EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL MARKETING - PART 2

Tools and Channels of Digital Marketing
Marketing has changed quite a bit since the Internet became a new channel to reach prospects and customers. While old school channels like television, radio, magazines, etc. are still important to marketing plans and strategies, inbound marketing is also extremely important. In the years that marketers have taken over the Internet, some vital lessons have been learned. There are different tactics, practices, results, and tons of curve balls in the game of Digital Marketing.

Along with these, there are some amazing marketing tools that can help make reaching your audience, creating online marketing campaigns, engaging with customers, and measuring results, a lot easier.

Here is a list of essential digital marketing tools that are sure to help in your overall marketing goals.Website

A well designed website is one of the most primary tool of digital marketing. Before creating a website, it is important for you to ask yourself these questions:

• Why you need a website?
• What will be your domain name? Who will be your hosting provider?
• What will be your logo look like?
• What kind of content you will cover in your website?

A website is important which can be a brand itself of your company and will add credibility of your organization. It is important for you to keep in mind these points:

There should be a logical roadmap i.e. Your vision should be clear for creating a website. Keep it simple, sober with minimum usage of flash.

Crucial Information

You should cover all important information about your business. Take any XYZ restaurant, for example —  "everyone wants music and in their giant 'about' page," the basic things like the menu, contact information and directions should be integral. 

Correct contact information

How many times do you visit a website and think 'how hard is to contact this company?' Have a number, email, address and a contact form easily accessible and visible,". It makes a difference because there's nothing more frustrating than being unable to get in touch with a needed business or service.

Clear navigation

A map is useless without a legend and a website is useless without clear navigation. Make sure you use easy-to-understand and logical names for the various pages of your site — contact, about, FAQ, etc. Being clever or cryptic will just be a turnoff for users. When developing your navigation strategy, you should consider a call to action. What is it that you want people to do on your site? Place an order? Email for a quote? Become a member? Come to your brick-and-mortar store? Call to speak with a customer service rep? Make your goals clear and obvious.

Security

If you're selling anything online, you need to put some effort into securing your site with an SSL certificate. The SSL will encrypt communications between you and your clients (i.e. a credit card number, Social Security number), which will allay their fears of providing such information, since there's so much identity theft on the web.

Social Media Integration

There are a lot of social platforms out there, and you should promote your presence on them on your website like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare. Integrating these platforms into your website will help boost your SEO, improve your business' footprint on the social web and build your following across numerous social platforms.

A mobile ready platform

Smartphones and tablets are driving an increasing amount of web traffic, and the numbers are only going to grow as mobile devices become cheaper and more mainstream. Andy Chu, director of Bing for Mobile, says 70% of task completion happens within one hour on mobile sites, meaning that people are often browsing on the web with intent — they're looking to do something, buy something or go somewhere. If someone searches for a restaurant on his smartphone, he's likely to eat at that restaurant within the hour, says Chu. So your website better be readable on handheld devices.

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About Us

DGMC is supported by its parent body Rajasthani Sammelan which has been in the field of education for the past 60 years. The educational body supports and facilitates learning activity for approximately 14000 students from primary to post-graduation.

Today’s young media generation is highly equipped with technology that enables them to imagine, visualize and innovate. This is an important reason for the large amount of eminent independent production across various media portals. Youngsters, dedicated to hard work have managed to create wonders with their innovative way of communication.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL MARKETING - PART 1

Introduction to Digital Marketing
“A website must be supported with marketing and advertising if it is to become a true business channel” – Sam Saltis (Founder & CEO @ bwired)

What is the Marketing Process?

• Attraction
• Conversion
• Retention

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is the advancement of your organization or brand using one or more of the various digital channels, such as email, cellular phones and social networks.

The Digital Landscape

• What are your goals?
• What do you want?
• What are your needs?
• What you can afford?
• Who are your consumers?

Students? Adults? Children? Corporates ? It can be anyone of these or maybe all of them.

Why has Digital Marketing become so popular?

The key drivers are:

• Relationship Building
It is one of the most powerful weapons for the long term retention. You can create long term values with effective relationship building. Maintaining regular communication with your clients is aided efficiently through digital channels. For example: Amazon emails suggesting products you may like if you simply subscribe on their website.

• Measurability
Digital Marketing offers substantial opportunities to measure everything, starting from ROI to engagement and behaviour. There are two classifications of measurements: Quantitative and qualitative. 

Quantitative measurements can be easily counted, measured or weighed. Qualitative measurements cannot be easily measured and are more sensory, behavioral, and even emotional. While quantitative items are easy to measure, the qualitative takes more effort and analysis. The key to success is to find a way to correlate the immeasurable with the measurable. 

In digital marketing, there are quantitative measurements (views, clicks, volume i.e. Number of likes and tweets, time) and qualitative (complaints, feedback from surveys). With the help of Google Analytics you can check various number of things for your website. Like how many people clicked your site, how many bounced back, how many visited your site again and so on.

• Cost
Heightened by downturn, usage of digital channels is highly cost effective. 

Let us understand this with an example:
Mr Ajay has been appointed for promoting a National Art Exhibition. So he identified around 4000 people within a 50 miles radius fitting into predefined criteria. He worked with designers to create invites. Then he got those invites printed for all the 4000 people. He hired a person who stuffed those invites in an envelope and also got it posted to those people. It involved transportation as well as other overhead costs. 

After this was done, he noticed that only 65 people responded to his invites out of 4000 and out of this 65, 10 people said they won’t be able to attend the exhibition. 

He asked himself a few questions
- Why so low response?
- How many actually received the invites or how many looked at the invite?
- How many wanted some more information?
- How many actually saw it and read and decided to come? 

He was not happy that after such a hard work and spending so much, only 55 people attended the exhibition. Had he been done the same inviting via Digital Marketing, considering email marketing as an option, he would have saved a lot and response would have been much better. How? Please check below.

Know More About  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL MARKETING - PART 1

About Us

DGMC is supported by its parent body Rajasthani Sammelan which has been in the field of education for the past 60 years. The educational body supports and facilitates learning activity for approximately 14000 students from primary to post-graduation.

Today’s young media generation is highly equipped with technology that enables them to imagine, visualize and innovate. This is an important reason for the large amount of eminent independent production across various media portals. Youngsters, dedicated to hard work have managed to create wonders with their innovative way of communication.

INTRODUCTION TO TYPOGRAPHY

Introduction
Typography plays a big role in graphic design and can be one of the hardest things to get right. My aim here is to introduce some of the basics and the most common areas of typography that will be important in your graphics design work.

Typography plays a big role in graphic design and many designers are very passionate or opinionated about it. For this reason it is a very hot topic in design circles.

Developing your own skills in typography will take time and it can be one of the hardest things to get right. It is best to get a solid understanding of the basics as soon as possible in your education and career. However, it is a complex subject with a massive amount of detail which cannot be explained in just one article. So my aim here is to introduce some of the basics and the most common areas of typography that will be important in your design work.

So what is Typography?
Typography is an art form that has been around for hundreds of years. Words and text are all around us every day in almost everything we do. In every piece of type you see, somebody has considered how the letters, sentences and paragraphs will look in order for it to be read by us, or make us feel a certain way when we look at it. Sometimes it is done well, others not. Often it is us graphic designers who are the ones deciding how it will look, in our brochures, our logos, our websites and so on. The better we are at this, the more effective our designs will be.

Good typography comes from paying attention to tiny details as this can make the difference between graphic design work that is just acceptable or really good. There is more to it than just choosing fonts and making copy look good though – it is also about making things legible and readable (some of most basic functions of good typography) as well as making layouts look good in an aesthetic way.

Typographic basics
The following is an explanation of some common areas of typography. Learn More About Typography in Our Graphics Designing Course

Typeface or font?
Let’s get this one cleared up straight away! Designers are often unsure of the difference between these two, as they are both well used terms for the same thing. Actually, a typeface is a family of fonts (such as Helvetica Regular, Helvetica Italic, Helvetica Bold, Helvetica Black, etc.) but a font is one weight or style within a typeface family (such as Helvetica Regular).

Typeface classifications
There are many different classifications and sub-classification of typefaces, but the most common two types you will hear of are: Serif – these typefaces are the more traditional ones. They are distinguished by a short line or finishing stroke on the end of character strokes and stems (shown in the anatomy diagram below) and; Sans-serif – as the name suggests, these are distinguished by their lack of any Serifs. They only became popular in the nineteenth century and are considered modern as a result.

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Global Viewers!

Media  (TV, video, games, Internet, music, mobile phones) has brought about a substantial change in the experience of youth in our society. These changes leave many parents unprepared for the challenge on how to regulate their child’s behaviour and language with such technologies. These changes at times can have such drastic impacts that the complete behaviour pattern is changed.

The use of abusive language amongst the youth is a byproduct of films and television. The youth is being exposed to so much violence and abusive language in the form of names of films, songs or publicity of dialogues that leave an impact in the mind of the youth. The youth uses abusive language not only as trend but also because it is understood easily and thus leads to group acceptability.

The influence of western culture can be traced from the attitudes and behaviour of young adults. This varies from food habits, fashion statements, acceptance of violent behavior to sexual orientation. The emergence of music channels in the line of MTV has created significant changes in youth‘s language and their music preferences. Soap operas, movies and now days- the reality shows -made the youth increasingly aware of fashion and trends.  At present at least two among the five soap operas in Hindi as well as regional channels deal with the issue of premarital and extra-marital sex. Heavy viewing of foreign television programmes leads to the acceptance of western sexual norms like dating, live-in relationships. The present generation of young people, unlike their predecessors, lives in an increasingly globalizing world that is being transformed by a wide range of technological innovations. Language isn't just about communication; there is a strong cultural, social, political and emotional charge to it. The language of youth has changed, and now, television content must adapt to keep up with the younger generations' new interests and ways of communicating.

Arati Kamath 

www.dgmcms.org.in

Arati Kamath is a core faculty member of DGMC.

Online Communities

Involvement of citizens for better governance is a very innovative idea. BJP has started this drive to form online community to get inputs from the citizens. These inputs will be forwarded to the government for action.

These inputs will be very significant to the government for deciding guidelines, prioritizing issues to take action, but the major concern is how many people will get involved? Especially in Indian scenario, where 60% citizens are in rural areas and don’t have connectivity to internet. The youth will contribute and that too of urban areas.

Will the government get clear picture of the important issues through these online inputs? or is This innovative initiative is too early for Indian scenario?

Shubhangi Dharma

www.dgmcms.org.in 

Subhangi Dharma is a permanent faculty member at DGMC. She is a senior faculty and heads the Mass Communication Department at DGMC.

Net Neutrality!!

Nowadays there is a debate on “Net Neutrality” between Internet Service Providers (ISPs), telecom operators, regulatory bodies and content providers who are also referred to as OTT (Over The Top) players.

Net Neutrality is defined as the principle that all internet traffic has to be treated equally by ISPs, irrespective of content, sender, recipient, device or platform of data consumption.

It also says that ISPs cannot adopt a differential pricing strategy to its subscribers and that all subscribers should be treated equally by the ISPs in terms of quality of services provided by them.   

I hold the view that ISPs should be allowed to adopt differential pricing in a scenario where there is scarcity of spectrum which leads to network congestion. Especially when spectrum is auctioned at very high prices because it is a finite resource. Let’s equate the ISPs to a courier service provider. The courier service provider delivers shipment in an express mode by charging higher to the consumers. Whereas shipments of consumers, who pay regular ordinary charges, are delivered through normal mode. Or for that matter when one books a Tatkal ticket he is charged more to jump the waiting list.

Similarly ISPs should be allowed to adopt differential pricing based on quality and speed of services provided to the consumer.

On the other hand I agree that Net Neutrality has to be enforced to ensure that all internet traffic is treated equally irrespective of content, sender, recipient, device or platform of data consumption, which I believe have no relation with the quality of services provided by the ISPs.

Even the demand of telecom operators for a revenue share from OTT players is unjustified. There is no logic in that. It’s like the ISP asking an e-commerce portal to share its revenue from the sales done to an online shopper!! The shopper is buying products, services or content from a particular website because of the offerings made by that website which has no relation with the quality of service provided by an ISP.

Vishal Desai

Faculty

www.dgmcms.org.in

Vishal Desai is a permanent faculty member at DGMCMS. He is an alumnus of Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai. He has experience of 12 years in marketing, sales, product management and key accounts management at key positions in leading entertainment companies like Zapak Digital Entertainment Ltd. (Reliance Entertainment), Shemaroo Entertainment Ltd. and Milestone Interactive Group. He has managed mega entertainment brands like Slumdog Millionaire, Dhamaal, Chandni Chowk To China, Bal Ganesh, Spiderman, Batman and many more.

Offline to Online - Is it for real or is it a bubble?

The e-commerce space has seen lot of action in the past few weeks. Amazon has committed an investment of USD 2 billion for India. Flipkart got a funding of USD 1 billion. Alibaba’s IPO is the biggest in the world so far. It is in talks with Snapdeal for picking up a stake. Quikr and OLX have got Venture Capital funding as well. All this even when e-commerce accounts for less than 2%  of the total retail market. Out of that 70% comes only from online travel bookings.

Flipkart posted a loss of Rs 281 crores in 2012-13 with sales of Rs 1180 crores .This makes me wonder whether such kind of investments in the online space are viable.

Though e-commerce is growing at 30% CAGR (88% in 2013) against a global rate of 8-10%, is it the right time to pour in such huge amounts in the online space. Is this a pure valuation game in which private investors would eventually exit making a moolah while putting retail investors at risk.

Agreed that Indian e-commerce market, which is worth Rs 78,000 crores, will get a push from increasing penetration of smart phones and internet. But I see two challenges as follows:-

a)      Managing on ground logistics in a country where the population is scattered over hundreds of towns and thousands of districts. This calls for several brick and mortar fulfillment centers across India. Plus the density of population in semi-urban areas is not as high as urban areas, which increases delivery costs.

b)      All the frills that the e-commerce sites offer, like free returns, rock bottom prices, same day delivery, etc eventually lead to erosion of profit margins.

c)       Most of the online sites operate on a market place model. The major disadvantage of this model is that the shipping cost is higher because multi-product orders are fragmented across vendors and shipped separately. And this in turn may lead to customer dissonance because a customer won’t receive his entire order at one time. This may also lead to non-compliance of delivery timelines promised; reasons being cross state barriers and non-availability of stock with the vendor, order cancellation, and loss of consumer trust.

Several investment advisors believe that e-commerce valuations are being driven more by investor demand than by any significant improvement in their financial performance. A day will come when investors will start expecting positive returns on their investments. This is when valuations will become more realistic.

Also currently there is inorganic growth rather than organic growth that is based on business fundamentals, which may not be a right strategy.

Hence the next 2-3 years are very crucial for this space. If these e-commerce portals survive for next 2-3 years, we will have a e-revolution in retailing.

Vishal Desai

Faculty

www.dgmcms.org.in

Vishal Desai is a permanent faculty member at DGMCMS. He is an alumnus of Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai. He has experience of 12 years in marketing, sales, product management and key accounts management at key positions in leading entertainment companies like Zapak Digital Entertainment Ltd. (Reliance Entertainment), Shemaroo Entertainment Ltd. and Milestone Interactive Group. He has managed mega entertainment brands like Slumdog Millionaire, Dhamaal, Chandni Chowk To China, Bal Ganesh, Spiderman, Batman and many more.