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Introduction

Digital Marketing

Today’s time of Internet has opened the gateway of tremendous digital marketing opportunities
for businesses. By utilizing different channels of digital marketing, businesses cannot just share
their product and services online; additionally they can gain clients for their business, entice
them and can convert them to boost their ROI.

The speed and straightforwardness with which the digital media transmits data and support a
business is astonishing.  In this Introduction to Digital Marketing E-Guide, every single aspect of
Digital Marketing will be discussed to help marketers understand what Digital Marketing is, how
it functions, and how it can help them optimize their marketing campaign.

The world is super-connected nowadays and all things considered, marketing and advertising are
no more the same as they once were. This is particularly valid because of the ascent of online
networking, which has changed how organizations speak with potential and existing customers.

Today’s era of Internet has opened a gate of vast variety of opportunities for businesses. Using
social networks, one cannot only share a private picture of one’s birthday but also earn customers
for one’s business and reach them conveniently. The speed and ease with which the digital media
transmits information and help boost a business is amazing.

Digital marketing is the field of study that helps reach consumers through various mediums such
as social media, search engines, and internet tools. Marketing specialists acknowledge digital
marketing as an innovative attempt that demands a different way of addressing customers' needs.
It's a novel way of learning how customers behave.

Digital marketing focuses on segmentation and targeting. Targeting is a strategy that divides the
audience by segmenting. Segmentation is based on psychological, demographical, and
geographical characteristics. After segmenting, the brand only targets a specific group within the

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market. It aids to keep a track of your potential audience and competitors. Digital marketing
helps in using strategies for an accurate understanding of customer needs.

Thus, companies can examine marketing campaigns and perform the required measures. Digital
marketing is essential for enterprises despite their categorization. It enables the observation of
outcomes much quicker than traditional marketing and proposes an interactive approach that
encourages businesses to expand their customer base in real-time.

Digital marketing is one of the fastest growing and fastest changing industries in the world.
Leveraging a range of techniques, it provides businesses across all industries relevant leads and
increased conversions in highly targeted ways.

The course will provide you with the knowledge and skills required to plan and execute digital
marketing campaigns and then report on their effectiveness.

This will include learning the different tools to make your marketing more effective. Including
social media, SEO, paid search, and email marketing.

Part of this process will be knowing the difference between inbound and outbound
methodologies, understanding your audience, the buyer journey and how to identify trends.

Your aim will be to possess the digital marketing skills and knowledge to build a coherent
marketing strategy with SMART objectives, timescales and budgets in order to deliver a
quantifiable return on investment.

Whether you are from a marketing background looking to build your core skills or possess an
interest in understanding the basics of digital marketing this course will give you the foundation
you require.

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Kia Motors Corporation was established in May 1944 and is Korea's oldest automobile
manufacturer. Kia has developed from humble beginnings as a maker of bicycles and
motorcycles to become the world's fifth largest car manufacturer as part of the dynamic,

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worldwide Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group. Kia now manufactures over 1.4 million automobiles
per year across 14 production and assembly plants in eight countries. A global network of over
3,000 distributors and dealers sells and services these vehicles in 172 countries.

The company employs over 40,000 people and generates over US$17 billion in annual revenue.
Kia India Private Limited (previously Kia Motors India Private Limited until May 2021) is the
company's Indian subsidiary.

Following the announcement of the development of a new 536-acre manufacturing plant in

Anantapur District, Andhra Pradesh, the company was founded on May 19, 2017. Trial
production began in January 2019, and mass production of the plant's first product, the Kia
Seltos, began on July 31, 2019. The $2 billion factory has the capacity to produce 300,000
vehicles each year.

KIA IN INDIA

In May 2021, Kia Motors, as part of its new brand identity and brand purpose of "Movement that
Inspires," revealed its new corporate name, "Kia India." The name change symbolized Kia's
transformation into a company that invested in and manufactured more than simply cars to
provide a broad variety of sustainable mobility solutions.

Kia India is transitioning away from its old manufacturing-driven structure and toward a more
purpose-driven business as part of its brand relaunch. The new brand purpose, "Movement that
inspires," represented the company's ambitious intentions to lead India's future mobility
revolution with premium goods featuring unique design and segment-first innovations, digitized
services, and a large network.

There was a point when the Indian market lacked variety in terms of automobiles. The numbers,
on the other hand, have radically changed. The Indian market now offers a wide range of
vehicles, including hatchbacks, SUVs, sedans, and MPVs. In India, a number of well-known

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automobile manufacturers have operations. Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors, Mahindra and Mahindra
are just a handful of the famous names.

What is Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is the term used for the targeted, measurable, and interactive marketing of
products or services using digital technologies to reach the viewers, turn them into customers,
and retain them.

The traditional manner of marketing involved businesses to advertise their products or services
on print media, radio and television commercials, business cards, bill boards, and in many other
similar ways where Internet or social media websites were not employed for advertising.

Traditional marketing policies had limited customer reach ability and scope of driving
customers. The concepts of brand awareness and digital marketing are familiar to most people by
name, but they are often mistaken as something vague or hard to understand. This thesis aims to
provide applicable and practical information as well as practical research results.

Both of the subjects are wide and sample, hence it would be hard for a beginner to know where
to start. This thesis aims to explain both of these concepts and the synergy between them in a
clear but professional manner in order for companies to step away from the shyness and
vagueness of these terms, and to try something new.

This thesis will provide a qualitative study about the digital marketing field in accordance to
developing brand awareness. Most importantly the thesis should provide valuable information to
SMEs and the responsible employees within them who are not experts in the field, but wish to
learn and gain more insight on the matter of SME brand awareness and digital marketing. The
thesis will present different thoughts and theories about brand and branding, as well as provide
statistics and planned brand strategies.

The most common digital marketing tools are explained and presented shortly, with the benefits
and principals behind them. The research will offer an observation and a professional’s insights
into the subject of SME embarking digital marketing, with pre-assumptions, common mistakes

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and valuable suggestions on how to reinvent the marketing strategy of a company buying
behavior.

The channels for digital marketing include:

1. Website Marketing

Website marketing is the method of advertising your website on the Internet. It is one of the
digital marketing channels you can use as part of your overall digital marketing approach. 

A website is a significant marketing tool. It portrays your business on the Internet and it’s one of
the most influential digital marketing channels you can use to get better traffic or make more
sales. Every business that wants to survive the online world needs to have a distinctly planned
website marketing strategy. 

It is no longer a choice but a ‘must’ for businesses who want to stay in the highly competitive
online market. Once your target audience visits your website, there is a 70% chance that they'll
buy your product/service depending on how your website serves the purpose. 

A good website will help a brand position and gain a competitive advantage. Always create a
customized website that focuses on your customer's needs.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy employed to entice, engage, and retain an
audience by developing and communicating relevant articles, videos, podcasts, e-books, and
other media copy. This technique establishes expertise, boosts brand awareness, and supports
your business-aided recall when it’s time to buy what you sell.  

Content marketing is a go-to tactic that’s proven to work. It’s considered the most reliable
technique to tell customers how you're different from others. You can show your product as a
completely different version for your consumers or create USP (Unique Selling Proposition) For
instance, how does Kit Kat position itself apart from all chocolate brands? They use the correct

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content like videos, captions, animations, podcasts, and so on. They take part in social media
trends. To create the trendiest content that people will appreciate.

3. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing lets someone make money by promoting another person's business. You
could be either the promoter or the business who works with the promoter, but the process is the
same in either case.

It works using a revenue sharing model. If you're the affiliate, you get a commission every time
someone purchases the item that you promote. If you're the merchant, you pay the affiliate for
every sale they help you make.

Some affiliate marketers choose to review the products of just 1 company, perhaps on a blog or
other third-party site. Others have relationships with multiple merchants.

Whether you want to be an affiliate or find one, the first step is to make a connection with the
other party. You can use a platform designed to connect affiliates with retailers, or you can start
or join a single-retailer program.
If you're a retailer and you choose to work directly with affiliates, there are many things you can
do to make your program appealing to potential promoters. You'll need to provide those affiliates
with the tools that they need to succeed. That includes incentives for great results as well as
marketing support and pre-made materials.
3. E-mail marketing
The concept of email marketing is simple—you send a promotional message and hope that your
prospect clicks on it. However, the execution is much more complex. First of all, you have to
make sure that your emails are wanted. This means having an opt-in list that does the following:

 Individualizes the content, both in the body and in the subject line
 States clearly what kind of emails the subscriber will get
 An email signature that offers a clear unsubscribe option

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 Integrates both transactional and promotional emails

You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valued service, not just as a promotional
tool.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to engage with your audience to
build your brand's connections, grow sales, and drive website traffic. It concerns broadcasting
great content on your social media handles, hearing to and entertaining your followers,
interpreting your analytics, and running social media promotions.

The major social media platforms (at the moment) are:

⦁ Facebook

⦁ Instagram

⦁ Twitter

⦁ LinkedIn

⦁ Pinterest

⦁ YouTube

⦁ Snapchat.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in countless ways for countless reasons. For instance, a
business that is concerned regarding what followers and non-followers are speaking (Word of
Mouth) about its brand would monitor social media conversation rates and answer to appropriate
mentions (social media listening). If a brand wants to comprehend its performance and draw
comparisons with its direct and indirect competitors on social media, it would study its reach,
impressions, engagement, clicks, and sales on social media with various analytics tools offered
on the internet (social media analytics). If a brand wants to gain a specific segment of the

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audience on a larger scale, they would boost and run highly-targeted social media ads (social
media advertising) to communicate their message in real-time.

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The benefits of digital marketing

Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of
people, but it offers a number of other advantages as well. These are a few of the benefits.

1. A broad geographic reach

When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are provided you haven’t
limited your ad geographically. This makes it easy to grow your business's market reach.

2. Cost efficiency
Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also carries
a lower cost. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television spots, and other traditional marketing
opportunities can be high. They also give you less control over whether your target audiences
will see those messages in the first place.
With digital marketing, you can create just 1 content piece that draws visitors to your blog as
long as it's active. You can create an email marketing campaign that delivers messages to
targeted customer lists on a schedule, and it's easy to change that schedule or the content if you
need to do so.

When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you much more flexibility and customer contact
for your ad spend.

3. Quantifiable results
To know whether your marketing strategy works, you have to find out how many customers it
attracts and how much revenue it ultimately drives. But how do you do that with a non-digital
marketing strategy?

There's always the traditional option of asking each customer, “How did you find us?"

Unfortunately, that doesn't work in all industries. Many companies don't get to have one-on-one
conversations with their customers, and surveys don't always get complete results.

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With digital marketing, results monitoring is simple. Digital marketing software and platforms
automatically track the number of desired conversions that you get, whether that means email
open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases.

4. Easier personalization
Digital marketing allows you to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can't. Data
collected digitally tends to be much more precise and specific.

Imagine you offer financial services and want to send out special offers to people who have
looked at your products. You know you'll get better results if you target the offer to the person's
interest, so you decide to prepare 2 campaigns. One is for young families who have looked at
your life insurance products, and the other is for millennial entrepreneurs who have considered
your retirement plans.

How do you gather all of that data without automated tracking? How many phone records would
you have to go through? How many customer profiles? And how do you know who has or hasn't
read the brochure you sent out?

With digital marketing, all of this information is already at your fingertips.

5. More connection with customers

Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real-time. More importantly, it
lets them communicate with you.
Think about your social media strategy. It's great when your target audience sees your latest post,
but it's even better when they comment on it or share it. It means more buzz surrounding your
product or service, as well as increased visibility every time someone joins the conversation.
Interactivity benefits your customers as well. Their level of engagement increases as they
become active participants in your brand's story. That sense of ownership can create a strong
sense of brand loyalty.

6. Easy and convenient conversions

Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad or content.
With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope for is a phone call

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shortly after someone views your ad. But how often does someone have the time to reach out to a
company while they're doing the dishes, driving down the highway, or updating records at work?

With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the sales funnel
right away. They might not make a purchase immediately, but they’ll stay connected with you
and give you a chance to interact with them further.

7. Digital marketing creates growth

Digital marketing should be one of the primaries focuses of almost any business’s overall
marketing strategy. Never before has there been a way to stay in such consistent contact with
your customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalization that digital data can provide.
The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you'll be able to realize
your company's growth potential.

Objectives of Digital marketing of KIA Motors.

Most digital marketing strategies and campaigns have following objectives:

1. The importance of digital marketing.

2. Awareness of digital marketing.

3. How much digital marketing is helpful towards people?

4. Digital marketing growth in the market.

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Advantages of Digital Marketing

1. Global Reach

Traditional marketing is restricted by geography and creating an international marketing

campaign can be hard, expensive, as well as labour-intensive. However, digital marketing
happens on the Internet, which means that the reach you can achieve with it is immense. Even a
very small local business owner has the ability to reach an international audience with an online
store. This would never be possible with traditional marketing or would cost a whole lot of
money to do so.  This online accessibility has opened many growth opportunities for businesses
to explore. The combination of global reach and visibility is a great opportunity for any business.

2. Local Reach

While global reach is a significant advantage of digital marketing, it also improves local
visibility, which is especially important if your business relies on nearby customers. Local
SEO and locally targeted ads can be beneficial for companies trying to bring more customers to
their doors. Think of the reach you can get to a whole neighbourhood with digital marketing
versus the reach it would take you to print out flyers and distribute them around.

3. Lower Cost

Whether you want to promote your business locally or internationally, digital marketing provides
you with cost-effective solutions. It allows even the smallest companies to compete with larger
companies using highly targeted strategies. Most of these strategies won’t even cost anything at
all to start with (such as SEO, social media, and content marketing). However, not every form of
digital marketing is suitable for every business and some may even have more costs than others.
A business can find appropriate solutions based on its marketing goals.

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4. Easy to Learn

While there are many aspects of digital marketing that you need to learn, it is fairly easy to get
started with. It gets more complex from the nature of the goals and the scale of the campaigns.
However, it is all a matter of finding the right strategy that works for your business.

5. Effective Targeting

Even if you don’t have a clear idea of your target audience, digital marketing enables you to
extract data to see which audiences will work best for you and optimize your campaign around
them. There are many different options of targeting such as through keywords for search engine
optimization SEO pay -per-click, or through demographic information on social media. This
enormous amount of targeting elements at your disposal makes sure that every campaign reaches
the right audience. It also helps you to analyse the changing behaviours of customers and modify
campaigns for those changes. This ability to understand customers’ changing needs quickly is a
sure way of success for any company. 

6. Multiple Strategies

There are different strategies of digital marketing that can be used by different types of
businesses. A B2B business that is interested in gaining international leads may have a totally
different strategy than a B2C local business selling clothes. While some companies can benefit
more easily with content marketing and SEO, others can benefit from conversion-based ad
campaigns. The key is to always analyse the results and develop better tactics and methods with
time. A well-executed digital marketing strategy is one that changes and adapts quickly as the
needs of the business transform.

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7. Multiple Content Types

Another crucial advantage of digital marketing is the different content types available to

showcase your brand online. For a lot of platforms, there is a wide range of content types you
can choose from to keep your brand fresh and build effective online campaigns.

Unlike traditional marketing, you can more easily reproduce one content to fit as many
platforms as you want. 

Here are some of the most common types of content that you can choose from:

 Blogs

 Podcasts

 Emailers

 E-books

 Visual content

 Infographics

 Whitepapers

 Quizzes

 Social media posts

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 Webinars

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8. Increased Engagement

One of the most important advantages of digital marketing is increased engagement. Digital
marketing is designed to be highly engaging by default.  Users can share a blog post, like a
photo, save a video, or engage with your website via a paid ad click. The best part is that all of
these actions can be measured.

This enables you to create even more engaging posts to increase brand awareness or boost sales.
The more you engage online, the more loyal customers you can get. Businesses that use
engaging formats effectively in their online strategies have an easier time converting cold traffic
to loyal customers.

9. Analytics and Optimization

Another important advantage of digital marketing is web analytics which measures the result of
digital marketing campaigns in real-time. This helps to optimize future campaigns and fix any
possible mistakes quickly.

Analysing your digital marketing campaigns also enables you to have the ability to pinpoint
every source of traffic and take total control of your sales funnels.

Disadvantages of digital marketing

Some of the downsides and challenges of digital marketing you should be aware of include:

 Skills and training

You will need to ensure that your staff have the right knowledge and expertise to carry out
digital marketing with success. Tools, platforms and trends change rapidly and it's vital that you
keep up-to-date. 

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 Time consuming

Tasks such as optimising online advertising campaigns and creating marketing content can take
up a lot of time. It's important to measure your results to ensure a return-on-investment. 

 High competition

While you can reach a global audience with digital marketing, you are also up against global
competition. It can be a challenge to stand out against competitors and to grab attention among
the many messages aimed at consumers online. 

 Complaints and feedback

Any negative feedback or criticism of your brand is can be visible to your audience through
social media and review websites. Carrying out effective customer service online can be
challenging. Negative comments or failure to respond effectively can damage your brand
reputation.   

 Security and privacy issues

There are a number of legal considerations around collecting and using customer data for digital
marketing purposes. Take care to comply with the rules regarding privacy and data protection.

 Promotional Strategies Can Be Copied

One of the drawbacks of Digital Marketing is piracy. It hardly takes some minutes to copy your
information from your Promotional Strategies campaigns. Even they can misuse your
promotional strategies. There are many hackers who can track and copy your valuable Digital
marketing strategies. So, you must remain active and aware about your strategies when
marketing online and to be sure that your valuable efforts should remain protective and not being
used by your haters or competitors at the end of the day.

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Digital marketing goals 

1. Sell - Grow sales

Start with your most important transactions that lead to revenue and profit! That's sales, or if you
don't sell online, the leads that your online marketing will deliver which will convert through to
sales or donations if you're a not-for-profit.

Notice how ASOS aim to increase sales through boosting trust in the online purchase process
and offering free delivery.

2. Speak - Get closer to customers through dialogue and participation

Digital channels are not only great sales channels, they excel as communications channels to
engage your audience through the 6 main digital marketing tools. We recommend creating
detailed conversion or budget models which allow you to set goals by channel for reaching and
influencing your audience.

Since digital channels work best when joined with other channels, the goals here should also
include online visits prompted by traditional offline media.

Although ASOS.com is a pureplay, it's customer magazine is important in building the brand and
influencing sales.

3. Serve - Add value

The company website and social customer service are a natural place for customers to go to get
their questions answers or to complain... Paying attention to the quality of service you offer is
also key to support your capability to Sell, Speak, Save and Sizzle.

So, you need customer satisfaction goals to assess how you good you are at customer service and
then improve it further.

ASOS have invested in a choice of customer service channels as this example shows.

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4. Save - Save costs

Less glamorous than the sizzle of building your brand and social media engagement, but you
should show the value you gain through using online cost savings to reduce service costs and
save on traditional media like print and post.

This is most relevant for a multichannel retailer or service company who can set goals for a
number of catalogues downloaded or number of service transactions compared to other channels.

If you're fighting for budget for online channels, the savings you can demonstrate to your finance
director or budget holder will improve help your cause

5. Sizzle - Extending your brand online

Putting the Sizzle into your digital marketing will really help your sales and speak goals, but it's
not too easy to set goals for and then to track. So, what is the "Sizzle in your Sausage"?

Sizzle is about building your brand online. Think about what makes for a positive online brand
experience is for your audience and you.

If the experience you create is effective, the benefits of engaging with your digital presence will
be clear; the interactions within the site and with other channels will be smooth and the visitor
will want to use your online services again, and tell their friends and colleagues about it.

So key sizzle goals are levels of satisfaction and recommendations or advocacy. ASOS have
invested heavily in community platforms and social media to deliver the sizzle

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Impact of digital marketing with reference to KIA Motors

There is no doubt that that the coronavirus dealt a hard blow to most sectors in India, especially
the auto sector. All their major revenue streams i.e., sales and service practically stopped
overnight. This meant that automakers had to strategize how the marketing atmosphere has to be
changed to keep the customers engaged in their products. As it was the best time to be
advertising through social media, many automakers invested heavily into all the major platforms
like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc. KIA Motors India, a subsidiary of KIA Motor
Corporation, a fairly new face to the Indian automotive sector, was having a positive growth
until the lockdowns hit. So, they had to strategize how to keep the potential customers engaged
so that once the industry does pick up, they can capitalize on their investment.

During this corona period, KIA had launched multiple online campaigns to promote their
vehicles. They had recently partnered with Bollywood actor, Tiger Shroff to announce the
anniversary editions of the KIA Seltos. The company also associated with Aakash Gupta, a
stand-up comedian, and influencer, for a unique car unboxing video called Aakash versus Wild.
Shakti Upadhyay, Head of Marketing and PR, Kia Motors India, said that they have seen a
positive impact with the ad campaign.

The biggest challenge that KIA faced as a new player is that they were not able to demonstrate
their product due to the restrictions set during the coronavirus lockdowns. so, they used digital
media to spearhead their marketing efforts and keep the product line in the customer’s mind.
Talking about Gupta, Upadhyay said that they wanted to be relevant in the eyes of the consumer.
The strategy was to create an initial interest in the consumer’s mind and then talk about the
specific features with an interested customer via a digital medium. He said that people were
ready to buy their brand after the ‘unlock’ and that entry-level cars were in demand. Upadhyay
stressed the importance of maintaining good customer relationships so that the customers would
stay engaged with the product and not lose interest.

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The Kia Digi-Connect solution will also provide customers several additional options of 360-
degree virtual experience through video call, screen and video sharing along with sharing of
brochures, pricelist etc. through digital medium during the video conference to further address
their queries.

Additionally, the app allows customers to include multiple family members and friends on the
same call from different geographic locations to collectively understand and discuss with
dealership representatives, similar to a showroom visit experience.

"We believe this initiative will be a game-changer in the purchase journey of the customers as
it offers a safe platform where customers can access all the information about Kia products
and services from the comfort of their homes, as they would when visiting the showroom,"
Kia India Vice President and Head of Marketing & Sales Hardeep Singh Brar noted.

Kia sells models like Seltos, Sonet and Carnival in the country.

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