Hi I'm Kartik and in this session we're going to talk about digital marketing strategies. Before we discuss any specific digital marketing strategies, it is useful to look at the entire landscape of digital marketing and identify the set of options available to us. At the high level, we can classify digital marketing strategies into three main buckets. The first is owned media. The second is paid media. And the third is earned media. Owned media refers to web properties that you own or you create. For example, your own website, your mobile apps, social media channels where you might create a Facebook page or a Twitter channel for yourself, blogs where you create the content, and things of that nature. Paid media is essentially the world of advertising. It includes marketing on search engines. It includes social ads. It includes display or banner ads and it also include affiliate marketing. And finally, earned media refers to third-party mentions by bloggers, reviewers, or even your customers who might Tweet about your product or discuss your product on Facebook. In short, earned media is, essentially, mentions about your brand that you didn't necessarily create, you didn't pay for it, you literally earned it. Let's begin by talking about owned media. When we create a website, we are used to asking how to design the website content so as to best serve our user's information needs. But from a marketing perspective, we also have to address how to design these websites to ensure discovery of our website by a search engine. And how to ensure our website places prominently in the search engine results. Similarly with regard to social media, we might ask which social media platforms to engage with. For example should we engage with Facebook and Twitter or LinkedIn or Pinterest or any other social media platform that's out there. And given the choice of any platform, what kind of content should we create on that platform? Similarly we might ask, how do we engage with our email subscribers with effective email content? Furthermore, the role of digital marketing is not just customer acquisition, but it also includes customer retention, cross-selling, and up-selling products. So one might ask, how do we design our website to ensure that customers can find products easily on it? Personalization is a very important tool to help in this process. Personalization on the web is often enabled by software known as recommender systems. Recommender systems are tools that attempt to predict items of interest to users based on some information about those users and the items or products that we carry. For example, we are used to messages like people who bought this product also bought this other product. Or people like you liked these other products. These are systems that help consumers find new products that are of interest. They also help them sort through their alternatives and select the product that's right for them. For example, if I'm looking to buy a DSLR camera, I might find that a store like Amazon carries several dozen DSLRs. But when I look at an individual product, I might see a message that says people who viewed this product eventually bought this other product. And that can help me direct my search a little bit better so that instead of looking 50 or 60 different cameras, I focus my attention on three or four more relevant opportunities. Recommender Systems offer value not just to consumers but also the firms that deploy these systems. For firms they help them in cross-selling products. They help in converting browsers to buyers. And they help increase loyalty by creating a custom browsing experience. As a result, these systems are used by most of the major online e-commerce and media firms. For example, in retail, we might be used to seeing certain products recommended to us on the homepage. Or when we select a specific product ,we might see messages such as people who bought this product bought these other products. These systems not only offer value to consumers but they have a significant impact on consumer choice. For example, one study suggests that nearly a third of sales at Amazon originated from recommendations that the website makes, in other words, this contributes to billions of dollars of sales at Amazon. And similarly, another study says that roughly about 80% of media streams on Netflix originates from recommendations. Personalization systems are crucial for e-commerce companies that offer large product assortments. Think of an online store like Amazon that offers maybe dozens of smart phones or dozens of cameras. When consumers are faced with so many choices, recommenders can help them focus on a narrower set of more relevant alternatives. And this ultimately can help drive transactions and sales. Similarly for media companies that generate revenues from advertising, recommendation systems can be crucial in increasing customer engagement on the website. So for example, on YouTube, personalization allows YouTube to recommend other videos that are relevant to the user. And a user who comes into the website to view one video might end up leaving the website eventually after watching ten other videos, therefore increasing advertising revenues for the company. Now if you determine that personalization is relevant for your website, it is important to recognize that there are several third party tools that provide personalization as a service. So, you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel and build a personalization system from scratch. There are many third party vendors like Monetate and Rich Relevence that offer personalization as a service. Furthermore, there are several open source tools available such as Apache Mahout which can be used if you have some technical resources or skills in house. Moving on from owned media, let's talk about paid media. As far paid media is concerned, we have several options ranging from sponsor search on search engines like Google to social ads on platforms like Facebook, to display our banner ads on publisher websites. The questions to answer here include, how much to spend on each of these platforms. Once we have made that decision, how do we manage our ad campaigns on these websites? Another option available is affiliate marketing which involves paying a partner to promote your products to their users. Now with affiliate marketing, an important question to answer is which companies to approach for affiliate marketing partnerships. Finally, moving on to earned media. How do you get customers to discuss your products on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook? What incentives might you want to offer to these customers for discussing your products? How do you identify and engage influencers? Finally, with regard to earned media, how do you get customers to discuss your products on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. And what incentives might you want to offer to these customers for discussing your products on these social media platforms? How do you identify and engage influencers? For example in fashion and battle, bloggers and YouTube video bloggers can have significant influence on decisions made by your customers. So you could consider engaging influencers as paid advisors at your company. In summary, an effective digital marketing campaign accounts for all the available options in terms of paid, owned, and earned media. And it accounts for the individual elements associated with each of these media options and identifies the ones that are best suited for your product and for your customers. In the next few sessions, we'll explore each of these ideas further with regard to owned, earned, and paid media.
