Digital Marketing: Hard Work, and No Magic at All

More than four billion internet users were registered in January 2018, and this number is growing without stopping. On average, a person spends 5 to 10 hours online every day. Majority of modern professions relate with the computer and internet; add to that online shopping, news portals, social networks and YouTube, and you will not find free time from the global web.

This tendency of increasing time that humanity spends online has made marketers search for new methods of paving the way to consumers’ hearts. These methods and approaches have formed a new branch of marketing that we know as Digital Marketing.

Digital Marketing is

Web marketing, online marketing, internet marketing, and even electronic marketing, and these are all variants of how people named digital marketing. None of them is incorrect, but the most logical and appropriate name is the last one.

So what is digital marketing? On the wide web you can find hundreds of definitions that transmit the same idea with different words.

Digital Marketing is the use of all possible forms of digital channels for product or service promotion.

It’s one of the most lucid and straightforward definitions. Moreover, it’s not a textbook phrase; it’s an answer from our specialist, whom we asked to describe the essence of digital marketing in one sentence.

Now, you may say: “Well, use of all digital channels and product promotions are very interesting and useful, however, how does it work in practice? What steps do digital marketers take, for example, to increase business income or enhance their position on the market?”

How It Works

Work of the digital marketing team is an extended and multi-level process which employs many experts from different areas: marketers, designers, content creators, SMM/SEO experts.

Depending on issues, specialists from other areas can be involved to perform solutions of developed business strategy. Marketers perform the most difficult and extensive part of the whole project. Essentially, they create a development vector of the entire project and partly generate an action plan for the digital marketing team. Let’s consider the working process of the marketer step by step since it always raises the most questions and misunderstandings.

Marketers need to identify the tasks of the whole marketing campaign. If it’s a new product or product, not touched by the marketer’s hand then the first thing the marketers do is carry out different researches to know more about the product itself and its market environment; in other words this is an analysis of domestic and external contexts. Let’s see which aspects they include:

Analysis of the domestic context is an analysis of the company or product from the inside, research into its inner environment. These include goals of the company, vector of the strategic development, company’s strengths, values, and core competencies.

Analysis of the external context is an analysis of the external environment, and its factors, influencing the product. The primary objectives of this analysis are to define the target audience and competitors. Marketers not only have to understand who the prospective consumers of the product will be, but who these people are, how much can they spend on the product, their lifestyle, model of their social behavior, habits, and preferences. Regarding competitors, marketers define their strong and weak aspects, action on the market, analyze their marketing strategy, “what they say and do.” Only after that, the DM team begins to develop the marketing strategy fully.

Steps of the Marketing Strategy

1. Identifying Business Goals

The first step which the marketer does, at the beginning of any project, is to specify the goals and objectives that the product or service will strive to achieve—in other words, business needs.

Business goals (Money)

It is the foundation of the goals of the marketing strategy. It includes market situation, sales, and company’s profit.

Marketing goals (Numbers)

Marketers should specify how the target audience needs to change to get the stated goals. It might include increasing the number of new customers, changes to consumer base and habits of the product usage, increasing loyalty to the product.

Communication goals (Opinion/Action)

These goals are the supposed actions which consumers should take after the watched advertisement. At this level, marketers pursues objectives such as the creation of need on the product, increasing product awareness, a formation of the positive attitude to the product, and encouraging customer to purchase.

Media goals (Coverage)

It is the main measurable media targets that marketers want to achieve as a result of the successful strategy. For example, increasing coverage by two times, a growth of traffic to the website by 200%, increasing the number of leads by 100% for six months.

2. Development of the Value Conception

Development of the value conception is an inseparable part of any business strategy. At this point, marketers need to figure out why people will have to purchase the product, and find or create the features which would say: “We are better than the others because…” Creating the proper image in the minds of the future consumers is the essential purpose which the team always wants to achieve during the promotion campaign. At this step of the campaign’s development, marketers solve three issues relating to value conception:

Choice of Value
The name speaks for itself. Marketers define features which will differentiate the product from that of competitors. For that, they research the market to understand what benefits competitors offer, where they are better, where they can be ahead of them. Marketers have to find an answer to the question—why consumers should choose their product, and think of how to convey to consumers that their product is better. And the last, but not least—at this stage marketers decide who the target audience is.

Realization of Value

Now that we know what advantages the product has in comparison with competitors, it’s time to decide how to show these advantages to our target audience. Realization of value includes four points:

• The product itself (Stuffing and wrapper) It’s how the product looks like inside and outside.

• Price (Why should I pay?) The product has to “explain” why it costs this money precisely.

• Distribution channel (Where) We have to define the best places for purchasing our product.

• Promotion (Encourage) Figure out how we will motivate people to buy the product.

Transmission of Value

At this stage, marketers decide what advertising channels will be the best for the promotion of the product. They specify the budget needed for advertising, directly choose the means of delivering information to the target audience, find out the most profitable digital channels.

In the next article, we will talk about the remaining stages and touch upon the issue of putting into practice the developed business strategy.