that you have a lot more say over where your ad gets placed and
who sees it, which is important for B2B companies. You also can track each ad’s
performance with a level of granularity not possible in traditional advertising right down
to the individual person clicking an ad.
1. Targeted Placement
Let’s tackle the placement part of the equation. When you’re advertising online,
you place your ad on a web page. In most instances, you can dictate both where on the
page your ad appears and on what websites.

n s
tio
When you are running a display ad, you typically have the choice of several page
placements. Many sites offer advertising along the top of the page (so-called banner

l i c a
advertising), along the left or right sides, along the bottom of the page, or in a box
somewhere in the middle. Not all sites offer all positions, of course, but you d be surprised

b
at what’s available if you’re willing to pay for it.

u
ul P
Page placement is less assured when you’re running pay-per-click advertisements.
We discuss the mechanics of this type of ad in more detail later in this chapter, but in

a h
general know that the higher you bid for a per-click price, the more likely your ad will
appear higher on a page. Bid lower, and your ad will likely appear lower on the page.

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It’s a kind of pay-for-placement deal.
Equally important for B2B marketers, you can easily place display ads with just
those websites that meet specific targeting requirements. You can choose specific sites
where you want to appear (such as industry-related sites) or identify sites by their
traffic or demographic profile.
With pay-per-click ads, on the other hand, you let the ad network determine
which sites to use; you identify (and pay for) certain keywords, and your ad appears
on sites with content that matches those keywords. Although that might not be as
desirable as choosing specific sites for your ads, you could discover new sites for
promotion that you wouldn’t have found on your own.
The point is, online advertising is more about narrowcasting than broadcasting
your message - which is ideal for B2B marketing. Traditional media tend toward the

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broadcast model, where your message goes out to a large audience with a lot of waste,
and you end up overshooting your target audience, even when advertising in industry-
specific publications. In contrast, online media are very targeted. If you only want to
reach IT decision makers in Fortune 500 companies, you can do it; you don’t have to
show your ad to everyone and their brother in the consumer world.
2. Improved Tracking
There’s an old saying among advertisers that you know that only half of your
advertising works, but you don’t know which half. Well, with online advertising, you
can quickly and easily determine which half of your advertising is working- down to a
specific ad on a specific website.
That’s because online, you can track when an ad is clicked; when someone
takes action with an ad, you know it. There’s no guessing as to whether this ad or that

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drove a given person into a store to make a purchase because the data tells you precisely

tio
which ads delivered the most traffic back to your website. (And from there, you can
track further actions including sales.)

i c a
This puts a lot more responsibility on you as an advertiser, of course. There’s no

l
u b
more waffling about a given ad enhancing your brand image or gaining some nebulous
type of “exposure.” Online, an ad either gets clicked or it doesn’t. You know immediately

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whether your advertising is working by tracking the traffic from the ad to your website.
The more clicks you get, the more effective the ad is. (At attracting viewers, in any case

a h
not necessarily in increasing sales.) If you don’t get any or many clicks, you know a
particular ad is in the half that doesn’t work.

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This ability to track ad results clearly distinguishes online advertising from its
offline brethren. With traditional advertising, there’s no way to know how effective any
single ad is; sure, you can tell if sales go up during the course of a campaign, but you
don’t know which ads in which media truly drove those sales. With online advertising,
there’s no way not to know how each ad is performing; you get near real time data that
can help you fine-tune your future ad content and placement.
3. Efficiency of Investment
This combination of relevant placement and improved tracking makes online
advertising a much more efficient investment than traditional B2B advertising. You
don’t have to engage in broad placement when you want to target only a narrow audience.
You don’t have to put up with half your ads not working when you can easily determine
which ads are pulling customers and which aren’t.

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The upshot is that you can typically get better results with less investment online,
especially if you properly target where you advertise; you don’t have to pay for unwanted
broad reach. You can create very targeted ads for a very targeted business audience,
which will likely result in higher response rates. In other words, you can target the exact
audience you want, and pay only for those results.

4.6 PAYMENT METHODS OF ONLINE ADVERTISING

Q7. What are the Payment Methods of Online Advertising.
Ans :
Different Payment Models
There are lots of different types of ads you can run and several different payment
models to choose from for those ads.
n s
a tio
Let’s look at the payment models first. There are two primary forms of payment
for online ads you can pay for impressions, as with traditional media, but you can also

c
pay for performance.

b l i
vehicles:
P u
Online advertisements are purchased through one of the following common

h ul
Cost per Thousand (CPM): Advertisers pay when their messages are exposed
to specific audiences.

a

 R
Cost per Click (CPC): Advertisers pay every time a user clicks on their ads.
Cost per Action (CPA): Advertisers only pay when a specific action (generally
a purchase) is performed.

4.6.1 CPM (Cost-per-Thousand)

Q8. Write about CPM (Cost-per-Thousand).
Ans :
CPM - Cost-Per-Thousand
Let’s start with the payment model you’re probably most familiar with, the good
old cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) model. It’s simplicity itself; you pay a certain
price to get your ad in front of a thousand eyeballs.

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For example, you might make an ad placement with a $50 CPM. That is, you
pay $50 for each 1,000 impressions. This might be measured in terms of 1,000 copies
printed of a newspaper or magazine or 1,000 viewers of a television program. In any
case, you apply this $50 CPM rate to the total number of impressions the total print run
or the full viewership. So, continuing the example, if you place your ad in a magazine
with a 100,000-copy print run, you pay $5,000 total for your ad that’s 100,000 divided
by 1,000, times the $100 rate.
With this traditional model, you’re paying for exposure, not for results. It doesn’t
matter if don’t make a single sale from the ad; you still pay the full cost of the ad. The
only thing the host medium guarantees is the eyeballs; what the bodies connected to
those eyeballs do after viewing your ad is totally up in the air.

n s
Although this payment model is not the dominant model on the Web, it is still
used for some online advertising, notably online display ads. In this instance, an ad

a tio
network guarantees placement on a selection of websites that deliver a specified amount
of traffic; you apply the CPM rate to the website traffic, and you get how much you pay.

c
l i
Know, however, that with the online CPM model, there is no guarantee of any

b
results.
P u
sort of driving traffic back to your website. You’re paying solely for placement, not for

CPM

a h ul
CPMs are billed at a flat rate per 1,000 “impressions”. An impression is a measure

R
of the number of times an ad is displayed or has left an impression on a user, regardless
if it was actually clicked on or not. You’re not charged additionally for any clicks that
the ad receives.
CPMs are usually display ads (meaning that they are visual), but not always.
Strengths
 CPM rates are usually pretty inexpensive.
 It’s easy to apply a budget that makes sense for you since you’re paying only for
a certain amount of views, which gives you more control over how much you
spend.
 CPMs guarantee that your ad will be shown the number of times that you want it
to be seen.

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Weaknesses
 If people don’t click on your ads and convert to customers, you risk overspending.
 It’s difficult quantify the return of your traffic buy until the end of the campaign.
 Rush of resulting web traffic is uncommon. Actually, it’s so uncommon that you
are more likely to complete NAVY SEAL training than click a banner ad.

4.6.2 CPC (Cost-per-click)

Q9. Write about CPC (cost-per-click).
Ans :
Instead of paying for impressions or views, most online advertisers opt for a
more performance-oriented payment method. The most popular online payment method,

n s
then, is cost-per-click (CPC), a hallmark of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. With CPC/
PPC ads, the advertiser pays only when a user clicks an ad. The advertiser does not

tio
pay for the placement of the ad itself, so the number of impressions or views is mostly
irrelevant.

l i c a
The actual cost-per-click is typically determined by how much the advertiser is

u b
willing to bid on a specific keyword. That is, you choose a keyword to associate with
your ad, and your ad is displayed on websites that have similar content or on search

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results pages when someone searches for that keyword on Google, Yahoo!, or other
search engine. How often your ad is displayed or how high up on the search results

a h
page are factors of how high you bid for that keyword in relation to how high competing
advertisers also bid. If you bid more than your competitors, your ad will be seen more

R
often and more visibly. If you’re cheap about it (that is, if you get significantly outbid),
your ad will be less visible.
As to that CPC bidding, how much you actually end up paying is a factor of what
you bid versus what your competitors for that keyword bid. You don’t necessarily pay
the full bid price; if you outbid the competition, you’ll be charged only slightly more
than the next-highest bid. So, if you bid $2 per click and the next-highest bid is $1 per
dick, you might only be charged $1.10 per click or so. In any case, you’ll never be
charged more than your specified bid amount.
And remember, you pay only when someone clicks your ad. Even if your ad gets
displayed on a website that has 100,000 visitors per day, if only one of those visitors
clicks your ad, you pay just for that single click. (Of course, if you only get one click
from a 100,000-visitor site, there’s probably something wrong with your ad or you’re
advertising on the wrong site.)

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Given that you never know in advance how many clicks an ad might receive,
how do you know how much you’ll spend for CPC advertising? That’s simple; you
establish a budget up front. The ad network will run your ad until you’ve hit your
budget level and then cease all further display. You’re never charged more than what
you budgeted.
Most online ad networks work with a daily CPC budget level. So, for example, if
you set a $100 daily budget and bid $2 per click, your ad will run each day until you’ve
received 50 clicks. (That’s the $100 total budget divided by $2 per click.)
The advantage of CPC payment is that you’re truly paying for results. You don’t
pay if no one takes action on your ad. It’s that simple and that powerful.
For this reason, CPC is the dominant payment method for online advertising,

n s
both to consumers and to businesses. Certainly, all the text ads you see on the search
sites are CPC in nature; much display advertising is also moving to the CPC model.

c a tio
Both the CPM or CPC payment models can be used with any type of online
advertising. There are two primary types of ads used by B2B marketers text ads and
display ads. We’ll discuss both next.

b l i
Pay per click (PPC)

P u
ul
PPC (also known cost per click or “CPC”) do exactly what they say on the tin:
They’re ads that are paid for only when someone actually clicks on them. This means

a h
that you don’t pay if nobody sees your ads, and even when they do see your ad, you
don’t pay unless they actually click on it. These ads are usually shown in text form,

R
possibly with a smaller image.
The price that you pay per click is determined by the marketplace value of the
keyword or expression you’re interested in. This is calculated by your ads quality score
and the competition for said keyword you want to target.

Competitor Adrank
 0.01  Actual PPC
Your Quality Score

Strengths
 Unlike impressions, clicks are extremely straightforward to track. Someone either
did or didn’t click on your ad.
 You only pay for the clicks you need.

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 There’s less of a risk for overspending on ads that aren’t converting, because
you’re only paying for traffic that’s actually directed to your site.
 You’re able to place budget caps on traffic coming in through large networks
(again, so you don’t overspend).
 CPCs and budgets are modifiable in real time.
 Well-optimized PPC campaigns can bring in significant traffic.
 For marketers who track ROI, PPC advertising can be a much more cost-effective
way to get traffic than CPM.
Weaknesses
 Because you’re competing with other advertisers for traffic, this can sometimes
cause PPCs to become expensive and unaffordable.

n s
tio
 But, if you’re not bidding with a competitive PPC, it’s possible that you won’t
get any traffic.

l i c a
Just because a click didn’t convert to a paying customer straight away, doesn’t

u
to handle this accurately. b
mean that they might not become one later on. Attribution models must be able

ul P
It can be complicated, and you really need to know what you’re doing to see an
ROI.

a h
You might lose money at the start, before you optimize over time.

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Just because someone clicks on your ads, doesn’t mean that they have any interest
in your offer. 50% of clicks on static mobile banner ads are accidental.

4.7 DISPLAY ADS

Q10.Explain about Display Ads.
Ans :
Display Ads
Display ads are the paid advertisements that appear in front of users on website
pages in the form of graphics. Display ads are different from Search Engine Marketing/
Pay Per Click/ Search ads, which appear on search engine results pages. This means
that PPC ads appear only when a person is searching, and display ads appear when a

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person is surfing. However, display ads technically do still appear when a person is
searching, because people often visit the web pages that show up in their search results.
Display ad are commonly referred to as banner ads, but they don’t always take exact
banner form. They graphics that can be a smaller square or rectangle, and can appear
on the top, middle, or side of a web page.
Different Types of Display Adverts
It is a common misconception that the Display Network only provides you with
the option of displaying image ads. In fact, the Google Display Network lets you
advertise in a variety of formats and sizes with text ads, static and animated image
ads, rich media and video ads.
 Text ads –The GDN allows you to run the same text ads on display as you
would on the search network. Text ads consist of a headline and two lines of

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text, and allow advertisers to create a range of ads to text which copy is generating

tio
the most clicks.


l i c a
Image ads. A static image that would fill the entire ad block on the website it
appears upon. You can include custom imagery, layouts and background colours
on image ads.

u b


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Rich media Ads. Rich Media Ads include interactive elements, animations or
other aspects that change depending on who is looking at the ad and how they
interact with it. For example, a moving carousel of products.

a h
Video ads. Video ads have become more popular since YouTube is included on

R
the Display Network. You can now use AdWords to place your ads next to
YouTube videos.
In the early days of the web, display ads -typically in the form of banner ads -
were all there were. Over the next decade, PPC text ads became the advertiser’s chosen
format as Google took over the search advertising market. But in recent years, display
ads have made a bit of a comeback, especially for B2B advertisers.
Display ads can be sold on both a CPM and CPC basis. CPM used to be the
more popular method and is still common in larger ad sizes. CPC is gaining ground,
however, as advertisers embrace the higher accountability model; it’s the de facto
standard in smaller, text ad-like sizes and is even becoming popular in larger sizes.
One of the benefits of display advertising is the variety available. For example, if
you’re into PPC advertising but don’t want to be relegated to a bland text ad, you can

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create a small PPC image ad instead. This type of ad is the same size as a text ad but
conveys the advertising message in a graphical format; with most of these PPC image
ads, the entire ad is clickable.
Larger display ads tend to be more popular among big advertisers. The best-
known type is the so-called banner ad that stretches across the top of a web page,
although “banners” can also run along the bottom of a page or down either side. (A
vertical banner ad is more accurately called a skyscraper.) This type of ad can even sit
in a box in the middle of a page.
Benefits of Display Ads

1. Display Ads are Visually Appealing

s
One of the first benefits of display ads is that, because they are graphic content,

n
tio
they can be designed and styled. Regular SEM ads (Search Engine Marketing
ads) are text only and with character counts, limiting how effectively and quickly

l i c a
you are able to capture attention and convey your message. With display ads,
you can use graphics, video, audio, and your company’s branding to stand out to

u
users and attract their attention.
b
2.

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Display Ads Support Brand Awareness

a h
The visual component of display ads also benefits your business by facilitating
brand awareness. With a PPC ad, users have to read the text on the ad and then

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click through to a landing page to learn about the business and its offer. Since
display ads are branded and styled, often with an offer, a user can gather
information on your brand simply by seeing your display ad, no click necessary.
3. Effectively Target with Display Ads

When online advertising, it is important to target the people most relevant to your
business. Just as with SEM and Facebook Ad targeting, you can create specific
parameters for your display ads: which sites they appear on, which geographic
area they appear in, which demographic or niche market they appear to. For
example, a car dealership can target people of driving age who live in their zip
code and are visiting auto-related websites. The benefit of targeting your display
ads is that you can maximize your spend.

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4. Increase Your Visibility with Display Ads

Although display ads target specific audiences, this does not mean they limit the
visibility of your business online. Display ads give you the ability to appear on
websites that are not only highly trafficked, but which are also related to the offer
of your ad. Display ads benefit your business by getting you in front of a high
volume of the right people, even if they’re not searching.
5. Display Ads Provide Data
It is important to be able to measure your marketing activities, such as by using
Google Analytics, to track their performance. Display advertising platforms offer
this benefit to your business. With the data it provides, you can know exactly
how many times your ad or ads have been clicked. Being able to track your
investment allows you to ensure you are getting the most out of it.
6. Display Ads Support Retargeting
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a tio
In addition to standard targeting capabilities, display advertising also allows for
retargeting. With retargeting, you can put your ad in front of people who have

c
b l i
previously visited your website. This is a way to reach out to people who have
expressed interest in your business, and who could still be considering your
business.

P u
ul
4.7.1 Examining Rich Media Ads

h
Q11.How to Examining Rich Media Ads ?

a
Ans :
R
When it comes to display advertising, there’s no one single type. Today’s display
ads can be image ads (that is, they consist of a static graphic image) or rich media ads.
And when it comes to rich media, the sky’s the limit.
It’s anything that moves or plays or that delivers dynamic content to the targeted
audience. In short, you can look at ads that offer any or all of the following:
 Voice narration or music
 Video playback
 Animated elements
 “Frame-breaking” construction, where elements of the ad break out of the
traditional ad frame and move across the underlying page

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 Expendability, where the ad itself shrinks or grows dependent on some

action
 Dynamic content, such as live Twitter or blog feeds inserted into the ad
 User interaction
A plain image ad, in contrast, is just a picture. A still picture. That isn’t necessarily
a bad thing, especially from a technological standpoint. There are several issues with
rich media ads, concerning both download time (audio and video files can be rather
large and slow to download over a slow Internet connection) and compatibility (not all
users have the state-of-the-art technology installed to play back all rich media ads). If
you want to guarantee a no-hassle experience with all users, ditch the rich media and
stick with a simple image ad.

n s
On the other hand, rich media ads can really pull viewers into your message.

tio
Watching a character walk across the web page while talking directly to the viewer can

web page.

l i a
be a compelling experience. And some people will always stop to watch a video on any

c
u b
The real benefit of rich media ads, of course, is their effectiveness which is
measurable. By most accounts, rich media ads typically have a CTR two to four times

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that of simple image ads, which means moving from a 1% (or less) CTR to some­thing
in the 3% range. That’s significant.

a h
So, if you want to stretch your imagination, stand out from the pack of static

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image ads, and increase your CTR, by all means incorporate rich media into your
display advertising. You won’t be alone; by most accounts, more than 40% of all display
ads incorporate some form of rich media content.

4.7.2 Choosing a Display Ad Format

Q12.How to Choosing a Display Ad Format ?
Ans :
Whether you go with a plain image ad or a fancy rich media one, you also have
to decide on the size of the ad you want. For many years, display ads were synonymous
with banner ads, those horizontal ads that stretch across the top of the page. But there
are places on a page other than the top where you can place an ad, and that placement
will to some degree determine the size and shape of the ad.

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Display ads can, of course, be horizontal banner ads. They can also be vertical
sky­scrapers or smaller square or rectangular ads. In fact, the Interactive Advertising
Bureau (IAB) has compiled a list of 18 common web ad formats of various shapes and
sizes, as detailed.

Ad Unit Size (Width × Height, Recommended

in Pixels) File Size
Leaderboard 728 x 90 40KB
Pop-Under 720 x 300 40KB
Full Banner 468 x 60 40KB
Large Rectangle 336 x 280 40KB
Half-Page Ad 300 x 600 40KB
Medium Rectangle 300 x 250

n s 40KB

tio
3:1 Rectangle 300 x 100 40KB
Square Pop-Up
Vertical Rectangle
250 x 250
240 x 400

l i c a 40KB
40KB
Half Banner 234 x 60
b 30KB
Rectangle
Wide Skyscraper

ul Pu 180 x 150
160 x 600
40KB
40KB

ah
Table: IAB Recommended Ad Units

R
Of course, you’re not limited to a single ad format. You can employ different
for­mats on different sites or even place multiple ads in multiple formats on the same
page. This particular approach can be effective; if you don’t get their attention with a
top-of-page banner, the smaller rectangle ad further down the page might just do the
trick. Or, even better, the two ads work together to reinforce your message. It’s an
increasingly popular approach.

4.7.3 Creating Effective Display Ads

Q13.How to Creating Effective Display Ads ?
Ans :
Want to create an effective display ad? To do so, you need to consider not only
ad media and size, but also position, content, and all sorts of other stuff. Here are some
tips for ensure display advertising success:

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(a) Bigger is Better

When it comes to advertising effectiveness, bigger is better. It should come as no

surprise that wider ad formats tend to out­perform narrower formats—even if
the narrower ad is also taller. It’s all about readability. Visitors can read more at
a glance with a wider ad than they can with a taller one. Obviously, you should
experiment with different ad sizes, as well as ad positions, to find the ones that
work best for your ads. But there’s nothing like size for getting you noticed.

(b) Keep it small

While we’re talking about ad sizes, you also need to consider the file size of the
ad—the size of the image or video or Flash file that loads when the ad is displayed.

s
In general, you want to keep file sizes as small as possible for most formats,

n
tio
under 40KB. Anything larger and you will affect the viewership of the ad.

(c) Choose the best position

l i c a
You don’t always get a vote in where your display ad appears on a page. But if

u b
you can choose your ad position, where should you place it? There are some

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variables to consider, but in general the best position for a display ad is nearest
the page’s core content that can be seen without scrolling. That typically means

a h
near the top-middle of the page, either above, to the left, or below the main
content. Other good positions are directly after the end of an article, blog post, or

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other editorial con­tent; between other elements, such as between articles or blog
posts; and near navigational elements, such as menus and back/up buttons.

(d) Bottom line

Top is better than bottom, left is better than right, and butting up against important
content is best of all.

(e) Include a call to action

It should go without saying that if you want a prospect to click your ad, you need
to make that clear. Include some sort of call to action, such as a “submit” or
“click for more information” button. Without such a call to action, most readers
assume a banner ad is like a billboard, not meant for interaction.

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(f) Keep it short

If you have an animated display ad, keep the animation relatively short. Surveys
show that viewers spend less than 10 seconds looking at the top of a web page.
You have to display all your content within this time frame, including and especially
your call to action. Dispense with long animations and get your message out
there as quickly as possible.

Finally, don’t assume that you will get everything right on the first try. You
should always include a period of testing for different display ad approaches.
You can test different sizes, placements, content, and the like. Evaluate responses
on a regular basis and go with the ads that perform the best. You might be surprised
how some­thing small, such as changing the font or background color, can improve
an ad’s performance.

n s
4.7.4 Custom Landing Page and its Importance

c a
Q14.How to Maximizing Effectiveness with a Custom Landing Page ? tio
Ans :
b l i
u
A landing page is the page that appears when a prospect clicks your ad. The

P
ul
landing page could be your site’s home page, it could be a product page for whatever
it is you’re advertising, or it could be a page specially designed to accompany the

a h
specific advertisement.

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Why Landing Pages Are Important
Here’s the deal. Most people, business people included, don’t view more than the
first page of the resulting web page when they click an ad. If they don’t like what they
find, or if the landing page doesn’t contain the information they want, they leave
immediately.
For this reason, you need to set up a well-structured landing page to greet those
users who click your ad. The more effective your landing page, the more clicks you will
convert to sales.
The best landing pages display content that is a logical extension of the
advertisement. Depending on the nature and intent of the page, it should provide
additional information, ask for the customer’s contact information, or in some instances,
ask for the sale.

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1. Why You Need a Separate Landing Page

As we’ve discussed, you could link to your site’s home page, but that generally
isn’t a great idea. That’s because most home pages are rather general in nature; they
advertise your company or brand, not necessarily the specific product or service
mentioned in your ad. That is, they don’t follow directly from your ad which could be
confusing to potential customers.
Likewise, linking to any existing page on your site might not be the best approach.
Remember, if you’re looking to acquire leads rather than just generate raw clicks, your
landing page has to further the acquisition process. That means that you shouldn’t
point to a generic brand or product page; customers need to see a page that displays
the product or service you talked about in the ad. Going to any non­specific page
requires unnecessary work on the part of the prospect to learn more about what’s

s
advertised and to ask for more information; response rates dramatically fall off the

n
tio
more clicks the prospect has to make.
The best approach, then, is to link to a page on your site custom-designed for

l i c a
readers of your PPC advertisement. This page should display information about only
the product promoted in your advertising - and include some sort of lead-generating

u b
mechanism to ask for the customer’s contact information.

ul P
Why design a special landing page for each ad you create? It’s simple: You want
to make it as easy as possible for buyers to ask for more information or give you’re their

a h
contact info. If you just dump potential customers on your site’s home page, they could
get lost. Or they might have trouble finding the product they want and give up. In any

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instance, you don’t want them randomly browsing your site; you want them to
immediately respond to your specific offer.
2. Creating an Effective Landing Page
Although you can create a different landing page for each ad you place, you
might be able to get by with a single landing page for all the ads in a campaign. In any
instance, some custom page design is in order.
The connection between your ad and the landing page is of utmost importance.
That means that your landing page must discuss or display the product or service
promoted in the ad. It probably shouldn’t display any other products or services; you
don’t want to confuse potential customers. Remember, a prospect clicks your ad to find
out more about what the ad talked about. He expects to click to a page that follows
seamlessly from what was discussed in the ad.

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For this reason, your landing page needs to be consistent with your advertisement,
both in terms of content and presentation. That means using the same terminology
employed your ad—talk about the same product in the same way. Don’t change things
up or get greedy about presenting other products. There will be time enough for that
later if the customer decides to continue the purchasing process.
And if you’re designing a landing page for a PPC image ad, the page should
convey the same look and feel of the ad itself. Obviously, this is less important if you’re
running a text ad, which really doesn’t have a visual design. But a landing page for an
image ad should look and feel like the ad the customer just clicked.
Naturally, the landing page can and should include more information than you
had space to present in the ad. After all, you now have a lot more than three lines to
work with. So, the landing page should include detailed information about the featured

n s
product, as well as more detailed product photos. It should be a very informative page.
3. Asking for the Lead

c a tio
The purpose of your online ad and the associated landing page is to acquire a

l i
customer lead. To that end, you need to include a form (or a link or button that links to

b
a form) that asks for the prospect’s contact information. The landing page has to work

P u
toward convincing the prospect that it’s worth talking to you.

ul
That means that you have to provide enough information to make the prospect

a h
comfortable with your company and your products and services. The landing page,
then, needs to include links to additional product information, collateral materials, and

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the like. You have to get and keep the prospect interested in your product, and then
entice the prospect to leave his contact information.
You then have to make it easy for the contact to enter the asked-for information.
To this end, don’t ask for any more information than is absolutely necessary; resist the
temptation to ask for overly detailed information about the buyer’s company size and
purchasing plans and what not. The more you ask for, the lower your response rates
will be. Maybe all you need is the prospect’s name, company name, and email address.
If you want or need more data, you can ask for it after you make the initial contact.

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Short Question and Answers

1. SEM Comparison with SEO.
Ans :
SEM is the wider discipline that incorporates SEO. SEM includes both paid search
results (using tools like Google Ad words or Bing Ads, formerly known as Microsoft ad
Centre) and organic search results (SEO). SEM uses paid advertising with Ad
Words or Bing Ads, pay per click (particularly beneficial for local providers as it enables
potential consumers to contact a company directly with one click), article submissions,
advertising and making sure SEO has been done. A keyword analysis is performed for
both SEO and SEM, but not necessarily at the same time. SEM and SEO both need to

n
be monitored and updated frequently to reflect evolving best practices.
s
tio
2. Keywords
Ans :

l i c a
A search engine doesn’t yet have the human capacity to read sentences and

u b
para­graphs and understand what it reads. Current technology enables a search engine

ul P
to pull specific words and phrases from a page’s text, but that’s about it; the search
engine has no way of knowing how well those words and phrases are used.

a h
To determine what’s important on a page, search engines look for keywords.

R
A keyword is a word or phrase entered as part of a search query; the search engine
tries to find the keyword on a web page and then determines how important that keyword
is on the page.
The search engine does this by noting where on the page the keyword
appears and how many times it’s used. A site with a keyword buried near the bottom
of a page will rank lower than one with the keyword placed near the top or used repeatedly
in the page’s text. It’s not a foolproof way of determining importance and
appropriateness, but it’s a good first stab at it.
3. HTML Tags

Ans :
A search engine looks not just to the visible text on your site, but also to the
page’s underlying HTML code-specifically, the metadata in the code. This metadata

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includes your site’s name and keyword “content,” which is specified within the <META>
tag. This tag appears in the head of your HTML document before the <BODY> tag
and its contents.

A typical <META> tag looks something like this:

<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT = ” keyword1, keyword2,

keyword3">

It’s easy enough for a search engine to locate the <META> tag and read
the data contained within. If a site’s metadata is properly detailed, this gives the search
engine a good first idea as to what content is included on this page.

Beyond the <META> tag, search engines also examine the <TITLE> tag

n s
in the code. The search engines figure that the words you use in your page’s title define,

tio
to some extent, the key content on the page. For this reason, you want to make sure

the page’s name.

l i a
that each page’s <TITLE> tag includes two or three important keywords, followed by

c
u b
The search engines also seek out the heading tags in your HTML code

ul P
<H1>, <H2>, <H3>, and so forth. For this reason, you should use traditional heading
tags (instead of newer Cascading Style Sheet coding) to emphasize key content on
your pages.

a h
4.
Ans : R
Inbound Links

Google was the first search engine to realize that web rankings could be somewhat
of a popularity contest that is, if a site got a lot of traffic, there was probably a goodTeason
for it. A useless site wouldn’t attract a lot of visitors (at least not long­term), nor would
it inspire other sites to link to it.
So, if a site has a lot of other sites linking back to it, it’s probably because
that site offers useful information relevant to the site doing the linking.
For example, if your business sells security solutions, you’ll get more oomph
with a link from another security-related site than you would with a link from a site
about computer systems in general. Relevance matters.

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5. Methods of Online Advertising

Ans :
Different Payment Models
There are lots of different types of ads you can run and several different payment
models to choose from for those ads.
Let’s look at the payment models first. There are two primary forms of payment
for online ads you can pay for impressions, as with traditional media, but you can also
pay for performance.
Online advertisements are purchased through one of the following common
vehicles:
 Cost per Thousand (CPM): Advertisers pay when their messages are exposed
to specific audiences.

n s
tio
 Cost per Click (CPC): Advertisers pay every time a user clicks on their ads.

a purchase) is performed.
l i c a
Cost per Action (CPA): Advertisers only pay when a specific action (generally

6. CPM - Cost-Per-Thousand
u b
Ans :

ul P
Let’s start with the payment model you’re probably most familiar with, the good

a h
old cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) model. It’s simplicity itself; you pay a certain
price to get your ad in front of a thousand eyeballs.

R
For example, you might make an ad placement with a $50 CPM. That is, you
pay $50 for each 1,000 impressions. This might be measured in terms of 1,000 copies
printed of a newspaper or magazine or 1,000 viewers of a television program. In any
case, you apply this $50 CPM rate to the total number of impressions the total print run
or the full viewership. So, continuing the example, if you place your ad in a magazine
with a 100,000-copy print run, you pay $5,000 total for your ad that’s 100,000 divided
by 1,000, times the $100 rate.
7. CPC (cost-per-click)
Ans :
Instead of paying for impressions or views, most online advertisers opt for a
more performance-oriented payment method. The most popular online payment method,
then, is cost-per-click (CPC), a hallmark of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. With CPC/

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PPC ads, the advertiser pays only when a user clicks an ad. The advertiser does not
pay for the placement of the ad itself, so the number of impressions or views is mostly
irrelevant.
The actual cost-per-click is typically determined by how much the advertiser is
willing to bid on a specific keyword. That is, you choose a keyword to associate with
your ad, and your ad is displayed on websites that have similar content or on search
results pages when someone searches for that keyword on Google, Yahoo!, or other
search engine. How often your ad is displayed or how high up on the search results
page are factors of how high you bid for that keyword in relation to how high competing
advertisers also bid. If you bid more than your competitors, your ad will be seen more
often and more visibly. If you’re cheap about it (that is, if you get significantly outbid),
your ad will be less visible.
8. Display Ads

n s
tio
Ans :

i a
Display ads are the paid advertisements that appear in front of users on website

c
pages in the form of graphics. Display ads are different from Search Engine Marketing/

l
u b
Pay Per Click/ Search ads, which appear on search engine results pages. This means
that PPC ads appear only when a person is searching, and display ads appear when a

ul P
person is surfing. However, display ads technically do still appear when a person is
searching, because people often visit the web pages that show up in their search results.

a h
Display ad are commonly referred to as banner ads, but they don’t always take exact
banner form. They graphics that can be a smaller square or rectangle, and can appear

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on the top, middle, or side of a web page.

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Social Media Marketing: Understanding Social Media, Social

Networking with Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogging as a social
medium, Microblogging with Twitter, Social Sharing with
UNIT YouTube, Social Media for Customer Reach, Acquisition and
Retention. Measurement of Digital Media: Analyzing Digital
V Media Performance, Analyzing Website Performance, Analyzing
Advertising Performance.

5.1 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Q1. What do you mean by social media marketing.
Ans :
n s
Social Media Marketing

c a tio
social media sites.
b l i
Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through

P u
Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different

ul
social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short
messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social

a h
networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of

R
other activities.
The following are some of the features of social media marketing:
 A technology for everyone: Unlike the period where everything was exclusive
and paid for, technology such as this is free for all to use.
 Making the World Wide Web a much bigger place: since social media is
an online process, the use of the Internet helps immensely in reaching out to a
wider audience.
 User-generated content: Content such as pictures, videos, blogs, news,
information or any other kind of data used to be the specialization of a privileged
few. Well, not anymore, as advancement in online technology makes it easier for
anyone to float content on a social media platform.

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 It is handy and scalable: Accessible to the public, social media can now be
used by a diverse set of users. This not only provides people with tremendous
opportunities but also provides easy-to-access information and tools to work for
the person’s convenience.
 An information diffusion mode: The process changes how people read,
share or collect information and thus social media is very much capable of
distributing information at a faster pace.
 A constructive way to build relationships: With the help of social media
marketing, people can easily share information with others. This ensures that a
better relationship is built with social media as the base.
 Connecting with others: There lies a tremendous opportunity to make real

n s
and meaningful connections with prospective customers. It provides a better

tio
perspective to human relationships. This personal perspective helps many

their message in a better fashion.

l i a
businesses to find a way to establish the network with their customers and promote

c

b
From content readers to content publishers: Consumers are not only

u
ul P
content readers but with respect to social media, they are also the content
publishers. Hence, a valuable platform for people to share any kind of relevant
content with their network of followers.

a h
Brand power: Brand power is the best way to promote or publicize a brand or

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a product. What drives the media is the amalgamation of technology with the
creativity and thus a whole new world for social media marketing is available for
anyone to use.
 Provision of customer service and relayed feedbacks: With the help of
technology, a person can easily respond back to the customer’s feedback or even
provide services by coordinating with his employees.
 Influencing a generation: Convincing a person to follow a brand or a product
is altogether another story. From suggesting the idea to its implementation and
then its successful execution marketing can be an influential force in the industry.
 Gain of good will: With the help of social media, good will can easily be
generated for a company or a brand.

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5.2 UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

Q2. Explain about understanding social media.
Ans :
Social media is a top platform for market research and decision-making process.
Billions of people use social media for learning, marketing, shopping and decision
making. Now when they use social media, they create and generate data that enables
data analysts to do the analysis on the related subject.
Objectives of Social Media
More and more people of all ages are using social media for both personal and
professional purposes. From social interaction and staying in touch with friends to

s
gathering information, shopping and sheer entertainment, social media’s reach is vast.

n
tio
Social media opens up channels of communication between businesses and people,
humanizing brands and helping build relationships with customers. It’s not only your

l i c a
friends and family using social media, but your prospective clientele as well, so setting
social media objectives for your business is important. Here are 5 reasons why you
should be using social media for your business:

u b
1. Brand Awareness

ul P
Making sure you stay top of mind among your target customer requires a constant

a h
presence within their sphere of influence online. According to Global Web Index,
the average person spends more than 2 hours each day on social media, and

R
that number continues to rise each year. Social media is low-hanging fruit to
build brand awareness. The platforms are free, easy to use, and provide a wealth
of valuable data about your target audience. If your business isn’t at least
maintaining consistent, relevant and engaging posts online, you may be missing
out on an easy opportunity to increase awareness online.
2. Website Traffic
Driving traffic to your website is often an important step toward making a sale.
When used effectively, social media can be one of your top sources for site referrals.
To drive traffic to your website, share original, high-quality, engaging content
from your website on social media. Not only does this drive leads to your site,
where prospective customers can learn more about your company, but it can
also help establish brand recognition and thought leadership within your industry.

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3. Engagement
Communication is key for any business to be successful. However, many
businesses lack in positive engagement and two-way communication with their
customer base. Social media allows businesses to interact with users freely and
quickly, which can help resolve problems promptly and proactively and improve
a business’ reputation as a result. You can also create positive engagement
experiences with customers through social media, such as through contests and
giveaways, which can build a positive brand image in your audience’s mind.
4. Consumer Insights
Social media can be an easy way to survey customers and learn more about
their interests, perceptions about your business, and other valuable insights. By
engaging with your customers on social media, you can gain valuable insights

s
that may otherwise cost an arm and a leg through paid market research or focus

n
tio
groups. Through strategic social media interactions and clear views of your fans’
demographics, interests and behaviors, you can easily spot trends, allowing you

4. Branding
l i a
to adjust your marketing strategy effectively as needed.

c
u b
Social media can give brands more personality. Nowadays, a brand’s social

ul P
profile may be more important than other forms of traditional advertising. In
fact, 84% of millennials stated that they don’t trust traditional advertising, whether

a h
that be ads on print or TV. They claim that blogs and social media content are
more influential. This is because they see these social media platforms, such as

R
Twitter and Facebook, as two-way social networks rather than one-way marketing
machines. They are more likely to stay tuned on social media and hear what you
have to say.
Types of social media and what they’re used for :
 Social networks—Connect with people
 Media sharing networks—Share photos, videos, and other media
 Discussion forums—Share news and ideas
 Bookmarking and content creation networks—Discover, save, and
share new content
 Consumer review networks—Find and review businesses
 Blogging and publishing networks—Publish content online

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 Interest-based networks—Share interests and hobbies

 Social shopping networks—Shop online
 Sharing economy networks—Trade goods and services
 Anonymous social networks—Communicate anonymously
Positive Effects of Social Media
Social media allows the social growth of the society and also helps many
businesses. It provides tools like social media marketing that can reach a millions of
potential clients. We can easily access information and get news through social media.
Social media is a great tool for creating awareness about any social cause. Employers
can reach out to potential job seekers. It can help many an individuals to have social
growth and interaction with the world without having any hitch. Many people use

s
social media to make themselves heard to the higher authorities. It can also help you

n
tio
meet like-minded people.
Negative Effects of social Media

l i c a
Many physiatrists believe that social media is a single most factor causing

u b
depression and anxiety in people. It is also a cause of poor mental growth in children.
Increased use of social media can lead to poor sleeping patterns. There are many other

ul P
negative effects like cyber bullying, body image issues etc. as well. There is an increased
‘Fear of Missing out’ (FOMO) at an all-time high in youth because of social media.

a h
Advantages of Social media :
1.
R
Communication
Social media is an excellent form of interface to communicate with our old or
new friends, colleagues, and anyone we like to chat with anytime. Social media
helps people bring back their old memories, celebrate new memories and also
meet new people in their life. Social media platforms have been a blessing for the
world of communication.
2. Amusement
Social media inevitably brings amusement and entertainment for everyone of
every age, gender, caste, color, and creed. Teenagers feel great when they upload
a picture and get likes and kind comments on their posts. Older adults feel great
when they see the photos and videos of their children & grandchildren happy.
Social media admittedly does an excellent job of making everyone happy.

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3. Opportunities
People get all sorts of great opportunities in life for their betterment through various
social media platforms. Students from overseas who have worked hard get great
opportunities for colleges abroad. A person looking for a job uses social media
platforms for the desired position in their desired place. Social media also gives
a chance to entrepreneurs and dreamers who want to bring a change for good.
Social media does provide a significant push to a person who needs it with
incredible opportunities.
4. Business

It helps the new rising businessmen who wish to expand their business to more
people, overseas, etc.

n s
Instant requirements fulfilled : Due to social media, our immediate needs

tio
or even regular requirements are met with just some clicks away. If we are hungry

i a
or craving for something to eat, we get food delivered to us easily and quickly

c
without any effort. Need urgent clothes, shoes, and electronics? Online shopping

l
does it for you in a heartbeat!

u b
5. World updates

ul P
Anyone can get an update of every corner of the world within a few minutes. A

a h
person sitting in one corner of the world can get to know stuff about another part
of the world, like who is the most critical person in a particular place. Social

R
media also provides every sagacious or bogus information about politics, trends,
lifestyle, music industry, film industry, gaming industry or anything else for that
matter.
Disadvantages of Social media
The rise of social media has not only given rise to good things but has also
created quite a few damaging ones. Let’s have a look at a few of them.
1. Reduce real-life interaction
The rise of media has made not only the young generation but also the former
generation more social and has thus, reduced the real-life communication between
everyone. The more people indulge themselves in social media, the more they get
addicted to it and try to avoid physical one-on-one with their families and friends.

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2. Cyber crimes
The high use of social media has increased the number cyber crimes performed
too. Cybercrime is just the same as a real-life crime conducted on a social media
platform. Too much trust on social media has made people share their personal
details, resulting in cyber criminals violating their privacy on social media
platforms. Then some hackers contribute to cyber crimes. That is one way in
which social media kills privacy very easily.
3. Infestation on grammar

The high use of social media has given rise to the excessive use of abbreviations
and slangs everywhere, not only on social media but also in real life conversations.

n s
People have started using abbreviations to the extent that they have forgotten the
correct way to use grammar or to strike up a conversation. Just to make one’s

a tio
talk look “cool,” people make up their abbreviations and have started forgetting
the correct way address, someone. It is a prevalent way in which social media

c
has destroyed ancient languages.

b l i
4. Health issue

P u
ul
Social media addiction is very harmful. If a person gets addicted to social media,
he/she can sit up for hours and hours without any real-life interaction which will

a h
be not only harmful to their eyes but also their mental health. The stunning lifestyle

R
on the internet supports drug abuse by using the terms such as “All cool people
do drugs.” These kinds of statements influence the young teens to be a part of it.

5.3 SOCIAL NETWORKING WITH FACEBOOK,

GOOGLE + AND LINKEDIN
Q3. Discuss about social networking with face book, google + and
LinkedIn

Ans :
Social networking is, perhaps, the most popular social medium today, because
it’s a true online community; it’s where friends, family, and business colleagues can
hang out online and share their experiences.

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In practice, a social network is a large website that hosts a community of users

and facilitates public and private communication between those users. Social networks
enable users to share experiences and opinions with each other via short posts or
status updates.

Some social networks, such as school or alumni networks, are devoted to a

specific topic or community. Other social networks, such as Facebook, are more broad-
based, which allows for communities devoted to specific topics to develop within the
overall network.

In short, social networks help people keep up-to-date on what others are doing,
and keep others updated on what they are doing. They also help establish a sense of

s
community based on shared experiences at school, in the workplace, or at play.

n
tio
There are three major social networks active in the U.S. Today:

1. Facebook

l i c a
u
with both consumers and businesses. b
With more than 750 million users, it’s the largest social network available, popular

2. Google+
ul P
a h
This is the newest social network on the block, Google’s big entry into the social

R
networking scene. Google+ garnered 20 million users in its first few weeks of
operation, and has the potential to be a strong long-term competitor to Facebook.

3. Linkedln

This is the social network for professionals and business people. Linkedln has a
smaller, albeit older and more affluent, audience than Facebook (100 million
professional users), which makes it very popular among B2B marketers.

These are not the only social networks out there, of course; others are smaller
and more targeted, more popular in other countries; or, like the formerly dominant
My Space, on their way to an eventual demise. It’s appropriate to focus your
B2B marketing efforts on the big three players.

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5.4 PLATFORMS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Q4. What are the Platforms of Social Media?
Ans :
A) Social Networking
1. Definition: Using websites and applications to communicate informally
with others, find people, and share similar interests
 Allows users to directly connect with one another through groups,
networks, and location
2. Examples: Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn
B) Microblogging

n s
tio
1. Definition: Posting of very short entries or updates on a social networking
site

i c a
Allows users to subscribe to other users’ content, send direct messages,

l

and reply publicly

u b
subjects

ul P
Allows users to create and share hashtags to share content about related

2.
h
Examples: Twitter and Tumblr

a
Additional tool for managing micro blogging : TweetDeck

R Tweetdeck downloadable desktop application made exclusively for

Twitter, allows for the organization of tweets through “customizable
columns, multiple accounts toggling, scheduling, and automatically
refreshing feeds”. TweetDeck relies on column-based interface that
allows all social media profiles to be viewed in one window.
This beginner’s guide to TweetDeck detials how to set-up and
customize Tweet Deck features to your agency’s needs.
C) Blogging (Using Publishing Websites)
1. Definition: Recording opinions, stories, articles, and links to other websites
on a personal website
2. Examples: Word press and Blogger

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D) Photo Sharing
1. Definition: Publishing a user’s digital photos, enabling the user to share
photos with others either publicly or privately
2. Examples: Instagram, Flicker, Snapchat and Pinterest
E) Video Sharing
1. Definition: Publishing a user’s digital photos, enabling the user to share
photos with others either publicly or privately
 Allows users to embed media in a blog or Facebook post, or link media
to a tweet
2. Examples: YouTube, Vimeo, and Periscope
F) Crowd sourcing

n s
tio
1. Definition: Obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting
contributions from a large group of people, particularly those from the online
community

l i c a
G)
2. Examples: Ushahidi, Inc.

u b
Tools for Managing Multiple Social Media Platforms
1.

ul P
Definition: An aggregator is a tool that can be used to “aggregate social
media site feeds in one spot, allowing users to search by keywords.”
2.
a h
Examples: Hootsuite

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5.4.1 Blogging as a Social Medium
Q5. Explain about Blogging as a Social Medium.
Ans :
It might surprise you to think of blogs in the same breath as Facebook and Twitter,
but it’s true; blogging is a form of social connection. A blogger makes a personal
connection with his readers, and a community is formed when those readers comment
on the blog posts. (And on other comments, of course.)
As such, blogging is one of the key social media. Now, we’ve already covered
blog marketing, so I won’t repeat that information here. Know, however, that because
blogging is a type of social media, you probably should consider blog marketing when
you develop your overall social media marketing strategy.

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5.4.2 Microblogging with Twitter

Q6. Explain about microblogging with twitter.
Ans :
Microblogging with Twitter
Then we have microblogs. As the name implies, a microblog is a little bitty blog-
more accurately, a service that broadcasts very short blog posts, broadcast to a group
of subscribers.
In reality, microblogging has more in common with social networking than it
does with traditional long-form blogging. A microblog is what results when you separate
the short text messages or status updates from a social network into a separate feed.
Microblogs, typified by Twitter, exist solely to distribute short text posts from individual
users to groups of followers. These posts are similar to traditional blog posts but are
much shorter, typically in the 140-character range.
n s
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That said, a microblog is considerably different from both a social network and

i a
a traditional blog. Microblogs do not offer any of the community features found on

c
larger social network sites; there are no topic-based groups, one-to-one private

l
u
message distribution. It’s all about the tweets.
b
messaging, photo sharing, and the like. The only service a microblog offers is public

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The most popular microblogging service today is Twitter, with more than 100
million users. A company creates a Twitter account and begins to post short text

a h
messages, called tweets. Other businesses sign up to follow the tweets of the first business;
they are then notified when that business makes a new post. B2B companies use

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tweets to talk to their customer base, via new product announcements and other bursts
of information.

5.5 SOCIAL SHARING WITH YOUTUBE

Q7. Explain about Social Sharing with YouTube.
Ans :
Social Sharing with YouTube and Flicker
One interesting aspect of the social web is social sharing, the passing around of
pictures, movies, music, and such between friends and family. Social networking sites,
such as Facebook and Google+, offer media-sharing features; in fact, Facebook is
probably the number one photo-sharing site on the Web. But there are lots of sites
dedicated solely to sharing specific types of media online.

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All of these sites work in a similar fashion. Users upload their media photos,
movies, whatever to the site. The uploaded media are made available either publicly to
everyone on the site, or privately to selected lists of friends and family. Other users,
invited or otherwise, then view the uploaded media as they wish.
Most media-sharing sites also offer some degree of community interaction, typically
by letting users share the media they find and like with others. YouTube, for example,
makes it easy for users to email links to their videos, as well as embed videos in blogs
and other websites. Flicker goes a step further by encouraging user-created groups
devoted to particular subjects or types of photography. Most sites also offer private
email-like communication between users.
In terms of photo-sharing sites, Flicker is the big dog. In the video-sharing arena,
it’s YouTube standing head and shoulders above the completion.

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Q8. How Important Is Social Media Marketing for B2B?
Ans :

l i c a
There’s an ongoing myth that B2B companies are less engaged in social media

u b
marketing than are B2C companies. Research disproves that myth.

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For example, a recent Business.com survey showed that 81% of B2B companies
had a company presence on social networking sites, compared to 67% of B2C

a h
companies. Similarly, 75% of B2B companies participated in Twitter, compared to

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49% for B2C companies, while 66% engaged in online discussions, compared to 43%
of B2C companies.

This embrace of social media is also apparent in B2B marketing budgets.

According to Outsell, B2B companies were expected to increase their social

marketing expenditures 43% in 2010 no other marketing media had that kind of increase
in support.

There’s a reason why B2B companies are embracing social media it’s where
their customers are increasingly going to for information. The same Business.com survey
cited previously found that 62% of businesses visited company social network pages
for information, while 54% searched for information on social media sites. If that’s
where your prospective customers are looking, you need to be there.

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Fig.: The most popular social media sources for business information

l i
The reality is that social media might be more important to B2B companies than

b
P u
for their B2C cousins. That’s because most B2B companies have a smaller potential
customer base and a higher average price point than do B2C customers. With these

h ul
dynamics, using social media to turn customers into advocates which is what social
media does pays bigger dividends for B2B companies.

a
R
It’s interesting how business professionals use the Internet to share information
and build their network of industry contacts. Social networking sites are rife with
professional communities that help their members solve problems and share their
experiences and insights. Consider also how B2B buyers tend to rely on third-party
feedback in making their purchase decisions, and you can see the value of social networks
in various stages of the B2B buying continuum.
How exactly does social media marketing benefit your business? Certainly, social
networking is all about nurturing relationships with your most loyal customers; it’s a
unique forum for two-way communication and community building. But beyond that,
a strong presence in social media can benefit your other digital marketing activities; it
can increase your business exposure, drive traffic to your website, and even improve
your search engine rankings. It can also generate real leads.

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Fig.: Additional benefits of social media marketing

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And let us not ignore the cost factor. Social media is among the most cost-effective

c
marketing vehicle in your arsenal. It’s not free; in fact, it’s somewhat time-intensive.

l
u b
But the actual upfront costs are minimal, which makes it ideal for smaller or cash-
constrained businesses. Establishing a presence on most social networks takes nothing

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more than your time which in itself is valuable. Indeed, you’ll need to determine just
how much time to devote to social media marketing as opposed to other forms of

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digital and traditional marketing. Yes, you can get results, but you’ll have to decide
whether the time investment is worth it. Inevitably, there are tradeoffs to be made.

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As noted previously, the term social media actually encompasses several different
types of websites and services. Some are more influential among business purchasers
than others.
As to which of these social media has the biggest impact for B2B companies, it
kind of depends on which survey you’re reading. For example, an Outsell survey found
that Facebook was most effective for 51% of respondents, with Linkedln close behind
at 45%, followed by Twitter at 35%. In contrast, Linkedln got the top spot in a HubSpot
survey, dubbed effective by 45% of respondents; in this survey, Twitter was number
two with 38%, and Facebook was number three with 33%.
Which social media is most effective might depend on the particular types of
businesses you’re trying to reach. In 2009, Marketing Profs conducted a survey of their
members that broke out social media use by size and type of business (see Figure);

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there are definitely differences between business types. For example, Linkedln is going
to be more important to you if you’re targeting smaller businesses than if you target
larger ones; Facebook is definitely more important to B2C companies than it is in the
B2B universe.
I think the takeaway here is that all the big three social networks (Facebook,
Linkedln, and now Google+) plus Twitter are worthy of your attention. Effectiveness
might vary somewhat from one to another, but they all can help you build a thriving
customer community and, just perhaps, generate a few leads, too.

5.6 SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CUSTOMER REACH, ACQUISITION

Q9. How to using Social Media for Customer Reach, Acquisition?
Ans :
n s
Using Social Media for Customer Reach and Acquisition

c a tio
Many marketing experts endorse social media for reaching new customers. I

l i
think that’s certainly the case for B2C companies, but much less so for B2B. It all

b
u
depends on where potential business buyers are looking for their initial information.

P
ul
It’s true that business purchasers are using social media; the data backs that up.
But for what are they using it?

a h
My experience indicates that social networks are great vehicles for connecting

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with your existing customers; it’s relatively easy to get a customer to subscribe to your
Facebook page or Twitter feed and participate thusly. It’s much more difficult, however,
to entice someone who doesn’t know you to join your social community. After all, how
likely are you to become a fan or subscriber to a company that you don’t presently do
business with? There are just too many things happening on these social networks to
throw a speculative relationship into the mix.
That’s not to say that some companies don’t use social media to acquire new
leads; it happens. Indeed, your social media presence is another good source of
information for buyers in the decision-making phase of their purchasing process. But
you’re less likely to engage these pre-prospects in your social community than you are
existing customers; potential buyers will read and download the information you have
in your social media streams, but probably won’t stick around much to chat.

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Ways to Reach Customers on Social Media Channels

Sometimes, the best ways to reach customers on social media requires some
outside-the-box thinking. If you’re looking to expand your following, sell more of whatever
service or product you’re providing, or simply put out excellent content, keep reading.

Here are the top tips for ways to reach customers on social media channels.

1. Choose the right channels for your brand.

It’s no longer just Facebook and Twitter dominating the online sphere. Pinterest
has now topped Twitter to be the second-largest driver of traffic from social
media sites (while the first is Facebook), according to Shareaholic’s latest report.
Taking quality photos of the product or services you sell is a great start. Channels

s
like Pinterest and Instagram are highly image-driven. By the same token, you

n
tio
can make your own images (with text overlay) using a site
like Canva or PicMonkey. Google+ is another underrated platform; it can help

c a
your content rank higher in Google search. Furthermore, joining and interacting

l i
u b
with communities on Google+ can expand your target audience. If you’re
considering posting ad content, your top platforms will typically be Facebook,

2.
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Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter.

Take advantage of hashtag research on Instagram and Twitter.

a h
Sites like Websta.me will reveal how many times a hashtag has been used. On

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Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags—and it’s a great way to expose others
to your brand. Hashtags will help archive your posts on Twitter and Instagram
for others who are searching for the same topics, or who take an interest in that
kind of content.
3. Discounts, promotions, freebies, useful advice—help out your
customers.

Running contests, promotions and offering freebies is another of the best ways
to reach customer sonsocial media.Providing something helpful and infor-
mative through your social media channels will help draw in a wider
audience—don’t just push your product. Make your content shareable. A
giveaway once in awhile won’t drive customers away, either.

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4. Join groups and communities (and follow your target audience) to

share your content
On Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, this is especially important. Join
relevant groups on LinkedIn and Google+ (and even on Facebook) that might
be interested in what you’re promoting. Find pages related to what you’re selling
on Twitter and Instagram (perhaps even competitor pages) and follow the users
who are following those accounts. This will, at the very least, immediately make
your brand known to prospective customers.
5. Share your story & showcase your customers on social media
channels.
Big brands periodically share “throwback” or “behind the scenes” photos and
stories on social media. Furthermore, they share stories from customers. If you’re

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selling T-Shirts, for instance, showcase your apparel by inviting customers to

tio
share their own photos of them wearing it. Then, you can repost it. This is one of
the top ways to reach customers on social media: sharing feedback and

l i c a
experiences directly from your customers. Also, offer your social media followers
some behind-the-scenes or “throwback” images or stories on your online

u b
platforms. It gives some depth to the journey of the business you built.
6.
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Take advantage of friend referrals to drive traffic to your accounts.

ul
Invite your current customers and your friends to share your content. Also, extend

h
an invitation for your audience’s other connections to like or follow your social

a
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media accounts. Using social media helps to initiate word-of-mouth referrals,
so it’s important to find new ways to reach customers on social media.
Sometimes, it means asking for referrals (and perhaps offering referral and new
customer discounts).

5.7 USING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CUSTOMER RETENTION AND LOYALTY

Q10.How to Using Social Media for Customer Retention and Loyalty?
Ans :
The more important use of social media marketing comes in the retention and
loyalty phases of the B2B buying continuum. Social media are uniquely suited to building
customer communities, forging strong relationships with your most loyal customers,
and encouraging those customers to recommend your company to their colleagues.

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Key here is establishing your online presence (company pages and feeds), posting
regularly with information of value to your customer base, and then actively engaging
your customers in the community. That means using your posts to start conversations
and then following up with your customers’ replies. You want customers to feel that
you’re listening to them, and that they’re important members of your corporate family.
Obviously, part of retention marketing is encouraging customers to make repeat
purchases. To that end, you can use social media to let customers know about new
products, upcoming specials and sales, and so forth. You can even offer exclusive deals
to your social media subscribers—items or discounts only they are aware of and can
take advantage of.
As to the loyalty phase, you need to encourage your social media subscribers to
enlist other businesses to subscribe to your pages and feeds. It’s a matter of actively

n s
promoting your social network links and “like” buttons, so that customers get their

tio
friends and colleagues to sign up. Of course, you have to offer information that your

i a
customers think is worth sharing; if they don’t like what they’re seeing, they’re not

c
going to recommend you to others. But any new subscriber a customer brings to the

l
future.
u b
social media table can become a viable lead or paying customer some­time in the

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In this fashion, social media represents the ultimate in word of mouth marketing.
You provide the forum for customers to gather and talk about you, and then let the

a h
word of mouth recommendations begin. You’ll gain a stronger, more loyal customer

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base—and hopefully garner some new leads, in the bargain.
Ways to Improve Customer Retention With Social Media
A loyal customer’s true value is essential information for developing a customer
loyalty program. Lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition costs (CAC) are the
two primary factors that determine the effect customer loyalty will have on a company’s
bottom line.
LTV is the estimated net profit that will result from a company’s relationship with
a customer. This quantity is also known by other names such as customer lifetime
value (CLV) and lifetime customer value (LCV). CAC is the cost incurred by the
company in convincing a customer to buy a particular product or service. It includes
the cost of the product itself as well as the cost of marketing, research, and making the
product available to the customer.

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The value of a relationship with a customer isn’t well-quantified for many

businesses, so marketing research is needed to help estimate the return on investment
(ROI) of this relationship. Most businesses focus on generating new leads rather than
estimating the value of existing relationships, which makes it difficult to determine if a
marketing activity is creating a positive ROI.
This issue is especially relevant for social media marketing, which has a low-
barrier to entry and a low cost of customer interactions. Social media can, therefore,
be an effective means of increasing loyalty throughout the relationship, and not just in
the form of social media customer service.
Specific techniques for improving customer retention with social media include
the following:
1. Provide superior social media customer service

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The quality of customer service is always a critical factor for retaining customers,

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but it’s especially important when solving the customer’s problems. The majority

l i a
of customers who leave a business do so after a bad experience with customer

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service. Social media provides a unique opportunity for customers to share poor
customer experiences with other customers, but it also provides businesses with

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a way to demonstrate their focus on retaining customers over the long term.

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The key to avoiding negative publicity is to provide good customer service
in the first place with practices such as offering generous return policies and

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responding promptly to questions. Social media customer service is the ideal
channel for the latter.

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However, once a problem with customer service arises on social media, the
best strategy is to acknowledge it, apologize for the problem, and resolve it as
quickly as possible. It’s also vital that you not shift blame or get defensive in your
response.
2. Leverage endowed progress
Endowed progress is a consumer’s perceived progress towards a goal, which
can increase the consumer’s motivation to reach that goal. It can, therefore,
result in higher rates of goal attainment compared to customers who don’t receive
an endowment. Implementing a loyalty program on social media that leverages
endowed progress generally requires you to establish the goal, determine the
actions you want to reward, and provide the customer a head start or endowment
towards that goal.

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The following two loyalty programs illustrate the concept of endowed progress
on social media. The first program offers customers a free product after five
purchases. The second offers a free product after seven purchases but gives
customers a head start towards that goal by initially crediting them for two
purchases. Both programs require the customer to make five purchases before
receiving the free product, but the second program provides an endowment. The
second program will typically yield better customer retention, assuming all other
factors are equal.
3. Provide valuable information
One of the best ways of using social media to improve customer retention is to
become a resource of useful information. Social media channels are an effective
means of disseminating information to customers and prospective customers,

s
especially for the purpose of increasing marketing leverage. A company’s

n
tio
relationships with its customers become stronger when those customers rely on
that company to provide them with relevant advice and commentary. A business

l i c a
should also strive to become an established authority on general subjects within
its areas of expertise, which will attract prospective customers who are primarily

u
looking for an information resource.
b
4.
P
Focus on valued customers

ul
Businesses should focus on their most valuable customers to get the best results

h
from their efforts to improve retention on social media. The customers who will

a
R
yield the highest lifetime value for a business may be those who spend the most
money. However, customers who are more consistent with their purchases may
be more valuable to a company in the long run. Other types of valuable customers
include those who are easy to serve or act as brand ambassadors.
5. Educate your customers
Social media provides an excellent opportunity for a business to educate its
customers on its products and services. Customer education is especially helpful
for new customers who have just purchased a product. This use of social media
can reduce customer frustration and confusion, which can proactively avoid a
customer service call or the loss of the customer altogether. Common methods of
educating customers include product guides and tutorials, especially videos.
Consultation and training services are also an effective means of providing
customer support on social media.

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Q11.How can the B2B marketer start to increase customer loyalty through
social media engagements ?
Ans :
Steps in increase customer loyalty through social media
1. Pay Attention to Customer Sentiment
The best way to get started with customer loyalty is by empathizing with your
buyers wherever they happen to be in their professional lives. Enter the role
of social listening.
By using specialized social media managment tools, you can monitor social
posts, discussion groups, and comments about your industry, and about your
brand specifically. If you find discussions happening about issues your customers

s
are concerned about, it’s the perfect chance to offer helpful suggestions that are

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tangential to your products and services. If your brand name is coming up in
conversations, you can step in with helpful content or directly answer lingering
questions.

l i c a
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Not all B2B marketers track sentiment, so if you’re an early adopter, you’ll
have the advantage in tracking a phenomenon that will only become more and

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more important in B2B marketing. Social listening is one of the ultimate keys to
determining how your customers really feel about you, which is the first step in

h
solidifying positive impressions and creating future loyalty.

a
2.
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Combine insights from your CRM and social
You already have customers. And you already know how the relationships with
them have evolved and what sentiment you’ve detected. This is invaluable data.
When you take what you’ve learned from social listening and combine it
with insights into how your real-time customers feel, you’ll have all the intelligence
you need for crafting a consistently attractive experience that inspires loyalty.
Here are some ways of mining your customer relationships for invaluable data:
 The obvious: ask your customers how they feel about you! All it
takes is a simple survey, consisting of a few questions. Let customers tell
you, both through multiple choice answers and in their own words, what
they like about your brand message, your products, and what concerns or
unresolved issues they have with both.

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 Analyze what your CRM software says about your customers.

Collect data across touch points about customer sentiment. Brainstorm with
colleagues in sales about their impressions of important customer
relationships.
 Compare your ideal customer profiles with current relationships.
Determine whether the journeys that some of your best customers have
with your brand measure up to the model put forth by your ideal customer
profile. From there, you can ask a few important questions: are customers
happy with your services, or might there be some dissatisfaction lurking
under the surface? Do you need to work harder to generate demand, or
perhaps present offers in a different way to truly appeal to the market segment
in question? Based on what you gather from current customers, see if your
customer profiles still hold up as they are.
3. Customer Advocacy Grow out of Interactivity
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Of course, customer loyalty goes beyond just serving up excellent content all the
time. The ultimate in customer loyalty is involving your buyers in unfolding story

c
l i
that is your brand. That is, B2B marketers should turn their company’s most
loyal customers into advocates.
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5.8 USING SPECIFIC SOCIAL MEDIA

h ul
Q12.How to using Specific Social Media ?
Ans :
a
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Given that each social network is unique, let’s look at how you can be using the
big players in the social media world - Facebook, Linkedln, Google+, and Twitter.
1. Using Facebook
Facebook is the biggest social network, with more than 750 million users. Both
B2C and B2B businesses have found success marketing on Facebook.
Here are some tips on how to best market to other businesses on Facebook:
(i) Create a page for your business
Not a personal page, but what some call a “fan” page. (Facebook just calls
them, somewhat generically, “pages.”) This page is where all your posts
(status updates) will appear, and can also host other content. Speaking of
that other content.

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(ii) Add photos to your page

These can be pictures of your products, people, facilities, you name it just
make sure they’re of interest to your customers.
(iii) Add videos to your page
This is a great place (in addition to YouTube, of course) to post all the
educational and informational you produce.
(iv) Add a discussion board to your page
You can add tabs or subpages to your Facebook page; one very useful one
is a discussion board page.
This is where your customers can talk amongst themselves with you joining
in as necessary, of course.
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(v) Further customize your page

c a tio
b l i
Facebook offers a variety of tools you can use to customize both the
appearance and content of your page; you can also link to content on other

P u
sites, including YouTube and Twitter. Use the tools at your disposal to make
your Facebook page reflect your branding and a similar look and feel to

a h ul
your main website.
(vi) Encourage customers to “like” your page

RIn Facebook parlance, someone who “likes” your page (that is, who clicks
the Like button on your page) becomes a subscriber to your content. Your
status updates will show up in their news feeds, and they’ll have access to
all the con­tent you post. You need to use other promotional media to
encourage all your customers to go to Facebook and click that Like button.
Make sure you include the URL for your page in all your promotional
materials, and actively ask customers to “like” or follow you on Facebook.
(vii) Encourage customers to recommend your page to others
This is part of the loyalty phase; encourage your existing customers to get
their friends and colleagues interested in your page. The more noncustomers
you have signed up, the more potential leads you have.

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(viii) Post regularly

You don’t just want a static page on Facebook. You also want to regularly
post interesting messages—what Facebook calls status updates. You should
try to post somewhere between once a day and once a week; more frequently
is better.
(ix) Post about topics of interest to your customers
This goes without saying. Your posts have to be useful and interesting to
your customers or they’ll quit reading them—or even “unlike” you on
Facebook You can post about your company, your employees, your products
and services, your customers, even industry issues. Just make sure each
post is of value.
(x) Ask questions
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c a tio
Your posts can also include questions for your Facebook customers.
Facebook is all about conversations; why not start the conversation yourself

l i
by posing a question or posting a survey? Ask your customers what they

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think about a particular development, industry trend, new product, or

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whatever. Not only do you get the conversation going, you also get free

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market research.

h
(xi) Encourage comments

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Your Facebook friends can post their own messages on your page. (If you’ve
enabled said third-party posting, that is.) Encourage your customers to use
your Facebook page to ask questions, comment on your products and
services, and just generally get the conversation started. It’s all about customer
participation.
(xii) Monitor and respond
It’s not all about talking to your customers; it’s also about listening to them.
That means you can’t just post your own content, you have to constantly
monitor the comments that your customers make about your posts and to
your Facebook page. Communicating on Facebook requires a lot of attention
and the ability to respond quickly and intelligently. Make sure you assign the
job to someone who is both technically proficient and PR savvy.

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2. Using Google+
The newest entrant into the social networking field is Google, with its Google+
service (plus.google.com). Google+ is a lot like Facebook, only more organized
and with a cleaner interface. Within a few weeks of launch, it had attracted more
than 20 million users, and experts believe it will hit 100 million users faster than
any similar site.
One of the more interesting features of Google+ is how it ties together posts
to the social network with Google’s search engine. That’s right, Google+ posts
will not only show up in search results, but also influence other results. For example,
mentions on Google+ should increase a company’s search ranking. So, the more
you get people talking about you on Google+, the higher your normal Google
search ranking will be.

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Although Google+ is still new and marketers are still figuring out its ins and

tio
outs, the basics of what you need to do with the site, at least from a marketing

marketing on Google+:

l i a
perspective, are already becoming apparent. Here is some basic advice for

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(i) Establish a Page for your business

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Google offers business Pages, similar to Facebook’s business pages. You
want to create such a Page for your business, and customize it (as much as
Google allows) to reflect your company’s brand.

a h
(ii) Add content to your Page

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Like Facebook, Google+ lets you add photos and videos to your business
Page; you should do so. (And make sure you use your company logo as
your profile picture!)
(iii) Invite your customers
Naturally, you want to invite all your customers to become your friends on
Google+. That’s what it’s all about.
(iv) Create segment-specific Circles
One of the unique features of Google+ is the ability to group similar “friends”
into Circles, and then direct your posts only to specific Circles. This is a
great way to segment your customer list; you can create Circles by region,
company size, industry, or whatever, and then segment your posts accordingly.

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(v) Post frequently

As with Facebook, you need to keep your face in front of your customers.
That means posting regularly, at least weekly and perhaps daily.
(vi) Post interesting and useful content
Also as with Facebook, make sure your posts are interesting to and useful
for your customer base. The more useful your posts, the more your customers
will look forward to reading them.
(vii) Host video chats
Google+’s Hangout feature lets you conduct video chats with up to 10
participants. That’s an ideal way to host your own webinars or product
demonstrations, free.

n s
tio
3. Using Linkedln

l i a
Facebook and Google+ are consumer-oriented social networks that also happen

c
to be used by businesses. Linkedln (www.linkedin.com), on the other hand, is a

u b
social network designed specifically for business professionals which makes it
an essential part of your B2B digital marketing plan.

ul P
What Linkedln lacks in raw usage numbers (it’s only 100 million strong,

a h
compared to Facebook’s 750 million users), it more than makes up for in other
key factors. It has an older user base (big among the 35-54 group), a more affluent

words,R
demographic, and high visibility among business people of all stripes. In other

Linkedln is the go-to medium for reaching potential business decision makers
in your industry.
How do you harness the power of Linkedln for your B2B marketing? Here
are some tips:
(i) Create a company page
Your company page on Linkedln is your home base on the social
network. It’s more than just a profile of your company; it’s also where your
customers can read your posts and engage with you socially. You need to
create one.

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(ii) Customize your company page

You can add tabs to your company page for various business-specific
functions, such as a company over­view, products and services, careers,
and the like. You can also add photos and videos to your page, which is
always good.
(iii) Add presentations to your company page
Linkedln provides a number of applications, such as SlideShare, that enable
you to add PowerPoint presentations to your company page. If you have
presentations to share with customers, this is a good way to do it.
(iv) Use polls to attract an audience

s
Add the Linkedln Poll application to your company page to ask questions of

n
tio
your current and potential customers—or of Linkedln subscribers in general.
It’s a great way to engage your audience, and to attract new prospects.
(v) Add Twitter and Blog feeds to your page

l i c a
b
Linkedln offers several applications that let you add feeds from other sources—

u
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specifically your blog and Twitter account—to your company page. This
lets you consolidate multiple information streams in a single place, which
makes your Linkedln page that much more valuable to your customers.

a h
(vi) Create a Linkedln Group

RLinkedln Groups are mini-networks where like-minded professionals take

part in discussions about a given topic. Almost 18 million users take part in
Linkedln Groups every week, creating a vibrant community of business
people. Consider creating a group related to your industry, and then actively
participate in it. You can help group members—your current and potential
customers—share insights, learn best practices, and engage in industry
debate.
(vii) Promote your Linkedln Group
Use all the media at your disposal, digital and otherwise, to let your current
and prospective customers know about your Group—and encourage them
to join.

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(viii) Participate in other Linkedln Groups

Your own Group is important, but so is your active participation in other
Groups-specifically,
Groups hosted or visited by your customer base. Social networking is
a two-way street, and you need to participate as much as you host.
Even though Linkedln has a smaller user base than Facebook or Twitter,
you might find that you get better results from this social network for
professionals. It’s definitely worth your attention.
4. Using Twitter
Now we come to Twitter, which as you know really isn’t a social network but

n s
rather something more akin to a blog, but with shorter messages. For many B2B
businesses, Twitter is the first social media they add to their marketing plans.

c a tio
Twitter is probably the easiest social medium to get started with and use on
a regular basis. You create an account for your company and then start tweeting.
That’s it.

b l i
u
Of course, you do have to adjust your messaging to the medium. In Twitter’s

P
ul
case, than means creating posts that have no more than 140 characters; that’s
the maximum you can include in a tweet. Past that, what you tweet about is up
to you.

a h
(i)
R
Here are some tips on how to best use Twitter in your B2B marketing plan:
Encourage followers
Twitter works for B2B marketing only if you have lots of current and potential
customers following you. To that end, use your other media to publicize
your Twitter feed, and encourage customers to follow you there.
(ii) Tweet frequently
Twitter followers expect a regular stream of tweets from the people and
companies they follow. Tweeting once a week probably isn’t going to be
enough. Heck, once a day might not be enough. Many successful businesses
tweet several times a day. It’s all about maintaining a constant presence,
and given the barrage of tweets out there, more is definitely better.

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(iii) Keep it relevant

What should you tweet about? Whatever your customers want to read, of
course. You might post about new products, specials, industry news,
whatever is of interest to your customer base.
In short (and short is important on Twitter), you need to find some
snippet of real news or information, and make that your tweet. In most B2B
companies, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem—there’s always
something new and interesting to tweet about. And if you can’t find anything
interesting to tweet about, maybe you shouldn’t be tweeting.
(iv) Keep it short
As previously mentioned, your tweets cannot exceed the 140-character limit.

s
Because of this, tweets do not have to con­form to proper grammar, spelling,

n
tio
and sentence structure—and, in fact, seldom do. It is common to abbreviate
longer words, use familiar acronyms, substitute single letters and numbers

l i c a
for whole words, and refrain from all punctuation. You should also use a
link-shortening service, such as bit.ly (www.bit.ly), when you want to include
links in your tweets.

u b
(v) Break up long posts

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When you’re posting to Twitter, think in terms of single-sentence

a h
communications—a single thought sent out into the Twitterverse. Instead of
saving up all your thoughts for one long blog post, post them throughout the

Rday in short, individual tweets.

(vi) Link to more information
Sometimes you just can fit everything you want to say into 140 characters.
In this instance, you can tweet a summary, something akin to a headline,
and then link to a longer article on your blog or website. (Or, for that matter,
to industry news on another website.)
(vii) Tweet about other media
Use Twitter as a promotional vehicle for other marketing activities. If you
have a new blog post, tweet about it; if you’ve posted new photos to your
Facebook page, tweet about that, too. There’s value to be gained by pointing
from Twitter to other things you’re doing in your company.

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(viii) Use hashtags

On Twitter, a hashtag is the equivalent of a keyword. You create a hashtag
by putting the hash or pound character in front of a given word, like this:
#hashtag. When you add a hash character before a specific word in a
tweet, that word gets referenced by Twitter as a kind of keyword, and that
word becomes clickable by anyone viewing the tweet; it also helps other
users find relevant tweets when they search for that particular topic.
(ix) Monitor the Twitterverse
It’s likely that you’ll have many customers who want to use Twitter as a
means to contact you with questions and customer support issues, either as
responses to your tweets or via private tweets. That’s cool it’s nice to have

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another support channel. This means, however, that you have to answer
these questions, and in a timely fashion. If you can’t answer the questions

do it, make sure the customer is satisfied.

c a tio
directly, forward them to your customer support department. However you

l i
Twitter is a unique bird, as you’ll soon discover. It’s primarily a one-

b
way communications vehicle, and a great way to get your messages lots of

P u
them in front of your most loyal customers.

a h ul
5.9 MEASUREMENT OF

Q13.Discuss about Measurement of Digital Media.

DIGITAL MEDIA

Ans : R
Digital Media
Digital media is digitized content that can be transmitted over the internet or
computer networks. This can include text, audio, video, and graphics. This means
that news from a TV network, newspaper, magazine, etc. that is presented on a Web
site or blog can fall into this category. Most digital media are based on translating
analog data into digital data. The Internet began to grow when text was put onto the
Internet instead of stored on papers as it was previously. Soon after text was put onto
computers images followed, then came audio and video onto the Internet. Digital media
has come a long way in the few short years to become as we know it today and it
continues to grow.

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The Birth of Digital Media

In earlier times, messages were once distributed by one particular source to their
audience. The audience gathered their sources through a certain form of distribution,
whether it was newspapers, magazines, radio, or television. Publishers had a great
source of power over the information distributed and how it was perceived by the
public. However, all that began drastically change with the rise of computers and more
importantly the Internet.
The Future of Digital Media
Last year the State of the News Media report predicted that 1,500 newsroom
jobs would be lost at the end of the year making them 30% smaller than they were in
the year 2000. This shows that digital media in the news continues to grow. Although
traditional news media will most likely never be fully extinguished they will need to
further adapt to the times.

n s
tio
In order to make money, they will need to work with search engines to fight

l i a
against news sites provided for free and rely more on advertising. Digital media has

c
eliminated many cultural boundaries and will continue to do so as other less developed
countries begin to become more reliant on technology. Digital media has provided

u b
instant communication between people all over the world. Different forms of digital

ul P
media make this interaction easy and fun. Technology and the sharing of photographs
on the Internet have found ways past language barriers. Thanks to digital media we are
now entering a world that is culturally globalized.

a h
Digital media products can be found in:


ReCommerce
Games – console, online and mobile
 Websites and mobile applications
 Animation
 Social media
 Video
 Augmented reality
 Virtual reality
 Data visualization
 Location-based services
 Interactive Storytelling

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Best Digital Marketing Measurement Tools

 Google Analytics : A single tool that is helpful for data collection, configuration,
data processing and reporting. It’s specialized data reviewing feature helps to
analyze the performances of the website or page, apps and different marketing
channels used during the campaign. Google Analytics consists of JavaScript
code on each page of websites, a data collection feature and a processing engine
that presents the reports.
 Google AdWords : It is a unique tool of Google for designing and maintaining
the PPC ads. It also enables to monitor the statistics so that brands can track the
success of the ads by calculating the return on investment.
 Google Search Console (aka Webmaster) : It is a tool set to understand
what is going on within the website. Google Search Console or Webmaster

n s
Tools helps to analyze contents, identify technical errors, check indexing status

tio
and optimize visibility of the websites. Search Console or Webmaster reviews a

the dashboard to the website owner.

l i a
website the way a crawler views and crawls it and presents the detailed report in

c

b
Google Alerts : It allows to set alerts for a personal name, brand name and

u
products. These alerts help notifications to remain updated. That is the main


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reason it is good to be used as a social media tool.
Adobe Analytics : This tool helps to discover high-value audiences by applying

a h
real-time analytics and detailed segmentation.



R
Webtrends : Its analytics use simple dashboard interface to reveal the true
picture of customers’ interaction with the brand across different channels.
Mixpanel : It is an advanced analytics platform that answers the queries of
reporting actions. It is apt for mobile and web functions.
 Upsight : It is an ideal tool to identify business KPIs. It is brilliant as it first
explores the user database and then creates personalized user experiences for
better app performances.
 Bitly : It is a unique online tool that helps to shorten the URL so that it becomes
easier to share among different platforms. But, it is easy to measure the success
rate of bit.ly URL. Add (a +) at the end of each bit.ly URL to count the number
of clicks, track the location of the clicks and identify the top referrers. This is
suitable not only for the brand URLs, but also to track competitor’s URL.

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 Hootsuite : This tool helps to get a clear and complete overview of social
media performance in real time and measure the team’s performance. Hootsuite
analytics share customized reports of each social media platform’s performance.
These reports are shown in dashboard called Boards mentioning the in-depth
analysis of all platforms.
 Apsalar : It is a tool to measure digital marketing campaigns with the help of
mobile app attribution and data management procedure.

5.9.1 Analyzing Digital Media Performance

Q14.How to Analyzing Digital Media Performance ?
Ans :
Analyzing Digital Media Performance

n s
The performance of most digital marketing media can be quantified rather
objectively. Either the numbers are good or they’re not.

c a tio
Let’s look at each digital marketing medium individually, along with the key metrics
you’ll want to measure.

b l i
P u
Digital Media Analytics can be simply defined as analysis of qualitative and
quantitative information flowing from your business and using it to understand user
behavior.

a h ul
The main objective of digital media analytics is to measure the performance of

R
your digital properties and report the information in such a way that actionable insights
can be deduced from those reports. To understand this better, you need to analyze an
organization’s varied requirements at various stages.
1. Inception
This is the first stage where the management decides to launch a product. The
main aim at this stage is to create a seamless and an efficient product. The focus
at this stage would be to spend less and then see how users are reacting to the
product.
2. Growth Phase
This is the second stage where you would have data around the user reactions to
your product. The main focus at this stage should be to expand the reach of the
product by all the profits made in inception phase. In this phase, it is very critical

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to understand the marketing channels that are performing well for your business,
and this can be achieved only by extensive testing. You need to have a check on
the ROI on each marketing channel.
3. Aiming Retention
At this stage, you have enough members visiting your portal, so the main focus
at this stage would be to get sales from your existing customers, and at the same
try to acquire new customers. At this point you would probably be a market
leader so the focus should also be to maintain the positions by exploring new
market channels and also be innovative to ensure customers are engaged.

5.9.2 Analyzing Website Performance

Q15.How to Analyzing Website Performance?

n s
tio
Ans :
Analyzing Website Performance

l i c a
u b
If you want to see how well your website is performing, you need to know a few
things. It helps to know how many customers are visiting your site, of course.

ul P
It’s also nice to know how many pages are viewed, as well as which are your
top- performing pages.

a h
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more you can discover about the

R
current and potential customers visiting your site information that provides important
insight into the kinds of visitors your site is attracting and how they’re finding your site.
Given all you can track, however, here’s a list of what I feel are the most important
metrics for B2B sites, the ones that truly measure your digital marketing performance:

1. Visitors
The first metric that most people involved with a website want to know is how
many visitors there were to the site. The more visitors you have, the busier your
site is. You can track both “raw” visitors and unique visitors; the unique number
is more relevant because the raw visitor data can count the same visitors more
than once. When you track unique visitors, you’re tracking individual people,
even if they make multiple visits to your site within a 24-hour period.

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2. Visit
When a visitor views your site, that counts as a visit. Obviously, you can have
more visits than you have visitors because people can visit more than once a
day. That said, it’s nice to know how often your site is being accessed, so the
visits number is good for that.
3. Page views
Most of us want visitors to view .more than just one page on our sites. To that
end, you should look at the page views metric. A Track these metrics to learn
more about how people are finding your site and what they’re doing once they
get there.
Choosing A Web Analytics Tool

n s
To gather data about your website’s performance, you use a web analytics tool.

a tio
Web analytics is the collection and analysis of data relating to website visitors. It’s a
way to measure the traffic to your website, and then find out what visitors are doing

c
during their visits.

b l i

P u
Which are the most popular web analytics tools? Here’s the list I’d choose from:

ul
ClickTale
 Google Analytics

a h
Logaholic


RMetaTraffic
Mint
 Omniture
 Piwik
 Unica
 VisiStat
 WebTrends
 Woopra
 Yahoo! Web Analytics

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Interestingly, the most popular of these tools, such as Google Analytics, are free.
Others are available on a paid subscription basis. But know that most of these tools
track the same key metrics, so you might as well look around for the lowest-cost solution
available.
Analyzing Search Engine Marketing Performance
As previously noted, most of the new traffic to your site will come from search
engine results. As you’re also aware, you can improve your search rankings by performing
search engine optimization (SEO) on your site.
There are lots of ways to track the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, from
monitoring site visitors to looking at your ranking at Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Here
are the ones I view as most important:
1. Visitors

n s
tio
Our first key metric is one with which you should be quite familiar—the number
of visitors, either on a site-wide or page-specific basis. To measure ongoing SEO

l i c a
success, you want to look at the number of visitors over time, not just those on a
specific date. If you see that the number of visitors per day is increasing over

u b
time, you know you’re doing something right.
2. Page views

ul P
Page views matter to SEO for two reasons. First, you can see how the popularity

a h
of a page increases over time; an increasing number of page views means that

R
you’re doing something to attract more traffic to the page. Second, you can
determine the relative popularity of pages on your site—that is, which are your
site’s most popular pages, as determined by their respective number of page
views.
3. Landing pages
Look at the most popular landing pages on your site, and try to determine why
these pages attract so many visitors. Is it because they’re searched for or because
they’re linked to? (You can use two of the other metrics—queries and inbound
links, which we discuss in short order—to help answer this question.
4. Referring sites
Now let’s turn our attention to how visitors get to your site—from search sites,
referring sites, direct links, or other method. Next, take a look at which specific

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sites are driving the most traffic to your site. Chances are, Google, Yahoo!, and
Bing will be among the top traffic drivers. Display this data in descending order,
and make a note to pay special attention to the top-referring sites; it’s also a
good idea to find out why a lot of traffic is coming from a given site.
5. Keywords/queries
For the portion of traffic coming from the search engines, you want to determine
which keywords are generating the most traffic. Take a look at the list of queries
or keywords generated by your analytical tool; this will tell you the most important
keywords for your site. If this list matches your own internal keyword list, great. If
not, you might want to either rethink which keywords are most important (based
on the ranking of actual keyword queries) or rework your site’s SEO to better
emphasize your desired keywords.

n s
tio
6. Search engine ranking

l i a
There’s one more metric you want to ana­lyze to determine the effectiveness of

c
your SEO activities—raw search engine ranking. It makes sense, really; if you’re

b
optimizing your site to rank higher with the search engines, you need to find out

u
ul P
whether your ranking actually is improving. A high ranking means more people
will see and click through to your site; a low ranking means fewer visitors. It’s

h
really that simple.

a
R
5.9.3 Analyzing Advertising Performance
Q16.How to Analyzing Advertising Performance ?
Ans :
Analyzing Advertising Performance
After you start advertising online, it’s time to start tracking your campaign’s
per­formance. That means looking at different types of raw data and then analyzing
that data in various ways. You can learn from both your successes and your failures
and use this information to create better-performing campaigns in the future.
When you’re tracking the performance of your online ad campaign, what data
should you be looking at? Here’s a list of what I feel are the most important metrics for
both PPC and display advertisers:

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1. Impressions

How many times was your ad displayed? That’s the impressions metric, which
is especially key for CPM display advertising; the more impressions, the more
people who were exposed to your ad.

2. Clicks

How many times was your ad clicked? That’s the clicks metric, key to PPC
advertising; the more clicks, the more traffic you have to your landing page. Of
course, you can’t get a lot of clicks if you don t start with a lot of impressions, so
that’s always job one. But a large number of impressions doesn’t always result in
a large number of clicks; if your ad isn’t interesting or compelling, people won’t
be inspired to click it.

n s
tio
3. Click-through rate

l i a
Raw clicks are important, but not necessarily the best measurement of an ad’s

c
effectiveness. A better measurement of ad effectiveness is the click-through rate

u b
(CTR). This metric measures the number of clicks as a percentage of the number

ul P
of impressions. A high CTR indicates that your ad is doing its job; a low CTR
indicates that you need to retool your ad copy.

4.

a h
Percent of clicks served

R
When looking at the performance of indi­vidual ads within an online ad campaign,
take a gander at the percent of clicks served metric. This data point tells you
which ads in an ad group are getting the most displays; it divides the number of
impressions for a given ad by the total number of impressions for all the ads in an
ad group. Naturally, an ad with a higher percent of clicks served number is
outperforming the other ads in the campaign; an ad with a lower number is
underperforming the other ads.

4. Average position

In what position was your ad displayed on a search engine’s results pages? That’s
the average position for an ad; the higher an ad’s position, the more clicks the ad
will get and the more traffic that ad will drive to your landing page.

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5. Cost
How much have you paid in total for a given keyword, ad, or campaign? That’s
the cost metric—as in, this item costs you this much money over a specific time
frame.
6. Conversions
In web analytics, a conversion occurs when someone clicks your ad and then
proceeds to do what you want them to do make an inquiry, leave their contact
information, or even make a purchase.
7. Conversion rate
This is the number of conversions divided by the number of clicks.
8. Cost per conversion

n s
tio
This is how much each conversion cost you.

l i c a
u b
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Short Question and Answers

1. Social Media Marketing
Ans :
Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through
social media sites.
Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different
social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short
messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social
networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of
other activities.
2. Social media
n s
Ans :

c a tio
b l i
Social media is a top platform for market research and decision-making process.
Billions of people use social media for learning, marketing, shopping and decision

P u
making. Now when they use social media, they create and generate data that enables
data analysts to do the analysis on the related subject.
3.
Ans :
a h ul
Social networking with face book, google + and LinkedIn

R
In short, social networks help people keep up-to-date on what others are doing,
and keep others updated on what they are doing. They also help establish a sense of
community based on shared experiences at school, in the workplace, or at play.
There are three major social networks active in the U.S. Today:
(i) Facebook
With more than 750 million users, it’s the largest social network available, popular
with both consumers and businesses.
(ii) Google+
This is the newest social network on the block, Google’s big entry into the social
networking scene. Google+ garnered 20 million users in its first few weeks of
operation, and has the potential to be a strong long-term competitor to Facebook.

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(iii) Linkedln
This is the social network for professionals and business people. Linkedln has a
smaller, albeit older and more affluent, audience than Facebook (100 million
professional users), which makes it very popular among B2B marketers.
4. Microblogging
Ans :
(i) Definition: Posting of very short entries or updates on a social networking
site
 Allows users to subscribe to other users’ content, send direct messages,
and reply publicly
 Allows users to create and share hashtags to share content about related
subjects
n s
(ii) Examples: Twitter and Tumblr

c a
Additional tool for managing micro blogging : TweetDeck tio

b l i
Tweetdeck downloadable desktop application made exclusively for

P u
Twitter, allows for the organization of tweets through “customizable
columns, multiple accounts toggling, scheduling, and automatically

a h ul
refreshing feeds”. TweetDeck relies on column-based interface that
allows all social media profiles to be viewed in one window.
This beginner’s guide to TweetDeck detials how to set-up and

5.
R
Digital Media
customize Tweet Deck features to your agency’s needs.

Ans :
Digital media is digitized content that can be transmitted over the internet or
computer networks. This can include text, audio, video, and graphics. This means
that news from a TV network, newspaper, magazine, etc. that is presented on a Web
site or blog can fall into this category. Most digital media are based on translating
analog data into digital data. The Internet began to grow when text was put onto the
Internet instead of stored on papers as it was previously. Soon after text was put onto
computers images followed, then came audio and video onto the Internet. Digital media
has come a long way in the few short years to become as we know it today and it
continues to grow.

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6. Digital media products

Ans :
 eCommerce
 Games – console, online and mobile
 Websites and mobile applications
 Animation
 Social media
 Video
 Augmented reality
 Virtual reality

n s
tio
 Data visualization


Location-based services
Interactive Storytelling
l i c a
u b
ul P
a h
R

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JAWAHARLAL NEHRU TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY HYDERBAD

M.B.A II - Year III - Semester Examination
R17
MODEL PAPER - I
DIGITAL MARKETING
Time : 3 Hours] [Max. Marks : 75
PART - A (5 × 5 = 25 Marks)
(Short Answer Questions)
ANSWERS
1. (a) Digital Marketing (Unit-I, S.Q.A 1)
(b) Online Advertising (Unit-II, S.Q.A 3)
(c) Digital Marketing Plan (Unit-III, S.Q.A 1)
(d) HTML Tags (Unit-IV, S.Q.A 3)
(e) Social media (Unit-V, S.Q.A 2)
PART - B (5 × 10 = 50 Marks)
(Essay Type Questions)
2. (a) What is digital marketing? Explain the concept of digital
marketing. (Unit-I, Q.No. 1)
(OR)
(b) What are the components of digital marketing ? (Unit-I, Q.No. 3)
3. (a) Write about website marketing. (Unit-II, Q.No. 2)
(OR)
(b) Write about search engine marketing. (Unit-II, Q.No. 3)
4. (a) Write about Digital Marketing Plan. (Unit-III, Q.No. 1)
(OR)
(b) Why you need a digital marketing plan? (Unit-III, Q.No. 2)
5. (a) What is the importance of search engine marketing ? (Unit-IV, Q.No. 2)
(OR)
(b) How Online Advertising Differs from Traditional
Advertising? (Unit-IV, Q.No. 6)
6. (a) Explain about understanding social media. (Unit-V, Q.No. 2)
(OR)
(b) Explain about Social Sharing with YouTube. (Unit-V, Q.No. 7)

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SOLVED MODEL PAPERS DIGITAL MARKETING (JNTU-H)

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY HYDERBAD

M.B.A II - Year III - Semester Examination
R17
MODEL PAPER - II
DIGITAL MARKETING
Time : 3 Hours] [Max. Marks : 75
PART - A (5 × 5 = 25 Marks)
(Short Answer Questions)
ANSWERS
1. (a) Digital marketing trends (Unit-I, S.Q.A 6)
(b) Digital Marketing Channels (Unit-II, S.Q.A 1)
(c) Element of Digital Marketing Plan (Unit-III, S.Q.A 2)
(d) Methods of Online Advertising (Unit-IV, S.Q.A 5)
(e) Social networking with facebook, google+ and LinkedIn (Unit-V, S.Q.A 3)
PART - B (5 × 10 = 50 Marks)
(Essay Type Questions)
2. (a) What is the need and scope of digital marketing ? (Unit-I, Q.No. 4)
(OR)
(b) What are the benefits / advantages of digital marketing? (Unit-I, Q.No. 5)
3. (a) Explain about social media marketing. (Unit-II, Q.No. 7)
(OR)
(b) Discuss about migrating from traditional channels to
digital channels. (Unit-II, Q.No. 12)
4. (a) Write about situational analysis. (Unit-III, Q.No. 6)
(OR)
(b) Write about opportunities and issues in digital
marketing plan. (Unit-III, Q.No. 7)
5. (a) Write about CPC (cost-per-click). (Unit-IV, Q.No. 9)
(OR)
(b) Explain about Display Ads. (Unit-IV, Q.No. 10)
6. (a) Discuss about social networking with facebook,
google+ and LinkedIn. (Unit-V, Q.No. 3)
(OR)
(b) Explain about Blogging as a Social Medium. (Unit-V, Q.No. 5)

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MBA II YEAR III SEMESTER

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY HYDERBAD

M.B.A II - Year III - Semester Examination
R17
MODEL PAPER - III
DIGITAL MARKETING
Time : 3 Hours] [Max. Marks : 75
PART - A (5 × 5 = 25 Marks)
(Short Answer Questions)
ANSWERS
1. (a) Display Advertising (Unit-I, S.Q.A 4)
(b) Website Marketing (Unit-II, S.Q.A 2)
(c) Action Plan (Unit-III, S.Q.A 4)
(d) CPC (cost-per-click) (Unit-IV, S.Q.A 7)
(e) Microblogging (Unit-V, S.Q.A 4)
PART - B (5 × 10 = 50 Marks)
(Essay Type Questions)
2. (a) Discuss briefly about digital marketing platforms. (Unit-I, Q.No. 6)
(OR)
(b) Discuss about Digital Marketing Strategies. (Unit-I, Q.No. 7)
3. (a) How to using Digital Media for Customer Acquisition
Process ? (Unit-II, Q.No. 20)
(OR)
(b) How to Using Digital Media Retention of New customers? (Unit-II, Q.No. 22)
4. (a) Write about goals and objectives in digital marketing
plan. (Unit-III, Q.No. 8)
(OR)
(b) Explain about writing the marketing plan and imple-
menting the plan. (Unit-III, Q.No. 12)
5. (a) How to Choosing a Display Ad Format ? (Unit-IV, Q.No. 12)
(OR)
(b) How to Maximizing Effectiveness with a Custom
Landing Page ? (Unit-IV, Q.No. 14)
6. (a) How to using Social Media for Customer Reach,
Acquisition? (Unit-V, Q.No. 9)
(OR)
(b) How to using Social Media for Customer Retention
and Loyalty? (Unit-V, Q.No. 10)

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