A PROJECT REPORT ON

DIGITAL MARKETING TECHNIQUES

By

Prashanth Bhushan- 2011A3PS171P

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Study Oriented Project

under Dr. Sangeeta Sharma, Associate Professor, BITS-Pilani

BIRLA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE, PILANI

April, 2015

Table of Contents

Digital Marketing......................................................................................................3

Our Product: Internet Business Model- Content Provider.......................................4

Brand Awareness is Essential...................................................................................5

How to market the product?....................................................................................6

Social Media: Facebook, Twitter...........................................................................6

E-Mail Marketing..................................................................................................6

Search Engine Optimization using Google AdWords platform..............................7

Implementation of the Techniques: Introduction to AdWords................................8

Types of Advertising Campaigns..............................................................................9

Reaching the Target Audience...............................................................................10

Generating a keyword list......................................................................................11

Important Metrics Related to the Keywords..........................................................13

Key Performance Indicators...................................................................................15

Best practices for creating effective advertisements using AdWords....................16

Facebook Marketing..............................................................................................17

Business Goals for using Facebook.....................................................................17

Setting and Promoting a Business Page on Facebook.........................................18

Ways to promote a page on Facebook...............................................................18

How to advertise on Facebook...........................................................................19

Ad Targeting options...........................................................................................20

Conclusions............................................................................................................21

References.............................................................................................................22

Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing (also Online Marketing, Internet Marketing or Web Marketing) is a collective name for marketing activity carried out online, as opposed to traditional marketing through print media, live promotions, TV and radio advertisement.1

The rapid growth of Digital Marketing Industry is a direct consequence of the global phenomenon that is the Internet, and effectiveness of Digital Marketing channels in generating revenue and awareness. Compared to traditional methods of advertising, Digital Marketing offers rather realistic costs (particularly important for small- and medium-size businesses and start-ups), accurate targeting and excellent reporting.

In simplistic terms, digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media. Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it involves the use of channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t – typically in real time.

With the number of internet users in developing countries like India growing at a rapid pace, this medium is turning out to be one of the most important marketing mediums for companies. Tools like Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter and emails are fast becoming advertising channels to reach out to a wider and more specific target audience on the internet.

Our Product: Internet Business Model- Content Provider

Afuah and Tucci (2001) define an Internet business model as “the method by which a firm plans to make money long term using the Internet”. Research into appropriate eBusiness models has grown significantly over the past few years, with authors taking both theoretically and empirically-based approaches to the development of definitions and taxonomies of business models suitable for the New Economy.

Content providers, are: “those firms that provide users access to content of interest including news, information and entertainment, leisure activities, and other material”. Overall we can break the value chain as it currently exists in the online content market into four component parts: the creation of content, the adding of value to content, the distribution of content, and its consumption.2

The online travel portal which we have taken into consideration falls under the category of an online content provider as it provides its users with information pertaining to hiking locations across the country. Apart from providing content in the form of blogs, pictures and videos, it will provide users with the option of booking treks and hikes with trained professionals on the website (B2C commerce). The value chain of our portal can be graphically shown as:

Brand Awareness is Essential

Our aim is to increase the brand awareness among people for our product. We are assuming here that an eventual increase in brand awareness of our product will lead to an increase in bookings on our website. Also, with an increased user base, we will be able to generate more revenues through advertisements.

Getting new customers to try and stick with a brand is an essential part of any brand's strategy. Customer loyalty drives revenue, and brand recognition is a key way to increase customer loyalty. By getting a brand's name out there and accentuating the positive aspects, internet marketing can improve consumer sentiment and increase profits.

Increasing brand awareness among young consumers is necessary for businesses looking to grow in the future. Brands that don't do this may find themselves obsolete as their current customers get older.

Brand awareness is also an important part of any SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. When consumers search for things using brand names in the keyword, the search results will greatly favor the site of the brand in the query. A search for "shoes" and a search for "Nike shoes" will bring up radically different results. It may simply be the low-hanging fruit, but branded keywords generally have a much higher conversion rate than non-branded keywords. Even with business to business marketing, the conversion rate for branded search is higher than the rates for direct traffic to the site and non-branded keyword traffic, according to the 2013 B2B Optify study. This is why small business owners should make brand awareness a key part of their overall marketing strategy. A local lawyer will get far more web traffic from search if people in the community know the lawyer's name and use it in the search than from people just searching for local lawyers.

How to market the product?

The various channels of distribution for the marketing of our product are listed below. This paper has included only the channels that are most relevant to our website.

Social Media: Facebook, Twitter

Social Networking websites allow individuals to interact with one another and build relationships. When companies join these social channels, consumers can interact with them directly. That interaction can be more personal to users than traditional methods of outbound marketing & advertising.7

Social networking sites act as word of mouth. Social networking sites and blogs allow followers to “retweet” or “repost” comments made by others about a product being promoted. By repeating the message, the user's connections are able to see the message, therefore reaching more people. Because the information about the product is being put out there and is getting repeated, more traffic is brought to the product/company.

Through social networking sites, companies can interact with individual followers. This personal interaction can instill a feeling of loyalty into followers and potential customers. Also, by choosing whom to follow on these sites, products can reach a very narrow target audience.

E-Mail Marketing

Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and

is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be done to either sold lists or a current customer database.7

Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

Search Engine Optimization using Google AdWords platform

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results - often referred to as "natural," "organic," or "earned" results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.6

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.7

SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be more effective like paid advertising through pay per click (PPC) campaigns, depending on the site operator's goals. A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site's conversion rate.2

Implementation of the Techniques: Introduction to AdWords

AdWords is an online advertising platform created by Google that matches key search terms with paid-for ads. Basically, AdWords is a program that allows you to buy text-based ads for certain search phrases that people use when performing a search.3

Every time someone performs a search, the text on your website comes into play. Google’s job is to connect those who are performing a search with the content that they want. This means that if your website uses certain terms that Google’s visitors are looking for, Google will become more likely to match that visitor with your website. This is why a big part of good SEO is built on the use of important keywords and phrases.

Because the Google AdWords program is built on keywords, Google has tons of data on which keywords are the most popular for each industry and website.

Google AdWords provides a keyword tool once we login to AdWords. There are both free and paid versions of this tool. This is the tool that we will use to find important keywords surrounding your blog or business.

It is one of the most powerful keyword optimizer tools available on the web because of the tons of data that is available with Google.3

Types of Advertising Campaigns

When you start setting up your AdWords campaign, you'll need to choose a campaign type and a campaign sub-type. The campaign type determines things like where your ads can show to customers on Google’s advertising networks, and what format they can be in, like text or video. The campaign sub-type determines how many settings and options are available to use for your campaign, or you can choose a specific campaign sub-type if you want to accomplish a specific goal with your ads, like driving more installs of your mobile app. 8

Types of Campaigns

o Search Network onlyo Display Network onlyo Search Network with Display select

If you create a Search Network only campaign, your ads can appear throughout sites on the Google Search Network. This campaign type works by linking your AdWords keywords to the words or phrases someone uses to search on Google, then showing relevant text ads on search results pages.

This campaign type is useful for advertisers who want to connect with customers right when they’re searching their products or services. For example, a small home repair business that earns most of its revenue from plumbing repairs might create a “Search Network only” campaign to target its ads to high-potential customers searching for plumbing services.

With a Display Network only campaign, your ads can show throughout the Google Display Network. This campaign type works by matching your ads — including text, image, rich media, and video ads — to websites and other placements, like YouTube and mobile apps, with content related to your targeting.

What kind of business might create a “Display Network only” campaign? Say you're a jewelry store wanting to increase awareness of the engagement rings you sell. With a “Display Network only” campaign, you can reach people visiting wedding-related sites, such as blogs about wedding planning.

A Search Network with Display Select campaign allows you to show your ads — including text, image, rich media, and video ads — with search results on the Google Search Network and relevant placements within the Display Network. With this option, your budget is shared across both networks.

Say you're a newer advertiser wanting to promote your car repair service. You might create a “Search Network with Display Select” campaign to reach people in more places who are seeking your services, whether they're looking on Google Search or checking out a car service review site.

Reaching the Target Audience

Audiences: Depending on your advertising goals, you can choose the audience that best matches your customers. To drive brand awareness, use affinity audiences to reach TV-like audiences on a broad scale. To reach as many potential customers as possible with an affinity for a specific product area, you might try adding custom affinity audiences. To reach specific audiences actively shopping for a product or service, use in-market audiences instead.

Interest categories: This allows you to reach people interested in products and services similar to those your business offers. When you target interest categories, you can show your ad to people who demonstrated specific interests, regardless of whether your ad correlates with the particular topic of the page or app they're currently on. You’ll find interest category targeting alongside remarketing in your account.

Remarketing: This option can help you reach people who have previously

visited your website while they visit other sites on the Display Network. You’ll find remarketing alongside interest categories in your account.

Demographics: This option allows you to reach people who are likely to be within the age, gender, and parental status demographic group that you choose.

Generating a keyword list

Building a good keyword list can help you show your ads to the customers you want. Keeping a few things in mind, we can generate a keyword list that will best optimize our ad visibility.

o Think like a customer: Think about the main categories of your business and the terms or phrases that would fit into each of those categories. Include terms or phrases that your customers would use to describe your product or service.

o Align your keywords with your goals: If you want to get the most bang for your buck, you might want to select specific keywords that directly relate to your ad's theme. Or, if you'd prefer to reach as many people as possible, choose more general keywords. No matter how general or specific your keywords are, they should always be as relevant to your ads and website as possible. Also, keywords of two or three words (a phrase) tend to work most effectively.

o Align your keywords with your goals: If you want to get the most bang for your buck, you might want to select specific keywords that directly relate to your ad's theme. Or, if you'd prefer to reach as many people as

possible, choose more general keywords. No matter how general or specific your keywords are, they should always be as relevant to your ads and website as possible. Also, keywords of two or three words (a phrase) tend to work most effectively.

o Use the Keyword Planner or Display Planner: For your Search Network campaigns, you can use the Keyword Planner to get keyword ideas and related data, like the average number of times people searched for certain terms. For your Display Network campaigns, you can use the Display Planner to get keyword ideas and related data, like how many times ads could show for those ideas based on a week-long or month-long period.

o Use keyword match types: Keyword match types are settings for each of your keywords that give you greater control over who sees your ad. For example, you might use the phrase match type to show your ad for searches that include the exact phrase with additional words before or after. Or, you might use the exact match type to show your ad for searches that include the exact phrase without any additional words. Both the phrase match and exact match types expand to show your ad for close variations — including misspellings, singular and plural forms, and acronyms — of your keywords.

Important Metrics Related to the Keywords

It is important to remember that not all keywords are created equal. Some are better than others. In the listing of each keyword, we will see three key metrics that can help us determine the value of each word.3

1. Competition – This metric will give us an idea of how popular a keyword term is. Now, this doesn’t mean how many people search for it, it really means how many people purchase the keyword. Remember, most people use this tool for buying ads, not writing blog posts. For the blogger, this metric isn’t the most important, but there is something that we can learn. Keywords with a ranking of “High” competition could potentially be harder for us to compete against because they are more sought out by buyers.5

2. Global Monthly Searches – This will tell you how many times the keyword or phrase has been searched for, globally, in the last month. Now we’re getting somewhere. The more popular the term, the larger the number. However, bigger isn’t always better here. In the chart above, the terms with the lowest numbers might actually be the easiest to target. Remember, the more popular the term, the more competition you will have.

3. Local Monthly Searches – The third data column will tell you how many people are searching for a suggested keyword on a more local level. This is generally by country. Similar to Global Monthly Searches, this metric will give you a more local flavor on search terms.4

In addition to keyword research, AdWords is a valuable tool for getting a better CTR (Click Thru Rate) with your existing rankings. You might rank well for a given keyword, get a lot of traffic, and still be unable to monetize this traffic because your CTR is low. The reasons for this might be various but inadequate title and description could be a very possible reason.

AdWords can also help you get better CTR with your existing rankings. For instance, if you run ad AdWords campaign and you are satisfied with the conversion/performance, you might want to keep changing your ad title and description until you feel you have reached the maximum CTR for your keywords.

Sure, it might take us a couple of tries till we find the winning combination of a title and a description and it might even lower CTR in the process but once we find this magical combination of a title and description, just copy them as the title and description for the page in order to maximize our organic search CTR as well.

Key Performance Indicators

1. Clickthrough rate (CTR): A ratio showing how often people who see your ad end up clicking it. CTR can be used to gauge how well your keywords and ads are performing. 6

CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown expressed as a percentage (clicks ÷ impressions = CTR). For example, if you had 5 clicks and 1000 impressions, then your CTR would be 0.5%

2. Actual Cost per Click (CPC): Your actual cost-per-click (actual CPC) is the final amount you're charged for a click. You're often charged less -- sometimes much less -- than your maximum cost-per-click (max. CPC) bid, which is the most you'll typically be charged for a click. Actual CPC is often less than max. CPC because with the AdWords auction, the most you'll pay is what's minimally required to hold your ad position and any ad formats shown with your ad, such as site links. 3

3. Maximum CPC bid: A bid that you set to determine the highest amount that you're willing to pay for a click on your ad.

4. Average Position: A statistic that describes how your ad typically ranks against other ads. This rank determines in which order ads appear on the page. The highest position is "1," and there is no "bottom" position. An average position of 1-8 is generally on the first page of search results, 9-16 is generally on the second page, and so on. Average positions can be between two whole numbers. For example, an average position of "1.7" means that your ad usually appears in positions 1 or 2.

Using the Google AdWords tools, the values of the some of the important parameters mentioned here can be found out. That will help in allocating and generating effective digital marketing strategies for our website.

Best practices for creating effective advertisements using AdWords

Connect your ads and keywords

Include at least one of your keywords in your ad text to show potential customers that it's relevant to what they're looking for. You want make sure that your ad text is readable, however, so don't include too many keywords in your ad.

Highlight what makes you unique

Include the products, services, or offers that make your competitive, like discounts, promotions or exclusives. For example, if you offer free shipping, tell your customers that. You'll also want to consider including your brand or company name so your customers see a name they recognize.

Include a call-to-action

Whether you're selling a something or offering a service, tell people how they can buy your products or contact you. Call to actions like purchase, call today, order, or get a quote make clear what the next steps are.

Match your ad to your landing page

Look at the page that you're linking to from your ad (the landing page), and make sure that the promotions or products in your ad are included in there. You can also look for call-to-action phrases on your landing page.

Tailor your ads for mobile

People looking at mobile ads are more likely to want to know where you're located, or to call you. Create mobile-preferred ads with mobile call-to-actions like "Find nearby stores" and send people to mobile optimized landing pages.

Facebook Marketing

Facebook is a social network for connecting people with those around them – friends, family, coworkers, or simply others with similar interests. Facebook started in 2004 as a closed community for college students (requiring users to sign up with a valid university email address) but has since expanded beyond that to schools, corporations, and any user across the world. Facebook allows users to connect and share information in a variety of ways.

Facebook currently has over 750 million active users, and that number continues to grow steadily. According to Compete.com, it is currently the second most popular website in the world (behind Google) in terms of unique visitors, and according to ComScore, the most popular social network overall.9

Business Goals for using Facebook

o Get found by people who are searching for your products or services.o Connect and engage with current and potential customers.o Create a community around your business.o Promote other content you create, including webinars, blog articles, or

other resources.o Generate leads for your business.

Setting and Promoting a Business Page on Facebook

A Page is similar to a Profile except that it is, by default, public, and users can Like and become a “fan” of your Page without first requiring approval from the Page’s administrators. Creating a Page is completely free but will require your time to build and maintain.

As the administrator, by default, your name and profile will not show up anywhere on your Page. You are the behind-the-scenes manager. When you post new information or respond to a discussion thread, it will appear to be posted by your company rather than you personally, even though you’ll be logged in as yourself (this can be changed in your Page’s settings). You can designate multiple administrators as well to help with the maintenance of your Page. 9

Ways to promote a page on Facebook

o Create an engaging Page Use applications like the discussion board and YouTube video box to add more interesting and engaging content to your Page. Give users a reason to become a fan of your Page and engage with you. More advanced Facebook users can add custom pages to their Page using iframes.

o Leverage the viral nature of Facebook – the News FeedThe added benefit of creating an engaging page is that every time a fan engages with your page – from becoming a fan to posting a comment to attending an event – that activity is published to their “News Feed” which can be seen by their friends on Facebook.

o Draw on your existing networkYou most likely already have email subscribers and blog readers – so make sure they know they can now become a fan of your business on Facebook. Consider emailing your opting mailing list, including a link to your page in

your email signature, blogging about your Facebook page, and posting a link or badge to your Page on your website or blog.

o Make your Page publicly searchableBy default, your Page will be public so it can get indexed by search engines and give you the opportunity to drive organic search traffic to your Page. If you don’t notice your Page showing up in searches, make sure you have set it to be publicly indexed and searchable. Go to “Edit Page,” click “Manage Permissions” and make sure “Page Visibility” box is un-checked. This will make it publicly visible.

o Use Facebook Ads for an extra pushFacebook ads allow you to advertise a website or other properties on Facebook, including Pages, Groups, and Events. If you’re familiar with Google AdWords, the system for building and running ads on Facebook is very similar. A later section will dive deeper into how to set up and optimize Facebook Ads.

How to advertise on Facebook

Facebook Ads allow you to promote your business, get more fans for your business Page, and drive more leads for your sales team. Facebook Ads allow you to advertise a website or content you manage on Facebook (like a Group, Page, or Event). The ad creation and management tools are very similar to the Google AdWords interface.

For Facebook Ads

o Choose your destination tab. This is the landing page that your ad will point to.

o Choose your ad’s title. Choose an eye-catching, concise title

o Create ad copy for the body. Create compelling copy to promote your ad.o Choose an image. Images are highly recommended, as they increase your

ad’s click-through rate.

Ad Targeting options

The second step is to choose your targeting options. Your ad is more likely to perform better and continue running successfully if it’s being displayed to users who are most likely to be interested in your product or service. Select the country you would like your ad to be displayed in. You can choose up to 25 countries, but note that if you target more than one country, you won't be able to refine your targeting to specific cities.

Conclusions

The importance of SEO tools in marketing can be seen clearly. All the content on the website has to be tailor made in order to maximize its visibility. The table that was made for the research gave an idea of the current trends among the population in adventure tourism searches. Keeping these in mind, we will have to come up with advertisements on all channels of distribution in order to maximize visibility.

As ours is a travel portal, we can further refine our SEO tools to get region specific searches. We can show region specific tourist locations to people. We can also use the search volume option provided in AdWords and filter it according to region. We can locate regions where people are more interested in adventure tourism, trekking etc. and accordingly launch our products in those regions.

Apart from SEO techniques, social media marketing is also a very important channel to improve online presence. Relevant advertising on Facebook and Twitter can help boost hits on the website. There are paid advertising tools (which help in filtering our relevant target audience and show targeted advertisements to them) that such sites provide which can be brought and used for marketing of our portal.

Apart from the e-marketing aspects of the website, there are a few more basic functionalities that one must keep in mind for better performance. The aim is not only to attract customers, but also keeping them on the website. 7

STRATEGY ASPECTS TO BE ANALYSEDAttract the client Domain

Design Positioning(SEO)

Marketing Product, Product Strategy Price Strategy Promotion, Communication Strategy Distribution Strategy

Retain users on the website Structure Navigability

Interactivity

References

1. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/digital-marketing.html 2. http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/ 3. https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2999770?hl=en 4. https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner 5. http://neumann.hec.ca/pages/jacques.nantel/notes/Marketing/textes/marketing3.pdf 6. http://www.tmu.ac.in/pdf/viewpointjantojune2012/final_inner_11.pdf 7. http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/sectors/tourism/tourism-business-portal/documents/

toolstutorials/commercialization/online_distribution_channels.pdf8. https://storage.googleapis.com/support-kms-prod/

D1B3826EDB9ED675F9CFB5E455579424C1FF9. http://www.tourismtechnology.com/tourismtechnology/cms/documents/files/

Facebook%20for%20Business.pdf