how have digital technologies transformed marketing?

how have digital technologies transformed marketing?

The Internet, the web and digital media have transformed marketing and business since the first website ( http://info.cern.ch ) went live. With over 3 billion people around the world regularly using the web to find products, entertainment and friends, consumer behaviour and the way companies market to both consumers and businesses have changed dramatically.

To succeed in the future, organisations will need marketers, strategists and agencies with up-to-date knowledge of how to apply digital media such as the web, email, mobile and interactive TV.

The aim of Digital Marketing: 

1. Strategy, Implementation and Practice is to support students and professionals in gaining and developing this knowledge.

In the text, we will show how traditional marketing models and concepts can be applied to help develop digital marketing strategies and plans and where new models are appropriate. We will also give many practical examples and best practices for applying online communications tools to effectively market an organisation’s products and services using the Internet and other digital media.

2. The challenge for marketers is to assess which innovations are most relevant to their organisation and to seek to gain advantage through introducing them to a company such that the digital marketing techniques integrate effectively with traditional marketing communications.

This text will take you through the questions to ask and potential solutions step by step to enable you to develop appropriate strategies

In this home blog, after an initial scoping of digital marketing, we review two main aspects of managing digital marketing. The first part of this blog we review the main strategic challenges and opportunities of digital marketing that must be managed by organisations.

We then go on to introduce the communications techniques for promoting companies online through digital technology platforms such as desktop, tablet and smartphone devices (for example, search engine marketing (SEM), and social media and display advertising) using the unique characteristics of digital media. 

The following practitioner interview with Nick Dutch, Head of Digital at Domino’s Pizza Group, highlights some of the challenges and opportunities of marketing an online business.

What is your process for making investment decisions in media?

The starting point is based on integrating with business priorities, which are based on a classic campaign marketing planning process based on new product introductions for example so online campaign activities are aligned with these. At a top level, we make an investment-split decision for search marketing, affiliates and display based on previous performance trends comparing the previous year to different quarters and of course our current business targets and forecasts. We need to use the best mix of media to attract customers who are exhibiting different behaviours in their buying decision.

So some customers will be in the process of getting pizza in tonight and are looking for the best deals right now. 

Affiliates are significant in driving that decision. But others may be considering eating in a few days; display can be important here and we do see a halo-effect of display ads prompting searches for Domino’s, so it’s important to balance performance and brand investments. At a practical level, like all e-commerce sites, we look at our year-on-year performance carefully all decisions are based on beating year-on-year performance mentality. 

Detailed decisions are involved here for example around search, we may have a search budget where we have to balance investment in paid and natural search to get the best efficiency.

Likewise, depending on the market factors, we will change the balance of targeting different terms in Adwords; some terms are demand creation such as generics, whereas others mop up demand such as brand or local search terms. Adjusting the media mix month by month is always an ongoing activity because of four factors. First, competitor action such as a promotion or competing on a brand term or other media activity. Second, new marketing options we may want to test to gain advantages  for example, the current targeting options in Gmail or custom audiences in Facebook.

Then there are changes to business needs such as weather affecting demand – we have to generate more demand which can be mean upweighting generic or local search targeting for new customers.

Finally, our analysis techniques or tools of which media are effective will improve for example, we have been looking more recently at purchase attribution and this has given emphasis on display budget against more ‘mopping up channels’. I haven’t mentioned social media yet since it’s not so important from a direct-sales point of view.

That said, we do use content marketing where bespoke content is developed around our audience’s passion, for example to associate us with football. But it’s critical for other aspects such as community management on the social networks where we create and share content continuously around this. We do offer social sign-in through Facebook Connect, for example, but that isn’t used to a significant degree.

Of course, social media is also important for customer service where we have to manage this proactively. You’re We use some outsourced services for different social media activities.