Marketing Strategy In The Digital Age: Applying Kotler's Strategies To Digital Marketing. Milton Kotler
is the digital participation cycle different from the sales funnel?
• The customer development part of the sales funnel is a single-line, downward, linear and fixed part. The digital involvement cycle contains a number of interactions. In the commitment to the purchase stage before and after, there are multiple contact points that join together to form a cycle of the process.
• The customer behavior of the sales funnel ends at the promised purchase stage and the digital participation cycle is followed by the establishment of loyalty, proactive recommendation and support for the advocacy phase after the commitment to purchase.
• Potential customers of the sales funnel can only get to know the product from the initial step in the traditional process; customers of the digital participation cycle may enter the cycle at any stage.
• The key to the marketing the sales funnel lies in the initial stage of knowing the product, working hard to lead customers into the sales funnel; the key to the digital engagement cycle is to focus on the customer at every stage of the cycle.
• The communication strategy of the sales funnel is to focus on sales; the digital participation cycle needs to reach out to and attract potential customers through content strategy and tactics and provide them value, thus building the loyalty.
• The target of the sales funnel is driven by short-term goals and orders; the goals of the digital engagement cycle are driven by long-term goals and customer values.
1.3 Digital Marketing Layout of Leading Enterprises
Quite a few enterprises get involved in the wave of digital transition. Arthur D. Little published Research Report of Digital Transition in 2015, and based on the results of this research report, digital-oriented and digital-centric enterprises take up less than 3% of the overall sales. Digital planning varies among different enterprises. Some focus on structural transition, on the shift from bureaucracy to Amoebic Organization featuring “big platform, small fighting units”; some emphasize reform of internal and external procedure. We have seen the proposals of DT transition procedures submitted by many consulting firms. Here, we focus on marketing and strategic transition. According to the standard of “industrial products — consumption goods”, “traditional enterprises — IT companies”, we classify the samples into four categories and select one leading enterprise from each type to introduce their digital marketing planning strategies (Figure 1.9).
Figure 1.9. Digital layout of leaders.
Source: KMG Research.
SEPHORA: SEPHORA is LVMH’s traditional beauty brand and a typical fast-moving consumer good (FMCG); it works very hard to promote its brand on a number of social platforms to create good customer stickiness.
Volvo: The traditional business-to-business (B2B) enterprise Volvo has changed its traditional way of business model, from a B2B enterprise to an experience-driven B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) player.
Amazon: Amazon, an e-commerce website, has made constant efforts to transform digitally in the industrial chain, continuously improving the customer experience through digital tools.
HourlyNerd: HourlyNerd, an emerging service platform for business consulting, which enables enterprises to have access to low-cost consulting services by digital approach, is the representative of the B2B Internet.
1.3.1 Traditional B2C player: SEPHORA
As a beauty brand under LVMH and ranked as the number one luxury goods conglomerate in the world, SEPHORA with strong powerhouse of innovations is a world-leading company.
In order to continuously provide customers with the best purchasing and user experience, SEPHORA has launched its own social platform Beautyboard. Similar to Facebook, users can share their own pictures on the platform and tag the products they use in the lower part of the photo. These tags are directly linked to the official website of SEPHORA, which sets up a bridge between the social and business platforms. The tagging function draws inspiration from NICE — a hot picture social media (Figures 1.10 and 1.11).
In addition to its own social platform, SEPHORA maintains high activity on major social websites and is capable of covering many social channels. It has a presence on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Google Plus.
Relying on data analysis technology, SEPHORA has launched new websites and, meanwhile, constantly improves mobile and web experience in the following ways:
Figure 1.10. The beauty board of Sephora.
Source: Sephora.
Figure 1.11. Sephora’s social platform spread.
Source: Sephora.
• building its own in-house digital team and merging traditional business units and digital departments;
• adding a chatting room themed on beauty and skin care on the website, in which members can have Q&A anonymously while a Q&A engine with a secure private environment is provided;
• increasing investment in video websites;
• using subscription text messages on the mobile end to promote information to consumers. Consumers can also use Apple’s Passbook (an app on App Store for managing membership card) to view the balance of their membership cards. After supporting Passbook, its app has had several million downloads. In this way, consumers can improve the online–offline combination of the purchase experience;
• adding four major service sectors to get customers accustomed to their life with SEPHORA, in order to maintain customer loyalty to the brand.
Digital marketing has brought SEPHORA nearly 5 million Facebook fans and 900,000 Twitter followers, is among the top 4 in App Store weekly downloads, has 9.3 million page views on average, has 80.3% share of keyword searches in Google’s total searches and is the first to provide O2O user experience.
1.3.2 Traditional B2B player: Volvo
The sales network of Volvo consists of about 2,300 local distributors among over 100 countries. From 1927 to date, in order to catch up with the times, Volvo has rightly identified the importance of digital technologies and digital marketing to the changing business models. Like traditional B2B enterprises, Volvo in the past put its marketing efforts on how to maintain good relations with channel partners and end clients, but now they expect to have direct contact with end users — drivers by digital transformation. This model is called the B2B+B2C mode (Figure 1.12).
Providing new digital services and building a dynamic digital functionality at the global level are the two main directions of Volvo’s digital marketing strategy.
▪ Digital services: Volvo has established a comprehensive social media channel to directly communicate with customers through the Internet. With Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as the main platforms for brand communication, it also has an independent customer service portal (Figure 1.13).
Figure 1.12. Volvo’s digital transformation strategy.
Source: M. Tannou and G. Westerman, Volvo: From B2B to B2B+B2C Company.
At the mobile end, Volvo has developed two unique