Digital marketing

Module 2:

Search Engine Marketing

⮚ Search engine marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your
business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With millions of businesses out
there all vying for the same eyeballs, it’s never been more important to advertise online,
and search engine marketing is the most effective way to promote your products and
grow your business.
⮚ Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing a business using paid
advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs).
⮚ Advertisers bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter
when looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity
for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.
⮚ These ads, often known by the term pay-per-click ads, come in a variety of formats.
Some are small, text-based ads, whereas others, such as product listing ads (PLAs, also
known as Shopping ads) are more visual, product-based advertisements that allow
consumers to see important information at-a-glance, such as price and reviews.
⮚ Search engine marketing’s greatest strength is that it offers advertisers the opportunity
to put their ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise
moment they’re ready to make a purchase.
⮚ It is paid search.
⮚ Publisher pays to Google Ad. for higher visibility.

PAY- PER- CLICK(PPC) Advertisement

⮚ It is also known as Cost Per Click (CPC) advertisement.

⮚ It is a model or a strategy used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays to
the publisher when the ad is clicked.
⮚ These paid adverts are typically placed above, or to the right of the ‘organic’ search
results, and can cost anything between a penny and £50 per click, depending on the
competitiveness of the keyword you’re bidding on.

Types of PPC advertisements:

● Display Ad. (banner, text, video, floating banner)

● Pop up Ad. (landing advertisement)

Advantages of PPC:

● It is cost effective.
● Creates brand awareness.
● Helps to measure Return On Investment (ROI).
● Helps to gain competitive advantage.
The main components of PPC advertisement( How does PPC work ?)

1. Advertiser
2. PPC network
3. Publisher

Examples of Google PPC:

i. Display network
ii. Pre- roll- Ads.(it is expensive)
iii. Mid- roll- Ads.
iv. Post- roll- Ads (it is always cheap or low cost)
v. Social Ad.

PPC Ad. Strategy:

⮚ Establishing an easy ad. to use campaign structure

⮚ Retargeting
⮚ Monitor and review
⮚ Identify the factors of success/ understand the factors of success
● Relevance
● Search quality
⮚ Create goals for PPC Ads.
⮚ Mobile preferences
⮚ Sequential re- marketing( cross selling)
⮚ Video marketing
⮚ Use of negative keywords( used to prevent irrelevant search)
⮚ Social media marketing.

Key word advertising

⮚ It is an online advertising strategy where an advertiser pays in order to have an
advertisement that appears in the results listing when a person uses a particular phrase
to search the web, typically by employing a search engine.
⮚ Selecting high quality relevant keywords for your advertising campaign can help you
reach the customer you want, when you want.

Keyword Advertising Strategies:

⮚ Research on the keywords

⮚ Should have knowledge about the type of keywords( Broad match, Phrase match, Exact
match)
⮚ Analyze the keywords
⮚ Keyword grouping
⮚ Using keyword planner(helps to choose a right keyword)
ON- Page optimization
⮚ It is a set of tasks done to improve your sites accessibility, usability, navigation, and
content for users and search engines.

⮚ It requires basic knowledge of HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language- is the standard

mark-up language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser) and CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation
of a document written in a mark-up language like HTML).

⮚ It optimizing the Title element, META tags, ALT and TITLE tags.

⮚ Optimizing the content: Keyword prominence, anchor text in links.

Ways of On-page optimization:

⮚ High quality page content

⮚ Page titles
⮚ Headers
⮚ Meta descriptions
⮚ Image Alt-text
⮚ Structured Mark-up
⮚ Page URLs
⮚ Internal linking
⮚ Mobile responsiveness
⮚ Site speed

Off-Page Optimization
⮚ It is a set of tasks to make our site more accessible and popular to users and search
engines by spreading links and promoting your site to target users.

Ex: Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc

⮚ Link Building is the most basic and most popular process. It involves following methods:
Direct Submission, Article Submission, Social Bookmarking, Forum Posting and Blog
Commenting.

Strategies of Off-page optimization:

⮚ Shareability( one can share the content)

⮚ Trust score
⮚ Back links
⮚ Popularity
⮚ Social media marketing and blogging
⮚ Analyse the competition
SEO Techniques
1) Understand the audience and user intent

2) Increase Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) score

3) On-page optimization

4) Off-page optimization

5) Use of voice search

6) Update the old content regularly

7) Build a variety of quality back links

8) Research the keywords well

9) Analyze the competition

10) Optimize the content for Rank Brain.

11) Avoid keyword stuffing and manipulative linking

12) Mobile optimization

13) Create SEO optimized landing pages

14) Using the Bucket Brigade copywriting technique

15) Optimize for featured snippets and other Google SERP features

16) Go beyond Google search

17) Grow the traffic with info-graphics

18) Measure SEO performance

Online marketing through social media

Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and
customers. Your customers are already interacting with brands through social media, and if
you're not speaking directly to your audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, and Pinterest, you're missing out! Great marketing on social media can bring
remarkable success to your business, creating devoted brand advocates and even driving leads
and sales.
Social media marketing
What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and
sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your marketing and branding
goals. Social media marketing includes activities like posting text and image updates, videos,
and other content that drives audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising.

How Social Media Marketing Can Help You Meet Your Marketing Goals

⮚ Improves the sales

⮚ Improves SERP ranking
⮚ Gives Customer delight
⮚ Increases Customer engagement
⮚ Drives customer to the traffic
⮚ Helps in Lead generation
⮚ Helps in Geo- targeting
⮚ It is cost effective
⮚ Improves conversion rate
⮚ Creates brand awareness and brand loyalty

Social media marketing strategies:

⮚ Create a personalized experience for your customer

⮚ Create community for audience
⮚ Determine the right social media discussion forum
⮚ Use chatbots
⮚ Create an efficient content marketing strategy
⮚ Create a social media schedule
⮚ Research your audience
⮚ Analyze the competition
⮚ Create the profile with diverse content strategy
⮚ Use brand advocates
⮚ Set SMART goals
⮚ Monitor and review

Google web master

What is Webmaster Tools? / What is Google Search Console?

Ans: Google Webmaster Tools, also known as Google Search Console is a collection of free
web utilities to help website owners ensure their site is Google-friendly. This set of Google Web
Tools have many useful applications, such as getting data about incoming search traffic,
requesting Google to crawl and index the website, viewing crawl error reports and many more.
Why to use Webmaster Tools?

Ans: One of the tool’s top applications is that it allows webmasters to make sure that their
websites and pages are crawled and processed for Google Indexing. Error reports enable them
to discover issues that might prevent their site from doing well in Google search. Webmaster
Tools also comes with a set of Google Search Tools which gives data on what keywords are
ranking on Google and what domains are linking to the given website.

How to use Google web master?

i. Submit and check a site map.

ii. Check and set the crawl rate, and view statistics about how Googlebot accesses a
particular job.
iii. Generate and check a robots.txt file
iv. List internal and external pages that link to the site.
v. See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs, and the
click through rates of such listing.
vi. View statistics about how Google indexes the site, and it is found any errors while doing
it.
vii. Set a preferred domain which determines how the site URL is displayed in SERPs.
viii. Rich cards: a new section added, for better mobile user experience
ix. Check the security issues if there are any with the website.

Web analytics process

Step 1: Set goals and some objectives

Step 2: Set the Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Step 3: Collect relevant data

Step 4: Analyze the data

Step 5: According to the findings pick the right suggestion

Step 6: Implement the insight (idea)

Customer Engagement
In an era of IMC, companies are sensitive to the need to maintain a substantial degree of
uniformity of the marketing message across disparate marketing media vehicles. This
consistency of information across the offline and online domain enable companies to develop a
relationship with the consumers by moving him up the attention engagement continuum.
Digitally savvy companies have thoroughly integrated their presence across disparate channels
to ensure consumer engagement.
Customer engagement objectives:

⮚ Increase brand loyalty

⮚ Increase customer retention
⮚ Improve revenue and sales
⮚ Ensure brand promotion
⮚ Improve brand position
⮚ Improve brand reputation
⮚ To create brand awareness

Customer engagement strategies:

⮚ Social media marketing

⮚ E-mail marketing
⮚ POEM Technique (Paid, Owned, Earned, Media)
⮚ Online reputation management (ORM)
⮚ Crowd sourcing
⮚ Blogs and Vlogs
⮚ Podcasting
⮚ Info-graphics
⮚ Whitepapers

Affiliate marketing
This was popularly known as ‘referral marketing’ in the good old days. Companies would pay
referral fees to agents, employees, customers, and anyone who would give reference of
potential buyers or send customers to their shops by giving reference.

Today the size of affiliate marketing business has crossed $5 billion. Apart from Amazon,
flipkart, snapdeal, and paytm, smaller companies have also started affiliate marketing programs
to increase their reach of customer. It has become an effective tool both for attracting new
customers as well as retaining the existing customers. In developed markets like USA and
EUROPE companies are getting 10 to 20 percent of their business through affiliate networks.

The goal of using an affiliate marketer is to increase sales which is be a win-win solution for the
merchant and the affiliate.

Definition, “it is an advertising model where a company pays compensation to third-party

publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services. The thirdparty
publishers are referred to as affiliates and the commission fee incentives them to find ways to
promote the company.”
TYPES OF AFFILIATE MARKETING PROGRAMS

1- Content affiliates: affiliates in this category run content sites and monetize their sites
traffic, by sending users to advertiser’s pages via banners or text links. These sites can
either be general interest sites, in which case they target high volumes of traffic, or niche
content sites, in which case the traffic volume is not as high, but the conversion rate is much
higher, providing the selected affiliate program is related to the content site.
2- PPC (Pay-Per-Click): PPC affiliates use their PPC advertising experience or knowledge in
order to send users directly to advertisers’ websites, usually via Google Adwords, but also
via facebook and other search engines. This type of affiliate marketing entails a relatively
high, risk, as affiliates pay users on a per click basis, but only receives payment from the
network once a sale or lead has been completed.
3- Social media affiliates: The rise of social media and community sites like facebook and
twitter have lead to the creation of a new type of affiliate, who sends users via his/her
account on social media websites. Affiliates in this category don’t rely on their sites’ users,
but on their circle of friends, followers, members of various social media accounts like
facebook pages, twitter accounts, boards on pinterest etc.
4- Email/Newsletter affiliates:- These affiliates own database of user emails, to which they
regularly send out offers and suggestions via newsletter. As with any communication via
email, it is crucial that the respective regulation and best practice is followed, i.e., all emails
have been collected legally and all users have proactively requested to receive email from
the affiliate. Newsletter usually contains offers and other promotions.
5- Shopping service affiliates:- affiliates in this category include websites that have been
created in order to offer a specific service designed to help and promoted online purchases.
Examples of sites of this type are price comparison websites, meta search engine, review
sites, aggregators etc. in reality monetization of these sites comes from the content itself, as
users are redirected to retailers sites in order to complete their purchase.
6- Price comparison affiliates: - it sites take the requirement details from your side and then
returns results based on your requirement. They are usually sorted by popularity, price, or
key features. The user can then lock on his/her selection based on the information, all
presented in one place.
7- Coupon / cashback sites:- A cashback website is a type of reward website that pays its
members a percents of money earned when they purchased goods and services via its
affiliates link. When a customer makes a purchase online instate of visiting the retailer
directly, they may choose to follow a link from a cashback website to generate a monetary
reward when buying products or services.

AFFILIATE NETWORKS

Affiliate network or affiliate brokers act as mediators between affiliates and merchant websites
with affiliate program. They track all activity arrange all payment, and help affiliate set up the
necessary likes on their website. Additionally, affiliate network helps recruit affiliate by including
an online merchant’s affiliate program in their directory. Different affiliate networks offer different
extra features, but most have a help centre and a place affiliates and merchants can go to view
reports of their traffic. Affiliate networks are a real convenience for prospective affiliates
because they present a wide variety of affiliate program in one central location. They make it
much easier to find a good program that is appropriate for your site. In return for the
convenience they provide, affiliate networks take a cut of each transaction. Typically, a network
takes somewhere around 20 percent of the commission. There are all sorts of affiliates, from
top websites to small personal pages. Basically, any website can join an affiliate program, and if
they choose well, they can make some money off it. Some sites, such as memo link, my points,
are just big collections of affiliate programs. These sites join a variety of pay- per-click or pay-
per-lead program and then pay their visitors a fraction of the commission on each click or
reward them with prizes.

AFIILIATE PROGRAM PAYMENT

There are three basic types of affiliate program payment arrangements.

1- Pay- per- sale (also called cost- per- sale):- Amazon.com’s affiliate program is an
example of a payper-sale arrangement. In this arrangement, the merchant site pays an
affiliate when the affiliate sends them a customer who purchases something. Some
merchant websites, like Amazon.com, pay the affiliate a percentage of the sale and others
pay a fixed amount per sale.
2- Pay- per- click (cost-per-click):- In these programs, the merchant site pays the affiliate
based on the number of visitors who click on the link to come to the merchant’s site. They
don’t have to buy anything, and it doesn’t matter to the affiliate what a visitor does once he
gets to the merchant’s site.
3- Pay-per-lead (cost-per-lead):- companies with these programs pay their affiliates based
on the number of visitors they refers who sign up as leads. This simply means the visitors
fills out some requested information at the merchant site, which the merchant site may use
as a sales lead or sell to another company as a sales lead.

There are a number of other arrangements as well, a company could set up an affiliate program
based on any action that would benefits them, and they pay their affiliates bases on the number
of customers the affiliates send them who perform that action.

HOW TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE?

If you are interested in getting involved in affiliate programs, the first thing you have to do is
decide whether you want to become an affiliate, want to acquire affiliates, or both. If you run an
e-commerce site and would like to increase your sales, you might want to start your own affiliate
program. If you run a small content site as a hobby and would simply like to bring in a little
money to cover production costs, joining a few programs as an affiliate would be a good option.
Your best option depends on what aspects to affiliate programs could best serve your site and
how much you are willing to spend. Becoming a affiliate is relatively easy. Go to an affiliate
network site and fill out an online application to become a member. The application will ask for
some personal information and information on your sites and will have you agree to a service
agreement. Most affiliate networks are completely free for affiliates.
Four features of Affiliate Marketing are:

⮚ Quality and targetedness (for referred traffic)

⮚ Marketing complementarities
⮚ Incrementality (for referred business)
⮚ Innovative thinking

AFFILIATE LINKING METHODS

An affiliate can link to a merchant site in a number of ways. The best link choice depends on the
nature of the affiliate and the nature of the merchant. Each kind of link is specially suited for
particular purposes. Common types of links includes:- Text links, Banner links, Search box,
Link to the home page, Product specific link, Storefronts, Co-branding, Registration.

Benefits of Affiliate marketing

⮚ Partnership and collaboration

⮚ More effective use of advertising budget
⮚ Easy tracking
⮚ Exposure
⮚ Boost the reputation
⮚ Cost effective
⮚ Broaden the audience
⮚ Mutual benefits

Strategies of Affiliate marketing

⮚ Choose the right audience

⮚ Attract sales with coupons, deals and promotions
⮚ Leverage affiliate promotion from multiple sources
⮚ Leverage the power of niche influencers
⮚ Optimize your product pages for conversions
⮚ Build a robust affiliate network

CRM & CX in digital marketing

What is CRM?

Ans: Customer relationship management (CRM) applications and strategies are critical to the
success of a modern business. The term CRM ostensibly refers to a set of applications that
firms use to manage customer data, analyze customer interactions, receive the most relevant
customer data in real-time, and use this data to update and improve customer relationship
strategies as and when a firm receives the data. CRM systems and applications are designed to
broadly compile customer data across multiple different channels of communication including
emails, phone, social media, websites, live chat, and direct email. CRMs are designed to
provide team members tasked with bettering customer relations with comprehensive data such
as personal information, key preferences, purchase history, keyword patterns, interests,
concerns, and other forms of relevant data. CRM applications have massively improved a firm’s
ability to interact and respond with its customers.

CRM is vital to e-commerce

Specifically, a customer would look up something on Amazon. Amazon’s CRM would remember
this and re-display this information to the user when the user is using Facebook and Twitter,
send emails about the same to the user, and suggest the recommendation when the user
revisits Amazon. The value CRM brings to brand is important as an increasing number of
customers are always on and always connected. As online shopping on mobiles continues to
rise, we can only expect the number of digitally influenced sales to increase.

CRM allows you to target digital marketing services

With the data firms glean from CRM applications, they can engage in digital marketing that
specifically targets individuals with great precision. By understanding what makes a customer or
a prospective customer, businesses are able to figure out the best possible way to target their
users. Based on an individual’s browsing history and social media preferences, the individual is
presented with information in a different manner than his or her contemporaries. By offering a
personalized and targeted approach, businesses can improve their image in the eyes of their
customers. The right CRM tool could often be the difference between success and failure for
your business.

CRM is incredibly cost-effective for businesses

Probably the best aspect about CRMs is that they are incredibly cost-effective. The right set of
CRM tools will reduce the manual load on staff members, require next-to-no paperwork to deal
with customer data, and allow businesses to use fewer resources to meet their needs. CRMs
will undoubtedly be an expensive investment at the onset, especially for a new business, but its
benefits are clear for all to see. CRMs minimize wasteful expenditure and make the entire digital
marketing process a far more nuanced and thoughtful landscape. It allows firms to determine
what type of customer relationships and interactions must be prioritized at any given level in
order to maximize a firm’s sales and growth potential level.

What is CX?

Ans: Digital customer experience management understands how people interact with your
brand online. Organizations today must find a way to create emotional connections with their
users on their mobile devices, let their customers provide feedback, and respond to those
issues.

CX Strategies:

⮚ Enrich behavioral data with customer feedback

⮚ Enable personalized customer experience
⮚ Channel flexibility
⮚ Simplicity and ease of use
 ⮚ Purchase convenience
⮚ Service convenience
⮚ Power innovation through advanced analytics
⮚ Mobile support
⮚ Inbound marketing
⮚ Customer relationship management

Benefits of customer experience (CX)

⮚ More customer acquisitions

⮚ Better customer engagement
⮚ Increased customer conversions
⮚ Cost effective
⮚ Improved crisis management
⮚ Increased customer loyalty and retention

E-mail Marketing
Email-marketing

“It is promoting the products and services through e-mail”. Moreover, it is not limited to
promotion of the products and services; it can also be used for building relations with the
customers and to reach out the potential customers. Further, email marketing helps businesses
to keep their customer informed about various events and transactions.

E-mail marketing strategies:

⮚ Incentive customers to review the product they have bought via e-mail
⮚ Use A/B testing to optimize open and click through rate (CTR)
⮚ Set up cart abandonment emails to identify bugs and improve check out conversion rate
⮚ Incorporate images that add value
⮚ Mobile optimization
⮚ Measuring e-mail performance
⮚ Personalize the emails
⮚ Content Optimization

⮚ Gamification in emails

⮚ Social media Integration in Email marketing

⮚ Follow the anti-spam laws and guidelines

⮚ Visually appealing email designs

E-mail marketing Process

Step 1: Build a Targeted email list

Step 2: Know your goals

Step 3: Understand e-mail type

Step 4: Know your audiance

Step 5: Use technology wisely

Step 6: Create great options

Step 7: Plan emails and follow ups

Step 8: Craft your subject line

Step 9: Write the copy

Step 10: Focus on email marketing design

Step 11: Test and track

Some examples of Email marketing tools:

Litmus, Mail Chimp, Reach Mail, Target Hero, Drip, Mad mini, Cake mail, Mailjet, icontact, Zoho,
Lead pages, Constant contact.

CONTENT STRATEGIES

What Is Content Strategy?

Content strategy refers to the management of pretty much any tangible media that you create
and own: written, visual, downloadable ... you name it. It is the piece of your marketing plan that
continuously demonstrates who you are and the expertise you bring to your industry.

You might've heard how important content creation is for the growth of your business, it needs
to have a well-planned purpose. When you develop a content strategy, there are some key
things to consider:

Whom you’re Creating Content For ?

Who's the target audience for this content? For how many audiences are you creating content?
Just as your business might have more than one type of customer, your content strategy can
cater to more than one type of reader or viewer.Using a variety of content types and channels
will help you deliver different content to each type of audience you have in mind and engage
everyone your company does business with.

The Problem it's Going to Solve for that Audience

Ideally, your product or service solves a problem you know your audience has. By the same
token, your content coaches and educates your audience through this problem as they begin to
identify and address it. A sound content strategy supports people on both sides of your product:
those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are, and those who are already using
your product to overcome these challenges. Your content reinforces the solution(s) you're
offering and makes your customers more qualified users of your product.

What Makes You Unique

Your competitors likely have a similar product as yours, which means your potential customers
need to know what makes yours better -- or, at least, different. This is where content comes in.
In order to prove why you're worth buying from, you need to prove why you're worth listening to.

The Content Formats You'll Focus On

What forms will your content take? Infographics? Videos? Blog posts? Having identified the
topics you want to take a position on, you'll need to determine which formats to budget for so
you can best express that position.

The Channels Where It'll Be Published

Just as you can create content in different formats, you'll also have different channels you can
publish to. Channels can include owned properties, such as your website and blog; and social
media properties, such as Facebook and Twitter. We'll talk more about social media content
strategy in the step-by-step guide later in this article.

How You'll Manage Creation and Publication

Figuring out how you'll create and publish all your content can be a daunting task. It's important
for a content strategy to know who's creating what, where it's being published, and when it's
going live. Today's content strategies prevent clutter by managing content from a topic
standpoint. When planning a content calendar around topics, you can easily visualize your
company's message and assert yourself as an authority in your market over time. Learn more
about topics in content strategy in the video below.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy:

1. Define your goal.

What's your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content
and create a content marketing plan?

2. Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content's target audience -- also
known as your buyer persona. This is especially important for those who are starting out or are
new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and
valuable content that they'll want to read and convert on.

3. Run a content audit.

Most people start out with blog posts, but if you want to venture out and try producing other
content pieces, consider which ones you want to make. For instance, if you've been doing
weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an ebook that distills all your blog posts into one
ultimate guide would be a one way to offer information in a different format. We'll go over
several different types of content you can use further down on the list.If you've been in business
for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year. Figure
out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach.

4. Choose a content management system.

Have a system in place where you can manage your content. A few vital parts of content
management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics.

Consumer segmentation, targeting and positioning using online tools

INTRODUCTION

Companies spend a lot of time in engaging the consumer in the virtual domain and building
participatory environments. Now, the companies need to be able to harness this consumer
engagement participation. This is done by understanding what the consumer is stating online
and segmenting the consumer on the basis of his demographic profit, psychographic
preference, thoughts, and comments.

Following the process of segmentation, the companies can build consumer profiles. These
profiles help companies in the following ways:

a) Targeting consumers separately to achieve greater conversion; and

b) Building brand positioning

The consumers have shown their willingness to purchase online. Companies that are able to
modify their processes and invest their marketing resources and align their messages to suit the
online consumers, who are more interested in a targeted campaign, will benefit the most.

DIFFERENT METHODS FOR CONSUMER SEGMENTATION

There are several ways to segment consumers. Segmentation can be done on the basis of their
behavioral characteristics, demographic, and psychographic information, social status, or even
benefit segmentation. The following section explores various ways of segmenting and targeting
online consumers. Consumer segmentation:-

o Geographic

o Demographic

o Behavioral

o Psychological
o Benefit

Efficiency and significance of marketing activities change according to the market segmentation.
The traditional marketing segmentation methods have to be adapted to the online domain as the
market structure changes.

Consumer targeting

Past research studies have explored the usage of the Usenet on the internet as a marketing
tool. The Usenet was a collection of online groups which were typically theme based. The
accuracy in the identification of possible target segments made Usenet a very attractive
proposition for marketers. It was observed that readers of specific news groups tended to be
highly involved with the topics of the news group. Significantly, researchers also found that
people who were absorbed in one news group demonstrated a low involvement in the activities
of another news group. This subsequently enabled marketers to believe in the potential of online
product and brand groups, which could be used for consumer segmentation and targeting.

Involvement implies momentarily diverting all our resources to the achievement of a specific
activity. When an individual is involved in a particular online activity, he/she wants to see the
completion of the activity and is affected by all the information floating in that environment,
which impacts the activity in question.

Online Targeting Types:

a) Predictive targeting

b) Deterministic targeting

c) Non- deterministic targeting

ONLINE TARGETING

Mass marketing was proven ineffective since a majority of targeted consumers may not be
interested in an advertised product. Mass marketing is very expensive and since only a small
percentage of targeted consumers may be interested in the products, this mode of marketing
and advertising is very cost ineffective. This creates the base for effective consumer
targeting.The likelihood of the consumer response forms the basis for the marketer’s targeting
efforts. As per Suresh vittal’s research on applying customer value to online targeting strategy,
forrester , 2009, consumer targeting in the online would can be classified into three types:

DETERMINISTIC TARGETING

It is also known as rules-based targeting , this is the most commonly used approach and takes
the form of ‘if visitor performs the following actions, then offer x, y, or z’. or, even simpler,’ if
visitor belongs to segment A, then offer product x’.
MARKETING IMPLICATION

In an offline scenario, this would employ offering specific products to consumers at the point of
sales. For instance other cheese and ketchup to a consumer who has purchased burger buns.
In an online scenario, this would imply throwing up information such as people who viewed this
page also viewed.Typically, deterministic targeting implies that not only do consumers receive
promotional information at the time of a purchase, based on their purchase behavior, but also
the marketers and advertisers can push the consumers in an effectively real-time manner,
specifically in the context of retailer for FMCG products.Hence, organization can make changes
and optimize their promotional campaigns accordingly.

NON- DETERMINISTIC TARGETING

In addition known as self learning, this is when a decision system applies advanced analytics to
train a model and apply it to making decision based on visitors behavior.

PREDICTIVE TARGETING

This takes the second approach further and applies business rules, constraints, pre-existing
segmentation, and analytical techniques such as decision trees and neural networks to drive the
targeting process. Not surprisingly this approach also required the most complete profile of the
customer. What is not often discussed is the cost associated with each approach.

MARKETING IMPLICATION

What market must recognize is that the act of targeting is not ‘free’ and has a cost associated
with it. This cost is made up of system costs, data costs, analytical costs, and experience costs.
Of these costs, the hardest to assess is the experience costs, that is, the cost of presenting an
offer to a customer and the subsequent reaction and impact on future value.Companies also
invest in response modeling where consumer response are used to drive organizational actions.
For instance, if a consumer positively interacts with an organization or likes the company-
generated content, his future actions can be predicted based on the degree of his affinity to the
organization.

BEHAVIOURAL TARGETING

Another technique that is proving to be an effective targeting methodology for consumers

visiting online stores is behavioral targeting. For instance, during a visit to an organization online
store, a consumer may have viewed items from a particular brand and the behavioral targeting
tool may then use that information to show those consumers corresponding banner
advertisements depicting information on the same brand he had viewed earlier.
FEATURES

a) Profile visitors to a company website in real time in order to provide them with customized
offering.

b) Most of the tools can work in synchronization with Google analytics.

c) Primary information of value includes data pertaining to cookies, consumer IP addresses,

links clicked by the consumer, keywords used for search, products clicked on etc.

BRAND POSITIONING ONLINE

Brand positioning is about differentiating a brand to stand out before a target audience by
demonstrating it as more significant than the competing brands. Traditional positioning
strategies are based on one of the several variables such as the following:-

a) Category

b) Image

c) Unique product feature

d) Benefit

Prepared by:

Puspanjali Mishra

MBA Faculty