Introduction to Digital Marketing:

Teaching: The last sessions we had discussed about what marketing is, an
overview of the definition of marketing, and what are the different elements of
marketing? We also had a session that specifically looked into what are the
important theories of consumer behavior. What are the models by which
consumers make purchase decisions? We will now enter into this area of digital
marketing.

What is digital marketing? Many of you would have asked this question to
yourself, while you decided to choose this course? Now, digital marketing is all
marketing that is done over the digital platform or a digital media. Now, what are
the things that marketers can possibly do over such a platform? They can use
digital media for the creation of products and services. There are a lot of
companies that gather ideas from customers over the social media platforms. There
are a lot of companies that engage in a specific activity called as co-creation or co-
production where the customers actively participate and get involved in creation of
products and services.

Digital Media and digital platforms can also be used for communication and for
promotion of the products. We discussed briefly about the case of advertisements.
We also know that there is a lot of social media promotion that happens. Many
times companies have a lot of sales and a lot of promotional activities that they do.
For example, there are e-commerce companies in India which basically have huge
sales around the festival seasons. So you can use digital platforms to communicate
about products, about services, about specific events that you're doing, about
different people who are involved in the company's ecosystem. It can also be used
to manage a lot of your reputation on the marketplace. For example, there are
companies which often have to encounter a lot of negative news in the market
place. So how is that you can reach out to customers very effectively and make
sure that all of this negative news can be neutralized? For communication and
promotion, digital technologies can be used.

Of course, another important element of using digital marketing is for the selling or
delivery of products and services to customers. E-commerce is a very brilliant
example here. You have a lot of companies which have created their businesses
and their business models in the e-commerce space. Companies like Amazon,
companies like Flipkart who are engaged in creating a marketplace for customers
to come and purchase your products. So delivery and selling of products and
services to customers is also something that is done through the digital platform.

There is a lot of data that you can collect from the digital media. I discussed this
briefly in the earlier session as well. You had a lot of problem collecting authentic
data from customers earlier. You had a problem where in you had to go to
customers with a survey or a questionnaire and ask for their feedback about lot of
things. But as of today with the help of digital marketing techniques, it has become
very easy for you to collect all of this data because this data is available to you in
real time.

You can listen to what the customer is saying, you can also understand what the
customer is saying. One example is a lot of customers today use your products and
give feedback, give reviews about your products on online platforms. Say for
example, every time you go to an e- commerce platform, say for example, when
you go to Amazon, you see there are these star ratings and there are these review
comments that customers have provided. Now all of these review comments are
rich information about what your product is and what customers feel about your
product. Many times companies use all of this to understand what improvements
can be made on this product. So unlike the case where you had to go to the
customer to understand what the customer felt about the product, in today's day,
because of digital marketing tools and techniques, it is very easy for you to listen
to and understand the customers. A lot of this can be used to improve the products
and services. In a lot of cases when you have to come out with new products, such
information becomes very important. There are also a lot of techniques that are
used to manage relationships with customers. You would have heard about this
term called customer relationship management, wherein you are trying to have a
relationship with the customer that is beyond the normal selling and buying cycle,
wherein you're trying to keep reminding the customer about a lot of benefits that
you're doing, wherein a lot of loyalty programs are done by companies.
In the digital space, all of this becomes very easy. Say for example, when we use
emails to remind customers about their consumption patterns, to give them some
loyalty benefits and all of this is communicated either through emails or through
social media or through mobile platforms. All of this is because digital marketing
is the enabler here. It also helps you to understand what the competition is doing.
Nowadays, it has become a very open world.

We all understand what everybody else in the world is doing. Hence it has become
very important and very easy for us to understand what the competition is doing.
Philip Kotler has also given a definition of what marketing or digital marketing is.
He defines digital marketing as a form of direct marketing, which links
consumers with sellers electronically using interactive technologies like emails,
online forums and news groups, interactive television, mobile platforms, social
media, etc. So in this definition, basically he captures everything that I have been
talking to you about: use of electronic platforms, use of electronic media, and how
customers can be made aware of your products, how products can be delivered to
these customers, how you can understand what the customer is feeling about your
products, and on top of all of that, how you can create new products and strategize
your way to success.

Now there are certain salient features of digital marketing and how it is different
from what traditional marketing was. For example when we think about traditional
marketing and the way in which traditional marketing used to operate, we always
used to think that the marketer knows everything. The marketer or the company
that is manufacturing the product has all understanding of what the customer
wants, what the customer feels, and the only activity that you're involved in was to
communicate it to the customer. Today with the emergence of digital platforms, it
has become much more interactive in nature. The communication is no longer one
way from the marketer to the customer, but it is a two way interaction now. The
marketer can of course reach out to the customer while the customer can also come
back to the marketer, give the marketer a feedback about the product, ask questions
to the marketer, etc.

Remember the case of television advertising. It is a one way platform. You can
only communicate to the customer through the television platform. You cannot
hear back what the customer is feeling. In many cases, companies don't necessarily
know what the customer is feeling. In a digital media, it is very easy for you to
communicate both ways, so that is why two-way communication is very effective.
It is also important to understand that apart from the marketer and the customer
communicating to one another, there is also many-way communication that is
going on. Think of the case of social media. You use a product, you like the
product, you might go and talk about that as a status update on Facebook, you
might go and tweet about the product, you might take a picture of yourself in a
very fancy location using the product and put it on Instagram.

Now the communication has become many-way rather than the marketer and the
customer talking to one another. You have many customers who are interacting
about your product in easier and in much more accessible platforms without
spending any money. Segmentation and targeting have become much effective
now. You might recall we had discussed about segmentation and targeting in one
of the earlier classes. Segmentation was how you broke down the heterogeneous
market into homogeneous groups so that you can target one or few of these groups
very effectively. Now with digital platforms, you can do segmentation and you can
do targeting much effectively because segmentation and targeting requires data and
understanding of the customer which the digital platform provides to you. If you
remember your YouTube consumption, when you go to YouTube from one
browser in your computer, you might see a set of videos, set of recommendations
that are provided specifically to you. No other customer in the world might have
the same usage pattern, same videos and same channels that they're watching. So
now it is possible for us to market individually to each customer and provide

options and services and products for the requirements of specific customers at an
individual

level, which was not very easy and not very effective in the earlier days of
traditional

marketing.

As I mentioned already, it is easy to measure and also every company has an equal
opportunity
in the digital space because earlier if you're talking about television advertising, it
is expensive,

it is only accessible to companies who have a big budget. Today when you're
talking about

social media platforms and reaching out to customers on such platforms, it has
become easy for

most companies to operate in this place. So opportunity has become very easy.

You might also remember there are generally two types of techniques that
marketers use. One is

called push marketing and the other is called pull marketing.

Push marketing is where you use a lot of trade promotions, a lot of incentives to
trade partners

specifically to retailers and wholesalers who are now going to push your product to
the market.

Say for example, if you go to a Kirana store near to your house and you are trying
to buy a

product, but you don't know which product to buy, you might ask the retailer, the
owner of the

Kirana store as to which product should I buy? The Kirana store owner in most
cases is going to

recommend the product which gives him the highest margins. So if I sell a product
for 10

rupees, I get two rupees on this product v/s three rupees on the other product, I will
always

recommend the three rupee product because that is what gives me a higher margin.
So this kind
of incentivization on the trade platform or to trade partners and thereby making
sure that the

product is available in the market and bought by customers is generally known as

push

technique.

On the other hand, there are techniques where you provide a lot of advertising, a
lot of

information to customers, and all of this information is used by customers to now

go to the

retail space and collect your product or for demanding your product. That is what a
lot of other

companies do. These kinds of techniques which basically make the customer to
pull your

product is known as pull marketing.

Now, digital platforms help you do both of these things simultaneously, say for
example, if I

use display advertising, if I use email campaigns, if I use any kind of techniques
whereby I'm

pushing my product to the customer, it helps me to push marketing. On the same

time if I know

of customers who are interested in certain product who might be willing to search
for this

product on a search engine, they might see my advertisement and buy this product,
so pull also

is possible. So both push as well as pull marketing can be done very easily. You
get real time

feedback from customers and feedback on your campaigns.

Earlier in traditional campaigns, if you run an advertising campaign, you hardly
know what the

impact of the campaign is. There is a very interesting quote that says that
traditional advertising

is mostly about spray and pray. You are spraying the content and spraying the
message across

the entire market or across the entire target group and you're praying that people
will come and

buy your product. It was not very accountable. You didn't know if your campaign
was doing

good or doing bad. You might have had created a campaign, you might have spent
crores and

crores of rupees in the production and in the airing of all of these advertisements,
but the impact

might not be significantly high. In digital platforms, it is not the case. You have
real time

feedback so you can measure return on investment at a real time.

There is also a drastic shift in the moment of truth theory. Generally we used to
consider three

moments of truth that used to happen when we're talking about traditional
marketing: the first,

the second, and the third moment of truth. The first moment of truth is basically the
first

interaction that the customer has with your product. Often times it happens in the
point of
purchase location or probably in the retail space where the customer first sees the
product on the

retail shelf. The second moment of truth is where the customer actually purchases
your product

from the retail location, and the third moment of truth is once a customer has used
the product,

what is the feedback that the customer gets, whether the customer sees that the
product has met

his or her expectations, or whether the product has not been good enough to meet
his or her

expectations. So, in traditional marketing, these were the three moments of truth.
So the three

places where the customer actually interacts with your product and makes
decisions about

whether the product is good enough worth exploring, whether the product is good
enough worth

buying or whether the product was good enough, worth consumption.

Now what has happened with digital marketing is that there has now become a
Zeroth Moment

Of Truth. ZMOT is basically the digital information search that the customer
engages in. Many

a times prior to you going to a retail location or prior to you going to an e-

commerce platform,

there's a lot of information search that you do wherein the customer now has one
more stage

wherein the customer interacts with the product. So zeroth moment of truth is
again something
that has gotten itself evolved because of the digital marketing practices and that is
one salient

feature that makes itself different from the traditional marketing practices.

Digital marketing applications are always available to customers irrespective of the

location of

the customer, irrespective of what the customer wants as a language preference,

irrespective of

whether the customer is browsing for your product information in the morning
hours, in

business hours, or during the midnight or during later hours in the day. It becomes
very easy for

you to provide your information to the customer and be available to the customer
round the

clock. So information is always available and you can purchase the product at any
point of time

in the day. Traditionally you had to wait for information when the business hours
of the

company are on, you had to wait for purchasing the product when the retail store is
available

and when the retail store is open, which might be from nine in the morning till ten
in the night,

but after that you have to wait till the next business day. With digital marketing, all
of this has

become much easier for customers, so always availability is one more thing and
personalization
of course, remember I mentioned to you about the YouTube example. You can
personalize

content, you can personalize information and you can personalize the product for
each

customer's requirement because digital technology helps you do all of these things,
so these are

some salient features which make digital marketing a lot different from traditional
marketing.

Now let's look into how the AIDAA model becomes relevant in the digital space.
Now here

we're trying to introduce a lot of different aspects specifically in the digital space
before we get

into the digital ecosystem or the digital landscape as I like to call it. So the AIDAA
model that

we discussed in the previous session talks about Awareness, Interest, Desire,

Action, and

Advocacy. These were the five stages that the customer generally engages in.

Awareness is where we are trying to create awareness in the customer's mind about
the products

that you have to offer to the customer or the services that you have for offer to the
customer.

The key objective in the awareness stage is to create recall about the product. Now
what is

recall? Recall is basically the customer's memory and the customer's association
that they have

with your product category. Say for example, when I talk about soft drinks, when
the customer
is thinking about soft drinks, there might be some brands that the customer is
remembering, so

these brands that the customer is able to remember and able to recall from the
memory is what

we call as recall or brand recognition. Now, awareness stage, you're trying to

create such recall,

you're trying to create awareness about your brand or product or offering in the
customer's

mind. We use a lot of digital platforms and digital technologies to do this. Say for
example, you

might have seen a lot of display advertisements. When you go to a certain website
you might

have seen there are pop up advertisements that come out. There are a lot of banner

advertisements that you see in different websites. There are a lot of social media
messages and

social media advertisements that you see, a lot of sponsored links which generally
we call as

native advertisements. There are these content that is generally shown on your
Facebook wall

which resembles something that your friend has shared, but there'll be a small title
on one

corner that says it has been sponsored. All of such advertisements basically create
greater

number of impressions about your product in the customer's mind, thereby

increasing recall. A
lot of YouTube based or video based content is also generated so that they can be
used to create

awareness.

Once the customer is aware of your product, the next option or the next stage is
where you want

to generate interest in the customer's mind. Now to generate interest in the

customer's mind, we

basically are trying to bring the customer's mind and bring our products into the
consideration

set in the customer's mind. So there are two things that are important here. One is
where we

need to understand a set of customers who are really thinking about this product
and two is

where we have to create a message that becomes very relevant to the customer and
makes the

customer now remember and consider buying your product. So in order to do both
of these, we

use a lot of creative content.

We use a lot of search engines wherein we basically are trying to find out who is
the customer

who is actually looking for the product, because many times when the customer is
considering

to buy certain products, the customer might come to a search engine, try to find out
more

information. There might be cases where a lot of content is provided as really

creative
advertisement which captures the attention of the customer. A lot of viral
campaigns are used

here. A lot of influencers are used here. You might have seen on social media, on
Instagram, on

Facebook, etc. there are a lot of influencers. People who have great following,
people who are

considered experts in certain areas talk about certain products. Consider the
example of the

latest laptop that you saw. There might be a lot of influencers who use these
laptops, review

these laptops and give you information about these laptops. What are the good
things about this

laptop? How does this laptop compare to some other product that is available in the
market? So,

all of these influencers are generally used in order to create interest in the
marketplace.

The third stage is desire. Desire is where now you want to make the customer feel
that the

customer knows enough and there is a conviction in the customer's mind that they
should go for

the purchase of the product or now your product has to come into the choice set the
customer.

This is where you have to provide the customer a lot of comparative information,
information

about different parameters which the customer is interested in. Remember in the
last class,
when we were talking about evaluation of alternatives in the five stage model, we
discussed

about how the customer uses attributes to evaluate different products that are
available.

Now many a times information should be provided to the customer on these

specific attributes,

which helps the customer to make a choice or decision. So you have to provide
infographics,

you have to provide a lot of content that is talking about how this product is going
to be useful.

You have to provide reviews about other customers and how they found the
product useful. So

that is where a lot of word of mouth, a lot of detailed comparative information is

provided.

Specifically, this part is done either on third party affiliate websites or it is done
using the e-

commerce platforms where you provide a lot of content to the customer. You
might also use a

lot of sales promotion techniques here. You might have discounts or promotions
that you give

to the customer so that the customer can now be desireful about buying your
product.

The next stage is action. Action is where the customer is actually thinking about
purchasing a
product. There are a lot of e-commerce platforms and there are a lot of affiliates
who are

involved in this activity. E-commerce platforms basically try to gather all the
requirements of

the customer and fulfill these requirements. Affiliates are basically third parties
who engage in

this ecosystem and give incentives or give customers a lot of information about
which products

to buy from which e-commerce platforms. So together e-commerce platforms and

affiliate

platforms come alongside or side by side and provide customers an opportunity to

buy the

product.

The last stage is basically advocacy. This is where the customer wants to give you
feedback and

give other customers feedback. Now, there are a lot of word of mouth platforms. E-
commerce

platforms can be used to write reviews. Social media platforms can be used to
write reviews

about the product. A lot of times customers are not very happy about your product,
so you

should be able to provide customers with the right opportunity to come back and
suggest what

grievances they have. So many a times you would have seen that people go to the
Facebook
page of the company and talk about what they liked, what they disliked about the
product. A lot

of complaints are provided on twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, etc. So you need

to also be

sure that such kinds of reviews and such kinds of feedbacks are also addressed
properly. So all

of these different elements will be discussed further in the coming sessions when
we get into

details of what search engines are, what search engine marketing is, what display
advertisement

is, what social media marketing is, what email marketing is, and all the other
different elements

that we'll touch upon in a sequential pattern.

Now, when we think about all the different platforms and all the different
opportunities that you

have on the digital marketing ecosystem or the digital marketing atmosphere, it

might become a

little overwhelming for anyone because you have a lot of social media platforms
out there. You

have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. You have search engines out
there, Google,

Amazon, YouTube, etc. You have other platforms and you have a lot of affiliates
out there. You

have all other opportunities wherein you can use any website or any blog or any
kind of content

provider out there to position your products. So if we really don't have a place or a
mechanism
by which we can create a system of categorizing and putting everything in
perspective, it might

become a little overwhelming for us to understand what this entire ecosystem is

capable of or

what kind of platforms are available in the entire ecosystem.

So that is why we are going to discuss the key elements of the digital marketing
ecosystem now.

The manufacturer or the marketer of the product is on one end and the customer or
the

consumer of the product is on the other end and we're trying to see what are the
directions and

what are the different things that are out there for which a marketer can use in
order to make

sure that the product is communicated, promoted and sold effectively in between
these two

entities.

So the first element here is the manufacturer, and then you have the consumer. All
the activities

that are involved in the fulfillment or the delivery or selling of products and
services from the

manufacturer to the customer happen across platforms which are generally called
the e-

commerce platforms.
So, any platform that you're talking about, Amazon, Flipkart or any other platform,
eBay for

example; all of these platforms are e-commerce platforms. Now in e-commerce

platforms, you

might have platforms which are consumer driven. There might be platforms which
are business

to business driven. So, there are a set of platforms which are B to B driven. There
are a set of

platforms which are B to C driven. There are also other platforms which are C to C
driven,

wherein consumers or customers can now interact with other customers and sell
products to

them. So, all of these platforms exist. We will come into details of e-commerce in
subsequent

sessions, but e-commerce is where you are using a digital platform or an online
platform to

make sure that sales of products and sales of services and fulfillment can happen
effectively.

Now when we're talking about other platforms, there are some platforms which
basically the

manufacturer or the marketer uses to reach out to the customer and communicate to
the

customer. These kinds of platforms are generally known as outbound marketing

tools or

outbound marketing techniques. This is where you're basically trying to reach out
to the

customer rather than the customer coming to you. You're trying to go to the
customer and try to
talk to the customer. So if you take the example of display advertisements, when
you go to a

website, you might find that there are these small display advertisements, banner
advertisements

or pop-up advisements that come out. The customer isn't necessarily asking you for
information

on this. The customer isn't looking for such information, but you find that there is
an

opportunity that this customer who comes to, say for example, the customer comes
to a football

blog. The customer might of course be a player or a person who likes playing
football. Now you

have understood that the person who comes to such a website is a person who
might be

interested in the game of football. So you can put up banner advertisements there
about football

shoes, about football clubs, about footballs necessarily or any other products or
services that are

associated with football, which have a target group of people who are interested in
football. So

such kinds of display advertisements are generally considered to be outbound

marketing. You

also have a lot of advertisements on search engines. They are also considered as
part of

outbound marketing, we will come to that in detail in the next session.

Inbound marketing is where the customer is looking for something and you make
yourself

available for the customer. So in many cases like we discussed in the awareness,
interest, desire,

stages of the customer's journey, the customer might be specifically looking for
some

information. So this is where the customer has an opportunity or the customer is

trying to reach

out to you and gather information about you.

In many cases, the consumer is now reaching out to you, which is now called as
inbound

marketing. This is where you are making sure that there is an opportunity that all
customers

who have a necessity or who have a requirement for your product or service can
directly reach

out to you and come to you. So such kinds of platforms are inbound marketing
platforms. So

you might use a lot of search engines here. Specifically you might use search
engine

optimization techniques wherein the customer is coming and searching for some
information

and he is directed to your website. There might be social communities,

communities on social

media, etc, wherein the customer can go and discuss with other customers, or
discuss with

experts who have the information and can provide this information.
There might be other opportunities where you will have a lot of email forums
where the

customer can come and register and type in a lot of information and it comes to
you as an email

wherein you can reach out to the customer very easily. There might be a lot of call
to action

kind of campaigns out there wherein the customer can get your address, get your
phone number

and thereby the customer can reach out to you. So all of these elements where the
customer can

now easily come to the manufacturer are known as inbound marketing.

There is a completely different animal out there, which is social media. Now,
social media, like

I discussed in one of the earlier classes is where consumers are interacting with
other

consumers. So is the case of mobile technologies. So social media and mobile

platforms are

predominantly used by consumers to interact with other consumers.

What manufacturers or marketers try to do is try to make themselves relevant in

this ecosystem

that predominantly is consumer to consumer driven. So when consumers go and

register

themselves for a Facebook page or for an Instagram account, what they're trying to
do is to

manage relationships with other consumers. When you buy a mobile phone, you're
buying a
mobile phone so that you can now communicate with your family members,
friends, etc. Now

in these scenarios also marketers try to make themselves relevant. So that is where
you'll find

that a lot of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter marketing, which is part of the digital
ecosystem, as

part of the social media marketing, part of the digital ecosystem, as well as a lot of
location

based applications, a lot of applications that are created so that customers can use
them

specifically on their mobile phones. All of this becomes important. So e-

commerce, outbound

marketing, inbound marketing, social media marketing, and mobile marketing are
the five

elements of the digital marketing ecosystem.

If you take any company out there and try to see what kind of activities that they
do, this could

be a good exercise for you to understand this better. Take any company out there,
try to map all

the different activities that they do in the digital space. You'll find that companies
have a mix of

all of these different elements. They might have a presence on e-commerce

platforms. It could

be their own e-commerce platform. It could be some other third party e-commerce
platform.

They might have applications where they try to reach out to customers and do
outbound
marketing. They might have techniques where they are available when the
customer is looking

for them and do inbound marketing. They might have a significant presence on
social media

wherein they will have their own Facebook pages, they will have their own twitter
accounts,

they will have a LinkedIn page, and they might have an account on Instagram.
They might use a

lot of influencers to talk positively about them. They might also have mobile
applications and a

lot of mobile based technologies that are used to reach out to customers. So again,
the elements

of the digital marketing ecosystem include e-commerce, outbound marketing,

inbound

marketing, social media marketing, and mobile marketing. We will come to each
of these in

specific sessions that we're going to cover in this course.

Also to understand here are the three types of media that a company can have.
These three types

of media include paid media, owned media, and earned media. So if you take the
first letters of

each of these, terms, P, O, E, M, it's also known as the POEM framework wherein
we're talking

about three types of media that the company can have.

Paid media is all the kind of platforms wherein you're paying a third party to have
a presence.
Say for example, if you're advertising on google, you basically are paying a certain
amount of

money to google so that your ad comes up in the top position in the search result
page. So that

is what paid media is. You can do advertising on Facebook wherein Facebook is
now going to

show your advertisement. It could be a video advertisement, it could be a text

advertisement, or

it could be a remarketing campaign. Any of these can be shown by Facebook if

you're going to

pay Facebook a certain amount of money. So, paid media is all the kind of media
that you can

use by paying a third party or paying the owner of certain media.

Owned media is all the media that you own. This is where we're talking about all
different

digital assets that the company owns. We're talking about websites that the
company owns.

We're talking about social media accounts that the company owns. We're talking
about different

applications that the company owns from the google playstore or from the apple
store. There

could be a lot of such assets that the company has now invested money and
resources in and

created for themselves and they own all of these accounts or all of these platforms.
So that is

what owned media is.

In many cases you get a lot of attention in the digital marketing space, not by
paying the third

party, not by investing in owning such accounts. This is where customers talk
about you in a

favorable manner. This is where customers like to talk positive things about you.
So all such

platforms and all such media attention that you get that is basically because of the
good

products that you make or the good work that you're trying to do is what is known
as earned

media.

So paid media is when you're paying a third party for certain activities. It could be
cost per

conversion, cost per lead, or cost per click kind of methods that are used. It could
be cost of

impression. If you remember, you would have seen a lot of advertisements that pop
up in the

beginning of a YouTube video wherein you'll see that the advertisement pops up
and then after

five seconds probably you'll click on that link which says skip ad. So all of this is
basically by

paying the media partner and this kind of advertising or this kind of media is paid
media.

There are a lot of companies which have their own websites, their own digital
applications,
applications that the customer can download and use, websites where the customer
can come

and have information, raise grievances, buy products, etc. All of these are owned
media and

there are a lot of things that the customers do on their own.

Now, say for example, you are a mobile phone company. The customer uses your
mobile phone

and finds that the mobile phone is extremely great. The customer talks about it in a
video. The

customer is a blogger who talks about it in a small video on YouTube. So such

content, you had

not paid google for that, you have not paid YouTube for that, you have not
invested in the

production of such content, such content is called user generated content and such
user

generated content or such content that customers provide or customers make is

generally what

is known as earned media. So, all of these are extremely important for us to
understand as part

of the ecosystem.

Again, in the previous exercise that I mentioned to you, if you look for that
company, you will

see that the company again has a mix of paid, owned, and earned media. In most
cases, you will

see that they have different presence in their digital elements. You'll also have
different kinds of
media that you use. Now in order to start strategizing as to how you should
actually think about

creating a digital presence or a digital marketing strategy, you might want to take a
five step

approach. Now, don't get overwhelmed, I'm not going to go into detail of all of
this. I just want

to introduce the small framework to you so that we have this understanding as to

how we are

going to do things. These five stages basically involve: Define, Design, Implement,
Measure,

and Improve.

Now define is where we are talking about defining your specific objectives. Your
objective

could be to increase sales, it could be to increase positive word of mouth, or it

could be to

increase awareness of your products in the customer's mind. Any of this could be
the objective.

So the first stage is where you define these objectives.

Second is where you design the campaign. So like I mentioned, you could use e-
commerce,

outbound, inbound, social media, mobile platforms, or a mix of all of these

elements. But it is

for you to understand and for you to design which kind of an element or which
kind of a mix of

elements should you use. So that is the second stage where you have defined
something,
defined that this is my objective, then you design the digital marketing strategy.
When you are

designing this strategy, you also have to keep in mind that the strategy should be
full proof, so

some element of testing of the strategy, some element of brainstorming on whether

this strategy

will work or not, some element of trying to see if it has a sync with the target group
and with

the kind of product category that you're selling; all of these elements are required
in the design

stage.

The third element is where you implement the strategy. Now implementation
would involve, if

you're doing a search engine campaign, it will be actually going to google and
trying to

implement the search engine marketing campaign. If you’re doing a Facebook

campaign, it

would be going to Facebook and putting up this campaign online. If you're doing
something

very organic, for example, if you're talking about search engine optimization, it
would be

implementing the optimization plan that you have in mind, so it could be

implementing

whatever you have designed.

The fourth stage is where you measure what the results or what the returns are, and
the last
stage is once you measure, you might see that, okay, I had planned that I will get
such number

of customers who will come and buy my product. I had planned that this is the
number of sales

incremental revenue that I'll get from the customers. I'm not necessarily getting any
of that. So

how do I achieve the objectives that I set forth? So that is where you think about
improving

your campaign and improving your performance.

So irrespective of what we do, the digital marketing ecosystem gives us an

understanding of the

opportunities. It also gives us an opportunity to understand what kind of mix we

should have.

And when you strategize, you start by defining what your objectives are, designing
the kind of

digital marketing strategy, implementing the strategy, measuring it, and finally
improving the

overall strategy.

You'd have frequently heard this term which is generally called a digital pipeline or
a digital

funnel, and you would have thought to yourself as to what a funnel is and why is
the funnel

required? Now this is something that comes from the general understanding or
general

philosophy of a marketing funnel.

Now, if you take all the customers or all the people who might do business with a
company at

any point of time, you can actually break these people into different groups and
you can actually

do different things to these different people depending on what stage are they in
the purchase

process. You might see the marketing funnel or the digital funnel on my right side.
You'll see

that there are different sets of people in different stages. You would find that there
are suspects,

prospects, leads, qualified leads, customers and advocates.

Now suspects are generally all the people who have possibly the opportunity of
buying your

product. So if you're going to do segmentation and targeting properly then

everybody in your

target group is a suspect. Everybody has an opportunity to buy your product. So

this generally is

a very large number of people out there who are suspects.

Out of these people who are suspects, there might be a fewer number of people
who are

interested in your product or who are aware of your product. So these might be the
people who

come to your page, visit your page, see your advertisement, etc. So from the
suspect list, you

have a lesser number of people who are generally called prospects. Now from
these prospects,

there might be people who become leads.

Leads are the ones who are a little bit more interested, a little bit more active in the
purchase

process. So these will be people who generally come and fill up the registration
form in your

page and subscribe to your newsletter. These will be the set of people who will
come to your

Facebook page and like it. These might be the people who come to your twitter
handle and

follow you on Twitter, etc.

Now once these people who are leads, once they qualify as somebody who is really
interested in

the product because they now start looking for information, who start engaging
with your

product or with your platforms, they become qualified leads and once these
qualified leads, now

start purchasing from you, start paying money to you and provide you some kind
of revenue

and some kind of incentive for the products that they are consuming, they become
customers.

So a customer is only a person who actually pays money to you because that is the
business that

we're in.

And once customer starts consuming your product and start using your product,
they might feel

good about your product, or they might feel bad about your product. Irrespective of
these two
cases, the customer will talk about the product and generate word of mouth. The
customer

might also give a lot of reviews to other customers. They might also create a lot of
content like

we discussed in the earlier case with this user generated content, so these are the
people who are

advocates.

So the entire approach is in such a way that you will have large number of
suspects. You will

have a lesser number of people who are prospects. You'll have even lesser number
of people

who are leads, from the leads there will be a smaller number of people who
become qualified

leads, from the qualified leads not everyone is going to buy your product. You
might have a

smaller number of people who become your customers and from the customers not
everybody is

going to talk favorably about your products. There might be a smaller number of
people who

will become advocates about your product. So this approach or this funneling
mechanism that

we have wherein you have a large number of people on the top and smaller number
of people

going down each stage is why we call it a marketing funnel or a digital marketing
funnel.
Now, if you take the same thing and put it as a pipeline, put it horizontally, you
will find that

like water flowing through a pipeline, you have suspects who will flow into the
pipeline. They

become prospects, they become leads, they become qualified leads, customers and
advocates at

the end of the pipeline. So that is why you have both these concepts of a digital
funnel as well

as a digital pipeline.