WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING?

Digital marketing is a term that has been around for quite awhile but hasnt been very well defined, encompassing things like banner advertising, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click. Yet, this is too narrow of a definition. What about email, RSS, voice broadcast, fax broadcast, blogging, podcasting, video streams, wireless text messaging, and instant messaging? You get the idea. To clearly define what digital marketing is lets talk about what it is not. For starters, it does not include more traditional forms of marketing such as radio, TV, billboard and print because they do not offer instant feedback and report. Sure, some people may respond to a call to action from an advertisement in one of these mediums but there is no way to know the exact number of people who saw or heard it. Such data is collected (and still then just educated guesses) long after the initial ad impression is made. Yes, convergence has made television at bit more interactive, with devices such as TiVo able to record viewer statistics like those for Web sites, but there is still a long way to go. With digital marketing, however, were already there. At its heart, digital marketing centers around the Internet, which has become both a communication vehicle and a very powerful marketing medium as the recent Doubleclick acquisition by Google demonstrated. The Internet can be used both to push a message to someone like email, IM, RSS, or voice broadcast, as well to pull content serving a banner ad and Pay Per Click search terms. Digital marketing, therefore, can be thought of as the combination of push and pull Internet technologies to execute marketing campaigns. Because it is digital, a reporting engine can be layered within a campaign allowing the organization see in real-time how that campaign is performing, such as what is being viewed, how often, how long, as well as other actions such as responses rates and purchases made. Please note that each digital marketing technology is different and they cannot all provide the same types of reports. Also, digital marketing is constantly evolving and new technologies are being created all of the time. To help promote this new concept of digital marketing, we recently updated the Wikipedia entry for the term and did our best to not only define digital marketing but to explain what it is as well as the players in this space. In the true collaborative spirit of Wikipedia, we invite you to add your own thoughts and ideas, as we too are still adding and editing. Currently our definition is: Digital Marketing is the pratice of promoting products and services using database-driven online distribution channels to reach consumers in a timely, relevant, personal and cost-effective manner.

Digital Marketing Pull vs. Push

There are 2 different forms of digital marketing, each of which has its pros and cons.

Pull
Pull digital marketing technologies involve the user having to seek out and directly select (or pull) the content, often via web search. Web site/blogs and streaming media (audio and video) are good examples of this. In each of these examples, users have a specific link (URL) to view the content. Pros:

Digital Marketing and Power Users of the internet are an integral aspect to the United States economy. Interactive Media is a form of art and creative inspiration. Cons: Considerable marketing effort required for users to find the message/content. Some types of marketing content may be blocked in mixed content scenarios (i.e.: Flash blockers) Since requests are inherently opt-in, the size of content is generally unlimited. No advanced technology required to send static content, only to store/display it.

Push
Push digital marketing technologies involve both the marketer (creator of the message) as well as the recipients (the user). Email, SMS, RSS are examples of push digital marketing. In each of these examples, the marketer has to send (push) the messages to the users (subscribers) in order for the message to be received. In the case of RSS, content is actually pulled on a periodic basis (polling), thus simulating a push. Pros: Faster delivery - push technologies can deliver content immediately as it becomes available. Consistent delivery - some push platforms have single content types, making it difficult for the user to block content by type. Better targeting - since push technology usually justifies subscription, more specific marketing data may be collected during registration, which allows for better targeting and more personalization. Better data - marketing data can be correlated to each request for content, allowing marketers to see information such as user name as well as demographic and psychographic data. Smaller audience - push technology not implemented on common platforms generally need client and/or server software before content can be created, distributed, and/or viewed. Higher cost - less popular platforms may have higher implementation costs. Lesser discoverability - smaller audiences mean fewer views mean less visibility in search engines.

Cons:

Digital Marketing solutions and Multi-Channel Communications

While digital marketing is effective using one message type, it is much more successful when a marketer combines multiple channels in the message campaigns. For example, if a company is

trying to promote a new product release, they could send out an email message or text campaign individually. This, if properly executed, could yield positive results. However, this same campaign could be exponentially improved if multiple message types are implemented. Digital marketing solutions include the use of multiple channels of delivery, along with the use of both Push and Pull digital marketing techniques. Both of these are used to deliver messages and information about products and services to customers, along with any others who submit inquiries. Digital market campaigns have yielded greater conversion rates for affiliates than e-marketing strategy alone, because it is not restricted to the Internet. It may seem to be hard to believe, however, there are many people in this country who do not own a computer or have access to the Internet. Although almost everyone has a cellphone, MP3 player, iPod, and views outdoor digital displays.

An email could be sent to a list of potential customers with a special offer for those that also include their cell phone number. A couple of days later, a follow up campaign would be sent via text message (SMS) with the special offer. Push and pull message technologies can also be used in conjunction with each other. For example, an email campaign can include a banner ad or link to a content download. This enables a marketer to have the best of both worlds in terms of their marketing method. .

ADVANTAGES OF DM
1.One of the main advantages of digital marketing is sending communications to a large number of people, really quickly. Theoretically, we assume that some people who see your campaign message are so impressed that they quickly forward it to their friends. Another benefit of digital marketing is its relative cost. YouTube videos, Facebook posts or Twitter tweets can be created at almost zero cost. This allows you to connect with millions of Internet users, practically for free.
2.

3.Internet marketing does not require much work. Once you create your message, whether a video, photo, post or tweet, you just need to send it out once. If your digital marketing message is good enough, it will spread like wildfire, bringing you a whole host of new customers. 4. Digital marketing has a long shelf life. All messages that you send over the Internet can be viewed by people for years. Sure, there will be times when your message will be more in vogue than others. As internet marketing messages spread far and wide, it is quite possible for you to reap rich harvests at a later date 5. Internet marketers also have the advantage of measuring statistics easily and inexpensively; almost all aspects of an Internet marketing campaign can be traced, measured, and tested. The advertisers can use a variety of methods, such as pay per impression,pay per click, pay per play, and pay per action. Therefore, marketers can determine which messages or offerings are more appealing to the audience This is the power of digital marketing; it can reach more people than Internet marketing and traditional direct marketing campaigns. You may say there are newspapers for ads; however the

readership of newspapers has been declining over the years due to the advances in the Internet. This is why digital marketing provides leading edge solutions for business marketing campaigns.

Disadvantages
Difficulty in Attracting Customers Small business may not have the resources to pay for paid directory inclusion, pay per click inclusions and often have to rely solely on search engine optimisation or word of mouth to drive traffic to their sites. With millions of businesses selling the same product and services, competing with more established businesses can be frustrating and costly venture for small business. Difficulty in Evaluating Legitimacy of Transaction Another notable disadvantage of doing promoting businesses online is that it may be difficult for the businesspersons and consumers to thoroughly evaluate the legitimacy of a transaction. Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to thieves using stolen credit cards and stolen information to do online transaction.With Internet credit card and identity fraud on the rise, small businesses are forced to finance costly security measures to reduce their vulnerability to fraudulent transactions. Salespersons and Customers are Isolated Another disadvantage of promotion via the Internet is that the customers and businesspersons are isolated. There is little personal contact between customer and salesperson prior to and after the sales is closed. Thus, the prospect for repeat sales may thus be diminished. Entrepreneurs are therefore compelled to adopt marketing strategies to drive online users back to their site.

From all indications, it appears that the advantages of Internet promotion, far exceed the disadvantages. With adequate knowledge, entrepreneur can benefit significantly from Internet promotion, especially small business owners. More and more, the growth and outreach of the Internet, its ease and accessibility for customers is becoming inevitable. Small business would therefore be well advised to start their web advertising function in order to improve their competitiveness online.

BUSINESS MODELS
Digital marketing is associated with several business models: E-commerce: a model whereby goods are sold directly to consumers (B2C), businesses (B2B), or from consumer to consumer (C2C).

 Lead-based websites: a strategy whereby an organization generates value by acquiring sales leads from its website. Similar to walk-in customers in retail world. These prospects are often referred to as organic leads. Affiliate Marketing: a process wherein a product or service developed by one entity is sold by other active sellers for a share of profits. The entity that owns the product may provide some marketing material (e.g., sales letters, affiliate links, tracking facilities, etc.); however, the vast majority of affiliate marketing relationships come from e-commerce businesses that offer affiliate programs. Local Internet marketing: a strategy through which a small company utilizes the Internet to find and to nurture relationships that can be used for real-world advantages. Local Internet marketing uses tools such as social media marketing, local directory listing, and targeted online sales promotions.

WHAT IS DIGITAL STRATEGY

In the fields of strategic management, marketing strategy and operational strategy, digital strategy is the process of specifying an organization's vision, goals, opportunities and initiatives in order to maximize the business benefits digital investments and efforts provide to the organization. These can range from an enterprise focus, which considers the broader opportunities and risks that digital potentially creates (e.g., changes in the publishing industry) and often includes customer intelligence, collaboration, new product/market exploration, sales and service optimization, enterprise technology architectures and processes, innovation and governance; to more marketing and customer-focused efforts such as web sites, mobile, eCommerce, social, site and searchengine optimization, and advertising.

Overview
There are numerous approaches to conducting digital strategy, but at their core, all go through four steps: 1. identifying the key opportunities and/or challenges in a business where online assets can provide a solution; 2. identifying the unmet needs and goals of the customers that most closely align with those key business opportunities and/or challenges;[1] 3. developing a vision around how the online assets will fulfill those business and customer needs, goals, opportunities and challenges,[2] and 4. prioritizing a set of online initiatives which can deliver on this vision. Within each of those stages, a number of techniques and analyses may be employed.

Identifying the key opportunities and/or challenges in a business

Stakeholder interviews

Includes one-on-one interviews, group interviews and workshops with a company's senior management, marketing and sales, operations and service stakeholders with a goal of understanding the business strategy, challenges and opportunities, products, organization, processes, supply chain and vendors, distributors, customers, and competitive landscape, as well as the potential role of their online assets. Competitive analysis Includes evaluations of a company's main competitors and potential substitutes with the goal of understanding a company's strengths and weaknesses relative to their competitors and potential substitutes. While this often includes steps found in traditional marketing competitive analysis, such as products, prices, etc. Competitive analysis for Digital Strategy includes two unique items: Heuristic evaluation An evaluation by a usability expert of the usability and user experience of a company's online assets compared and contrasted to those of it competitors and potential substitutes.
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Features/functionality analysis An evaluation of the features and functionality provided by a company's online assets, compared and contrasted to those of its competitors and potential substitutes. Financial analysis An analysis of a companies financial data (which may include everything from public financial statements to private ERP data) with the goal of understanding the financial impact (positive and negative) that certain changes would have on a company.

Identifying the unmet needs and goals of the customers

Customer interviews Includes one-on-one interviews and focus groups with a company's customers with a goal of understanding customers behaviors, needs, goals and perceptions of the company and their industry both in the broadest business context as well as specifically online. In addition to standard marketing strategy methodologies and questions, customer interviews for Digital Strategy may includes usability testing, an analysis of how effective customers are at using the online assets developed by a company for their intended purposes. In digital strategy this is used to uncover usability barriers in the present state that may prevent the accomplishment to the online vision. Ethnographic research An analysis of customer behaviors in their environment, for example: field observations of shoppers at a store. In addition to standard ethnographic research, digital strategy may include video taping of a customer using their computers or specific computer applications or web sites. Web analytics An analysis of the usage patters of a company's online assets with the goal of better understanding customer behavior as well as identifying strengths and weakness of the company's current online offerings. This may include understanding how many people are visiting a web

site, what are the most popular pages, what are the most popular paths, where are people coming from, where do they drop off, how long do they stay, etc. Performance Assessment: Review of effectiveness of current digital technologies. Barriers. Needs. Funnel analysis

A specific methodology for web analytics where the company's online assets are modeled as a sales funnel, with a visit or impression representing a new leads, a certain page or action in the web site considered a conversion (such as a user hitting the purchase confirmation page) and specific pages in the web site representing specific stages of the sales funnel. The goal of the analysis is to provide insight into the overall conversion rate as well as the key weak points of the funnel (the stages in which the largest percentages of users drop out of the funnel).[4] Analytical CRM An analysis of a company's customer databases and information repositories with the goal of segmenting customers into homogeneous groups across one or more dimension of behavior, demographics, value, product or marketing message affinity, etc. In digital strategy this often includes the online customer registration database which companies use to provide access to their customer specific, protected areas. Multi-channel analysis An analysis of a customers behavior (such as their purchase behavior or their service behavior) that looks across all the different channels in which customers interact with a company's products or information. There are lots of different ways to do this, be a representative example would be, a company focuses on the customer purchase process (how a customer becomes aware of a product, how a customer develops the intent to purchase a product, and how a customer actually purchases the product). The analysis would look at which channels (example: phone, catalog, retail store, web site, 3rd party search engine, etc.) a customer uses at which stage of the purchase process, attempts to understand why each channel is used, and evaluates the company's strengths or weaknesses in that particular channel for that particular stage of the process.[5] Statistical surveys An approach to collection customer feedback in a quantitative manner from a large population. In digital strategy, surveys may be used to validate or invalidate key questions raised in more qualitative exercises such as customer interviews and focus group. Depending on the breadth of the survey population and the degree of variation within the population, survey results may be segmented to form homogeneous groups across one or more dimension of behavior, demographics, value, product or marketing message affinity, etc. Surveys are often conducted online using web intercepts, e-mail lists, or 3rd party panels, although phone surveys or other offline means may sometimes be used when they are questions as to the online savvy-ness of a particular ta Developing a vision and prioritizing a set of online initiatives Business plan or case A spreadsheet with supporting documentation that quantifies the investments and returns over time that will result from the execution of the online strategy. The Business plan also defines the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure and evaluate the success of the online strategy. Technical assessment

A design of a technical architecture which will meet the needs of the business vision and conform to the business plan and roadmap. This is often done as a gap analysis where the current technical architecture is assessed. A future technical architecture, which meets the needs of the online vision, is designed. The gaps between the current state and future state are identified, and a series of initiatives or projects to fill those gaps are developed and sequenced. Organizational and process assessment Similar to a technical assessment, organizational and process assessments look at the changes that need to be made to an organization and its processes in order to achieve the online vision. They may involve a series of business process reengineering projects focused on the areas of an organization most affected by the online initiatives. Portfolio management A way of prioritizing various initiatives by comparing their cost of implementation to their expected business benefits. This is often done by creating a two by two matrix where cost of implementation runs along the x-axis (from high cost to low cost) and expected business benefit runs along the y-axis, from low benefit to high benefit. Individual initiatives or projects are then plotted on the matrix in terms of their calculated costs and benefits and priorities are determined according to which projects will provide the greatest benefit for the least amount of cost. Online media plan A plan detailing the allocation of media spending across online media (as of 2007, this includes: search engine marketing, banner advertising, and online affiliate networks) usually as part of the customer acquisition or retention portions of the digital strategy. Since 2007, social media has become increasingly important in engaging with customers both for marketing and customer support purposes, which particularly benefits smaller businesses.[6] Proof of concept Graphics representations or comps of key ideas or processes of the digital strategy. These are often created in order to better communicate a key concept or to build excitement among stakeholders when building consensus or socializing a digital strategy. Roadmap A high-level project plan which details the durations and dependencies of all the initiatives in the digital strategy. The roadmap will often include checkpoints to assess the progress and success of the digital strategy. Measurement plan A description of the key performance indicators used to measure the effectiveness of the digital strategy as well as the process for collecting and sharing the information. The measurement plan usually covers the financial, operational, and e-business metrics and their relationships.[7][8] Governance model The organizational structure, roles, and process description of the operational entity the will manage the initiatives in a digital strategy. The governance model describes who is responsible for what, how decisions are made, how issues are escalated, and how information on the performance of the projects is communicated within the organization.

Role of personas in digital strategy

As of 2007, a trend in digital strategy is the use of personas as a framework for using customer information to prioritize online initiatives. Personas are character sketches which represent a typical member of one customer segment and highlights their needs, goals and behaviors. Because it is representative of a customer segment, it allows decision makers to prioritize various features based on the needs of the segment. Because it is a character sketch, it is sometimes easier for decision makers to internalize the key needs of the segment than it would be by reading reams and reams of data. A typical approach is to create the segment based on customer analysis such as customer interviews, ethnographic research, and statistical surveys. Then assemble key decision makers or stakeholders, present the findings of the personas, and use them to kick start a brainstorming session around different online initiatives which can meet the personas needs and goals.[9]

Execution of a digital strategy

Historically, execution of a business or digital strategy is done as a big bang, with large initiatives such as site redesigns and transactional systems taking 612 months to develop and often an additional 612 months before they deliver any results. As of 2007, a trend has emerged where companies adopt a more iterative approach to rolling out their strategies, one which leverages a series of smaller tests, which are carefully measured and analyzed and used to modify or optimize the digital strategy. An example of this test-measure-optimize-scale approach is that a company might take some key pages on their site and test a number of versions of those pages with different marketing messages, design approaches, user experience optimizations, navigation optimizations, and even new features and functions using a multivariate or A/B test. The company would then identify the page which had the best combination of changes in terms of some key business metric (such as conversion), analyzing the results to understand which changes where most instrumental in affecting the high conversion rate, and applying those learnings to future pages and future tests (conversion optimization). The advantage of this approach is that in the long run, it tends to be more successful in delivering business results, because each step is measured and adjusted for. In addition, it tends to favor smaller (less risky, less expensive) steps rather than larger (more risky, more expensive) initiatives before getting the payback.[10] The disadvantage is that over time this approach tends to converge on a solution (local optimum), not necessarily the best solution (global optimum) that might have been reached if a company starts from scratch instead of building each step on the previous one. Another disadvantage is that although this solution tends to favor smaller, more incremental changes, there is often a larger up front cost to setting up all the measurement systems and staffing a company with the right analysts and change processes to react to these tests in a timely and effective manner. As a result, companies often adopt a mix of big bang efforts augmented by some smaller, more iterative efforts as part of their overall strategy. A person who is primarily focused on digital strategy may be referred to as a digital architect or digital strategist and a person who executes a digital strategy may be referred to as a digital marketing engineer.