Digital marketing can be understood as the marketing of the product and services using the digital channels to reach the consumers. It is the promotion of products or brands through one or more forms of digital media. Some of the examples of digital marketing are social media marketing, marketing through internet, mobile marketing etc. Digital marketing has brought in disruption in the marketing world. Traditional approaches of marketing like print advertisement, television advertisement etc., have taken a backseat, and everyone is focussing on digital marketing. Every company across globe is investing heavily in digital marketing because of its numerous benefits(Mooney & Slobodian, 2016)
Search engine optimisation(SEO), Pay per click(PPC), Public relation(PR), Social media marketing(SMM), Content marketing, Affiliate marketing, Viral marketing & influencer marketing are some of the different types of digital marketing strategies companies are adopting. These techniques have a great advantage over the traditional approach in terms of the reach & targeting. The ability of digital marketing to initiate a 2 way communication makes it extremely useful tool in the hands of the marketers(Ryan, 2016). It also helps the companies to successfully conduct market research, research on any new product the company is looking to launch and also to collect and review the feedback shared by the customers and handle their grievances. The biggest advantage of digital marketing is the engagement and the conversation a brand can have with its audience. Another major utility of digital marketing over traditional means is the analytics, with the advent of digital marketing, marketers have gotten heaps of consumer data regarding their preferences, their buying behaviour, likes and dislikes, their hobbies, which when analysed provides useful information to the marketers. Eventually after analytics segmentation, targeting and positioning and remarketing becomes easier for them (Lanz & Carmichael, 2015)
For the purpose of the study, Amazon.com is selected. Within the purview of digital marketing, all strategies used by amazon, its relevance, importance and its future scope will be discussed. The various digital marketing channels will also be discussed at length along with analytics.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy which focuses on increasing the visibility in organic (Non-paid) search engine results.SEO covers both the technical & creative elements which are required to improve the website ranking, drive more traffic on the website and increase the awareness in search engines. Every website requires working on its SEO, not just to make it search engine friendly, but it also makes the website better(Berman & Katona, 2013)
Majority of the website traffic is driven by search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), then comes various other social media platforms, affiliate marketing which pushes the remaining traffic on the website. However, search engines are still the preferred way of navigation for the users (Fishkin, 2015). The advantage of search engines is that they provide targeted traffic, because people are looking for your content, hence the users are highly filtered and targeted, thus if the search engine is unable to read the website, it will not show the website in the search result, thus losing out an opportunity to gain a customer, resulting in revenue loss. Targeted traffic to the website helps to gain popularity, revenue and exposure like no other channel of marketing. Search engine requires SEO, because they need to crawl through millions of website and come up with the most relevant result to the user (Dwyer, 2015)
SEO process can be broken down into 7 steps
In order to understand the elements of SEO strategy, it is divided in two parts: On Page SEO & off Page SEO
On Page SEO refers to the techniques which can be implemented on the website to improve the ranking in Search engine results page, on the other hand Off Page SEO refers to anything to everything that can be done outside the website to increase the visibility (Seo & Jung, 2016)
Sitemap can be understood as an XML file that lists the URL’s for a site with additional Meta data about each URL.
In order to measure the success of the SEO strategy, KPI measures are in place, some of the examples of it are:
In simple words, SEM can be understood as inorganic marketing (Paid advertising), it is the process of gaining traffic on the website by buying advertisement on search engine(Lanz & Carmichael, 2015). Brands use PPC to gain attraction on the website and increase the sales; it also helps in increasing the brand awareness. It is more often used by brands to promote their product and services (Social, 2015) Some common terms synonymous to PPC are:
Just like SEO, PPC has certain aspect to it in order to achieve a formidable strategy.
Keyword research: Researching for the keyword is the basic thing, every business should focus on, but some people try and not do it effectively and use the tool provided by Google. If the keyword is relevant, half of the work of PPC is done.
Keyword Grouping: This is the process of grouping of keywords and combining them to target the important market segments(Killoran,2013)
General setting: In this setting, choosing the name of the campaign along with the description is important. The types of campaign can be chosen from:
Search Network Only: Ads are triggered according to the search query, and the ads are only in text
Display Network Only: In this, both text and display appear on the publisher site.
Search & Display Network: Ad appears both on the search query and publisher site(Rehman & Khan, 2013)
Network: Google has the maximum network (67%), falling behind are Bing & Yahoo. Network is important to get more clicks on the advertisement. Google has maximum publishers in its kitty, like About.com. This helps in getting more impressions.
Devices: Advertisement should have do mobile targeting; the rising share of smartphones makes it inevitable for businesses to not focus on the device targeting in their campaign settings(Kang & RIew, 2015)
Location: Google ad words provide an option of choosing the location or the geographical area. It helps in better targeting(Mierlo, 2014)
Languages: As location helps in better targeting, Google has also given provision for selecting the language(Yuan, Wang, Li & Qin, 2014)
Bidding & Budget: Money on ad words is an important criterion for selecting a keyword and also managing the campaign. Google provides many options like setting up of daily budget, enable enhanced CPC etc., one should choose the bidding method according to the size and budget the campaign has been assigned(Fernandez, 2015)
PPC marketing is thus a very important tool, and Amazon takes real good advantage of the benefits of it, due to its business model, PPC is very relevant for the firm. It effectively uses Ad words and keeps on changing the strategy of its ad campaign to widen its targeting(Wilson, 2017)
It is a form of advertising which conveys the message using text, logos, GIF, animations, other graphics. It is very selective in targeting and it is different than Google’s classified ads or text ads, because that only includes the brand’s message, but the overall message of the brand(Vandatta & Poulin, 2015)
Marketers often presume that this advertising is expensive, but on the contrary, it is in direct proportion to the size of the banner and the host site(Jakobson & Rueben, 2013)
Amazon takes great advantage of the display/online ads, it spends heavily on the publishers site and other networks. Some of the benefits it of which is:
Building awareness, increasing the visibility and targeting the audience are some of the key benefits of Digital display advertising, as mentioned above, amazon does the same to increase the brand awareness and let its beautiful creative speak for the brand.
Amazon though, with its extensive big data knowledge, puts in lot of effort to not let its CTR decrease, hence does a good evaluation of the campaign before putting it live(Goldfarb & Tucker, 2011)
These ads are provided in different formats, depending on the host site or the publisher, some of the popular ad formats Amazon use for its digital display campaign are:
Users are bogged down by 100’s & 1000’s of ads every day by companies who are either selling their product, services, creating awareness, spreading information and so on, it is very easy for the user to get bored and also stop using that brands services. Hence, in order to take care of the customers, brands do frequency capping, in it, a brand controls how many times a user can see the ad. For example if the frequency is set as 2, a user would see the ad 2 times in a day, for one ad group.
The ads are created, and are ready to be published on the publisher site, which forms a part of display network. Display network can be understood as a collection of more than 2 million website, where the brands ad can appear. Display network sites reach about 90% of the entire internet audience, and it also comes with unique targeting offers, which puts and classifies the customer in a bucket and then shows the ad to him ranging high on relevancy and the search.
In e-commerce business, remarketing is the most deployed strategy, because ones the user has seen the ad of a product on a display network, and he has clicked onto it, the marketers make a note of it and keep showing the ad of the same product to the user on different website for the time he either purchases it or deletes his cache memory. It can be understood as one of the smartest ways to connect with the users or visitors who have not made the immediate purchase or enquiry, hence in remarketing, that audience who showed interest in the product, but has not purchased it yet, they are showed the ad anywhere else they look on the internet. A brilliant strategy which is highly selective and targeted in its operation.
In order to have a better understanding, the process is broken down into 5 simple steps; these are the steps amazon uses in order to setup a digital display campaign for its online audience
All these unique features and the usability make the digital display advertising lucrative to the brands.
In simple terms, it is the process of sending email to a consumer or potential consumer or group of people to make them do a purchase with the brand. Email marketing can be used for variety of purposes like, sharing information, making the customer aware of the company’s new policies or the changes in the product section, might have information regarding some festive season off, or personalized coupons for the sender, all in all, email marketing is also a very effective way of online promotion.
Some common terms used in email marketing are:
ESP-Email service provider- It is an acronym for the software which helps in sending the mails to the subscribers.
Marketing automation- Process of sending mailers to the subscribers based on some triggers.
Dynamic content-It is the content that can be displayed and triggered based on subscriber’s data
Hard bounce-It is when the email is returned to the sender permanently owing to certain reasons like invalid id, domain name etc.
Soft Bounce- An email which failed to deliver because of some temporary reasons.
Data capture-As email marketing is a very interesting tool in the hands of marketers, they want to capture as many contact they can, some of the smart ways by which amazon captures data or the contact of the people interested in their product or services are
Segmentation- In the context of email marketing, it can be understood as the practice of splitting up the email list into more segmented list. Amazon uses the following ways for its segmentation:
Hence, with segmentation more targeted communication can be send across to the customer base, it can also be segmented on the basis of open and closed clicks.
Designing the email is setting up the email in such a way that it appeals to the customers and they can take a call to action for it. Amazon uses some of the techniques to make the designing look more and more effective.
There are some metric to measure the success of email marketing campaign:
These are some of the metrics which helps in understanding the success of the email marketing campaign, analysing these metric provide amazon with valuable insight on the effectiveness of its campaign
It refers to the process of getting traffic or attention with the use of social media platforms. Platforms like Facebook, instagram, twitter provide great tools of advertising to the marketers. Amazon spends heavily on these platforms. Social listening is the key parameter in social media marketing, it is the process of listening to the conversation happening around the brand on social media, and amazon has a specialized team dedicated to social listening. It pushes the content most suitable for its audience. On a regular basis company keeps on pushing engaging content, coupons, offers and insight into products to keep its audience engaging and let the conversions drive the flow.
Facebook is leading the charts in social media platforms, some of the reasons for its high popularity amongst the marketers are:
Facebook promotions are extremely necessary for any brands. With the specific targeting, demographic options amazon targets its customers. Another important platform marketers are taking advantage of these days is, Integra. Instagram is becoming hugely popular with the marketers, with the new feature of story integral designed and launched; marketers are going crazy about it and doing promotions. Apart from that, instagram also provides an option of sponsored content, where the brand can advertise the product to its target audience. This targeting is also an aide to the publisher marketing as explained in the PPC above. Instagram is growing at a steady pace and more and more brands are using the platform extensively.
Twitter is another micro blogging site, which lets brands interact with its audience by composing a short message in 140 words. Twitter also lets brands use GIF and images to interact with its audience. Amazon realized the importance of twitter marketing and has been quite active in terms of marketing on the platform. Twitter has some features which cannot be copied and are essential to the businesses:
YouTube is other marketing channels which amazon a big fan is of, amazon has its own channel under which it keeps pushing content for its users. Apart from that, amazon uses the you tube platform for static marketing on the mask head and also puts rollers and in between ads in the video to its target audience. Linked in on the other hand is used for employer branding, through linked in amazon get good talent on the board, and it is also used to target the audience on linked in.
Tools like Google analytics, Moz analytics, Kiss metrics, twitter analytics and Facebook analytics provide valuable insight on the marketing campaign to the brand. This lets the advertisers know how is their audience reacting to the content, what is the conversion rate, what is the bounce rate, CTC, impression etc., using these metrics, company can revaluate its marketing strategy and work towards improving its marketing efforts.
Smartphone penetration is increasing rapidly; device targeting is becoming a good option. According to a research, a user interacts almost 150 times with his phone, hence it provides ample of opportunity to advertise on mobile phones. All the e commerce companies and social media platforms have moved to app based models, apps make it easier for the advertisers to target it users. 40% of user’s internet time is spent on the mobile phones, hence a great tool for advertising. Some of the interesting statistics on mobile marketing are:
Some of the ways by which amazon uses to target its mobile audience are:
Amazon has a different strategy to target its audience on different platform. It uses mobile marketing as a channel to provide clear and concise content, optimizes business for its local audience, understands and analyses its domestic and global audience and then targets the right content to them according to their search and browser history. Analytics on mobile is extremely important; some of the ways in which the KPI is measured are viewabilty, active page dwell, and interaction rate & total exposure time.
The entire user data on the internet is analysed through the various analytics tool available. All social media tools have their own tools to analyse the data and provide insight to the brands. Apart from it, Google has the best analytic tool which summarizes all the campaigns on Google ad words, Google sense, and Google search history and provides valuable information to a brand. A user journey can be understood as the first time he sees an advertisement on any media platform (Internet, social, mobile, publisher site, affiliate marketing), the ad leaves a cookie on his device and that cookie traces his entire journey. The ad is shown repeatedly to the user over and over again on different platforms and makes him remember about the product. SO, the journey from seeing the ad to the conversion is the user journey.
Setting up of Google analytics to track the user data is extremely simple and not a time consuming job. With the evaluation of the audience, or getting the audience insight, the traffic can be more and more targeted for its audience. This targeted traffic helps the website to increase its conversion rate and also achieve a better Click through rate. Some of the tools used by Amazon for analytics are:
40% of Amazon’s marketing budget is already being spent on digital marketing, the amount is excessively high, but in comparison to traditional marketing it is still less. Keeping in mind the above techniques, some of the strategies amazon should adopt to gain better market share can be:
Information gathering- Big data analytics has given huge power in the hands of the marketers. Now they have even the slightest bit of information about the user. This tool will help the marketer to better understand the user, his buying behaviour, his reading, watching habits etc., thus he can be easily put into a customer bucket and pushed organic and highly targeted content.
Business objectives: The above study is done with respect to the marketing department of amazon, hence the business objectives have to be defined in terms of the market growth and increase in its sales via the online channels. The objectives have to be evaluated on a quarterly basis and see the direction in which the organization is moving.
Spend more on Snapchat- Snapchat has evolved as the third most popular social media platform, it is slightly new in comparison to instagram, twitter, Facebook and linked in. But the youth is crazy about the snapchat. Hence, in order to target its young demographic between the age group of 14-38, snapchat is the best platform, and amazon can exploit the platform as it will be one of the earliest advertisers to market on that platform.
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