Digital Consumer

So far, you saw how different companies responded to various digital technologies. You saw examples of
companies who embraced digital technology by adding new features to their portfolio or offering. And you
looked at a couple of companies that used the digital wave to disrupt the entire industry that they operate
in. But before we jump into digital marketing and how you can leverage new channels, let’s look at the
most significant factor in any marketing decision — consumers themselves. Let’s understand how user
behaviour has changed through the last decade, and how this has been driven by global digital
transformation.

Suppose you wanted to buy a camera in the year 2000. You would have ​gone to stores of companies such
as Kodak, Canon, and Fuji to find the camera that matches your requirements and budget. You’d have

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asked for a review from people who you knew had used such a camera. After considerable research on the
cameras and user experiences of others, you would probably have gone to a store and bought a camera. It
would definitely have been an extremely time-consuming process. Now let’s consider the same situation
today.

The moment you want to buy a camera, you search for cameras on Google. You compare the alternatives
that Google displays, based on price, specifications, and the e-commerce website the product is offered on.
For user reviews, you visit forums such as Quora where people share their reviews of products online.
After you have zeroed down on the best camera that meets your needs and budget, you can simply buy
the same on Amazon or any other website that offers the camera at a lower price.

The steps that you follow from deciding to buy a camera to actually buying the camera, in both instances,
are almost the same. But in the second case, the time and effort it takes are much lesser than in the 2000
case. This is one of the major drives behind the consumer’s movement to digital.

You realised the need to buy a camera. You searched for the best camera brands. You compared prices and
how well each camera meets your requirements. You also looked at reviews in both cases. After all these
evaluations, you bought a camera, and if you liked what you bought, you probably promoted it by word of
mouth, via an online review, or both.

This is the journey followed by consumers in the purchase of almost every product:
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 1. First - Need Recognition
2. second – information search
3. third – evaluation of alternatives
4. fourth – choice
5. and lastly – post purchase

Now although the steps are the same, the time taken in the decision-making process is very different in
both cases. The consumer journey in the digital context is very different since each stage is very tightly
integrated with the next. In fact, in the digital context he has more information to influence his decision,
than he had in a traditional customer journey.

So traditionally it’s the outer blue circle where the need is recognised. Next you consider the product, and
search for information online, you evaluate all your alternatives, and eventually purchase and experience
it.

But what really differs in the digital context is the inner red circle. So due to better access, consumers can
message each other with information about the product and brand, and on top of that, they have the
ability to influence other consumers. That’s why, you see a dotted line from the inner circle to the outer
circle, at every stage. That’s how consumers impact and interact with other consumers, right. For example,
a consumer in the alternative evaluation stage may post his evaluation process online which in turn will
have influence on another consumer who is currently in the information search stage.

So in the digital context, through the inner circle, a consumer informs others and advocates positives or
negatives of a product and then influences the other buyers to go into the same digital process. Long story
short, the digital consumer is better informed, more communicative, and more in control of his/her
purchase. This is one of the major drives behind the consumer’s movement to digital.

As you saw in the example of buying a camera, customers use the internet for different purposes from
shopping to chatting to research and video watching.

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Here’s a survey, conducted in the US, that shows how consumers of different age groups use internet.
Some of the top online activities include - sending or reading emails and messages, using social media,
watching video and search. Users across different age groups use online search. And many respondents
also use the internet for ​buying products online.

If we talk about emerging economies, an almost similar internet consumption can be seen in India and
Nigeria - top online activities include - sending or reading emails and messages, using social media,
watching video and search. In addition to search and social, many Nigerians engage a lot in online news
and discussion forums. ​Now if you look at the division of the consumer’s time on the internet between
mobile and computer you can see that leaving aside email and browsing websites, mobile accounts for
more time spent for all other activities including search and social. While consumers still find the computer
the most suitable device for sending emails, consuming news, for games, and for social media, happens
mostly through mobiles. Even in emerging economies such as India, the total time spent on mobile has
increased significantly over the recent years.

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If we look at how Indians consume internet on mobile - entertainment, search, social media activities, and
messaging top the list. ​What some of these stats really show is that consumer behaviour is increasingly
going digital, and this is not only happening on computers but also on mobile devices. Most of the
traditional activities such as shopping, reading, watching video content are happening online as well, and
all of us need to embrace this fact and identify the consequences it will have on our businesses.

Google literally processes 2.4 million searches every minute. In that same span of time, 700,000 people log
in to Facebook, and Amazon sells over $200,000 worth of physical and digital goods. Search and social
media are the two key activities that individuals spend a lot of their time on the internet. And more
specifically, you saw that Google is the search engine that dominates the market. Just like Google
dominates the search landscape, it is Facebook that dominates the social media landscape, with a 42%
market share. YouTube’s share of the total social media visits is 25%.

Facebook tops the list of most used social media platforms in emerging economies such as India and
Nigeria too. So as a marketer in today’s world, it becomes important that you understand your user’s time
investments in these two activities on the internet, and you must learn to leverage this information in
order to create meaningful communications in the right places and at the right times. We will dive deep
into search and social media platforms in the 4​ and 5​ module of this program.
th​ th​

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One important challenge is to know how to measure or drive digital transformation. Now, one of the key
ways to drive digital transformation, you will agree, is by making investments in digital. One important
challenge is to know how to measure or drive digital transformation. Now, one of the key ways to drive
digital transformation, you will agree, is by making investments in digital. This is why in 2015, GSK focused
on evolving its mix of marketing investments.

Essentially, it came up with a digital media investment cap that it gave to its regional presidents. ​Financial
targets were defined and tracked based on the marketing dynamics, customer insights, and the growth of
digital. These targets decided the money that the company would spend on digital marketing. This created
a behavioural change among the company’s senior executives — it had to change the way its RoI was
monitored and how its KPIs were measured.

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This created a behavioural change among the company’s senior executives — it had to change the way its
RoI was monitored and how its KPIs were measured. ​All of this impacted GSK’s hiring strategy, which was a
necessary part of the transformation. For you to understand this shift better, let’s look at a particular
instance. ​So, one of the examples of strategic change was how GSK’s investments evolved in video
advertising.

Instead of defining investments in TV commercials and online videos as separate things, it implemented
something called a video-neutral investment plan. This essentially involved observing consumers and
understanding, from the reach standpoint, which media they were using most actively. Accordingly, the
company decided the budgetary mix between advertising via traditional television and online videos. So,
instead of having a TV budget, GSK now has a video budget.

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For instance, consider how in the Middle East in 2015, the company’s video budget went from 80% for TV
to 80% for YouTube, within a span of just 18 months. This was a huge shift. ​Another instance of GSK
changing its strategy in favour of digital was the award-winning campaign through which it promoted its
chocolate-flavoured Horlicks in India. ​Now, when it comes to YouTube, it is highly recommended that the
advertiser make the first five seconds count. The reason behind this is easy to understand.

In the case of most ads, after the video has played for five seconds, a ‘skip’ button appears on the right, at
the bottom of the ad. So, GSK launched a marketing campaign that used this creative. This was in line with
its chocolate-flavoured Horlicks. Also, according to the company, if you add the product to your milk, it will
actually dissolve before you even skip the video. This creative was largely based on the fact that the digital
consumer skips YouTube ads after just five seconds of letting them play. ​The communication of the
creative was such that it engaged with customers really well.

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Adapting to the Digital Consumer

Traditionally, the role of marketing in B2B technology firms is typically about sales support.
At HPE, we invested heavily in sales enablement, telemarketing operations, channel-partner go-to-market
synchronisation and organised events, to get prospective customers to interact with its sales teams. All of
this was aimed at generating marketing-qualified leads to feed the sales funnel.
In today’s digital world, however, digital tools and technologies are changing the way sales and purchases
are made. This shift has had a huge impact on HPE’s marketing strategy.

There has been a fundamental shift in buyers’ behaviour with respect to their expectations and how they
discover products and solutions. This has also changed how we, as a company, can influence their journey,
since their research can take place anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

Google reports that B2B buyers typically download 14 pieces of content online on their way to making a
purchase decision. ​Other industry analysts have found that up to 80% of buyers do not engage with the
vendors before shortlisting options. Moreover, an independent survey found that IT buyers might be
anywhere from two-thirds to 90% of the way through their journey before they engage with a vendor’s
sales representative. ​Such a change in customer behaviour makes it critical for companies ​us to find ways
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to influence buyers through digital, early in the research and information-search phase and during the
remainder of their buying journeys.

Secondly, digital technology equips HPE with one-to-many and many-to-many marketing communications
at scale, while maintaining a relevant experience for the individual. ​Personalised content can be created
dynamically and is distributed through sophisticated media products. ​HPE can now target its audience
better across various digital touchpoints such as social, video, display advertising, or even paid search, both
on the Web and on mobile. Users’ interactions with such touchpoints and their online behaviour data can
be captured and categorised to further facilitate the segmentation that feeds data into HPE’s CRM system.
This helps the company build and launch personalised communications.

So, like many B2B companies that are transitioning to the new digital world, HPE has also been shifting its
marketing strategy from one that was based on the classic field marketing principle to a digital-first
strategy that connects media, content, data, and technology. ​In the last couple of years, this has led to a
significant increase in the marketing-qualified leads and marketing-generated opportunities that can be
attributed to digital.

Going back a few years, in 2007, when I was at P&G and the conversations around growth were centered
on how to acquire our next billion customers, we wanted to enter emerging markets that were untapped
at the time. We also knew that things were different then. Traditional methods could have worked, but we
wanted to leverage the changing customer behaviour.

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One of the key products we implemented this with was Pampers, which was P&G’s best-selling product.
Our primary target customers were obviously pregnant women. So, when it came to reaching potential
customers in Africa, we decided to use a mobile-focused strategy. This was because the growing mobile
penetration in Africa was 30% at the time.
The statistics indicated that women had little access to competitive healthcare and knowledge of healthy
birth practices.

So, to resonate with this audience and offer it added value, we came up with a communication strategy
that made it aware of healthy birth practices. ​In line with our mobile-focused strategy, we took all our
online platforms and developed mobile versions of them.​

For one, we developed a mobile website. We also put SMS alerts in place, that were linked to the purchase
of our products. These SMS alerts redirected users to our mobile website, where they could shop. ​On the
website, women could also subscribe to our SMS alerts that educated them depending on which trimester
of pregnancy they were in. This essentially involved talking about what was going on with their bodies and
their babies at the time.

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So, we were there to advise them as they went through the different stages of pregnancy. This was a
value-added service that went a long way in building brand equity among our customers in Africa.
We also partnered with UNICEF as a part of our ‘One Pack = One Vaccine’ campaign, where for the
purchase of every diaper or wipe, we’d contribute 0.07$ to UNICEF’s initiative of fighting maternal and
neonatal tetanus (MNT).

As a result of this campaign, over 100 million lives were saved from maternal and neonatal tetanus in
countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. This is a fatal disease prevalent in newborns and their
mothers. All of this would not have been possible had we not used mobile advertising to tap into the
African market.

So, the key takeaways of this example are these:

1. Since the mobile penetration in Africa was growing significantly, we used mobile advertising to
reach out to our billion potential customers across the continent.
2. Our value-added SMS alerts, along with the One Pack = One Vaccine campaign, also helped us build
a connection that was beyond just our products.

The awareness campaign aimed at potential customers in Africa would have been more difficult had we
not identified the growing and significant mobile penetration and acted accordingly. These are some
patterns you should look out for when you enter a new market.

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Opportunities in Digital Marketing

Now that you have seen how digital transformation is impacting your consumers, it is time to see why you,
as a marketer, should leverage digital marketing strategies in order to reach out to and interact with your
consumers.

So the reason why you’re here today, and why you most likely joined this program, is because you know
that digital marketing is here to stay and we all need to embrace the opportunities coming through digital
marketing strategies.

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Based on a survey of over 3,300 marketing executives from around the world, more than 56% said that the
budget for social media marketing should be increased. Close to 50% said the same for budget allocation
for digital content marketing, email marketing, marketing analytics, and lead generation. This is a huge cut
of the overall marketing spends and underlines the vast opportunities that digital marketing strategies
bring to the table.

Let’s look at some of these advantages of digital marketing. ​The key to any marketing initiative of a
company is to know how well the initiative is performing with respect to its purpose and target. For a
traditional or non-digital marketing initiative, it’s not always possible to monitor the marketing plan and
especially the results in real time. Consider an ad in a newspaper, for instance. You may know what the
circulation of the newspaper is, but it isn’t easy to find out how many readers saw your ad. However, in a
digital marketing plan, the outcome measurement is easier and offers a better one-to-one mapping. In
digital marketing, there are tools that can help you with the real-time monitoring of a website or post.

For instance, you can get to know the number of active users on your website by using the tools that
Google Analytics offers. ​Even the measurement parameters, such as the number of likes, shares, and
comments on a Facebook/YouTube post, provide useful insights into the impact of the post. With these
existing parameters, the measurability of the campaign becomes easier both in the long run and in real
time.

With real-time monitoring, troubleshooting a marketing initiative is easier since the leakage can be clearly
identified. Since traditional marketing does not offer real-time monitoring, it gets very difficult to track the
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leakage. ​For instance, a recent ad campaign by Dove, in which the company tried to position its product
for every skin type, was immediately labelled as racist by the online community. Seeing this feedback from
the online community, Dove immediately took down the campaign’s posts and apologized. Although the
company’s image took a small hit, if this campaign had been offline, the negative impact would have been
significantly worse. ​Apart from troubleshooting, personalising a marketing initiative ​from user to user is
easier in digital marketing since user behaviour can be understood from a user’s online activity and a brand
can send very targeted communication to every single user.

This greatly increases the efficiency of the marketing campaign. The real-time monitoring that digital
marketing offers can be used to get insights that can help you, as a marketer to amplify a marketing
initiative outside digital. An example of a company that did this is Bajaj, an Indian multinational
conglomerate.

When Bajaj launched its ‘Bajaj V’ TV commercial across the country, it realised that it was very popular. But
it was nearly impossible, through telemedia alone, to find out whether there was a specific audience that
this video appealed to most. So to figure this out, Bajaj launched the same video on Facebook and targeted
different demographics across India. The commercial received a lot more appreciation from people in the
southern parts of India than those in the other parts. Therefore, Bajaj thought that it would be better if
more people from South India saw and comprehended the TV commercial.

So it went a step ahead to dub the commercial into languages that are spoken in South India, such as
Telugu, and Tamil. This improved the campaign’s engagement with customers and helped Bajaj acquire
better sales leads. This was possible only because of Facebook’s digital analytics tools.

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So the advantages that digital marketing offers over traditional marketing are —
1. Better measurability through web analytics tools
2. Real-time monitoring, which is impossible in traditional marketing
3. Easier troubleshooting
4. Personalisation
5. Improved efficiency

Like many B2B companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise also uses flagship events to convey its business
strategy and showcase its products and services. ​Discover is HPE’s flagship event that’s held twice annually,
once for America and once for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It is one of the company’s most
important sales events as it has significant revenue targets.

Discover is well established in the calendars of IT buyers, the media, and analysts, with many high-calibre
players in the industry anticipating an invitation to the event.

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Now traditionally, the role of marketing was to design the show floor, invite targeted customers, align
them with the sales team, and help with post-event follow-up marketing materials, with a purpose to
accelerate and close deals. The real challenge was that due to a limited budget and limited space, only the
most valuable customers could be invited. This meant the company missed out on a long list of
opportunities.

Digital marketing has helped a lot in overcoming this challenge. By adopting digital technologies, HPE has
transformed this otherwise highly manual and costly process and extended the audience participation in
Discover, beyond physical boundaries. ​Today, the company’s digital marketing team is tasked with
identifying key messages from the event’s agenda. This includes creating mobile-friendly social posts, using
paid promotions to target its online audience,
and driving its TG to its website.

This approach has significantly increased the event’s reach more than tenfold, i.e. from just a few hundred
attendees offline to thousands of potential buyers and influencers online. Post the event, since these key
messages are captured on the website, we update social posts with fresh images, scripts, and calls to
action that are relevant to the target audience in relation to its buyer journey.

Hence, we continuously drive incremental traffic to the web destination. This further extends the shelf life
of the key messages, beyond a singular event.​ ​The website allows navigation to product and contact pages,

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so customers can further learn about the specifics of the products they heard about. They can even use
chat to interact with an agent 24/7, which helps accelerate the sales cycle and achieve revenue targets.

Microsoft is a company that is going through an internal digital transformation even as it continues to
empower organisations and individuals around the world, to achieve their unique transformation and
realise their maximum potential.

From a traditional kind of marketing that relied heavily on a single channel and high-volume lead
generation to a more focused, targeted, and buyer-driven purchase process, there has been a significant
shift in marketing execution. To capture the customer sentiment and preferences and to align its
messaging and tailor its content to make it suitable for the consumer and to nurture him or her,

Microsoft launched its sales and marketing platform — Dynamics 365. This has greatly helped its clients
understand their customers better. Now, one of the strategies that organisations are adopting today is the
use of LinkedIn for social selling. LinkedIn presents a connected platform for information-dissemination,
creating awareness, lead generation, and sales, through an integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365.

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For instance, the ​IISc partnered with Microsoft and created a ​video that captured the partnership between
the two in using Microsoft’s Azure to build a tool that uses data analytics to solve the problem of water
scarcity. Not only was this video made to highlight the water scarcity problem and a solution to it, but this
was also a promotional campaign for Microsoft’s cloud service — Azure. ​The video was shared across
various social media platforms, including LinkedIn.
Since Azure’s potential customers were more likely to be present on LinkedIn, it was the perfect platform
to target them. Also, using LinkedIn’s PointDrive, it was possible to monitor who viewed the video and who
liked or disliked it.

Based on this, promotional content could be tailored to improve personalisation. ​Consider the alternative
— creating a published version in print would require the distribution of the copies to Microsoft’s 150,000+
workforce, dispersed across 100+ countries. The same would need to be shared with its thousands of
customers, without any control on the effectiveness of the content.

Another example of a company that demonstrates digital transformation in marketing is Metro Bank. The
bank focuses not only on the traditional metrics in evaluating performance, such as the value it holds in
deposits or the net number of new accounts opened, but it also looks at factors such as customer
happiness and satisfaction as daily performance metrics.
It has reinvented customer experience, in partnership with Microsoft, by eliminating the most common
customer pain points, such as long queues, complex processes, and irrelevant marketing offers.

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For instance, when activating an account, if a user needs more than five attempts, a customer service
officer will call the user to help him or her activate the account faster. Metro Bank also monitors social
media to understand what people are saying about it online. ​It uses Microsoft’s Social Engagement tools to
recognise relevant issues and direct them to the right employees. The company also uses the data on
customer dissatisfaction to understand commonly reported issues, to be able to build the next level of
products and services

This demonstrates the use of listening to the customer, providing him or her custom content, and
nurturing him or her throughout the customer life cycle, to gather insights and use the same for better
decision-making in innovation and improvement.

Digital Marketing Framework

Now that you have identified the many advantages that digital marketing offers over traditional marketing,
it is pertinent to talk briefly about something known as the digital marketing framework. Through an
understanding of this framework, you will identify the interplay between its most important components -
digital content, digital platforms, digital analytics and digital devices. Let’s learn more about this from
Professor Shasha.

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This is how a typical digital marketing framework looks. As you can see, the main components of the
framework are
1. Digital Content
2. Digital Device
3. Digital Platforms
4. Digital Analytics
I will spend some time on each of these. First, let’s look at Digital Content. As a digital marketer, you must
ensure that the information of your firm’s products or services reaches all your potential customers. Now
you can do this through blog posts, website promotions, page promotions, digital ads and much more.
Most of it will be covered in depth as you go through this program.

Any content through which you reach your online consumers counts as digital content. Digital content can
reach your customers through different online channels. It can be paid channels, owned channels or
earned. These channels will be covered in much depth in the next segment of this session. So let’s
understand who consumes this content. For Amazon, it will be a shopper looking to buy something online.
For platforms such as monster.com, it will be companies who are looking to hire employees or people who
are looking for jobs. These users generally consume your brand’s content through digital devices such as a
mobile, a tablet or a computer. As you may recall from the previous segment, you, as a marketer, can
decide how you want to divide your spendings between mobile marketing and Desktop marketing
depending on where your potential customers are.

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On any digital device, there can be different digital platforms that your content will appear to your online
customers. It could be on Facebook, Google Search, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. This again, is decided
by you, depending on who and where your potential customers are. Digital platforms will be covered in
depth in the 4th and 5th module of this program. This brings us to the last and one of the most important
components of the digital marketing framework - Digital Analytics. You may recall the many advantages
that digital marketing offers over the traditional marketing.

One of the main reasons for this edge are the digital analytics tools, that are in place to help you. You can
get information on who visits your Facebook page, who likes a post, where they are from, what age-group
they belong to, everything through digital analytics. I won’t talk about digital analytics at this point of the
program since it will be covered in depth in Module 7 of this program.

This equips marketers to take real-time decisions and optimise all spends to get the best bang for the buck
for his marketing budgets. This was never possible with traditional marketing. As a digital marketer, you
should identify the right use of digital analytics to find where most of your potential customers are.
Depending on this very crucial information, you can allocate your marketing budget across digital devices
and platforms. But the most important thing of it all, you must be through with the channels through
which the digital content reaches your customers.

Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

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In the previous segments, you saw how the consumer is evolving in the digital space and how and why
firms are increasingly spending on digital marketing channels. You saw that increasing your investments in
digital marketing efforts is worth it: digital marketing can improve the efficacy of your marketing initiatives.
You also learnt about the digital marketing framework and its components, and how it can help you take
important digital marketing decisions. But to invest wisely in your digital marketing efforts, you also need
to be aware of the different digital marketing channels.

So let’s look at a broad classification of digital media, depending on the channels through which you reach
a customer. Please note that here we will just be giving you an overview of the various channels; you will
learn about them in depth in subsequent modules. Nevertheless, this framework will help you classify
various digital channels in the right manner.

If you remember Coke’s ‘Share-a-Coke’ campaign, one of the key reasons why it went viral was because the
users shared pics/stories on digital platforms, with a #ShareACoke.
This was also the best part of the campaign because online user conversations around it reduced the
company’s efforts significantly.
Although these stories were about Coke, technically they weren’t owned by the brand. Rather, they were
earned from its loyal customer base. Do you think it would have been such as success, had it been just
through owned and paid promotions?
I am sure you would disagree. So this brings us to the classification of digital channels or digital media
based on ownership —

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a. Owned media
b. Paid media
c. Earned media

Any content that is distributed directly to the consumer through the company’s owned channels, such as
its website, Twitter handle, Facebook page, and YouTube channel, falls under owned media. Any owned
media is under the full control of the company, and the company alone can decide on it.
For instance, consider the Facebook page of Amazon India. Any organic post that reaches consumers
directly through this page will fall under owned media. This is the same for any other owned page or
owned website of Amazon. However, there may be times when you see a post from a company’s Facebook
page even when you don’t follow the page. There can be two reasons for this:
1. Someone or some page that you know or follow interacted with such a post.
2. The post is a sponsored post.

If it’s the first case, the post will fall under earned media since it’s reaching you through someone who
shared it or reacted to it. However, if it’s the second case, the post will fall under paid or sponsored media,
which we will talk about in more depth in a minute. For earned media, consider this article post on
Amazon’s Great Indian Sale, covered by The Times of India. Since the top deals on Amazon are what a lot of
consumers are looking for, they are also an ideal fit for the readers of The Times of India. So, The Times of

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India covers the same without any monetary exchange. This is an earned media for Amazon as its
spendings for this article were nil.

But don’t confuse this with native paid advertisements or advertorials; these are articles that companies
pay media houses for in order to get their names out there. We will look into this in greater depth when
we talk about content marketing.

Let’s now talk about the last category in the framework — paid media. Consider this post on Amazon
India’s Facebook page, which aims to reach out to a Facebook user. Neither does the user follow the page,
nor do any of his Facebook friends. How does this post reach him then?

The post falls under the category of paid media, as is indicated by the text ‘Sponsored’ under ‘Amazon
India’. ​So platforms such as Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn push content to a user depending on his or
her behaviour, for a monetary exchange with the advertiser.
In short, any post whose online presence is amplified through marketing spendings on Facebook, Google,
or YouTube falls under paid media.

To summarise, let’s have a look at the various paid, owned, and earned media channels: ​Under owned
media, you’d have Company’s own website, its blog extension, its Facebook page, its YouTube channel, its
LinkedIn page, its Twitter handle, its Instagram handle and any other social media page that is owned

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directly by the company. ​Under earned media, you’d have all the posts that are amplified by a third party,
without any payment, are earned media. So it can be shares of an owned or paid post, that increases the
reach of the original post. Often this is in form of press coverage or other customers talking about your
brand.

Under paid media, you’d have Google search and display ads, Facebook-sponsored posts, Facebook display
ads, LinkedIn-sponsored updates, Instagram-sponsored posts and any other marketing initiative in which
the firm has paid the digital advertiser. As a marketing leader, your long-term goal should be to maximise
owned and earned media through customer insights and thus, create high efficiencies for your marketing
campaigns by reducing spends on paid media.

Summary: Digital Consumer and Digital Marketing Framework

Now, let’s return to the Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Discover event and see how paid, owned, and earned
media were utilised to achieve the goal of accelerating the sales pipeline, by inviting customers to attend
Discover along with their HPE sales account teams.

Before Discover, the marketing team sent out emails and social posts to invite top-tier customers from
across the world to attend the event, asking them to register on a designated Discover page on the HPE
website. Organic search traffic also leads new potential customers to this registration page.
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During the event, filming and photography were carried out on site to create videos from keynotes and
customer testimonials, for online promotions. ​A news-style live broadcasting was set up, streaming the
event from the show floor live on the HPE website and YouTube channel. ​Keynotes were repackaged into
social posts such as infographics and quotations, which were promoted through HPE’s own social accounts
on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. ​Post the event, a series of social posts highlighting the key messages
were published on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These were promoted globally to the target audience,
with the media budget.

Moreover, an email campaign was carried out to thank customers for their participation. This included a
script to reinforce the event messages. Sales teams were also promoted to follow up with customers with
information captured through digital interactions, to help them close deals.

Here is a summary of the tactics employed to achieve this objective:

Under paid media, all the Discover-related content pieces were activated, including the paid social, paid
search, and programmatic buys of display advertising. ​Twitter live streaming was sponsored in order to
broadcast Discover sessions live to the online audience.
Under owned media, the Discover page was set up on the HPE website, for event registration.

Email campaigns were set up to automate invitations at scale. Emails were tracked to capture information
to segment and trigger relevant streams.

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Also, business- and product information-related videos that were created before the event, live streams on
the HPE website, and interviews were filmed at Discover for post-event promotion.
HPE’s posts on different social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were
shared by influencers and customers. This served as earned promotion for Discover.

Video 9 (As per the sheet)

In this session, you saw how consumers in the digital world are much better informed than consumers in
the non-digital space. Not only are digital consumers better informed but through different online social
platforms, they can also connect and communicate better. And so, they’re also more in control of their
purchase journeys.

You also saw the advantages that digital marketing offers have over traditional marketing, including —

1. Better measurability
2. Real-time monitoring
3. Easier troubleshooting
4. Personalisation
5. And improved efficiency
After learning about the advantages of digital marketing, ​you got a general idea of a digital marketing
framework and its key components -
1. digital content,
2. digital devices,
3. digital platforms
4. and digital analytics

Most of these were covered briefly as they will be covered in depth in later modules. You will learn about
digital platforms in 4th and 5th modules, and about digital analytics in the 7th module of this session.

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Having understood the digital marketing framework, you saw the broad classification of media channels
into:

1. Owned media
2. Paid media
3. Earned media
All content that reaches potential customers through a company’s website or other owned pages falls
under owned media.
Any media where the company has to pay digital ad networks such as Google and Facebook to expose
customers to its products or services, falls under paid media.
And any media exposure that a company earns through shares or other social media mentions, without
spending any capital, falls under earned media.

Now that you have learnt about the advantages of digital marketing and how paid, owned, and earned
media are used by companies to amplify their digital exposure, it’s time to go back to the basics and talk
about the importance of consumer focus. You will also learn about customer insights that are derived from
a consumer focus. Later, you will identify how companies derive insights which they then use to engage
with their customers.

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