Advanced Guide to Digital Marketing

Lecture Presentation by Dr. Arpan Kumar Kar | © Business Fundas

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Dr. Arpan Kumar Kar

Faculty – Indian Institute of Management

Blog: Business Fundas - Lectures by IIM Faculty

http://business-fundas.com

Leveraging the Web - The way ahead

Advanced Guide to Digital Marketing

http://business-fundas.com/








Agenda

Introduction

Digital Branding

Digital Marketing Research

Optimizing through Analytics

Promotions & Advertising Channels

Search Engines Optimization

Theoretical frameworks





3

Introduction





Understanding digital marketing

Corporate strategy

Marketing strategy

Digital marketing Offline marketing

Strategy formulation

•Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning

•Advertising, PR, Events

•Integrated programs and so on -------

Strategy formulation

•Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning

•Managing offering awareness

•Digital infrastructure and Digital promotion

•Manage user experiences, website offerings

•Managing online traffic and SEO

•Managing user data





Addressing key concerns

Developing a brand with intangible offerings

Managing consumer

information

Advertising and Promotion channels

Enhancing offering

awareness (E.G. web visibility)





6

Theoretical Frameworks





The 7S framework for Digital Marketing (Waterman et al.; McKinsey)

Strategy: Does the strategy fit with the vision and mission of your organization?

Shared values: Does the strategy go hand in hand with the shared values of not only your target customer segment but also of that of the implementers?

Structure: Does your organizational structure support adaptations to changes in environment in response to your campaign?

Skill: Do you have the suitable skilled workforce to design the campaign successfully?

Staff: Are your staff equipped to implement your strategy (location wise, access to technical resources)

Style: Does the campaign thematically fit with the style of your other campaigns?

Systems: Do you have systems in place to carry out the campaign? Is there support for your advertising campaigns and marketing plans?





The 7S framework for Digital Marketing (Waterman et al.; McKinsey)

Strategy: The significance of digital marketing in influencing and supporting organisations' strategy

•Gaining appropriate budgets and demonstrating / delivering value and ROI from budgets

•Techniques for using digital marketing to impact organisation strategy

•Techniques for aligning digital strategy with organisational and marketing strategy

Structure: The modification of organizational structure to support digital marketing

•Integration of team with other management, marketing (corporate communications, brand marketing, direct marketing) and IT staff

•Use of cross-functional teams and steering groups

•Insourcing vs. Outsourcing

Systems: The development of specific processes, procedures or information systems to support digital marketing

•Campaign planning approach-integration and managing content quality

•Managing/sharing customer information through a unified reporting of digital marketing effectiveness

•In-house vs. external best-of-breed vs. external integrated technology solutions

Staff: A combination staff with varied domain experience such as IT, Marketing, use of external consultants.

•Insourcing vs. outsourcing

•Achieving senior management buy-in/involvement with digital marketing

•Staff recruitment and retention, virtual teams, staff development and training

Style: Includes how key managers behave to achieve goals

•Relates to role of digital marketing team in influencing strategy

•it is it dynamic and influential or conservative and looking for a voice

Skills: Distinctive capabilities of key staff, but can be interpreted as specific skill-sets of team members

•Staff skills in specific areas like project management, content management, specific e-marketing approaches

Super-Ordinate goals: The guiding concepts to build the digital marketing organization’s culture

•Improving the perception of the importance/effectiveness of digital marketing among senior managers and staff





Important theories for Digital Marketing

Game Theory

• A mathematical concept that analyzes how strategic interactions between individuals, or agents, produce outcomes based on the agents' choices

• Companies use this information to guide their decisions in how best to communicate their products' value to consumers

Network Theory

• Study of relationships between people and elements through social network analysis for learning about patterns that develop within social networks and how they influence behavior

• Digital marketing channels allow marketers to listen to what consumers are saying

• They allow marketers to leverage the power of influential users to spread messages throughout their networks.

• Allow identification of users with the most influence across a number of differentiated networks.

Theory of Collective Intelligence

• The theory of collective intelligence holds that groups are smarter and more productive than the sum of their parts.

• Crowdsourcing allows projects to be broken down into small, individual tasks that are distributed to a large number of individuals for completion, has collective intelligence at its roots.

• Crowdsourcing allows marketers to engage consumers and make them part of their campaigns.

Theory of Generational Dynamics

• Consumers born of the same generation (10-year period) have common attitudes and behaviors

• The relevance of generational theory to digital marketing is primarily in the ways in which each generation communicates and the online places where marketers can reach them





10

Digital Branding





Understanding Branding

Resonance

Relationship and level of identification with the brand offerings

Judgments and Feelings

Focus on customer’s opinion and emotional response to the brand, from personal and network interaction

Performance and Imagery

Satisfaction from fulfillment of functional and psychological needs

(Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs: Physiological, Safety, Love and belonging, Esteem, Self-actualization and Self-transcendence?)

Salience

Brand awareness / cognition based on feedback

Brand : A name, logo or symbol to enable an entity identify an offering uniquely





Digital Branding: Challenges & Drivers

No single model has been holistic enough or sufficient to capture all the drivers

• Popular brand evaluation models are Aaker, Moran, Young & Rubicam, Inter-brand, Brand Finance etc

• Popular measures for evaluating brand equity are Differentiation, Satisfaction, Loyalty, Perceived Quality, Leadership or Popularity, Perceived Value, Brand Personality, Organizational Associations, Market Share, Brand Awareness, Distribution Coverage, Relative Market Price, Durability, Relevance, Esteem, Knowledge

Few unique drivers for a good digital brand

• Perceived value derived from tangible and intangible user experiences while consuming the offering

• Also dependent on customer perceptions of other customer’s loyalty to the offering (Customer Network Value)

• Visual brand language driving the offering’s Brand Personality Dimensions (E.G. Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, Ruggedness)

• Offering’s digital brand extension (e.g. where the offering is advertised, what other offerings are advertised with it)





Digital Branding Process

Extended from theories of Service Branding frameworks

Presented Brand

Core

External

Communications

Customer Network

Experiences

Brand awareness

Brand meaning

Brand

Equity





Challenges in Digital Branding

The Internet makes it more difficult to protect a brand • Stake-holder dissatisfaction spreads extremely fast through social networks and internet

forums

• Identification of source of negative communication is difficult

• It is not difficult for people to use established brands’ logos on their sites or products illegally to extend their own branding (e.g. Business-Fundas.com and BusinessFundas.com)

• Dynamicity of the partnering sites which adds to the brand equity

• Lack of legislative infrastructure to protect the brand

So how do organizations address the challenges? • Companies hire spider-teams to surf the Web and look for instances of spreading customer

dissatisfaction or brand abuse

• Brand monitoring activities can be outsourced to companies (E.G. eWatch and NetCurrents)





15

Digital Marketing Research





Comparison with traditional Market Research

Traditional marketing research

• Consists of focus groups, interviews, paper and telephone surveys, questionnaires and secondary research

• Findings based on analysis of previously collected data

• Cost intensive method

Online Market Research

• Availability of secondary market research data

• Allows relaxed and anonymous setting to collect information on consumer Demographics and Psychographics

• Use of incentives to collect data from exact target segments

• Lower costs for collection of data

• A lot of the traffic data is collected anonymously (E.G. Google Analytics, Alexa)





Tools for Data Collection for Market Research

• Direct tools • Online Questionnaires and E-Mails

• Indirect tools • Data collected anonymously from Web Surfing Behavior (e.g. Proactive

reactions to regular/subliminal advertising on the web)

• Unstructured data analysis of E-Mail exchanges

• Unstructured data analysis of Online Communicating Platforms

• Social network analysis

• Anonymous demographic data (E.G. Alexa, Quantcast, Google Analytics)

• Data collected from “Free” offerings (questionable yet popular tactic)





18

Optimizing through Analytics





Web Analytics and Tools

• Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage

E.G: Timing a post, Deciding a site’s niche, Ranking Key-words, Identifying primary traffic sources

• A tool for business and market research to determine and improve upon the effectiveness of a web site by enabling a digital marketing strategy

• Three categories of Onsite Web Analytic tools are available: • Hosted Tools(has a free version): Google Analytics, Webtrends, Yahoo! Analytics,

InstaVista, Bango Mobile Web Analytics, StatCounter, SiteCatalyst, Insight, Webtrekk

• Open-source tools: Piwik, AWStats, CrawlTrack, Analog, W3Perl, Webalizer

• Proprietary tools: Mint, Sawmill, Unica NetInsight, Urchin





Google analytics: A popular web analytics tool

Functionalities of the free version • Drill down visibility of traffic based on source, content popularity, type, geography,

demographics, behavior, browser details, speed, etc.

• Also can track advertising and performance of key-words

• Enables SEO through integration of Google Webmaster

• Can drill down to page level analytics in terms of traffic sources, keyword rank, events, page load speed

Potential benefits for a web-master (say for a blogger)

• Optimize post timing and promotion channels

• Optimize website to meet user requirements

• Aligning STP with ‘Actual Competencies’ by unraveling target preferences

• Align revenue from advertisements with SEO

• And so much more…





Screenshot of Google Analytics dashboard





22

Promotions & Advertising Channels





Digital Promotion Channels

• Social networking sites

• Graphical and Text banner ads

• Paid search engine adwords (e.g. Google adwords)

• Inline text links, sponsored backlinks

• Pop-up and pop-under advertisements

• Paid review articles in web-blogs

• E-mail subscription updates

• Advertisement on e-mail feeds, RSS feeds

• Sponsored web-casts and pod-casts

• Regular/Subliminal advertising on popular web media (like Videos)

• Subscription based benefits (e.g. Points-based promos, loyalty programs, freebies, Online coupons)

• Direct e-mail marketing





Pricing schemes in promotional channels

Popular pricing schemes for the advertiser are Cost-per-click , Cost-per-view, Cost-per-lead/Call, Cost-per-sale, Fixed cost

Exchanging banners/links/meta-press with partner sites directly or through a third party (E.G. LinkExchange)

Paid review articles are priced based on Page rank, Alexa rank, Google Index, E-Mail subscriber count and Views/Day from target audience for the website.

Other criteria for deciding the price of promotional content are number of do-follow / no-follow back-links in the content, key-word density and total words in content.

Specialized advertisement agencies facilitate contacts with advertiser and publisher, for a small fee (fixed/percentage of transaction) (E.G. ValueClick, AdSmart)

Auction based pricing models where a third party platform provides infrastructure for auctions based on the publishers choice of pricing scheme (E.G. BitVertize)





Banner Advertising

Factors to decide upon while

designing a banner

• Banner type/size (Panel, Side widget, Leaderboard, etc)

• Determining the best position (Header, Footer, Widgets)

• Text vs Graphic banners

• Animated vs Static banners

• Color schemas which ensure better visibility

Issues for the Advertiser to

deliberate

• Identifying the website which will provide targeted segment from visits

• Deciding the type of banner, the position on the site

• Deciding the content of banner vis-à-vis website layout

Issues for the Publisher to deliberate

• Web sites cluttered with advertisements annoy visitors

• Potential ‘churn’ of visits from your page to your client’s page from clicks

• Page loading slows down, in turn affects search engine visibility, and reduces search traffic

• Banner size (in KB). Website bandwidth is costly in peak hours.

• Banner code evaluation (virus, malware)





Embedded Advertising and major issues

Redirecting landing pages

• Visitor dissent and churn from click away

Inline text links

• Lowering of Page Ranks due to excessive outbound links, hence anti-SEO measure for the publisher

• Churn from click away

Pop-up and Pop-under advertisements

• Highest payout in contrast to other ads

• Slower page loading, hence anti-SEO measure for the publisher

• Pop under advertising is considered least obtrusive

• Prone to infection from virus / malware in scripts

Floating advertisements

• High visitor dissent

• Slower page loading, hence anti-SEO measure for the publisher

• High clicks but low conversion rate from click





Media-Rich Advertising (Webcasting / Podcasting)

Involves using streaming video/audio to broadcast an event

• Can be done directly or through third parties (E.G. ResourceMarketing, Navisite, ClearDigital)

• Media can be recorded for subsequent re-runs

Issues to deliberate for the broadcaster

• Media data density is critical for success

• Deciding the bandwidth of the broadcasting channel

• Media format such that it is accessible from various devices (E.G. I-Pad, Smart-phones)

• Pure media vs Cross-media advertising (hybrid advertising)

• Enabling degree of interaction with attendees during broadcasting





28

Search Engine Optimization





Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

staying up to date

keyword research

on -page optimization

site structure

link building schematic

brand building

viral marketing

adjusting

market research

Search Engine Optimization

was first used by John Audette

(Multimedia Marketing Group)

in 1997, heralding the birth of

the Digital Marketing era





Why is SEO important?

There are three ways to spread product / service offering awareness

• Direct marketing

• Direct advertising

• Leveraging Search Engine visibility

Only SEO is somewhat persistent after investment on marketing is minimized

• SEO helps to increase Web Page Visibility on Search Engines

• SEO ensures all the Web pages have been indexed on the Web and linked correctly

• Many of the SEO activities (e.g. Permalink building) have almost permanent impact

• Increases offering credibility and hence facilitates lead conversion to actual sales

• A good Search Engine position for keywords can catapult sales, and save massive investment on advertising





Broad Classification of SEO Tactics

White Hat SEO • Involves legitimate SEO Tactics

• Never indulge in Keyword spamming, Link spamming or Content spamming

Black Hat SEO • Involves illegal SEO tactics, which may result in penalty if tracked

• Some of the Black Hat SEO are as follows: • Automatically generated doorway pages

• Cloaking and false redirects (Hoogle.com -> hypocrisy.com)

• Keyword stuffing

• Hidden text or hidden links

• Pages loaded with irrelevant words

• Duplicated content on multiple pages (E.G. Massive content on Footer/Header)

• Misspelling of well-known web sites (gogle.com, foogle.com)

• Unrelated and centralized link farms





Popularity of Search Engines in 2011

1. Google: 900,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 1 - Compete Rank | 1 - Quantcast Rank | 1 - Alexa Rank.

2. Bing :165,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 13 - Compete Rank | 16 - Quantcast Rank | 22 - Alexa Rank.

3. Yahoo! Search: 160,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | *8* - Compete Rank | *28* - Quantcast Rank | NA - Alexa Rank.

4. Ask: 125,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 11 - Compete Rank | 14 - Quantcast Rank | 52 - Alexa Rank.

5. Aol Search: 33,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | *336* - Compete Rank | *240* - Quantcast Rank | NA - Alexa Rank.

6. MyWebSearch: 19,000,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | *65* - Compete Rank | 409 - Quantcast Rank | 225 - Alexa Rank.

7. Lycos: 4,300,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 837 - Compete Rank | 347 - Quantcast Rank | 2,097 - Alexa Rank.

8. Dogpile: 2,900,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 700 - Compete Rank | 876 - Quantcast Rank | 3,545 - Alexa Rank.

9. WebCrawler: 2,700,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 128 - Compete Rank | 1,281 - Quantcast Rank | 4,507 - Alexa Rank

10. Info: 2,600,000 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors | 371 - Compete Rank | 286 - Quantcast Rank | 5,283 - Alexa Rank

Reports by searchenginewatch.com




http://www.google.com/

http://snapshot.compete.com/google.com

http://quantcast.com/google.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com/

http://www.bing.com/

http://snapshot.compete.com/bing.com

http://quantcast.com/bing.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com/

http://www.search.yahoo.com/

http://snapshot.compete.com/search.yahoo.com

http://quantcast.com/search.yahoo.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/search.yahoo.com/

http://www.ask.com/

http://snapshot.compete.com/ask.com

http://quantcast.com/ask.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ask.com/

http://www.search.aol.com/



http://snapshot.compete.com/search.aol.com

http://quantcast.com/search.aol.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/search.aol.com/

http://www.mywebsearch.com/

http://snapshot.compete.com/mywebsearch.com

http://quantcast.com/mywebsearch.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mywebsearch.com/

http://www.lycos.com/

http://snapshot.compete.com/lycos.com

http://quantcast.com/lycos.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/lycos.com/

http://www.dogpile.com/

http://snapshot.compete.com/dogpile.com

http://quantcast.com/dogpile.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dogpile.com/

http://www.webcrawler.com/

http://snapshot.compete.com/webcrawler.com

http://quantcast.com/webcrawler.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/webcrawler.com/

http://www.info.com/

http://snapshot.compete.com/info.com

http://quantcast.com/info.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/info.com/


Search-Engine Registration

• Submission keywords and a description of the website to SEs

• Search engine will add the information to its database

• Registering increases the possibility that a site will make an appearance in search-engine results

• Most search engines do not charge a fee for registering However, some search engines require a back-link for inclusion (activesearchresults)

• Facilitates inclusion in Meta-Search engine indexes Aggregate results from a variety of search engines (E.G. Metacrawler, FrameSearch)





Creation of META Tags

What is a META tag

• An HTML tag that contains information about a Web page

• Does not change how Web page is displayed

• Contain description of page, keywords and title of page

• There are plug-ins / codes which generate Meta-Tags automatically

Most search engines rank your site by sending out a spider to inspect the site

• The spider reads the META tags, determines the relevance of the Web page’s information and keywords and ranks the site according to that visit’s findings

• Meta tags are also used as snippets by SEs as website / webpage description

• Meta tag for web-pages ideally should belong to the website meta-tag classification

• Meta tags should not be repetitive





Link building

Search engines prioritize pages based on the number of back-links to the page

• No-Follow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.

• Normal links are automatically Do-follow

• Blogging platforms are mostly No-Follow to reduce spamming comments

• Google accepts only Do-Follow links, while most other SEs accepts all back-links

• Relevance of the back-links to the page is also important

• Link building improves Page Rank / SERPs

Paid link building services are available (E.G. linkmarket, PRweb)

• Not favored by Search Engines if detected

• However, paid listing is acceptable in website listing hubs (E.G. DMoz)

• Hidden spurious links from other websites can also negatively impact your site if not reported





Google’s Page Rank

• Ranking of a web-page from 0 to 10, based on its ‘importance’ from ‘citation’ and ‘back-links’

• Google’s Page Rank is the most popular metric used to estimate search engine visibility of a website

• One of the most important criteria for advertisement pricing

• Classic Page Rank Algorithm of Google • PR(A) = (1 – d)/N + d × ∑N{PR(Vi)}/L(Vi)

• PR(K) = Page Rank of Web page K

• d = Damping factor for the website (mostly 0.85)

• Note: Increasing importance of SERP Rank in getting higher position in Search

Engines





SERP Rank (Search Engine Results Page)

The SERP consists of a list of links to web pages with text snippets

High number of quality back-links increase SERP rank Quality is determined by relevance, indexing, and SERP rank of the linked pages

High SERP rank gets you higher revenue from advertising (Needs SERP Reports)

Popular Tools Useful feature Additional features Price (cheapest plans)

Raven SEO tools Extremely high flexibility SEMrush report,

Wordtracker keyword suggestions, etc

First 30 days free for 1 domain, 15 keywords

Authority Labs Keyword history graphs Keyword suggestions $24/month

(up to 100 keywords, up to 10 domains)

Search Commander

Comparison with competitors

Progressive Graphs and Client User Accounts

First 30 days free for 1 domain 15 keywords. Then up to 100 phrases with 10 domains @ $24.99 per month

Sheer SEO Keyword history graphs Social media rankings Free for 3 months (100 keywords; 100

URLs); 7$/month (20 keywords, 20 URLs)





The latest SEO buzz: Google Panda

• Introduced in Feb 2011, to weed out “content farms” and low quality sites

• Based on an AI algorithm which looks for similarities between websites people found to be high quality and low quality, based on surfing behavior

• Probable usage of Image Analysis with Text Analysis to identify original content

• High importance to content recency

• Criticism of Google Panda • Sometimes renowned websites had “scraped” content and yet the original lesser known

site was penalized

• Appears to impact an entire site's ranking or specific section, rather than just the individual pages on a site

• Adversely impacted sites where most of the traffic came from “ever popular” content but were of smaller scale (e.g. Websites with niche content, Personal blogs)





Negative Pointers as per Google Panda

• A high percentage of duplicate content. This might apply both to a page or a complete site

• A low amount of original content on a page or site

• A high percentage of pages with a low amount of original content

• A high amount of inappropriate adverts, especially high on the page

• Page content and page title tag not matching the search queries a page does well for

• Unnatural language on a page including over-optimization of SEO

• High bounce rate on page or site

• Low visit time on pages or site, less than 30 seconds

• Low percentage of users returning to a site, without search

• Low click-through percentage from Google’s results pages (for page or site)

• High percentage of boilerplate content (similar static content)

• Low or no quality inbound links to a page or site (by count or percentage)

• Low or no mentions or links to a page or site in social media and from other sites.





Good SEO Practices

1. Use keywords in Title and URL / Domain name

2. Use Keywords in Description meta tag, Keyword meta tag, body text (1 - 6% per key-word, 5-20% overall) and in phrases if it matches search sequences

3. DON’T USE garbled text without meaning in Links

4. Use an efficient tree-like structure and high inter-links to ensure every page is reachable from any page within the site (sitemaps are helpful)

5. Link only to good sites and not to link farms. Dead links are detrimental.

6. Avoid "Link Churn“. This is noticed as paid link building efforts.

7. Try not to exceed 100K page size, ideally around 40K

8. Use less than 8 filler symbols in a single URL ( e.g. - _ % )

9. Freshness of content vis-à-vis total over-all content

10. Keep URL length less than 100 characters as much as possible, lesser is better





Good SEO Practices

11. Old is gold. Newer pages linked from an older site/page will get indexed faster

12. Never redirect through refresh meta-tags to other pages before the visitor spends less than 30 seconds on your site

13. Important to have substantial text in each page. Ideally Text : Html ratio should be higher than 25%. Avoid excessive Javascript

14. Avoid vile languages. Spiders recognize and mark websites with abusive content.

15. Avoid excessive cross-linking with partner sites (less than 10 inter-links in a page)

16. Accelerated link popularity is noticed as spam / paid link boosting

17. Site listing in directories like DMOZ are considered extremely beneficial

18. High Click-Through Rate within the site is considered very good

19. Never use scripts in the page for advertising unless sure of its quality

20. Always keep updating broken links lists for spiders





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Thank You




Advanced Guide to Digital Marketing

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