Digital Marketing Strategies And Importance Of Investing In Digital Marketing

Importance of Investing in Digital Marketing

Discuss about the Digital Marketing.

Digital marketing refers to marketing of products and services by using various digital channels in order to reach large number of customers easily. In today’s era, to promote new services or products in the market, online marketing is used. Online marketing has the ability to promote the product to larger audience by reaching at the right door. Instead of using old traditional methods of ‘interruption marketing’ where lot of efforts are required to make the product available for the audience, digital marketing is a better way. This report contains the details about benefits received and the strategies made by HVM to promote their products through digital channels. Various methods are used to mmeasure the success of HMV’s and the impact on its growth by using digital strategies.

Digital marketing helps in finding the goals of the competitor and knowing about their strategies which contributes in reaching wider audience in short span of time. Previously HVM used to promote the branding of products by launching loyalty programs, to reach to the customers.  The perceptive of HMV was to reach larger audience therefore digital marketing was used for better advertisement. Online marketing reaches to every type of target audience, aiming to spread awareness of the service everywhere (Armstrong, et al., 2015). It is important for HMV to invest in digital marketing capabilities to compete with other companies. As majority of the competitors are using online marketing, that helps in bringing the services and products online. This in turn helps in growing the business and also provides flexibility to customers. On the other hand digital marketing also supports HVM to know what others competitors are doing like HMV stores include books, audio, videos as well as wide range of movies and music. To promote these services HMV has launched various apps and online stores for better marketing.

HVM also uses sources of digital marketing for promotion of products; online marketing is cost effective as it has lower cost budgets as compared to traditional marketing strategies.  Digital marketing is of no use if customers cannot reach to the website. Therefore it is important to increase the traffic of the website or change the flow to get more traffic on the site. As more traffic means more customers that means more profit to the business (Tiago and Veríssimo, 2014). HVM want that the customers spend more time on online site so that business could be expanded. It is true in today’s world there are various ways to attract customers to website and get large scale of audience. It is done by online marketing as there is ease of accessibility of internet. While accessibility is simple but to grasp the online traffic it can be done by marketing strategies.  Blogging is one of the ways to increase traffic to the website, as blogs helps to enhance the business by attracting more traffic. To increase the volume of sale and improve return on investment HVM approached to search agency. To improve the visibility of the site and to compete with the one serving same services Search Engine tactics are used. To bring the website on the top lists a large number of keywords are prepared of all the available products and groups. As using keywords help the company to come in highly searched items. The searched traffic is directly linked with the keywords decided. Getting the brand online is easy but to come in top search perceptive is achieved by using SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Once the list of keywords is bided for a strong search engine, the next step is to tackle organic search engines(TechMagnate, 2017). As search engines like goggle, yahoo contributes to major traffic on the website. SEO acts like a magic for business, as it open a doors for long term marketing of the business (Yasmin, Tasneem and Fatema, 2015).

Use of Search Engine Marketing Tactics Improves Visibility

Keyword Research- It is an important step for building SEO, analysing the keywords contributes in optimizing search results. For HMV, keywords should cover all the music streams, books names, popular magazines, television series, games and everything related to fashion or cinema. The list of keywords should include the entire artists name as well as the latest updates (Envato, 2016).

Competitive Intelligence- After making the list of keywords, it is important to look what the competitors are serving globally, what they are lacking in or where they are ranked in. If detailed analysis is performed about the competitor, it could be easy to decide the future plan. As the cost of SEO is dependent on how many same competitors are available (Envato, 2016).

Web Design and Development and Getting Inbound Links- The layout of the website and it presentation is also important. The website should be designed which supports search engine friendly design. Other than that it is important to get first inbound link by any vendor to increase links to the website (Envato, 2016).

Getting Sitemap – It is a method to register the site to the search engine by sending them the report and other information related to the site. As in case HMV, a report is sent regarding the products that are delivered and in which regions the services are offered (Envato, 2016).

Web Analytics- To track the effectiveness of the site, it is important to determine the success area by analysing the parts where site is lacking. After getting the sitemap done HVM uses web analysis that helps to determine in which area improvement is needed and in which lanes marketing is needed to pull more customers (Envato, 2016).

Content Building and Link Building- To escalate the traffic to the site content and link building is used. HMV sells good quality products but showcasing relevant content is a medium for business growth. HMV promotes advertising the blogs services that are offered to increase the traffic. Other than that creating links between independent pages helps to gain ranking in SEO.

Trust and Community Building- Before expanding the services online and increasing links, it is important to be authorized and build trust to explore the business globally.

Getting Ranked- Looking for marketing campaigns and improving ranking is crucial. As getting the traffic is directly related to the ranking of website.

It is an internet adverting tool to create clicks for the website. Setting PPC is important and steps undertaken are (Ryan, 2016).

Steps undertaken to Design and Effective SEO

Setting Goal- It is important to set a goal or objective for building an online marketing plan. Identifying the key objective of HMV and planning the campaign accordingly helps in getting more traffic. If the marketing objective is clear and precise, lead generation could help in boosting the sale. Also for each objective a proper plan is created according to the requirements (Bolger, 2015).

Choosing Platform- Various channels are available for pay per click, like Facebook, Google, yahoo and other social media platforms. Platform need to be chosen wisely as it provides advertisement of the service.

Target Planning- After selecting a proper platform it is important to select the target audience. Audience could be targeted according to the location or according to the type. Geo-targeting allows the advertisement to appear in a specific location. It can help in optimizing the result. Also targeting user according to the type helps in customizing the ads to certain device or operating system.

Keyword Research- Creating a list of keywords by researching about by the trending activities. List of core keyword is created to get more customers and uplift the growth of the business. It is also important to check the list of keywords by reviewing them on the basic of cost. The keywords which are not contributing to any traffic are removed a new keywords are built.

Writing Effective Advertisement Text- Advertisement is a key to marketing as it promotes services and products on search platforms. Advertisement is made innovative by the text it contains, thus it is important to write a creative text that is appealing to the audiences. Strong text gets more traffic to the site as it attracts more customers. Also adding ad extensions give extra benefits it ensures that high quality is been served (Ryan, 2016).

Optimizing the Landing Pages- When a user clicks on the ad it gets redirected to the landing page. As the quality of landing pages is important factor to determine the score of traffic. Optimizing the landing page by providing a proper description of the product helps in receiving more customers (Ryan, 2016).

Monitor Competitors- For marketing strategy benchmarking is a key factor. It is important to keep an eye on the competitor, how they are growing, what strategies are undertaken by them, what keywords are used by them helps in planning a good plan. So that plans could be designed smartly for better growth(Ryan, 2016).

Steps Undertaken To Design And Effective (Pay Per Click) PPC

Installing Conversion Tracking Code- HMV being a part of retail industry has many keywords related to all the products, thus tracking code helps in knowing which keywords are actually profitable. So that keywords which are not offering profit could be removed.

Branding the objective to target audience- Reaching to large customers can be achieved by online advertising. It is very flexible approach as everyone surf the internet, so it helps in reaching large prospective audience. HMV tries to increase the sale of product by offering special discounts and offers that aims in getting more customers (Ramos and Cota, 2010).

Increasing marketing funnel- Building same kind of brands ads like the competitors helps in understand the marketing strategy in a better way. Accordingly plans can be decided to offer more benefits to the customer as compared to the benefits offered by the competitor group.

Creative design- Ads are generally designed to capture customer’s attention. Thus it should be designed in an innovative manner by using a picture and an addictive tagline; which would help to rasp more users. Ads should include fewer words but should depict the entire story to drive the target audience (Ramos and Cota, 2010).

Choosing right source of media- Once the ads, images and videos are prepared it is important to publish these things on the rick media platform. As research shows that users are more likely to click on the rich media ads.

Measuring ad impact- Metrics is used for checking if the online display and videos are effective or not, that they are giving some productive value or not. To check how well the banners are performing the cost of lead accomplished by the banner is calculated. It is important to measure as if the cost is productive or not this could be done by different methods adopted by HMV(Weideman, 2017).

HMV can target the audience through Search Engine Marketing

Various footsteps flowed by HMV to get audience are:

It is true that customers look for the product online due to flexible access. To ensure that HMV gets audience it showcases content that supports brands, by showcasing all music channels, books available and other products in an innovative manner. As the client focuses on the appearance of the website, HMV can develop an innovative website to provide good experience to customer. It also has an contract with Lynchpin which monitors the information of HMV and track the customers online so that flow of traffic can be identified(Cui and Hu, 2011).

Content marketing also attract customers

To ensure that site contains best content will help in getting real and long term customers. Appearance of the site just helps in getting customer in one run, but building a strong relation with customers is directly related to the content it offers(Baye,  Santos and Wildenbeest, 2016). To make sure that site operates in an optimum way it is important to use correct keywords. Content is crucial part of marketing as it directly indicates about the services and products (Baltes, 2015).

Laws and guidelines need to be taken with regards to Search Engine Marketing

While selecting keywords for the website, it should be noted that keywords should not be translated. Also the website should use proper copyrights standards so that the site can be showcased in the search result. Also a large amount of data cannot be copyrighted. Similarly, the website should be free from false data and keywords as it affect the quality of content. Other than that site should be legally registered before being part of SEO

(Holliman and Rowley,2014).

Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing  

Email marketing has completely changed the game for small business. As sharing the information through Email helps in getting new audience for the company and increases the traffic on the site. Email marketing for HMV is used to promote the offers and discounts on the products so that customers get enhanced towards the site. As the customers of HMV give the feedback using Email, thus it can be used as a great source for marketing. Email marketing also offers exclusive values so that user can subscribe as well as it attracts more customers by the content (Zhang, Kumar and Cosguner,2017). Benefits of email marketing are getting interested users to the site as the one who are concerned by seeing the email will only visits the site. In short email marketing can be done in a cost effective budget as well as it helps in reaching large amount of users. It provides world-wide exposure of the product. It helps in engaging the audience for longer run, making connections and building trust to get permanent clients. Regular E-mail reminders about new products, or bounce offers helps in getting users. Email marketing delivers services and engages the user for a longer time. Email marketing helps in optimizing the business needs as research showed that purchase of HMV products is contributed by marketing emails as most of the customers are available online. It is true that users check their emails at least once a day. By writing optimal subject lines helps in getting more audience attracted towards the business (Sahni, Wheeler and Chintagunta, 2018).

Social Media marketing provides an opportunity to reach to the target audience. Reaching the audience via social media is easy as it touches every door of target users. For business, social media marketing act as a crucial point in the growth and making profit. Similarly, HMV uses social media marketing by showcasing the products and services online. It also publishes new service and products online to reach to extensive customers (Wu and Liu, 2016). It is also beneficial as it helps in getting feedback from the users so that improvement can be done easily. It is a faster way to reach to the audience and users can remain active all the time. It is a cost effective approach for marketing, as well as it targets to all kind of target audience.  Social media marketing is helpful for HMV as it helps in knowing the interest of customer, so that marketing plans can be made accordingly. Social media marketing can be overwhelming as it independently sufficient to reach to user in minimum time. Social network has covered every area on the globe as billions of users can be reached in a short span of time. In case of HMV which is retail store serving the products of youth’s interest like music libraries, television and movies series(Patrick, et. al,2014). Thus advertising about these products on social networking site is worth it, as youth is active on social networking site all day long. Hence, advertisement of their interest will drive them to look more about it; which in turn will increase the traffic of the site (Ashley and Tuten, 2015).

There are various marketing channels to attract more customers, considering the case for small businesses first. Small businesses are looking to get more customers to grow their business. This can be done by using social media platforms like Facebook, twitter for promoting. As these sites are easy and flexible to use, it offers a great way to reach to all kind of target audience. Twitter is one of the powerful tools to engage customers, similarly posting or promoting products via pinterest helps in generating interest in customers. These marketing channels are very useful for start-ups who are initially looking for customers(Abdullah, 2017).

For attracting and engaging new customers, best marketing channel is digital marketing. As for expanding the business and making the lifestyle easy social media marketing methods are used.  It helps in engaging the customers and obtaining feedback in a real time form customers. It provides various facilities and features for promoting their customers effectively. Additionally it helps businesses to nurture relationship with customers for long term. It is true that everyone in the society relies on digital devices and services, so it right to promote in the section where target audience is already present(Ahmed and Hussen, 2015).

For optimum marketing and keeping the customers stable and for longer run email marketing could be used as it gives personal messages to an individual. This serves as a great medium for communicating with the regular users, telling them about discounts and offers it can provide to special users. Thus getting customers is easy but keeping them permanent is a difficult task. The key to keep customers for longer run is doing something of value or their interest so that audience are easy to pitch. This can be easily done by posting the products regularly, so that clear picture could be created in customer’s mind, about what actually we provide (Oregon State University, 2016).

Website optimisation techniques improves website performance

After launching a website, there are many things that need to be considered for boosting the performance of the site. Optimizing the speed of website and getting higher load space will contribute in improving the performance. Like HMV has some of the basic pages that every customer would visit, thus keeping those pages in the caching section on the browser enables the website to boost the speed significantly. As the customers looking for the products or searching for some television series on HMV’s website, the total response time should be less so that it helps in grasping user’s attention and will prove for a longer stay of the customer on the site. Also HMV sells many products thus having large number of images that usually take a long time to load, which is the reason of customers switching to other website. For this problem compression method can be used where large pages take more time to load is compressed to smaller images but marinating the speed. Like if a page has great quality content and images compression is the best web optimization techniques and helps in boosting the load time(Jain, Ahuja and Medury, 2015).

Websites are important part of the business as it showcases the impression of product, good and services. Managing the site traffic is important as it should not affect the speed or performance .Thus to maintain the user experience speed needs to be maintained, as speed is a critical element for running an effective website. It is true that faster loading websites are beneficial and provides better user engagement and have higher conversion rates which results in good SEO ranking (Killoran, 2013).

 Another factor to be taken care to improve the performance of HMV website is, controlling HTTP requests as more number of requests slower the web page. Thus the products should be categorized and kept in a single file so that round trip of searching can be reduced. Also while developing the website extra code should be removed like comments and spaces that are not needed. For HMV, which is being used all day long should use cloud to keep the data. There are major advantages to offloading your website and monitoring the site on a cloud-based host, it decreases the cost of website and increases the scalability and efficiency(Royle and Laing, 2014).

Apart from the external efforts it is important to keep an eye on which order products are loaded. If the products are loaded in the correct sequence it will decrease the response time and enhance the performance of the website (Mills and Plangger, 2015). As HMV has major role of downloading, as users mostly download music files and series thus it is crucial to decrease download size. Other approach is using Content Delivery Network (CDN), it is a network of servers which is located at different geographical locations. Each server stores the copy of files present on the website. So that whenever a visitor requests for a file on the site, the file searched on the nearest server and is delivered from the nearest server so that user experiences lightest load at the time. Thus in case of HMV products copies are saved in nearest server so that whenever customers listens to latest libraries it could be fetched from nearest servers. Thus this setup is used to have a significant impact on page’s overall performance (Lemonstand, 2018).

To increase the performance of website it can be done by minimizing the resources by the means of removing redundant characters from HTML code and CSS file that is not required. This speeds up the load time because it reduces the total amount of space occupied by  code that need to be bided from the server again and again (Weber, 2010).

And at last but not the least, it is important to optimize database. Removing the old products which are of no use now or removing old tables which do not contain relevant data. In case of HMV there are certain products or music libraries which are not available now or the products are out of stock. Thus cleaning out all the old unused indexes is important for faster access (Singh, Veron-Jackson and Cullinane, 2010).

Measuring the success of HMV’s digital strategy

Metrics- HMV uses traffic metrics to track the actual flow of traffic, from where the customers are coming in the businesses. The motive of these metrics helps in measuring site traffic; it focuses on how many unique visitors’ visits the site per day or week. As it helps HVM to do marketing in the area from where the traffic is driven to the website.

Other than that conversion metrics are also used by HMV to mmeasure how many visitors visiting the website are actually converted into valuable lead or proves to be a tangible sale for the company and checking the digital marketing success. 

Hootsuite- It is another tool used to measure the success of website. It is mostly designed for managing numerous social media channels at one single place so that the problem of switching between applications can be resolved. It case of HMV it manages the links of products or content description of the services and the performance of social media team.

Google Analytics- It is a tool that is used for analysing the data and its processing. It is used by HMV to analyse the performances of the pages of website as well as checking on different marketing channels used during the campaign. This method prepares a report telling all about the data information, that the content on the website is beneficial for the business or not (Edelman, 2010). 

Mixpanel- It is an important tool that provides analytics of the entire product as well as the latest trends in which customers view or purchase the products or service. It provides the capabilities of understanding the customers in a better way that could help the company to grow (Stokes, 2011).

An Effective Digital Marketing Strategy for HMV

• Detecting Objectives- It is the first step to briefly describe and understand the goals of the company. HMV is retail store so steps are taken to capture more market shares and increase profit margins.
• Research & Analysis- Next step is a researching phasein which audits are made to understand the market strategies deeply and target the right audience to discover the real perception.
• Engagement Plan– After understanding customers’ needs and competitors services it is necessary to develop engagement planning. This plan is used to connect and engage the right audience.  
• Creating Effective Development Plan-A proper plan should be taken by HMV regarding what marketing strategies need to adopted and actions taken to meet the profit level of the company. To gather more customers HMV uses effective techniques.
• Measuring The Results- It is the most important step, by checking that all the marketing strategies are working correctly and are producing some effective output that leads in calculating the profitable cost (Hall, 2016).

Conclusion

It can be concluded from the report that among all the marketing strategies, digital marketing is the best technique. It is used for promotion of products or services using different electronic media platforms. It is extremely important for gaining rapid growth in the business as it is the future of marketing and the source to get more customers to the company. In order to have an online business digital marketing strategies are used. The success of marketing can easily be measured by analysing the traffic to the site. Thus it helps in attracting new customers and building a long-lasting relationship with the user. 

References

Abdullah, K.D., 2017. Search Engine optimization Techniques by Google’s Top Ranking Factors: Website Ranking Signals.

Ahmed, A.M. and Hussen, H.M., 2015. A Simple Website Optimization Framework for Web developers in Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Int. J. of Multidisciplinary and Current research, 3, pp.992-8.

Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M. and Brennan, R., 2015. Marketing: an introduction. Pearson Education.

Ashley, C. and Tuten, T., 2015. Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1), pp.15-27.

Baltes, L.P., 2015. Content marketing-the fundamental tool of digital marketing. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov. Economic Sciences. Series V, 8(2), p.111.

Baye, M.R., De los Santos, B. and Wildenbeest, M.R., 2016. Search engine optimization: what drives organic traffic to retail sites?. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 25(1), pp.6-31.

Bolger, L., 2015. An investigation into the role of self-expression on the paradoxical resurgence of vinyl in a digital paradigm: A study across different age groups in Ireland(Doctoral dissertation, Dublin, National College of Ireland).

Cui, M. and Hu, S., 2011, September. Search engine optimization research for website promotion. In Information Technology, Computer Engineering and Management Sciences (ICM), 2011 International Conference on (Vol. 4, pp. 100-103). IEEE.

Edelman, D.C., 2010. Four ways to get more value from digital marketing. McKinsey Quarterly, 6.

EMAIL

Envato, (2016), Best Practices for Increasing Website Performance, [Online]. Available at: https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/best-practices-for-increasing-website-performance–webdesign-9109.Accessed on 5 March.

Hall, R., 2016. Brilliant Marketing: How to plan and deliver winning marketing strategies-regardless of the size of your budget. Pearson UK.

Holliman, G. and Rowley, J., 2014. Business to business digital content marketing: marketers’ perceptions of best practice. Journal of research in interactive marketing, 8(4), pp.269-293.

Jain, N., Ahuja, V. and Medury, Y., 2015. Digital Marketing Optimization. In Strategic E-Commerce Systems and Tools for Competing in the Digital Marketplace (pp. 162-170). IGI Global.

Killoran, J.B., 2013. How to use search engine optimization techniques to increase website visibility. IEEE Transactions on professional communication, 56(1), pp.50-66.

Lemonstand, (2018), 18 Marketing Channels To Find New Customers For Your Online Store,[Online]. Available at: https://blog.lemonstand.com/18-marketing-channels-to-find-new-customers-for-your-online-store/. Accessed on 6 March. 

Mills, A.J. and Plangger, K., 2015. Social media strategy for online service brands. The Service Industries Journal, 35(10), pp.521-536.

Oregon State University, (2016), How to Measure and Analyze Digital Marketing Campaigns. [Online]. Available at: https://pace.oregonstate.edu/how-measure-and-analyze-digital-marketing-campaigns Accessed on 6 March. 

Patrick, K.J., Snyder, R., Margolis, M., Alahverdian, M. and Barbera, S., trendyr LLC, 2014. Social media marketing. U.S. Patent Application 13/670,238.

Ramos, A. and Cota, S., 2010. Search engine marketing. McGraw-Hill, Inc..

Royle, J. and Laing, A., 2014. The digital marketing skills gap: Developing a Digital Marketer Model for the communication industries. International Journal of Information Management, 34(2), pp.65-73.

Ryan, D., 2016. Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation. Kogan Page Publishers.

Ryan, D., 2016. Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation. Kogan Page Publishers.

Sahni, N.S., Wheeler, S.C. and Chintagunta, P., 2018. Personalization in Email Marketing: The Role of Noninformative Advertising Content. Marketing Science.

Singh, T., Veron-Jackson, L. and Cullinane, J., 2010. Blogging: A new play in your marketing game plan. Business horizons, 51(4), pp.281-292.

Stokes, R., 2011. eMarketing: The essential guide to digital marketing. Quirk eMarketing.

TechMagnate, (2017), How to Measure Digital Marketing Campaign, [Online]. Available at: https://www.techmagnate.com/blog/how-measure-digital-marketing-campaign/.Accessed on 5 March.

Tiago, M.T.P.M.B. and Veríssimo, J.M.C., 2014. Digital marketing and social media: Why bother?. Business Horizons, 57(6), pp.703-708.

Weber, L., 2010. Marketing to the social web: How digital customer communities build your business. John Wiley & Sons.

Weideman, M., 2017. SEO vs PPC: A Model To Determine The Most Effective Digital Marketing Budget Division.

Wu, J., Li, K.J. and Liu, J.S., 2016. Bayesian Inference for Assessing Effects of Email Marketing Campaigns. Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, (just-accepted), pp.1-40.

Yasmin, A., Tasneem, S. and Fatema, K., 2015. Effectiveness of digital marketing in the challenging age: An empirical study. International Journal of Management Science and Business Administration, 1(5), pp.69-80.

Zhang, X., Kumar, V. and Cosguner, K., 2017. Dynamically managing a profitable email marketing program. Journal of Marketing Research, 54(6), pp.851-866.