What is virtual marketing and how is it used?

Marketers globally, for a number of years now have been utilising social media platforms to increase both brand exposure, advertise new products/services, as well as other things. This is due to the fact that over 37% of the world’s population are active social media users. For a further regional breakdown of social media using populations, please click here.

There are various age groups that browse social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube and Pinterest every single day and these platforms allow businesses to advertise on them for a relatively low cost.

Businesses, regardless of size are now using social media as their first port of call in regards to advertising, whether that’s creating a Facebook business page to gain brand exposure or setting up Intstagram or Twitter adverts that are aimed solely at the company’s target market. Please click here for a step-by-step guide on how to set up Twitter adverts.

There are also a number of other avenues to market said company, which range from creating launch events on Facebook to gauge the level of attendees and also engage with them, to running competitions and giveaways to increase page likes/followers, which in turn creates a consumer community for the company and maximises exposure. With social media platforms now being of paramount importance to companies, some now employ teams that will work solely on their social media operations, to ensure that their customer engagement and their online presence is of essence to the company’s values.

An example of this is Apple, since starting their Facebook account, they have generated 6.3 million followers. This allows them to post any new advertising material in regards to new products or services at no cost, which will reach a large majority of these Facebook users almost instantly. This is due to the fact that users not only like/follow their page but the majority of them also sign up for updates, which means they’re alerted when any new announcements are made, whether that’s a new product or a discount offer.

Throughout previous years, many companies have been targeting young people because they were the ones seen to be the only active social media users, however this could not be further from the truth. Every social media platform is used by people of all ages, cultures and annual incomes, which shows that the virtual marketing audiences of a number platforms are endless. To see a further breakdown of each social media platform’s audiences, please see here.

The growth in the use of smartphones across the world has now enabled businesses to get in touch with their customer bases instantly and virtual marketing has a lot to do with that. Not only do the majority of households in the western world have more than one personal computer in it, now 66% of the world’s population also owns a smartphone, which allows businesses and customers to engage on the move, as well as at home or at their desks.

Virtual marketing also covers a number of other marketing approaches, which range from email marketing and blogging to eWOM and ebooks. To learn more about the seven highly effective viral marketing techniques you should be using, please click here.

There is no sign of virtual marketing haltering in it’s growth, with the virtual world continuing to grow at a significant rate, which ultimately opens a number of potential possibilities for virtual marketing, it remains as one of the most important and effective avenues of marketing within an industry.

Despite it’s obvious advantages, these virtual marketing avenues can also have a hugely detrimental effect on the profitability of a business. An unethical advert or a poor piece of customer feedback can have a really negative effect on the organisation due to the fact that the nature of eWOM is instantaneous and can reach millions of people within a matter of minutes.

An example of this would be United Airlines and the viral video that was shared millions of times across the internet. The video saw airline staff violently dragging a passenger out of his seat and down the cabin before ejecting him from the aircraft due to the plane being overcrowded. This one video has had a hugely detrimental effect on the way that consumers now view United Airlines, which has reduced company profitability dramatically. For more information on the United Airlines incident, please click here.

 

The Advantages & Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a marketing method that allows businesses to regularly update both existing customers and potential new ones with new products, discounts, and other relevant information. These email databases are acquired by interested consumers signing up via the company website.

Advantages

Scalability

Companies are able to scale their e-newsletters to specific audiences. An example of this would be Samsung emailing Galaxy Note 7 customers only, informing them of the decision to recall the handsets due to faulty batteries. For more information regarding this recall, please see here.

Another example of specific audience targeting would be Nando’s sending an e-newsletter to Brighton based customers only to inform them of the opening of a new store located in Brighton Marina.

Sharable

The nature of email allows recipients to simply share e-newsletters by forwarding them, which in turn enables companies to potentially benefit from eWOM and also viral marketing. (Sterne & Priore, 2000)

Measurable

The measurability of email marketing allows companies to produce statistics, such as the open rate of the email. This is something that allows organizations to experiment with different copy, subject lines and design, to see which is most effective.

The way in which these e-newsletters can be measured isn’t restricted solely to who opens the emails. The campaigns can also be measured by what time during the day/week each customer opens the e-newsletter. This is something that enables businesses to segment their email campaigns and send them to certain customers at certain points during the day/week.

Less Intrusive

Unlike telephone marketing, email recipients can read company updates at their convenience, which makes them feel more comfortable and under less pressure. Another positive to this is the fact that, again businesses can then see when their customers open their e-newsletters, which allows them to maximize their open rates by sending the emails to certain audiences depending on the time they like to click through on to the email copy.

Cost-effective

Due to the fact that there are no printing or media space costs, email marketing can cost much less than other marketing methods. The only cost for a majority of companies is the monthly cost for the maintenance of their email database.

Disadvantages

Spam

Unsolicited commercial email or ‘spam’ irritates consumers. If e-newsletters aren’t sent to the correct audiences, it may result in the recipient deleting the email or even unsubscribing from the database. This can have a detrimental effect on the company’s ‘reach’ in regards to their e-newsletters.

Undelivered Emails

There are a number of things that businesses need to take into account when sending out an e-newsletter to their database due to the risk of it not being delivered. One of which would be the use of certain spam words. If these are used, email software and Internet service providers will filter the email and prevent it from arriving in the user’s inbox, which therefore has a negative impact on the purpose of email marketing campaigns.

As you can see below, there are still a number of relatively high-profile organizations that are using certain spam words, which prevents the email from landing in the recipient’s inbox and is alternatively delivered to their ‘spam’ inbox.

Design Issues

E-newsletters must be designed in such a way that enables it to be viewed on a number of devices, ranging from laptops, tablets and smartphones. If the emails aren’t formatted correctly, users won’t be able to view the email, therefore deeming the e-newsletter useless. File sizes are also something that needs to be considered, due to the fact that if the images embedded in the e-newsletter are of a large size, the email will take significantly longer to load, therefore losing the interest of the recipient.

Resources & Skills

For successful email campaigns, businesses must ensure that they have the right copy, design and database. If organizations don’t have the resources and skills in-house, they would need to outsource some of these elements, which would result in an extra cost.

Despite the average open-rate for all industries being at only 24.79%, if done efficiently, email marketing can be a very low-cost way of not only keeping your customers in the know in regards to discount offers, new products and new services but it also makes customers feel valued in regards to your correspondence with them (Chaffey, 2016). For further statistics across industries in terms of email marketing, please click here.

As long as the design of all email campaigns is optimized to be clear and visible on all devices and designed to stay out of recipients’ spam folders, email marketing is something that can be extremely useful, regardless of the industry that a company is in. (Sterne & Priore, 2000)

References

Chaffey, D. (2016). Email marketing statistics 2017 compilation. [online] Smart Insights. Available at: http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/statistics-sources-for-email-marketing/ [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].

Samsung, (2017). Galaxy Note7 Safety Recall and Exchange Program. [online] Samsung Electronics. Available at: http://www.samsung.com/us/note7recall/ [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].

Sterne, J. and Priore, A. (2000). Email Marketing. 1st ed. Hoboken: Wiley [Imprint].

How can blogging effect company profitability?

Since the birth of digital marketing and the reiterated importance of this marketing avenue, companies are now utilising the majority of digital marketing techniques to ensure that their presence online is as significant as possible, however one technique that isn’t used as frequently as it should is blogging.

Blogging is something that not only gives organisations a platform to publish relevant information regarding their products and services but it also provides advantages, such as the following:

  • Drives traffic to company website

Blogs can and if done effectively, will generate traffic to your website. This is due to the fact that the more blogs that the business posts around a number of different topics, the more pages from the company domain will be indexed into search engines, which in turn generates more traffic and potentially more revenue. (Holtz and Demopoulos, 2006)

  • Humanises the brand

News pieces from a company not only shows customers and users that there is a real expertise in knowledge in regards to a number of subjects based around the said product or service but it also allows businesses to portray a more human side to their writing. Blog posts give businesses a unique opportunity to share their voice and personality, building up trust and increasing the brand’s likeability quotient.

An example of how a company has humanised their brand is Coca-Cola with their Unbottled Blog. This blog has enabled Coca-Cola customers to see and understand the company beyond its conglomerate stature and see and understand that the company is doing much more than selling their products. To see Coca-Cola’s Unbottled Blog, please see here or alternatively see below.

  • Supports social media initiatives

Sharing other people’s content on a business’s social media is great but having a platform to publish content allows users to read and ultimately click through to the company’s website instead of someone else’s, which in turn generates an increase in leads and more importantly, conversions.

An example of this can be seen here, alternatively see below.

  • Works towards establishing authority and generating free PR

A company blog allows businesses to showcase both their experience and expertise in regards to their field, which is also something that will establish a certain amount of trust between customer and organisation. Due to a company’s expertise, they can often be interviewed by journalists as industry experts, which in turn generates free PR for the organisation.

An example of this can be seen here, alternatively see below.

Continue reading

Ticket Tannoy: e-newsletter analysis

In relation to the e-newsletter that I received from Ticket Tannoy, a UK based, electronic dance event ticket company, there are a number of positive aspects to the email, as well as some things that could have been improved.

Firstly, one of the positives to the newsletter, in my opinion, is the subject line. The subject line instantly informs the reader what the email will consist of in regards to content. It also instantly caught my attention due to the fact that it lists the DJ’s and events that I am interested in. However, although it lists the artists and events, it doesn’t give any further information, which plays on and sparks curiosity and entices the user to open to email to find out more.

screen-shot-2016-11-03-at-16-26-59

Another positive to the e-newsletter is the brief information that’s given for each event within the email. An email of this nature is something that may be opened in preparation for a day/night out for planning purposes, due to the fact that the newsletter contains the date of the events, the venues, opening times and artist line-ups. However, one way in which the e-newsletter could be improved is that it could be more personalised by only advertising events near the users location, as opposed to events from all over the UK. This is something that could increase the organisation’s e-newsletter open rates due to the fact that the user will know that the events within the email are actually accessible to them.

Please see below screenshot for brief information on the events within the email, with further information and purchasing being on the landing page here.

screen-shot-2016-11-03-at-16-27-12

The call to action (CTA) within the email is to generate purchases, however there isn’t one sole purchase to be made unless the specific landing pages for each event are reached (Please see above). There are nine different purchases that could be made via the newsletter for different events across the country by simply clicking the “Click to buy tickets” button below each piece artwork.

In terms of the information that’s provided by the newsletter, it informs the reader of events and relative musical artists briefly and then it also provides links to landing pages that enable the user to find out more information on the subjects in question, as well as also being able to buy tickets to their events.

Please see screenshot of brief information within the email below, with further information via the landing page here.

screen-shot-2016-11-03-at-16-27-25

The “read more” landing pages are very busy in terms of text and it can be a lot to take in, however there is a very simple and efficient ticket buying tab at the bottom of the page, to ensure users can simply purchase tickets. Despite the pages having a lot of text, they are very informative, to allow the user to understand what they’re buying tickets for.

In regards to the email’s layout, it is simple for the consumer to use and it’s allows the user to read briefly about the artist and the event before the call to action (buy a ticket). The way in which it could be improved is it could have had a video or two embedded into the newsletter, to show customers footage of previous events that have taken place with that DJ or in that certain venue, which could drive the call to action (sales) further (Worthy & Graham, 2002). Another constructive criticism of the newsletter is the fact that a competition within the email could have generated engagement further. An example of this would be “Tweet #KneeDeepInBrighton with our ticket link to be in with a chance to win four VIP tickets to the event, as well as a £100 bar tab!”. This would have generated a much bigger hype online, which in turn would have generated higher exposure for Ticket Tannoy.

 

 

References

Worthy, J. & Graham, N. (2002) “Electronic marketing: new rules for electronic marketing — an obstacle to m-commerce?”, Computer Law & Security 18 (2), pp. 106-108.

 

 

 

 

 

Brandwatch and how it was useful to Argos

Brandwatch is an analytical tool that allows organisations to process and organise online data, which then allows businesses to analyse the relevant feedback and improve in certain areas.

In relation to Argos and their use of Brandwatch, the software enabled Argos to consider their customers needs in regards to the opening of a number of new digital stores across the UK. The way in which Brandwatch organised the data allowed Argos to sift out irrelevant information automatically. An example of this would be a tweet that was made by a customer to the @Argos_Online Twitter account informing them that the sign above the store in Clapham Junction had been named incorrectly.  This tweet is something that allowed Argos to iron out the issue quickly and efficiently due to the fact that the Brandwatch software had automatically organised the tweet into a Clapham Junction category, which resulted in the appropriate member of staff picking up on the message and informing the manager of that store, which enabled that particular Argos store to amend the sign, much to the satisfaction of the customer: “@Argos_Online thank you so much for listening!!! I shall definitely be coming into the store. #greatcustomerservice #onehappybunny”

Brandwatch’s capabilities don’t end there. As a result to eWOM through social media, Brandwatch were able to organise and analyse data in regards to customer’s feedback by demographic. An example of this would be the fact that men showed a high level of positivity to the digital change in stores and were especially interested in the store’s high-tech features, whereas female customers spoke more positively about the company’s new approach to customer service. This is all incredibly valuable in terms of keeping their customers happy.

More information in regards to the new digitalised Argos stores can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/apr/29/argos-to-open-200-more-digital-stores-in-bid-to-modernise

 

 

 

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