The Benefits of Digital Marketing - Essay Example

Digital Marketing ntroduction Technology has changed the way business is done in a big way. It has made it easier and cost effective for organizations to conduct their business activities. One of the activities that has gone digital is marketing. Most organizations seem to be heading towards digital marketing since if is proving to more effective as compared to other methods of marketing (Thomas, &Housden, 2011). Digital marketing refers to the marketing and promotion of goods and services through the internet and other digital means such as television advertisement, computers, digital billboards, Smartphones and any other devices that have the ability to combine sound and images to deliver a certain message. Digital marketing enables the organizations to engage themselves effectively with the customers in a manner that is cost effective, timely and usually relevant. In addition, digital marketing brings the customers closer to the organization. Some digital means such as internet marketing gives the customer a chance to give his view over a certain product or services or even suggest on what they might need to be done to increase their satisfaction. This is important since it makes customers feel they are part of the organization and that they are being considered as important stakeholders (John and Jones, 2009). Digital marketing presents the organization with numerous opportunities to expand their operations and gain competitive advantage over their competitors (Henderson, 2005). Apart from improving the relationship with its customers, there are numerous other opportunities that an organization can realize from digital marketing. This essay is a report on an investigation of the opportunities to an organization that chooses a digital approach to market its products and services. The organization to be investigated is Walmart. Background of the organization Wal-Mart Stores Inc is a retail store based I the United States of America. It has a global presence operating in about 15 countries worldwide. It is a public corporation and is ranked third among the top public corporations in the world after Exxon Mobil Corporation and Royal Dutch Shell. Its shares were first traded on the New York Stock Exchange in the year 1972. No other retail store in the world is larger than Wal-Mart. In addition, in terms of private employers Wal-Mart ranks first with more than two million employees in all its stores worldwide. Wal-Mart, a family controlled company is among the most valuable companies in the world Walton’s family controls 48% of the company shares. Sam Walton founded the company in the year 1962 and then it was incorporated in the year 1969 (Walmart, 2012). The company offers a wide range of products in all its stores worldwide. For instance, the company is known to be the largest grocery store in the United States of America. It also sells household items such as furniture and utensils, electronics, jewelry, clothing, baby products, beverages, beauty items as well as pharmacy products. In addition, the company also offers a number of services. Among the services include; photo services, paint mixing and Marlin travels. In addition, the company has regal nail, salon and spa, a program that offers services such as manicure, pedicure as well as nail care services (Walmart, 2012). The company offers its products and services to a widerange of customers. It targets the youths, the old as well as children. This is a strategy that has helped it gain a large share if the market. It offers almost anything that people from different age groups are likely to buy. It has a marketing strategy that has been of much benefit to its operation and that has contributed to its global growth making it one of the biggest companies in the globe (Walmart, 2012).For instance, it offers its products and services at a relatively lower price as compared to its competitors. Its products are pocket friendly and affordable to many people. In addition, the company has products that fit for every class of people in terms of income (i.e.) income earners, middle class as well as high class earners. Walmart uses a number of methods to market and promote its products and services. It is known for its digital presence. It is one of the companies that market its products and services as well as engage with its customers online. Walmart has a great digital presence. It has launched a TV advertising and a new digital advertising campaign aimed at showing his real walmart. It has opened a website (www.therealwalmart.com) where it is advertising its products its services (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2013). It is a campaignthat will enable customers to access Walmart products and services online and they can even purchase online. It is cheap and convenient for many people in America an across the world. In addition, the Real Walmart advertisement campaign has three major focuses. One, it is aimed at helping the company’s customers succeed. Secondly, it is aimed at helping the company’s employees succeed. It is important to note hat the company refers to its employees as associates. Finally, it focusses on increasing the walmart efficiencies as well as direct- from – manufacturers approach so asto help lower the prices of its products and services. In the year 2011, it launched Facebook pages that were aimed at advertising local offers. The Facebook pages named “My Local Walmart” were to help the company communicate with its customers through Facebook and notify them about new products as well as send them invitations to its promotional events. Only those who are fans of the Wal-Mart Facebook people are able to access the “My Local Walmart” application. The company has continually engaged in creative modes of advertising that have the ability to meet its aggressive marketing strategy as well as engage in programs that have the ability to capture a large audience. It is a strategy that has been highly effective in terms of conversion rate. It has converted a large number of people to buy walmart products and become part of the company’s customers. In addition, the customer perception of Wal-Mart brand has also been improved through its digital presence (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2013; Shish, 2011). Importance of customer insight from key words research The growth of social media has been exponential and there are chances that it is likely to continue and exert a greater impact on people (Stanaland, 2012). Businesses have taken a new direction of advertising their operation taking advantage of the social media growth. There is a large amount of dataonthe social sites and this presents the need for organizations to realize the importance of customers to gain insight on the key words that they can use in their search (Weber, 2009). Key words are those words that a customer can search in from the various search engines and get relevant information related to the organization they are interested in (Chaffey, 2007). There are high chances that when someone searches a certain worn on the internet, they will get too much data, most of which is irrelevant. Therefore, it is important for a company to select strong key words for their search. For instance, one might get data that are available to almost everyone even to the various businesses that are competing for the same market. If the organization's information is available to its competitors, its competitive advantage will be lost. In addition, the relevance of the organization website may be lost since it does not withhold important information. Choosing the right key words to use will help the organization be at the top rank in search engines. It will also help the organization to efficiently optimize their content (Chaffey, 2007). Every company in the market is trying its best to gain a large share of customers. When customers are searching for information related to a certain company, they are likely to be drawn to the company whose information comes first and proves easier to access. The customer is in turn likely to go on and buy from that organization. Internet marketing may not be as easy as it sounds since marketers need to have a well sampled keyword in order to maximize its advantage (Segall& Zhang, 2009). Customer insight for key words makes it easy for them to find the products offered by a certain company and hence they are likely to buy from that company. In addition, good customer insight for keywords will help them filter the large volumes of data available in the search engines and access the relevant information regarding the company’s products. Lack of relevant information will turn customers off. They will lose their interest in the company’s product an issue that could benefit competitors (Gay, Charlesworth&Esen, 2008). When choosing the keyword research tools, it is important to keep in mind that the words chosen are crucial to the success of the company’s marketing campaign. Therefore, the marketer should choose words that will target he right audience. Choosing the wrong keywords is the worst thing the marketers would want to do since it will have unimaginable effects to the sales of the company. It will make the marketing campaign success to become a nightmare. There are a number of issues that a company is supposed to consider when choosing keywords. One, of the factors that should be considered is the keywords used by the competitors. This will enable the company select the kleywords that will give them an advantage over competitors. It will select words which are less competitive. The other thing that should be considered is the target customers and the blog to be used as well as the type of goods being sold (Smith & Chaffey, 2013). Walmart is a retail store that deals mostly with grocery in the United States of America. Therefore, the keywords that can be used should reflect on the products offered. the company has a long list of keywords that it uses for its search and these keywords enable it gain a competitive adavantage in the digital marketing. Following are some of the keywords words used as well as the search volume for each keyword, its SEO position and the ranking URL related to the keyword as per Concentrate Analytics (2012). The first kleyword is Walmart. Ther word has a search volume of 13, 600, 00 and its SEO ranking is position one. Ranking URl for Walmart keyword is http://www.walmart.com/. The second keyword is xbox. Tis has a search volume of 1, 000, 000. It’s SEO position is number 4 and the ranking URL is http://www.walmart.com/cp/Xbox-360/482412. third is the Virgin Mobile. It has 823 search volume, ranked 16th on the SEO position and URL ranking of http://www.walmart.com/ip/Virgin-Mobile-Broadband2Go-Prepaid-3G-USB-Adapter-VMMC76NTKIT160/12718736. Another keyword used by the company is ipod touch whuich has 550 000. Its SEO position is 7 and URL ranking of http://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-iPod-touch-8GB-with-FaceTime-Camera-and-Retina-Display/15075124. These are just amomg the keywords used among a long list of keywords that walmart uses for its marketing (Concentrate Analytics, 2012). Search engine and pay per click When the company is advertising its products on the internet, the publisher opf that information has to be paid. The payment is made per every click of the website where the information is being advertised. Pay per click is the amount of mioney that the advertisers will pay to the publisher every time the information is clicked (Kennedy& Kennedy, 2008). The pay per click model is used to direct traffick towards a compay’s website. In other words, pay per click is the amount if money that a company will pay so that its advertisement can be clicked on. When advertisers are making their adverts, they usually bid for keywords that the deem relevant to the market or the audience they are targeting. It isdimportatnt to note that the amount of money charged per click is usually fixed in all content sites. This methiod of payment is used instead of the bidding system . The payment per click, (PPC) usually dispays the adverts that are shown on search engines and that have results related to the words or phrases that the customer searches (Morgan and Hunt, 2008). An organization can use this method to increase the number of time their website is visited. For instance, the more the amount of PPC made, the more the times the advert is going to be displayed and in turn, more customers will be able to see it. In addition, customers can see the advert more times. Marketing is all about convincing customers to buy the company’s products. It is likely that when the customers see the advert more times, they are likely to get intrested and probably buy the products. Therefore, a company can use the search engine and the pay per click to maximize its sales. Following are some of the cost per click that Walmartuises for its various keywords and the related search volume. For iPad, the cost per click is usually $0.97 with the search volume of 1, 220 000. For the keywords ‘lego’, it pays the cost per click of $0.23 and the related search volume is 1 000 000. For Xbox, the cost per click is $1.01 and the related search volume is 1 000 000. Barbie has a cost per click of $0.21 and the related search volume is 673 000 (Concentrate Analytics, 2012). These are just among the list of the company’s keywords and their cost per click. As it has been mentioned before, Walmart has a long list of keywords a strategy that is meant to give it a competitive advantage in the internet advertising. Long tail in digital advertismentis a term that is uised to refer to the advert or keywords that occur the most number of times. In statistics, the term refers to the number among the many random numbers that occur the most number of times far from the head or from the central sedction of the distribution. A company should ensure that its keywords appear most times. This is one of the reasons as to why it should be very keen when selecting keywords to use in advertisement to avoid irrelevant data being displayed when the customer clicks the keywords. As it has been mentioned earlier, the more the number of times that a customer sees an advert, the higher the probability thettyey will buy the product being advertised. Bearing this in mind, a company wants to ensure long tail for its internet or digital adverts. For the advert to be appear many times per click, the company will have to pay more money as pay per click (Tapp, 2008). This is a worth investment since it will increase the number of customers viewing the products and hence increase the probability of raising the company’s sales. The main objective of any business organization is to make as much profit as it can. To maximize profits,m the company should ensure that it secures a large share of the market (Varnali, Tokerand Yilmax, 2011). This will be by ensuring that a high number of customers buy its products. Therefore, it will have to step up its advertisements so as convince more customers. This is why the investment on long tail is worth. Its impact on the company is that it will bring more customers to buy its products and hence increase it sales and profits simultaneously since the advert will appear more times on the search engines and hence will be viewed more times making it more appealing to potential as well as current customers. Recommendation Walmart is a company that operates in a highly competitive industry. Most companies tha sell similar products are highly involved in digital marketing (John and Jones, 2009). Therefore it should utilise any other e-marketing tool that can help it gain a competitive advantage. One iof the tolls that is not currently used and that can be of much benefit is the eNewsletter. This is a toll where the company avails newsletters to its customers online. In this newsletter, it will update the customers on what the organization is doing and the new products and the new services that has been introduced. Research has indicated that newsletters jhave the ability to maintain the current customers as well as win more potential customers for the organization. Online newsletters can can reach a high number of customers and therefore can be highly effective. To measure the success of eNewsletter, the company can track the number of newsletters or the number of times the newsletters have been clicked on and relate it to the changes in sales keeping other tools constant (Smith & Chaffey, 2013). The secondemarketing tool that the company should use is syndication. This is mostly used in sites such as Yahoo and MSN. The term used in such advertisement is ‘Really Simple Syndication’ (RSS). In this advertisement, the company will update its news on the Yahoo and MSN website. It is also effective since very many people have emails and as they access their emails they will see the adverts. It has the ability to catch more customers as well. There is no specific way to measure its success factor though the company can track the changes in sales. Digital marketing campaign legislation One of the aspects of digital marketing campaign legislationtha can be relavent to digital marketin is the one regarding ot acquisition of knowledge on how to to update websites and ensure compliance with website reqirments (Newland, 2011). There are issues of privacy and copyright that should be highly considered when using digital marketing. The company should ensure that it obsrevs all these regulations when using digital marketing. References Chaffey D. 2007, Total E-mail Marketing: Maximizing Your Results from Integrated E-marketing (EMarketing Essentials); 2nd Edition Butterworth-Heinemann Gay, R. Charlesworth, A. &Esen, R. 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Toker ,A. and Yilmax, C. 2011,Mobile Marketing; McGraw-Hill Education – Europe Walmart 2012, In-store services, Walmart, [online] Accessed from on May 10, 2013 Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2013, The Real Walmart, Accessed online from < http://www.therealwalmart.com/> on May 5, 2013 Read More