Interactive and Digital Marketing - Coursework Example

INTERACTIVE AND DIGITAL MARKETING Department Question An organisation could facilitate interactive communication between itself and the clients through various approaches. Primarily, there are the aspects of individual engagement and social engagement in which the Financial Times and the Economist facilitate interaction with their clients. Individual engagement is determined as the interaction between the client and the firm “in a manner that the brand defines as meaningful” [Lecturer’s Name, 2014a]. With regard to individual engagement, the Financial Times provides various approaches to engage an individual client. In the website, the organisation has provided several avenues such as the social media networks that the client could use to interact with the organisation. These tools include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Flickr (see figure 1). Through these tools, the organisation provides various avenues in which the client could interact on a personal level with the organisation. Figure 1: This figure shows the social media interaction tools used by the Financial Times. In addition, the figure shows other methods and approaches that the clients could use to engage with the company and with their peers. Figure 2: This figure represents the social media networking tools used by the Economist to facilitate interaction. On the other hand, the Economist facilitates for individual interaction with its clients through all these social media tools used by the Financial Times such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Flickr. However, the organisation’s website has added another platform that facilitates interaction between itself and the clients by including a free email option that allows clients to receive, send, and maintain correspondence with the organisation. In a similar manner, the two websites provides an individual with an opportunity to interact with the organisation by generating their own contents by giving a platform in which clients comment on the content generated by the organisation while they are also given a chance to create their own content. Through user-generated content that clients create and post on the websites of these two companies, each organisation provides an avenue that facilitates interaction between them and their clients. On the other hand, the Economist facilitates interaction through a section called the Economist Quiz, which facilitates individual interaction with clients by engaging them in understanding the content provided by the organisation. On the other hand, an organisation could facilitate interaction with its clients through social engagement that is defined as the interaction between the organisation and its brand assets, such as the clients, which provides peer-to-peer impact ([Lecturer’s Name], 2014a). This is facilitated through creating an avenue whereby clients interact amongst themselves and with the company, clients share content from the organisation, they engage in forums, comment on content, participate on discussion boards, and engage in reviews. For the Financial Times, the company facilitates social engagement through the social media tools identified earlier. In addition, the organisation provides their clients with opportunities to interact by commenting on the content generated by the company, and other clients. Other approaches include global conferences where clients interact with the organisation and other users from other parts of the world and engage in discussions (see figure 1 under social media and community hub section). For the Economist, the organisation’s website facilitates social interaction with the clients and their peers through various blogs segmented on topical issues (see figure 3). Other than using blogs, the organisation’s website provides a forum in which clients engage with the organisation and peers in debates and discussions (see figure 3). Through letters written by users – the Economist’s clients since they pay a subscription fee – to the organisation editors, the organisation facilitates interaction with its clients and their peers. Figure 3: In this figure, the Economist is shown how it segments various approaches for facilitating interaction via blogs. In addition, the section indicated under debates and discussions, shows other interaction approaches. Question 2: In each of the two websites, the companies clearly indicate to their customers that by continuing to browse this site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Cookies are an integral part through which any organisation collects information about the consumers and their behaviour ([Lecturer’s Name], 2014b). By this, the companies uses the internet through an approach known as cookie profiling with the intention of profiling a customer being to acquire information based on the webpages that each customer visited while on the internet (All About Cookies, n.d.). Other than using cookies, which are used by the two organisations to collect general information on the user’s activities while using the internet, each firm uses client subscriptions to collect information on its customers. Before accessing most of the material from each of the website, each firm requires its clients to subscribe to access the information by first segmenting the users on their country and secondly by the type of content that they want to receive. The Financial Times has differentiated its segments under the users who want full access to the company’s content known as premium subscribers, there are standard subscribers, there are individuals who want to receive the daily newspaper, and then the last segment is for corporates who want to subscribe to the content. On the other hand, the Economist’s various segments Segmentation, according to Strauss and Frost (2013), is the procedure through which an organisation could group individuals or businesses based on their use, consumption, benefits, or through services that they use on a website (cited in [Lecturer’s Name], 2014c). The process of gathering client information through subscriptions provides each website with a lot of information. The basic information provided includes the name of the client, their contact address, year of birth, gender, their country, and the content that they are interested in accessing as they subscribe as segmented by the company. On the other hand, the Economist collects information related to a client’s industry of operations and their job title or their position. For the Financial Times, the company collects information related to the number of the employees, employment status, how often they read the magazine, their use of the information they obtained from the magazine, and their status of investment. Other information gathered on the customers is related to the listing of the company clients worked for, the number of times clients read the magazine, and where they had about the magazine. On the other hand, the two websites use cookies to collect a lot of information that is beneficial to each organisation’s marketing objectives. Cookies help the organisations with information on the behaviour of their clients while they were using the internet ([Lecturer’s Name], 2014b). This information is related to the preferences and habits of the clients when they were online. Their preferences are on the likely products that the clients could buy on the internet and the number of times that each client visits a particular website. In conclusion, the Financial Times appears to do a superior job than the Economist despite the two companies both using cookies to gather client’s information. The superiority of the work it does is based on the information collected when clients are subscribing to the internet. The firm collects extra information that it could use to further segment its clients and use company-side tools, which push customized information such as advertisements to clients as part of an organisation’s customer relationship management (CRM) strategy ([Lecturer’s Name], 2014b). Question 3: Effective marketing and pitching to a potential client requires the knowledge of the client. In this case, the basic reason that the firms gather client information is to segment their clients and identify the marketing strategy that the organisation will use when targeting existing and potential clients. Segmenting the clients based on cookie profiling provides the firms with the tastes and preferences of the client with the organisation pushing the information that a client accessed based on their profiles. This information involves the ads that the client viewed based on their preferences. The data is also used to conduct performance metrics whose design and importance is “to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of operations” ([Lecturer’s Name], 2014d). These operations are related to the level of interaction that the organisation facilitates via its website in relationship to the comments generated by the clients. On the other hand, the amount of time that clients spent on the website is another measure that determines the level of engagement of the website and the relevance of the content generated by the organisation. There are various approaches in which the generated information could be used to develop and build relationships with customers. Using a balanced framework, which is a framework that focuses on using the data gathered by an organisation to understand e-marketing metrics ([Lecturer’s Name], 2014d), the organisations could build relationships with the customers. On a consumer perspective, this scorecard measures goals related to the loyalty of the customer, the retention of the customer, their engagement, and their satisfaction with the services provided by the organisation ([Lecturer’s Name], 2014d). The Economist and the Financial Times could understand the level of customer satisfaction by quantifying the number of customers who return to the website, new subscribers, and clients who renewed their subscriptions. By renewing their subscriptions, there is evidence that the level of satisfaction is high and there is excellent brand loyalty among clients. Hence, an organisation could improve on its level of engagement by collaborating with clients in order to provide the client with content that could improve their interaction and engage more with the company to improve their satisfaction levels and their loyalty to the company. Question 4: Financial Times could improve its interactive opportunities on the website by first ensuring that the company’s website was easy to use in order to ensure that customers interacted effectively with the company. Easy navigation helps customers find specific content that suits their information needs with the links and stories organised in a manner that they do not appear to clutter around on the website. This way, the customers and users will find it easy to navigate the website and use the features present for their benefit. For the Economist, it is important for the company to make it easy for customers and users to use their search bar when searching for content that they preferred. Interestingly, the company has failed to integrate a custom search bar whereby customers who used the website to search information found it within the website first before being redirected to other websites. Instead, the company’s search contains the Google search bar with customers being redirected to Google and obtaining information from other websites, which is one area in which the company has failed to capitalise on the interactivity of the customers. Once Google redirects the company’s website users away from the website, the company loses on interacting with this customer and loses a chance in which it could have used to pitch its products to the customers redirected by Google. Therefore, this is an opportunity that the company could improve its user experience, which consequently improves the interactivity between the company and its customers. Figure 4: In this figure, the Financial Times uses its own Custom Search bar while the Economist uses a Google custom search bar. Bibliography All About Cookies. n.d. What is a cookie profiling? Allaboutcookies.com, [online] Available at: [Accessed 25 April 2014]. Saffer, D. 2014. Improve your websites with microinteractions. Creative Bloq, [online] Available at: [Accessed 25 April 2014]. Shah, R. 2014. How Big Data Ups the Ante on Retargeting. Smart Data Collective, [online] Available at: [Accessed 25 April 2014]. [Lecturer’s Name]. 2014a. Engaging customers with social media [PowerPoint Slides], lecture notes distributed in [Course Title] at [The University] of [date slides were provided by instructor]. [Lecturer’s Name]. 2014b. Customer relationship management [PowerPoint Slides], lecture notes distributed in [Course Title] at [The University] of [date slides were provided by instructor]. [Lecturer’s Name]. 2014c. Segmentation, Targeting, Differentiation, and Positioning Strategies [PowerPoint Slides], lecture notes distributed in [Course Title] at [The University] of [date slides were provided by instructor]. [Lecturer’s Name]. 2014d. Strategic e-marketing and performance metrics [PowerPoint Slides], lecture notes distributed in [Course Title] at [The University] of [date slides were provided by instructor]. Read More