Introduction to digital marketing and social media

So, this is an Introduction to Digital Marketing and Social Media. My name is Dr. Rachel Ashman. I'm a lecturer in marketing at the University of Liverpool. And hopefully this talk will give you some insights into this exciting and innovative topic.

So, the Digital Marketing Institute defines the term as the use of digital technologies to create an integrated, targeted, and measurable communications which help to acquire and retain customers while building deeper relationships with them. I agree and support this definition as being the most comprehensive in my interpretation. This definition includes the terms digital, targeted, measurable, and relationship, all terms that are necessary to define digital marketing. It must be digital because of the technology. It is targeted because of the value in the technology allows it to be. It must establish relationships because marketing using different digital technology generally requires input from potential consumers. And it must be measurable, because measurability is inherent in the use of digital technology and inherent in the use of marketing. And this is particularly pertinent to a UK market, as in Britain we spend more time online than any other European country and really love to be in the digital marketing environment.

So what is digital marketing? You can see here there's a model taken from a book by Dave Chaffey, which just outlines the different types of online and offline communications. So with online communications, we can see number one we have search marketing, which encompasses things like search engine optimization, paid search, pay-per-click, and paid for inclusion fees. These all deal with traffic building and gaining an audience in the online market, so how people get to you. Number two is online PR. This deals with publisher outreach, community participation, media alerting, and brand protection. With online PR, you're trying to develop relationships with your consumers and trying to make sure that because in the digital environment everything is text based and written down and is evident by it staying in the environment so other people can read it that you really need to be careful in the way that you manage relationships with your customers so that you build up a good digital reputation. Number three is online partnership. This has to do with affiliate marketing, sponsorship, co-branding, link building, and widget marketing. This is where you start to capitalize on other people's audiences so that you can build your own one up to be greater than it perhaps was if you just relied on your own network online. So by link building and co-branding with other people, you can assimilate the brand values with other businesses that have the same ones as you or the ones that you wish to desire and gain more popularity in the online environment. Number four is interactive ads. So this has to do with site-specific media buys, ad networks, contra deals, sponsorship, and behavioral targeting. Interactive ads is something that's starting to come out more and more in the digital environment as consumers demand a more participative relationship with the companies that they interact with. So we see that having clicks and having interactivity during ads is a really good way to get engagement and to manage the customer experience. Number five is opt-in email. This has to do with house list emails, cold rented lists, co-branded, and ads in third-party e-newsletters. Opt-in email is one of the older forms of digital marketing. It can be quite difficult to get click-throughs on emails, particularly because companies force consumers to opt into them. And so this is a way to get a direct message to consumers that might be ignored or seen as noise by your customers if you spam them too much in the long term. And then six, social media marketing. This has to do with audience participation, managing a social presence, viral campaigns, and customer feedback. Social media marketing is all to do with being there for your consumers and gaining an audience and a relationship with your consumers in a way that makes it beneficial for your customers to follow you through enhancing their lives using things like content and storytelling. So we see here in purple that the offline communications are also detailed, which are the more traditional marketing media which we would see outside of the internet.