Introduction
In modern days, digital marketing is a widespread and all-encompassing area of advertising. Most companies use digital space at least in some capacity. As such, it is a subject of intensive study, as marketers strive to understand what attracts more customers and how to improve on the already existing strategies.
Discussion of Main Topics
Differences between Traditional and Digital Marketing
Traditional marketing is any type of marketing execution except the digital one. This means that it covers print ads in magazines and newspapers, posters and brochures, billboards and commercials on television and radio. It relies more on the hard copies that one keeps on their person and reaches out to the broad audience. In case of traditional marketing, the placement of ads is static and inflexible, it requires significant investments in order to achieve any efficiency, and even then, the message could fail to reach the intended audience (Chaffey & Smith 2017).
Still, it has more potential for reaching a local public, making it more viable for local businesses rather than for global ones. In addition to that, it is hard to measure the effect that this type of marketing has on the popularity of a brand, as analytics are most likely unavailable and tracking is tedious and unreliable (Chaffey & Smith 2017).
In comparison to that, digital marketing is conducted through the Internet and requires at least the basic connection to it as such. It encompasses websites, YouTube videos, streams, personal and corporate blogs, banner ads, social media pages and much more (Chaffey & Smith 2017). This type of marketing targets a specific demographic but it spreads farther than traditional marketing, as more than a half of the Earth’s population has access to the Internet, so it potentially attracts more customers, even while targeting a specific audience (Chaffey & Smith 2017).
Digital marketing is also more cost-efficient, as the overall spending on it are lies than the similar traditional marketing campaign would warrant. Apart from that, access to the statistics, such as video views, ads clicks and so on, allow for more viable analytics (Chaffey & Smith 2017). It helps to measure the effectiveness of the chosen advertising strategy and analyze which elements contribute more to the results and prioritize them.
Customer Touchpoints and Omnichannel Customer Service
A customer touchpoint is where a customer interacts with any service that a company provides (Barwitz & Maas 2018). For example, when a new customer clicks on an ad or installs a new app on their mobile device.
Omnichannel customer service is created when companies provide a seamless transition from one channel or device to another. In modern days, customers interact with a variety of devices and information channels and recent researches have shown that most of them start their search for a product on one device and finish it on another one (Bianchi, Cermak & Dusek 2016). This provides marketers with an additional challenge, as it is now required for this search to be seamless, consistent and complementary. This is an important task, as a consumer may lose interest in the product or may find an easier obtainable one if the process is not straightforward enough.
Data and Analytics in the Digital Marketing
Data analysis allows marketers to identify each aspect of the campaign and how much they contributed to it (Ganis & Kohirkar 2016). This, in turn, can lead to the highlighting of the aspects that need improvement and subsequent corrections. It allows for a greater understanding of marketing strategies and how they affect the customer’s perception of the offered product or service.
Website statistics are usually used in a study, which, in turn, leads to the skewed results, as such data is not enough for a comprehensive analysis (Ganis & Kohirkar 2016). A full-stack analysis is built on the evaluation and scrutiny of three broad categories (Ganis & Kohirkar 2016). The first one is the relationship between different marketing channels, defining how effective the interaction is between different venues of advertisement.
The second one is people-centric data on the buyer’s journey, which maps out how the customer has found the product or service, how many people have learned about it this way and what they did once they discovered it. The final one is the revenue attributed to specific marketing efforts, which shows which type of advertising was the most effective and how much each type has contributed to the campaign as a whole. Each aspect of a marketing campaign could be inspected and improved by using the analysis based on these categories.
Conclusion
As a conclusion, it should be noted that this assignment has provided only the overview of the discussed topics. Digital marketing is a continually evolving area of research, and its landscape and methods are subjects of change. Still, it does not mean that digital analytics and omnichannel marketing will become completely irrelevant, as modern trends indicate that this is the direction of modern digital advertising. Therefore, it is essential to study them as they improve.
Reference List
Barwitz, N & Maas, P 2018, ‘Understanding the omnichannel customer journey: determinants of interaction choice’, Journal of Interactive Marketing, vol. 43, pp. 116-133.
Bianchi, R, Cermak, M & Dusek, O 2016, More than digital plus traditional: a truly omnichannel customer experience.
Chaffey, D & Smith, PR 2017, Digital marketing excellence: planning, optimizing and integrating online market, 5th edn, Routlege, Abingdon.
Ganis, M & Kohirkar, A 2016, Social media analytics: techniques and insights for extracting business value out of social media, 1st edn, IBM Press, Indiana, IN.