The proliferation of digital technology gives businesses a diverse new set of tools to reach, engage, monitor, and respond to consumers to an unprecedented degree. The aggregated and voluminous digital data can also be leveraged to better target specific consumer segments. Following the Digital Marketing Channels: The Landscape, this course aims to give you a deeper understanding of core processes of planning a digital marketing campaign and the role of various digital channels in an integrated marketing communication.
1-1.4 Know Your Goal: Aligning Strategies, Goals, & Business Objective
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来自 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 的课程
Digital Media and Marketing Strategies
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从本节课中
Course Overview and Optimizing Your Digital Assets
In this module, you will learn the best practices for successful online copywriting and SEO, how specialized search can affect your rankings, and how to plan, set up, and run your own search campaign.
与讲师见面
Mike YaoAssociate Professor of Digital Media
Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising
A key question in
any strategic communication endeavor is
what do you hope to achieve through your communications?
This is certainly true in digital marketing.
Before you plan for any campaigns,
it is essential to make sure that your communication strategies are aligned with
your overall marketing goals and
your marketing goals are aligned with your business objectives.
Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of marketing funnel,
but let's briefly go through the basic concept as a refresher.
A funnel is the set of stages consumers typically go
through on their journey from being a prospect to a customer.
While each business should define these steps in
the most relevant way to their business model and market environment.
A marketing funnel typically includes, from top to bottom,
the stages of awareness,
interest, consideration, intent, evaluation,
and purchase or conversion.
The process is called a funnel because there are a lot of people in the first stage.
Then as you continue along the consumer journey,
many will dropout at each step and the size
of the crowd gets smaller the deeper into the funnel you go.
While consumers today are still going through each of these stages on their journey,
the conventional wisdom about them going through a
broad to narrow funnel is outdated in the digital age.
This is because the two implicit assumptions behind the funnel are no longer true.
First, the funnel-shaped process,
assumes that the only way to get to
the lower half of the funnel is through filtering from the top.
In the digital age of predictive analytics and behavioral targeting,
companies can find and precisely target leads with
strong purchasing tension and skip the top half of the funnel altogether.
For example, in traditional marketing post to sales customer relations management
and personal networking are on the exit end of a typical retail marketing funnel.
But today, these tactics can be adopted at scale through social networking sites
by directly bringing in new leads into the bottom of the funnel.
Armed with affordable and easy to use technological tools B2C and
retail marketers can also take advantage of B2B and direct sales strategies,
such as cultivating long-term relationships
and building trust in their marketing campaigns.
And vice versa. B2B marketers and
direct sales businesses can benefit from a low entry point,
to using the mass communication features of digital media.
The distinction between the top and the bottom of a funnel
are less relevant in digital marketing.
Another assumption built into the concept of a marketing funnel is that
consumers are ignorant and uninformed before they enter the funnel.
This is no longer true in the digital age.
Digital media users are active,
although their experiences are fragmented.
Consumers today are exposed to a huge amount of information every day,
besides mass advertising and marketing promotions.
The newer generations of consumers can get information about products,
services, and brands through many other channels beyond the control of marketers.
They also want more agency in choosing
the products they like and have control in the purchasing process.
For example, when I purchased my last car,
I gathered information about many different types of cars,
considered their utilities and functions and
went through a ton of reviews and independent reports.
I decided on the brand,
the model, the color,
and even the price point before I contacted
a local dealer to buy a specific car in their inventory.
Much of what I did leading up to the purchase
was beyond the control of any conventional marketing efforts.
The consumer experience in digital marketing is less linear,
less uniform, and less restricted.
People can jump from one stage of the funnel
to another and jump from one funnel to another.
Personally, I think the best analogy for digital marketing is not the funnel
but a tour guide or personal assistant. Within
a broad strategy based on specific business goals,
marketers need to constantly be aware of the interests,
needs, and intentions of their customers.
Be flexible and nimble, and be ready to adopt new tactics at any time.
More importantly, digital marketing is not just about having great salesmanship,
coming up with a single creative message or slogan or putting out attractive signage.
An effective digital strategy must offer consumers a pleasant,
seamless, and informative experience on their journeys.
Be responsive and helpful when needed,
but be gentle and respectful when not.
In addition, digital marketers must select
the right communication strategy for the right consumer at the right moment.
While paid advertising can be used to
reach and engage consumers in any stage of the journey,
specific advertising messages should be tailored to
different consumers for different goals on different platforms.
For example, a consumer journey leading to conversion on social media
is drastically different from one on search engines.
A consumer does not typically use social media for product search.
But they are highly engaged with interesting posts and content shared by their friends.
In such an environment,
marketers must rely on strategies such as
content marketing and influencer marketing to raise awareness and interests.
Being too aggressive and salesy on social media
will likely trigger reactants or worse, resistance.
In contrast, when consumers use a search engine to look for information about a product
they already have the interests or even intention to make a purchase.
As such, the goal is to make sure that your business can be found and is helpful.
As such, your search ad should be clear,
informative, but not explicitly persuasive.
Now going back to my example about buying a car,
while I was researching the price of
different car models and searching for nearby vendors,
I provided contact information to
a few auto sales websites, like TrueCar and Kelly Blue Book.
The direct sales arm of several local dealers
immediately contacted me and tried to secure the sale.
All of their efforts were great and useful to me before I bought the car.
But once I made the purchase,
one local dealer kept on calling me about the promotional deals they were running.
Even after I repeatedly told them to remove me from the list.
But another dealer's manager called me personally to ask why I had chosen to
buy from their competitor and
offered to stay in touch if I were to be in the market again.
It is obvious who will win my business, right?
Now, here's a parallel in the digital world.
During my research for the car,
I received many targeted ads from auto dealers when I browse the web.
However, these ads were very different.
One auto dealer bombarded me with the same ad everywhere I went,
it got very annoying after a while.
There was another brand that sent different ads using different messages to reach me.
I remember vividly seeing an ad on the side of my browser window saying something like,
"If you are still interested and looking for a car,
we just received new inventories."
This simple, personalized acknowledgement
and the gentle approach to offering their service
made such an impact on my evaluation of that dealer.
I actually clicked on the ad and visited the dealer's website to browse the inventory
even after I had already made my purchase.
The digital revolution has brought
new opportunities for marketers to consider the needs of
individual consumers and create a tailored communication strategy for that individual.
Instead of having to rely on just a few media channels,
digital marketers today can also choose from a variety of channels,
platforms, and messages to reach and engage their customers.
Instead of shouting into a big crowd to raise awareness,
digital marketers should consider the key characteristics and affordances of
different digital channels and use them appropriately
to create different funnels for different types of consumers.
I discussed the features and characteristics of
different digital media channels in more detail
in another course called Digital Marketing Channels:
the Landscape, in case you're interested.
For digital marketers, the question,
what do you hope to achieve?
Should no longer be considered in the context of a one to many mass communication,
but instead should be a question we ask in the interpersonal contexts.
This will allow them to be more strategic and effective.
