Marketing: An Introduction - Direct, Online, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing

Direct and Digital Marketing

Engaging directly with targeted individual consumers and customer communities to obtain an immediate response, build lasting customer relationships, engagement, brand community, and sales.

New Direct Marketing Model

• Most companies use direct marketing as a supplementary channel (e.g., direct mail, online catalogs, and social media pages).
• For many companies, direct and digital marketing constitute a complete model for doing business.

Rapid Growth of Direct and Digital Marketing

• Fastest-growing form of marketing.
• Direct marketing is becoming more Internet-based.
• Direct marketing is claiming a surging share of marketing spending and sales, including online display and search advertising, video, social media, mobile, and email.

Benefits of Direct and Digital Marketing

Buyers

• Convenient, easy, and private.
• Easy buyer-seller interaction.
• Quick access to products and relevant information.
• Brand engagement and community.

Sellers

• Low-cost, efficient, and speedy.
• Build close, personalized, interactive, one-to-one customer relationships.
• Greater flexibility.

Forms of Direct and Digital Marketing

Traditional Direct Marketing

• Face-to-face selling
• Direct-mail marketing
• Catalog marketing
• Telemarketing
• Direct-response TV marketing
• Kiosk marketing

Digital and Social Media Marketing

• Online marketing (websites, online advertising, email, online videos, blogs)
• Social media marketing
• Mobile marketing

Marketing, the Internet, and the Digital Age

• Digital and social media marketing: Using digital marketing tools to engage consumers anywhere, anytime via their digital devices.
• Digital age: Changing customers’ notions of convenience, speed, price, product information, service, and brand interactions.
• Omni-channel retailing: Creating a seamless cross-channel buying experience that integrates in-store, online, and mobile shopping.

Online Marketing

• Marketing via the Internet using company Web sites, online ads and promotions, email, online video, and blogs.
  • Marketing Web sites: Engage consumers to move them closer to a direct purchase or other marketing outcome.
  • Branded community Web sites: Does not try to sell anything but presents brand content that engages consumers and creates customer-brand community.

Online Advertising and Email Marketing

• Online advertising: Appears while consumers are browsing online.
• Email marketing: Sending highly targeted, highly personalized, relationship-building marketing messages via email.
  • Spam: Unsolicited, unwanted commercial email messages.

Online Videos

Posting digital video content on brand Web sites or social media (such as Facebook, YouTube, etc.).

• Viral marketing: digital version of word-of-mouth marketing. Videos, ads, and other marketing content that customers seek out or pass along to friends.

Blogs and Other Online Forums

Online journals of narrowly defined topics where people and companies post their thoughts and other content.

• Benefits: A fresh, original, personal, and inexpensive way to enter into consumer online conversations.
• Limitations: Cluttered, difficult to control, and largely a consumer-controlled medium.

Social Media Marketing

Social media: Independent and commercial online communities where people congregate to socialize and share messages, opinions, pictures, videos, and other content.

• Marketers engage social media in two ways:
  • Using the existing ones
  • Setting up their own

Social Media Marketing Advantages and Challenges

Advantages

• Targeted and personal
• Interactive
• Immediate and timely
• Cost-effective
• Engagement and social sharing capabilities

Challenges

• Effective usage uncertain
• Difficult to measure results
• Largely user-controlled

Integrated Social Media Marketing

Large companies design social media efforts that blend with and support other elements of a brand’s marketing strategy and tactics.

Firms that use social media effectively create brand-related social sharing, engagement, and customer community.

Mobile Marketing

Promotional content delivered to consumers through their mobile devices.

Engages customers anywhere, anytime during the buying and relationship-building processes.

Direct-Mail Marketing

Sending an offer, announcement, reminder, or other item directly to a person at a particular address.

• Tangible and creates emotional connection with customers.
• Effective component of a broader integrated marketing campaign.
• Direct and personalized.
• Sent to consumers who want to receive it.

Catalog Marketing

Print, video, or digital catalogs that are mailed to select customers, made available in stores, or presented online.

• Eliminates printing and mailing costs.
• No space constraints.
• Broader assortment of presentation formats.
• Real-time merchandising capabilities.
• Prices can be adjusted instantly.

Telemarketing and Direct-Response Television (DRTV) Marketing

• Telemarketing: Selling directly to customers using the telephone
  • Outbound and inbound telephone marketing
  • Rise of do-not-call legislation resulted in opt-in calling systems
• Direct-response television (DRTV) marketing
  • Direct-response television advertising (or infomercials) and interactive television (or iTV) advertising).
  • Interactive TV (iTV) advertising: Lets viewers interact with television programming and advertising.

Kiosk Marketing

Product or service information and ordering machines placed by companies.

• Smart kiosks
  • Wireless-enabled
  • Facial recognition

Public Policy Issues in Direct and Digital Marketing

• Irritation, Unfairness, Deception, and Fraud
• Consumer Privacy
• A Need for Action

Irritation

• Loud, long, and insistent TV commercials
• Junk mail and spam

Unfairness

Taking unfair advantage of impulsive buyers

Deception and Fraud

• Investment scams or phony collections for charity
• Internet fraud
• Phishing
• Online and digital security
• Access by vulnerable or unauthorized groups

Consumer Privacy

• Fear of invasion of privacy
• Ready availability of information leaves consumers open to abuse

A Need for Action

Government actions

• Do-not-call, do-not-mail, do-not-track lists
• Can Spam legislation
• Congressional legislation: Give more control to consumers over how online information is used
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Policing online privacy

Marketers’ actions

• Self-regulatory principles
• Advertising option icon (tell consumers why they are seeing a particular ad and allowing them to opt out)
• Privacy rights of children

Companies’ actions

• Own security measures
• Industry-wide measures