How Boo.com Could Have Prevented Bankruptcy With Digital Marketing Strategies

Overview of Boo.com

Nowadays, consumers possess an access to the information at any place, and time desire or require it. All thanks to the globalization and internet, many people in the world are capable to get information through mobiles, computers, or tablets (Social Beat Digital Marketing LLP, 2018).

Digital marketing is important because through electronic channels and by providing positive reviews, feedbacks about the product or company can entice new consumers and create an enduring relationship. Besides this, the company can easily get new clients through the channels of social media (Ryan, 2014). The aim of this report is to comprehend the understanding of digital marketing in the business. It will be comprised of providing the difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing. Besides this, the key intention of the report is to suggest how the use of digital marketing to could have supported Boo.com Company to prevent bankruptcy. Different strategies and tactics will be used to suggest different ways to enhance the performance of the company.   

Overview of Boo.com

Boo.com was a British internet company with short-life, established in 1998 by Patrik Hedelin, Kajsa Leander, and Ernst Malmsten, who were watched as Europe’s urbane Internet entrepreneurs by the investors since they had formed an online bookstore with the name Bokus.com. It was the thirst biggest e-retailer of the book, before establishing the new business i.e. Boo.com. After numerous extremely publicized postponements, Boo.com was introduced in 1999 vending exclusive fashion apparel on the Internet. The business spent $135 million as the venture capital in 18 months, but was positioned inexperienced bankruptcy in 2000 and discharged (Chaffey, 2014).

Vision of Boo.com

The vision of the company was to be the largest sports e-retailer of sports in the world (Support the Guardian, 2018).

Difference between Digital marketing and traditional marketing

Traditional marketing comprises notices, radio, and TV promotions, business cards, handouts, print advertisements, magazines to publicize on events, and announcements. Even so, as the technology is getting advanced, the Digital Marketing universe drives. Digital Marketing comprises social media, YouTube, and websites. On the other side, Online marketing is a bit similar to traditional marketing, as both traditional marketing and digital marketing are utilized for similar goals those are to create a brand picture.

Cost

This aspect possesses some of the differences in the cost of digital marketing and traditional marketing. As company promotes its services or products through radio and TV advertisements, magazines, and print ads and different media ads cost high on the other side ads on online social media are very much affordable. Besides this, traditional marketing requires a huge cost in order to grasp the advertisement running under the strategy. Internet marketing can similarly cost, but it involves some of the techniques of Digital marketing that are free (Dodson, 2016).

Ongoing Result

Under traditional marketing, business has to wait for some time approx. for a week or sometimes it takes a month to get the enhancing outcomes in the business (Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan, 2016). On the other side, once the use of online marketing is started, business does not need to wait for a longer time duration in order to look at the business increment.

Vision of Boo.com

The outcomes of the techniques of traditional marketing cannot be measured very easily. On the other side, in Digital Marketing, it becomes very simple to define a return on investment with the help of Google analytic tools.

Traditional marketing involves:

• Print media such as magazines, brochures, newspaper, and newsletters.
• Telemarketing
• Analytics for calculating outcomes
• Broadcast media such as radio and TV advertisement (Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan, 2016)
• Proved methods for a higher rate of success
• Established projects that are already recognized by the public
• Direct mail comprises catalogs, fliers, and postcards

Digital marketing comprises marketing efforts attached to electronic devices such as

• Content marketing
• Allows primary response from the target audience
• Websites
• Online video marketing
• Banner Ads
• Remarkable visitors achieve
• Social networking sites (Dodson, 2016)
• Google ads
• Cost-effective marketing strategies
• Easy Analytics

Calculation of marketing opportunities through digital marketing is sharp and simple. Business can frequently observe which of the technique is acting and which is not through Google Analytics. Besides this, it can observe different things too, for example, incoming traffic, internet visitors, basic trend, transformation rate, bounce rate and benefit.

Tracking 

It is very difficult to track the techniques of traditional marketing. In order to assess the viewer’s group and their communications business need to put a lot of extra efforts that are time-consuming.

Information and outcomes of the techniques of digital marketing could be easily registered. Without putting a lot of hard work, a business can check the processes are functioning with the help of Google analytics. If not, a business can make use of superior measures for improved marketing and therefore take a shot at healthier keywords to aim the viewer’s group, besides this, a business can also use channels of Social Media that are free and closely everyone uses them.

Importance for Boo.com to Invest in Digital Marketing 

The time businesses experience tough and complicated times or when its sales are falling, the executives need to make some important decisions, and these are mostly related to financial cuts. Here is the importance for Boo.com to invest in Digital Marketing

Support in increasing sales

The actions of digital marketing are dependent on the strategies studies such that the company could reach the target market at right time. Increased sales reflect that the company is successfully reaching its customers at the time they are interested in the services (Joseph, 2018). The time Boo.com sales were increasing, it would have invested in digital marketing in order to increase its sales.  

Customer Loyalty

For all the businesses, it is simpler and inexpensive to uphold customer loyalty as compared to gain new ones; therefore, it is the correct route to be followed at the time of crisis (Joseph, 2018)

Excellent relation between return and cost

In spite of numerous benefits that Digital Marketing carries to the business, requires less financial investment as compared to traditional marketing.

Investing in Digital marketing is measurable

Dissimilar to traditional marketing, in digital marketing it is likely to evaluate the taken actions. When a business thinks of placing a billboard of the company at some place, it becomes impossible to evaluate the direct influence of this on the sales, but in the case of digital marketing, it moves in the opposite direction (Joseph, 2018).

Easy communication with the person interested in the business

With the databases possessed by Google and social networks, a business can target audience depending on the factors like geography, demographics, and interests. Users of the internet leave valuable information to publicists (Pour and Mehdi, 2018).

Difference between Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing

Results in increased sales

The best strategy of digital marketing for businesses depending on inbound marketing will permit the following:

• Attract with the help of social media, blogs, SEO, etc.
• Convert by creating offers, landing pages, etc.
• Relate through marketing automation, lead nutrition, and email marketing
• Sell by CRM, inbound sales, and scores of leads (Joseph, 2018)
• Analyze by statistical analysis and numerous software metrics 
• Website Optimization techniques

There are different techniques that could have supported Boo.com to enhance its performance and confirmed its long-term survival in the market. Some of the techniques are:

HTTP requests reduction

Commonly, the more HTTP requests are made by the web page it slower the speed of loading. A browser is restricted to process some of the concurrent connections to a sole host. To stop bottlenecks, the several numbers of individual pages elements are decreased with the help of resource merging whereas smaller files, like images, are kept into one file (Novoseltseva, 2017). This decreased the HTTP requests and the round trips obligatory to webpage loading. Making fewer HTTP requests results in the essential optimization technique, with the major influence.

File Compression

Web pages are created through code files like HTML and JavaScript. The web pages and their code files increase complexity, and afterward their timing of leading. File compression could have supported Boo.com to decrease code files by 80%, thus refining site responsiveness.

Web caching optimization

Web Caching Optimization decreases load, latency, and usage of bandwidth. CDNs make use of devoted software of web caching in order to stock the document copies passing through the system (Novoseltseva, 2017).

Code minification

Code minification differentiates inconsistencies between codes inscribed by the web developers and the way network rudiments interpret code. Minification would have supported Boo.com in eliminating extra spaces and comments along with crunch variable names to diminish code.

Lossy compression

The technique of lossy compression is the same as those techniques utilized with audio files. It eliminated non-essential information and original image lower quality on numerous high-resolution images. These alterations like pixel complexity or color gradations are clear to the customer and do not let noticeably to influence the image perception (Novoseltseva, 2017).

Uploading original photos on the websites is not fruitful because they are heavy. Using tools such as JPEGmini, Kraken.io, and TinyPNG decreased the image size by maintaining the similar quality (Novoseltseva, 2017)

Redirects are known as presentation killers. Business must avoid there use as much as possible. A redirect will produce extra round-trip times and consequently rapidly doubles the duration that is needed to upload the initial document HTML (MOZ, 2018).

There are major returns to divesting the website nursing to a cloud-based host, for instance, scalability, competence, cost, etc.

Prefetching of the Domain name is the best answer to resolved domain names formerly an operator actually follows a link (Rendle, 2015).

Using Search Engine Optimization and Content Writing by Boo.com to retain and gain customers

The advertising is slowly ending, due to the development of informed customers and internet. Numerous businesses such as Boo.com must have realized this, which could have offered a great advantage to the business. Customers are smarter today because they can get the information related to service or product in just a single click. Content marketing can perform a big task as compared to spending huge investment on marketing or advertisements (Global Web Advisor, 2018).

Cost

Forms of Content Writing

Content marketing is straight forward, which represents one of the greatest reasons that it operates well for appealing customers. With content marketing, Boo.com could have tried to offer customers a helpful data or information regarding particular service or product that is offered by it. This is mostly done by the utilization of social media websites, press releases, and business blogs, to name some roads of content marketing. While the three areas offer huge opportunities for content marketing, deprived of good SEO that is search engine optimization, the efforts of the business would be wasted (Global Web Advisor, 2018).

Understanding Search Engine Optimization 

Search engine optimization is accurately what it sounds like optimizing or enhancing the information or content for the search engines. Here, the business ensures that the information it is placing will be documented by the search engine and attain an effective ranking of the search engine. If Boo.com would have attained high-ranking for a search engine for pertinent keywords, it could have attracted a number of potential consumers to the business website

Focus on Relevant Content

The chief feature of effective SEO is its content. All of the above, search engines, particularly Google, observe the content when defining ranking of the search engine. This also moves with the basic idea of content marketing, confirming that business is offering helpful content to its customers. This reflects that whether it is about creating a blog, article, or a press release, it starts with the content. If the writing of the content is outsourced, it must be ensured that business read the content and talks to the consumers with proper information that can enhance their knowledge on the particular subject, letting them take an informed decision

Hiring an “SEO Company”

SEO is not just about the content there are lot more things that must be considered. Prudently seeing the practice of pertinent keywords without utilizing them too frequently is a significant aspect, as well as the choice of title. Companies of SEO are conscious of this and have an understanding of how to make good content, and to perform keyword research and utilizing those keywords properly (McLeod, 2018). Furthermore, these companies know where to succumb press releases and how to form links to the content. Just posting an article on the blog is not enough. Therefore, if Boo.com were requiring a decent link building, article submission, and keyword research, it would have turned to a professional company of SEO. Deprived of decent SEO, content marketing is not operative as it must be.

Use of Social Media by Boo.com to attract customers

Online marketing performs a critical part in this modern age. In the new digital age, the platform of social media marketing is said to be on rising and has been a crucial platform for all the business to increase brand awareness in the competitive market. There are some ways Boo.com could have attracted customers with the use of social media:

Be Socially Active

The primary thing to entice consumers is to involve on social media. Boo.com could have set itself apart from its competitors to be visible in the market with the help of social media. Maintaining a strong relationship with the spectators is important because it helps in establishing trust among them (Doz, 2017).

Ongoing Result

Businesses can interact with its customers in different ways. For example, it can elucidate doubts and chat though fans pages, private messages, and group pages

Using Creative Content to bring Curiosity or Interest

Getting more attention on the business content is the definitive solution to increase the range of product. Posts with high attraction level, informative can reflect on the brand and they make a greater chance of being spread on the network of social media (Stelzner, 2018). If Boo.com has utilized social media, the strength of the business profile could have increased along with its referrals.

Marketing Matters

Marketing is said to be the best approach to marketing and to affect the consumers in a superior manner. It instantaneously supports to carry social influence to endorse a product. Marketing possesses the power to initiate societal revolutions besides humanizing brand loyalty. It is an organic marketing solution to quicken consciousness among possible consumers. Increase in the number of likes on the fan page highlights prominence of the business (Doz, 2017).

Organic sessions evaluate earned visits to the business website from search engines like Bing and Google (Murray, 2018).  

Followers of social media

Facebook page likes

Facebook daily reach (Zeisig, 2017)

Organic Users percentage on Website

The average position of unbranded terms (Deshpande, 2018)

PPC Marketing

Numerous business proprietors put their maximum efforts to create their brand and advertise their services, but still, they are unaware of the PPC marketing like Google AdWords (Chaffey, Robinson and Annison, 2010). They possibly identify the ads that reflect the top of their search inquiries.

Whether the goals of the business are to enhance subscribers, brand awareness and sales, it is essential to understand this, otherwise, the business can move in the wrong direction. In order to have effective PPC marketing, Boo.com first needs to define the goals (Medium, 2018).

Determining the PPC campaign budget is important because business has to make payments to the advertiser based on the number of clicks.

The essential need for the achievement of any Pay per Click campaign is an assortment of the correct keywords. With the help of proper keywords, Boo.com can advertise successfully an online business by a PPC campaign (Medium, 2018).

• Using distinct keywords for diverse ads if there are several keywords associated with the project of PPC management
• Creating attention gathering headline
• Creating copies of attractive ads
• Framing landing pages

Online display advertisement lasts to develop at a quick pace. By 2017, Forrester Research antedates that the market of online advertising will touch around $28 billion, with 17% yearly average growth over the next five years (Callahan, 2014). Online display advertising is developing due to its effective functioning. It provides an exclusive combination of targeting and reach online display has a wide reach since it allows marketers to aid advertisements to select spectators and it does not matter where the spectators travel on the Web.

Online advertising can help Boo.com Company to increase brand awareness because it is multipurpose advertising medium and can possess an influence at any point in the shaft, reaching customers, leads, prospects.

Managing digital marketing mostly require new staff, processes, skills, and technologies for marketing. One of the best way through which Boo.com could have managed its digital marketing is the McKinsey 7S framework. It could be used in the following manner:

7S Model elements	Application to the digital marketing team
Strategy	The implication of digital marketing in persuading and subsidiary strategy of the organizations
Systems	Developing particular procedures, or information systems in order to support digital marketing (Smart Insights, 2018)
Style	Comprises both ways under which main executives behave in attaining the goals and cultural style of the organizations as a whole.
Structure	The organizational structure modification to the provision of digital marketing
Skills	Unique competences of main staff members, but could be understood as team member’s precise skill-sets.
Superordinate goals	The supervisory concepts of the organization’s digital marketing, which is part of the culture and shared values The external and internal perception of these objectives may differ
Staff	The breakdown of the workforce in relation to their characteristics and backgrounds like IT vs. Marketing, age, and sex, use of contractors

Importance for Boo.com to Invest in Digital Marketing

Conclusion

The above report has highlighted the key concepts of digital marketing and its importance within an organizational setting. The complete report is based on how Boo.com could have used digital marketing to enhance its performance and attract potential customers. Boo.com was one of the short life business deals in the online retailing of apparels. From the above analysis, it has been recognized that there is huger different between digital marketing and traditional marketing.

The traditional marketing is expensive and there are fewer chances to measure its outcomes. On the other side, Digital marketing is cheaper and its outcomes can be quickly measured by the business. The above report has presented the reasons to invest in digital marketing that increase sales of the business, and customer loyalty. Moreover, it has highlighted different strategies of search engine optimization that Boo.com could have used at the time of its failure to attract more customers such as HTTP request reduction, file compression, web catching optimization, etc.   

References 

Beashel, A. (2016) How to Integrate Email Marketing with a Social Media Strategy [online]. Available from https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2016/05/integrate-email-marketing-social-media-strategy/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Callahan, S. (2014) 8 Steps to Creating Online Display Ads That Work [online]. Available from https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/blog/8/8-steps-to-creating-online-display-ads-that-work [accessed 16 December 2018]

Chaffey, D. (2014) Boo.com case study – a classic example of failed ecommerce strategy [online]. Available from https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/online-marketing-mix/boo-com-case-study-a-classic-example-of-failed-ebusiness-strategy/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Chaffey, D., Robinson, P., and Annison, L. (2010) Pay Per Click Marketing 1^st ed. U.K: ClickThrough Marketing.

Deshpande, P. (2018) 6 KPIs For Content Marketing [online]. Available from https://blog.marketo.com/2018/01/6-kpis-content-marketing.html [accessed 16 December 2018]

Dodson, I. (2016) The Art of Digital Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Creating Strategic, Targeted, and Measurable Online Campaigns 1^st ed. U.S: John Wiley & Sons.

Doz, J. (2017) How to Attract Customers Through Effective Social Media Marketing? [online]. Available from https://www.doz.com/social-media/attract-customers-effective-social-media-marketing [accessed 16 December 2018]

Gabbert, B. (2018) PPC Budget Guide: Are You Spending Your PPC Budget Wisely? [online]. Available from https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/08/29/ppc-budget-guide [accessed 16 December 2018]

Global Web Advisor (2018) Using Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing  to Gain Customers [online]. Available from https://www.globalwebadvisors.com/2018/08/17/using-search-engine-optimization-and-content-marketing-to-gain-customers/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Joseph, A. (2018) Digital Marketing – Investment or Spending? [online]. Available from https://www.relevance.com/digital-marketing-investment-or-spending/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Kotler, P., Kartajaya, H., and Setiawan, I. (2016) Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital 1^st ed. U.S: John Wiley & Sons.

McLeod, B. (2018) How To Choose A Reliable Seo Company [online]. Available from https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/how-to-choose-a-reliable-SEO-company/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Medium (2018) 4 Steps to implement Pay Per Click (PPC) [online]. Available from https://medium.com/@subsign/4-steps-to-implement-pay-per-click-ppc-6b922385c17c [accessed 16 December 2018]

MOZ (2018) Redirection [online]. Available from https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection [accessed 16 December 2018]

Murray, B. (2018) The 9 Most Important SEO KPIs You Should Be Tracking [online]. Available from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/top-seo-kpis/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Novoseltseva, E. (2017) Web Performance Optimization Techniques [online]. Available from https://apiumhub.com/tech-blog-barcelona/web-performance-optimization-techniques/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Out Law (2013) Online Advertising [online]. Available from https://www.out-law.com/page-5604 [accessed 16 December 2018]

Pour, K., and Mehdi, D.B.A. (2018) Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Digital Marketing and Entrepreneurship 1^st ed. U.S: IGI Global.

Rendle, R. (2015) Prefetching, preloading, prebrowsing [online]. Available from https://css-tricks.com/prefetching-preloading-prebrowsing/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Ryan, D. (2014) Understanding Digital Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Engaging the Digital Generation 3^rd ed. U.K: Kogan Page Publishers.

Shewan, D. (2018) The Comprehensive Guide to Online Advertising Costs [online]. Available from https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/07/05/online-advertising-costs [accessed 16 December 2018]

Smart Insights (2018) Managing digital marketing [online]. Available from https://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Social Beat Digital Marketing LLP (2018) Digital Marketing Insights 1^st ed. India: Notion Press.

Stelzner, M. (2018) Curiosity Marketing: A Better Way to Win Loyal Customers [online]. Available from https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/curiosity-marketing-win-loyal-customers-chalene-johnson/ [accessed 16 December 2018]

Support the Guardian (2018) Boo.com spent fast and died young but its legacy shaped internet retailing [online]. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/may/16/media.business [accessed 16 December 2018]

Zeisig, K. (2017) The top 13 KPIs for social media managers [online]. Available from https://www.klipfolio.com/blog/kpi-social-media-manager [accessed 16 December 2018]