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what about social media?

Engage rather than sell

– Tom. H.C. Anderson

I wake up in the morning and check out Instagram and WhatsApp to see if there is anything that I might have missed, any calls or important messages. While scrolling around, I encountered many ads that are directly catered to me every single day. The ads changes once in a while, restaurants, shampoos, and even cat beds when I just gotten myself a new kitten. The thing is, those ads are not annoying, they are interesting and I’m not the only one. There are 200 million Instagram users visiting at least one business profile daily. How does this change the way of marketers and advertisers promote their products around the world? It all started on the change of the web itself, Web 2.0.

The Web 2.0 basically describes the current format of the internet where we users can interact with one another and it is fundamentally about user-generated content, which eventually lead to the birth of Social Media. As the internet is on its user-based interface, it is a highly great tool for marketers to market their products, whether it is goods or services. Social Media is a free tool for marketer to use, less costly invest on a social media page, with higher interaction rate. However, do not be fooled, Social media pages also requires non-financial resources such as time and strategy to achieve the best result.

As the use of Social Media rose, advertisers begin to notice the potential of its market reach, hence in 2000, Lunarstorm was born. Lunarstorm was the first mover regarding the commercial advertisement-financed social networking websites though it closed down after a decade. Now, users are constantly exposed to advertisement every single day whenever they use their Social Media and as more and more people are moving away from traditional media, advertisers are putting more investments to improve Brand Awareness through social media. In 2013, Instagram first introduced advertising in their platform and since then more and more Social Media introduced sponsored posts such as Twitter, Facebook and Reddit where users can pay to boost the activity of said post and improve brand awareness. Nowadays, we are more exposed to advertisement/ sponsored posts more than ever, it is time for us to further think upon not only selling products but also engage with customers to build good brand resonance to improve customer based brand equity (CBBE).

How do you think company should utilise social media further to engage and build relationships with their customers and potential customers?
I personally think that company should focus on a certain target market so they can curate their content better and have better focus on the long run. Regularly updating their social media regarding promotions and information of the company and doing their best to reply to inquiries sent by users. Furthermore, companies should give back to customers by doing giveaways or challenges that may garner bigger following and better brand awareness.

What about you? Leave your thoughts down below and I’d gladly discuss with you.

Warmest Regards,

Sabrina

consuming social media.

I wish I knew how to quit you, Tumblr

– John Green

Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, to Wikipedia. There are many different types of Social Media created with different purposes. With the emerging use of Smartphones in the last decade, social media usage is now at all time high with a projected 3.1 billion social media users in 2021. Admit it, we’re glued to our phones. The constant flow of information, the never-ending new content, or FOMO. Maybe you don’t relate?

Where do you belong in the The Facebook segmentation matrix?

That maybe because as social media consumers, we are divided through our degree of creation and consumption. I personally enjoy consuming and creating content, a devotee one might say. You might be an entertainment chaser, nor connection seeker. Different users will have different types of target marketing strategies.

Companies would target your favourite Instagram influencer to promote their products influencing you to buy their items. One example would be Sugar Bear Hair.

Sugar Bear Hair is a hair supplement company that is famous for its tasty, gummy bear shaped supplement. It first went viral due to Kylie Jenner’s post on Instagram with the hashtag #sugarbearhair. Soon, smaller influencers are endorsed by Sugar Bear Hair to promote their products on social media especially Instagram.

As the new era approaches, there are many types of e-business models in the internet such as brokerage, advertising, subscription, infomediary, merchant, and community model. One of the most popular ones are subscription models

What’s your favourite e-business model?

Two of my favourite subscription models that I entirely enjoy is Netflix and Spotify. These two online businesses have great UI/UX that completely envelopes users to stay inside their services. Netflix ‘Next Episode’ button that loads every time I finish the series ended up making me binge watch more than I would like to admit. In fact, Netflix had become the largest global video streaming traffic, with 26.6% share! What’s even more mind-blowing is that users of Netflix watched a total of 1 billion hours on movies. Weekly.

To be honest, as long as the company’s are set on putting their customer on number 1 and keep on improving their businesses to cater the customer, more will come and would not mind spending a dime for it.

welcome to the dark side

The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

– Tim Berners-Lee, Web Father

Three things we need to change to save it:

Control over personal data
Spread of Misinformation
Lack of Political advertising transparency & understanding

Bots and Fake Accounts

Around 48 million of Twitter’s 15% are automated bots while Facebook had up to 60 million bots. The existence of bots can harm and sway advertising audiences, reshape political debates, defraud businesses and ruin reputation.

Three types of Twitter bots:

Scheduled bots, posts messages on timely basis e.g. The Big Ben Bot
Watcher Bot monitors other Twitter accounts/ websites and tweet when something changes
Amplification bots follow, retweet, and like tweets for clients to boost their engagement.

The Influence Economy

Fortune 500 has been reshaped and created a new status makers i.e. amount of followers/ retweets/ likes. High follower counts becomes a new market of YouTube stars with high subscriber counts where sponsors spend billions of dollars for sponsorship deals for the YouTube stars to promote their products. According to Captiv8, a 100k influencer may earn ~$2,000 for a sponsored tweet while an influencer with 1m follower may earn $20,000.

Privacy Issues

Privacy has no legal definition. It relates to the principles of human dignity, uniqueness, importance of solitude and has historically been described as the ‘right to be left alone’. In Victoria right to privacy is included in the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006.

Many of us checked the Terms & Conditions without reading it and big companies such as Google & Facebook may exploit our data from it.

More than half are somewhat uncomfortable to very uncomfortable due to advertising based on online behaviour. There are ways for us to opt out of online behaviour tracking but many of us do not know how to do so. For you, here are the how to opt out targeted ads through tracking online behavior:

Protect your privacy!

Despite knowing the consequences and giving the companies our personal information, there are many ways companies can misuse your personal information. This is done unknowingly to the data owner and may receive from harmless continuous spam mail to stealing credit card information.

Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (2017) Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey

Our Privacy Protectors

To ensure businesses are ethical in using personal information of their consumers, there are Advertising Standards Bureau such as Australian Government, ADMA, Ad Standards, ACMA, AANA; Public; and the media to overlook it. There are also Code of Practice released by ADMA for businesses to follow in order to be ethical.

However, there are limitations on regulations as not all issues can be regulated. For example, advertising or promotion may be legal but not considered ethical hence advertisers must set the appropriateness of their actions. It’s a grey area mostly.

Your Data

How do they compile our data to understand and target ads/ improve their services?

Geo-tracking – done by uber even when you are not within the application. Does other ride hailing apps do this too? Can this potentially harm consumers?
Internet of Things – Alexa, Smart Watches, Digital Weight Scale
Artificial Intelligence – Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Bixby

Are we safe?
It is a big question but it is important. To what degree do we agree upon giving away our personal data? How are data being regulated so that it does not fall to the wrong hands? This question to me raises even more question as the government are behind on technology than technology companies hence regulation may be outdated and companies can control the people and use leverage on their personal information. Should big tech companies such as Google and Facebook be broken up due to their massive personal information database?

Leave your comments down below on this matter and the question of the day. Stay safe and stay aware. Wash your hands

Warmest Regards,

Sabrina

digital campaigns & imc

Mediocre marketers think in terms of campaigns. Great marketers think in terms of growth frameworks.

– Neil Patel, Marketer

Integrated Marketing Communications is a process for managing customer relationships that drive brand value – integrating all promotional tools so it is all relevant and consistent to the customers (Schultz 2008). Nowadays, marketing has become more complex and more customer focused unlike mass marketing that has a massive target that may not necessarily be interested in the company’s products.

Nowadays, Integrated DM strategies across multiple channels – shift towards omnichannel marketing. Omnichannel is an approach that provides an integrated & seamless experience to the customer. Through using omnichannel the company broadens target market and hence increasing their brand awareness.

Media Selection Factors

Coulter & Starkis (2005). “Development of media selection model using the analytic network process. *International Journal of Advertising*, 24(2). (page 200)

Here are the 7 Ways in Creating a Successful IMC Campaign – Clio

Clear understanding of target audience
Pick channels
Consistent
Clear content that is easily adaptable on different media channels (3Cs: Communications, compelling, consistent)
Ensure messaging is integrated
Marketing team/agencies are in sync
Track campaigns

One successful example for an IMC campaign would be the Old Spice: Smell like a man.

Old Spice: Smell like a man

The writing of the script of the video is consistent to the Old Spice’s core values of being rugged and manly along with having witty remarks that shocks and captured the attention of the internet. The campaign was so successful they wrote a sequel to it

In this campaign, they incorporate IMC through asking consumers to submit questions via Twitter and Facebook to be answered personally by the Old Spice Guy. There were more than 2,000 questions within a 48-hour period and ~200 personalised video was created, setting new benchmarks for consumer engagement. This campaign is so successful that in the first 24 hours these videos were viewed more times on YouTube than President Obama’s 2008 election-night acceptance speech.

Why IMC?
It is target focused to the audience that the company wants to capture. Through that, IMC minimises cost for maximum brand awareness. IMC not only focuses on new customer but also maintain and build long-term relationship with the consumer.

What do you think? Discuss below.

Warmest Regards,

Sabrina

search engine optimisation a.k.a google ads.

If you build it, you may still need Google AdWord

Jennifer Mesenbrik

Does this look familiar? These are the ads that pops up when I search for AC cleaning. This is the gist of what search engine marketing is where companies promote/ optimise their websites in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing to show their webpage first when users search for certain words.

But what is a search engine exactly and what does it do?

Search engine searches for information on the world wide web. It has 3 components, crawler, index, and query processor. It also uses Ranking algorithm such as location & frequency of keywords on page, HTML title tag, content, quality of relevance, number of other sites linking to page and number of click-throughs generated by searches

We ALL know Google is the biggest search engine, but by how much? 92.7%

Marketing in Search Engines (SEM) is basically promoting organisation through Search Engines a.k.a Google to display your result on its first page and making it look clickworthy, either by optimising or paying. Two techniques are SEO or Paid search marketing (Pay-Per Click/ Sponsored listings)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

It is an approach, structured to show a company/ products in search engine’s first page natural results listings through selected keywords or phrases. So how to achieve success in SEO to direct traffic to your webpage? Here’s the 7 steps to SEO Success

Goals – Define it
Keywords
On Page SEO – Speak Google
Content Marketing – Quality content for Google & Humans
Off page SEO – Use Social media, Go local, build links
Metrics – Measure + Learn from results
Learn – Never stop learning!

With many SEO approaches such as Search Engine Submission, Index Inclusion, Key Phrase Analysis, On-Page optimisation, basically the things you do to improve Page Rank, These two are the two different strategies used for SEO.

White Hat

Basically high quality links. Quality content, appropriate titles + meta data, Keyword research, use keywords across all elements of the pages, Social media links

Black Hat

Buy em, no need to care about quality. Black Hat has hidden content, Meta keyword stuffing, Doorway pages/ redirection, and link farming

Nowadays, black hat strategies are dying as it is now mostly filtered by Google and White Hat strategies are promoted as it IS what customers want and it is valuable.

Paid Search Marketing (PPC)

It is a relevant text ad linking to company page as displayed on the SERP’s to usr’s search. With a fee per click. For PPC, highest bid with highest quality score wins

Analytics

We can’t not talk about analytics as it is used to assess + improve e-marketing contribution to a business. Successful analytics require top management support, IT support, data and analytics skill. It is needed to do A/B testing in optimising the website organically. It needs to test call to action buttons, headlines, Marketing mix offers to see which attracts the customer the best.

Social Media

Facebook page Insights and Instagram insights are helpful to businesses as it can show which posts shows the most engagement and Reach is also shown. What matters in social media is Growth & Management metrics, Content Strategy Metrics, and Audience Quality Metrics.

Opinion

SEM is very technical and requires a bit of understanding on online tools and its languages but the concept itself is easy to grasp. As long as you put your content in favour of Google, your link is shown in the first page. If you can’t do that but got money, then just do PPC! Leverage social media to improve your websites/ products to generate more clicks and keep on improving and learning through understanding the analytics and give people what they want.

Which techniques can optimise your SEM the most?
Personally, social media as for many people nowadays their news, chatting and sharing happens within their social media. It will be easier for your potential customers to share your links through it and it will naturally generate growth.

Photo by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels.com

What’s your thought on Google Ads? Bad or good, Let’s discuss it!

Warmest Regards,

Sabrina

the internet of things & big data

“If you think that the internet has changed your life, think again. The Internet of Things is about to change it all over again!“

– Brendan O’brien

The Internet of Things (IoT) is where items utilises the Internet/ systems of the Internet to trigger actions i.e. objects that talk to other objects/ objects that talk to people. IoT became common due to the falling cost of sensors and actuators, Increased ease of connections to these sensors and Improved ability to access and analyse data generated. Due to IoT, everything became smart. It started with the phone, then it spread to TV, AC, lamps, doorbell, pretty much everything nowadays can be controlled using your smartphone through using the IoT.

Forecast end-user spending on IoT solutions worldwide from 2017 to 2025

As IoT creates digital track, it can analyse our behaviours to curate advertisements. IoT is more narrow and specific according to the things used (e.g. lamps etc) so it can help create a precise user profile for marketers.

Wearable technologies such as smart glasses and smartwatches are becoming popular and it contains information needed for the users usually connected through their smartphones. As digital marketers, what can be done to exploit these new yet smaller screens?

Wearables are usually location dependent and it is instant. So, if you’d like to optimise marketing in such small devices, it is more profitable for local marketers promoting local events and restaurants. It must capture the customer’s attention ASAP as customer’s only glances at their wearables unlike their smartphones.

Big Data is literally ALL the world’s data that comes Internally (sensor data), Externally (social media, structured data, and unstructured data available as audio, images, video, and unstructured texts. It is out there, scrambled, waiting to be decoded. It is especially useful for niche markets. For example, one random fact is credit card companies found that people who buy anti-scuff furniture pads are highly likely to make their payments.

How do we use big data to improve digital marketing? Recommendation engines are currently everywhere in online shops and it usually lures you to stay there and makes you buy more than you needed. It’s like the new Supermarket Psychology that traps you in. To what extent is Big Data until it is considered a privacy violation?

Big Brother is Watching You
George Orwell, 1984

Which would you rather utilise Big Data or Internet of Things to optimise your digital marketing? Why?
Big Data can be used to analyse your digital tracks to curate ads to what you want. Nowadays I just think of the things and I want and sometimes it pops up in my Instastory as an ad! So darn scary tho as it ma y violate Privacy Policies without us knowing…

What are your thoughts? This is one of my favorite topics so I’d gladly discuss it with you.

Warmest Regards,

Sabrina

the ads have invaded our phones.

Mobile Marketing is the idea where marketing activity happens on consumer’s personal mobile devices. As more people uses smartphones than laptop and 74% use smartphones to access social media than laptops, mobile marketing has become a vast opportunity due to its accessibility. However it is definitely different than on traditional desktops as the way we interact with our phones differs with desktops as it has a much smaller screen, personal, timely, and location independent.

Trend of Smartphone users Worldwide by Statista

As it can be seen here, it is projected that by 2021, smartphone users will reach 3.8 billion users, emphasising the importance on having a mobile marketing strategy for corporates to market their businesses or to cater their users mobile needs. There are many tools to exploit mobile marketing that is through mobile ads, coupons, website, apps and payments.

Kaplan’s Framework on classification of mobile marketing applications.

As you can see, there are different segments on how ads are targeted to mobile devices. For example, mobile ads are targeted to strangers or groupies as the tactics may be push or pull depending on how they present it e.g. in games that require you to watch an ad for in game currencies would count under groupies as users have an incentive to use it.

According to the paper, there are also 4 types of social media that is dependent on location-sensitivity and time-sensitivity

Quick Timers is not location sensitive but time sensitive. Nowadays, stories, popularised by Snapchat is a 24 hour limited post, has now spread into other social medias such as Instagram, Facebook and now LinkedIn as it shows a more casual, new conversational formats to refresh the business focused world.

FRANCE-US-INTERNET-TECHNOLOGY-SOCIAL NETWORK

Space Timers is location and time sensitive. Usually used when we ask people ‘Where are you?’ and they say ‘I’m on the way!’ and they have really bad track record so you ask them for their live location through WhatsApp to show their location real time.

Slow-timers does not have any time or location dependencies where content can be read, watch, or heard anywhere and anytime like Youtube and TikTok. For example, this video was uploaded in January 2012 and still can be watched until today.

Space-locators are location focused apps such as TripAdvisor, Yelp that reviews restaurants and other destinations

Image result for tripadvisor — Sample Review from TripAdvisor

From this information, I have one question.

Given the opportunity, how can you optimise your favorite brand awareness through mobile marketing?
I personally love KVD Vegan Beauty due to their high quality and pigmented makeup, but the current scandal revolving Kat Von D is harming the company. They should put out Instagram Advertisement regarding CSR that they are doing to rebrand and improve their brand image as they are a makeup company and Instagram us a highly visual platform.

What are your thoughts? Leave them down below!

Warmest Regards,

Sabrina

about this blog.

In the spirit of further understanding digital marketing, this blog is created to expand our knowledge and hopefully pass the course in flying colors.

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raisa – kali kedua Quarantine life made me sing more basically ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫ #song #singers #singersallaroundtheglobe #indonesia #indonesia #indozonemusic #indomusikgram @indovidgram @dscvrm @giftedvoices @singersundiscovered @singingnotes @1000bestmusiccovers #cloudmusikgram #kalikedua #raisa #cover #raisakalikedua

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Hey bosswoman, you doing good?

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This blog is dedicated to learning, understanding, and exploring the means of digital marketing, Through this blog, we shall learn more regarding the technicalities and intricacies of the 21st century means of marketing. We will pursue understanding upon many things such as the usage of social media on marketing, viral marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, to the Ethical and Legal Issues on Digital Marketing.

The comment section is open for discussion with other commenters or me, Sabrina, and hopefully we can enlighten each other on our journey to understanding the depth of Digital Marketing. As a Student of RMIT, I hope that we, assuming that you are also an RMIT Student taking the same Digital Marketing course, will soar high and achieve the best possible outcome, internally and externally.

Warmest Regards,

Sabrina Oktavelia Tanumiharja