The Milkman Digital Marketing Strategy - Essay Example

The Milkman Digital Marketing Strategy Name Institution Professor Course Date Background The milkman coffee shop is located at the bottom of the Cockburn Street in the old town and it is near the Waverley station. It is a small but very cozy coffee shop that specializes in offering their customers with well-made Dear green coffee coupled with excellent and friendly service. The coffee shop was renovated form a previous sweet shop, the interior is composed of stone, which are softened by a charming trimming which makes the customers feel as if they are stepping back in time. The decor seems to be a lovely one, welcoming and it also keeps up with the historical old town. Some seats are located near the windows giving one a view of Cockburn Street while the internal seats are well suited for customers who are in need of a more intimate setting. A major marketing strategy constraint relates to the budget that is, the amount of money that is likely to be set aside will be minimal since the coffee shop is not very big and it has very few people working there. It may seem unrealistic to spend a considerable amount of revenue on a marketing strategy only. Another constraint relates to the audience, with the small amount of budget set aside for the marketing strategy, it is more likely that they will not reach the targeted audience in the most effective manner. Lastly, the other constrain relates to the goals with the limited budget and their target audience, they may not achieve their goals of reaching to a greater number of audiences and thus though their sales may increase, they may fail to reach the target. Digital marketing platforms It would be effective for managers at The Milkman coffee shop to evaluate the various digital platforms in a careful manner since it is actually impossible for them to make use of all the available platforms and make effective use of them (Carter et al. 2007). In these regard, a major platform that “The Milkman” needs to focus on is email marketing and through it, the coffee shop will be marketing their commercial messages to a wide group of people by use of the emails. This means that, each and every email that is sent to the current or potential customers of the coffee shop will be considered as email marketing. Through the use of this kind of platform, the coffee shop will build trust, loyalty as well as brand awareness and also enhance the relationship of the coffee shop with its previous or current customers, encourage the loyalty of their customers as well as repeat business. When used effectively, the coffee shop will manage to acquire new customers. Another digital marketing platform that the coffee shop should make use of is display advertising which entails advertising on various websites. This will include items such as images, texts, audio, and video and flash (Saravanakumar & Suganthalakshmi 2012). Through the use of these kind of platform the coffee shop will communicate in an effective manner and deliver the general advertisements as well as their brand messages to all the visitors who will visit the site since they will be compelled to see and view the ads and some of them may also go ahead and share the pages with their close friends and family members (INBAM Business Horizons 2015). This will be beneficial to the coffee shop since it may eventually lead to a greater number of customers in the long run. Social media strategy By making use of social media as a tool for marketing small businesses such as the coffee shop can have a greater reach to customers (Neti 2011). Since the advent of the internet, a great number of customers interacts with their brands through the use of the various social media sites thus the need of a sturdy social media strategy in place and presence on the internet so as to tap the interest of clients. In regard to these, the coffee shop needs to make good use of facebook and this is greatly attributed to the large number of internet users in the globe and mostly, a total of about 1 billion people have access to facebook. This shows that by making use of facebook as the social media tool, the coffee shop is likely to reach their target audience more easily and within a shorter period of time. The facebook page created ought to be discoverable, timely, connected and insightful. The reason for choosing facebook is that, it is usually more detailed when compared to other social media sites, for example, twitter. By having a facebook page, the coffee shop will provide photos, videos and longer descriptions as well as testimonials since the followers will have an opportunity to comment on their page (Saravanakumar & Suganthalakshmi 2012). Through the use of facebook, it can easily link back to the coffee shop’s twitter page. Facebook is seen as the most effective social media site and most widely used since, as of May 2015, about 93% marketers were making use of facebook to promote their items and businesses (Constantinides, Lorenzo & Gómez 2008). Facebook connects very well with the choices of platforms chosen that is email marketing and display advertising in that, display advertising can take place in the facebook pages and in regard to email marketing, they can make use of the emails to advertise and make their coffee shop and products being offered known to a greater number of people. The social media strategy sets out to attain the following objectives; Increase exposure of the coffee shops and its foods and services to a wide range of people. Garner marketplace insight Develop a list of loyal customers Improve sales of the company by about 50% The objectives stated above will be achieved through the use of the social media marketing strategy and it will entail advertising on the company’s facebook page and through the use of the platform mentioned above that is, through the use of display advertising and email marketing. All these are aimed at ensuring that, they reach a wide range of target audience who may be the already existing and new customers for the coffee shop (Lenskold 2003). Search engine strategy In regard to the search engine strategy, a major way that the milkman can use to build a successful business is through the use of search engine optimization (Kietzmann & Canhoto 2013). Search engine optimization is termed as the process of affecting a web page or websites visibility in a search engine unpaid results. A major reason as to why bigger emphasis as well as investment on search engines is not warranted is based on the fact that, the search engine algorithms seem to be adopting in a quick manner. For a great number of years, the search engines mainly made use of results algorithms that had great reliance on numeric ranking (Viardot 2004). With time, these search engines have really changed from simple numeric factors and they are now focusing more on the macro goals of making available results that the searchers want to view or see. For instance, some of the search engines have been reported to have updated their algorithm about 20 times in two years and this makes it unrealistic for a business such as “The Milkman” to try and keep up with the adjustments in search algorithm. Another reason why investment in search should be limited is based on the notion that not all traffic is created in an equal way. Search engine is not a very targeted approach, this is related to the fact that viewers of the search engines seems to be adapting quickly as the algorithms, this means that increased search traffic does not always lead to increases level of conversions (O'Brian & Montazemia 2004). This strategy has some aspects that are critical to it to ensure and enhance its success. In relation to the content, it should be well written and of high quality and at the same time HTML clues should be used to help the users of the search engines to determine the relevancy. Analytics and metrics of Digital Media Strategy A major difference that exists between losers and the winners in regard to web analytics is that while winners tend to have a well defined and structured as well as measurement model, losers fail to do these. The main cause of failure of a great number of the digital marketing strategies does not lie in the lack of creativity, or even in the people who are involved, but it lies greatly on the lack of structured thinking in relation to what the main purpose of the marketing strategy and also in the lack of objective measures to determine its success or failure. Thus the first and most essential step is to identify the business objectives, identification of the goals for each of the objectives, coming up with a list of key performance indicators, setting the parameter for success frankly and the identification of segments of behavior, people as well as outcomes to be analyzed to understand the reason behind the success or failure (Ryan & Jones 2009). In relation to metrics, the following metrics needs to be used that they include the audience statistics, engagement levels, top performing content, traffic sources as well as conversion rates. In relation to the audience statistics, companies may have the most best looking, user friendly site in respect to other in their industry, but it is of no good if the right kind of people are not visiting, and the orders as well as enquiries are not coming in. Thus, it would be best to look and notice any new and unique visitors’ very month, demographics as well as the new visitors versus the returning visitors (Trattner & Kappe 2013). The other metric to be used is the engagement levels; this means that the content in the digital marketing strategy needs to be engaging with the site visitors. This should be applied for any blog and news sections for the company website, in addition to service and product pages. In relation to these, “The milkman” needs to focus more on the time that the users spend on the pages as well as the number of social shares. This should be made effective by use of other tools to assist in understanding when and where the content is shared. The other metric is the traffic sources. Most business are usually curios of where the near visitor heard them from, being able to segment ones data based on the sources leads to a great number of valuable insights, for instance, the effects that an off page SEO tactic can have on the number of visitors in a website. The other metric relates to top performing content. Content marketing requires time commitment so business such as “The milkman” need to regularly check that the content they are producing and offering is performing well (Rust et al. 2004). The volume of visitors also needs to be measured to individuals posts within some duration of time to ascertain which topics offers the company with a short-term traffic and which one of them offers a slow turn of visitors over the weeks, months or years. The last metric is the conversion rates. The eventual measure of a digital marketing return on one’s investment relates to the fact that the website is playing an essential role in achieving the set objectives. Thus, one needs to make use of tools such as Google analytic to set ones goals based on what one expects the site users to do for instances, making a purchase, making an order or referring the site to others just to mention a few of them. By making use of the analytics and metrics, the coffee shop is able to ascertain if the set objectives were achieved or not and the reasons behind the success and failure of the strategy (Ambler 2003). By doing so, they are able to have an idea of what needs to be improved in the future to attain better results. References Ambler, T 2003, Marketing and the Bottom Line: The Marketing Metrics to Pump up Cash Flow, FT Prentice Hall, New Jersey. Carter, B, Brooks, G, Catalano, F & Smith, B 2007, Digital Marketing for Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey. Constantinides, E, Lorenzo, C & Gómez M 2008, ‘Social Media: A New Frontier for Retailers?’ European Retail Research vol. 22, pp. 1–28. INBAM Business Horizons, 2015, ‘Digital Marketing for Identifying Customers' Preferences -- A Solution for SMEs in Obtaining Competitive Advantages’, International Journal of Economic Practices & Theories. Kietzmann, J & Canhoto, A 2013, ‘Bittersweet! Understanding and Managing Electronic Word of Mouth’, Journal of Public Affairs vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 146–159. Lenskold, J 2003, Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer, and Corporate Profitability, McGraw-Hill, New York. Neti, S 2011, ‘Social Media and Its Role in Marketing’, International Journal of Enterprise Computing and Business Systems vol. 1, no. 2. O'Brian, J & Montazemia, A 2004, Management Information Systems, McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd, Canada. Rust, R, Ambler, G, Carpenter, V & Srivastava, R 2004, ‘Measuring Marketing Productivity: Current Knowledge and Future Directions’, Journal of Marketing vol. 68, pp. 76-89. Ryan, D & Jones, C 2009, Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation, Kogan Page, London. Saravanakumar, M & Suganthalakshmi, T 2012, ‘Social Media Marketing’, Life Science Journal vol. 9, no. 4. Trattner, C & Kappe, F 2013, ‘Social Stream Marketing on Facebook: A Case Study’, International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing vol. 2, no. 1/2. Viardot, E 2004, Successful Marketing Strategy for High-tech Firms, Artech House, Boston. Read More