Task 2: Digital Marketing Environment

 

The current digital trends

With ever-changing new features and algorithms on social platforms, time has become an important cost of competition. Marketing consultants are the expertise who can help clients to keep abreast of market trends in order to tailor-made an efficient and beneficial promotion strategies.

In response to the emergence of the pandemic, social distancing restrictions have increased the requirements for the use of social media. Take an example of YouTube, it has recorded 34.6B monthly visitors during 2019 to 2020. (see Figure 1) Lately, other than Vlog, tutorial videos on You-tube is also very attractive for its audience. (see Figure 2) Most of the product’s reviews in the form of tutorial videos are using influencer marketing strategies thereby affecting the target audience’s buying decisions. Audiences tend to seek more information from their favorite influencers and likely to have purchase action if, after viewing the video, audiences believes they have mastery of product use and the product has positive reviews. (see Figure 3)

Customer avatar

An ideal customer avatar can help to define who your target audiences are more precisely, so that the company can produce contents and services that are closer to customers’ needs. (DeVries, 2019) Aside from that general information of the customer, the more important thing is to focus on the character’s psychological characteristics. Therefore, the customer avatar includes the details of customers ‘lifestyle, values etc.

On the other aspects, it’s necessary to identify customer’s challenges and pain points in order to draw up the right direction for marketing. Current troubles or problems encountering in life is an issue that may affect any decision making. It is therefore a must to understand customer’s consideration when choosing a product or what kind of doubts they have when looking for related services or products. This definitely will help the company to judge whether they are potential customers or not.

In addition, the customer avatar also take into consideration customers’ interest. The company needs to understand what kind of things the customers is passionate about and what values they treasure. (Thorstenson, 2021) That will be a clue to tell what kind of products or services can meet customer’s satisfaction. And thinking about the transformation customer desires the most can help the company understand better about customers’ goals and clarify what suggestions the customer needs.  Figure 4 is given as an example of customer avatar.

Successful story in the industry

James Charles’s YouTube Channel: Unleash Your Inner Artist Makeup Tutorial

In the era of information explosion, consumers no longer “unilaterally” accept brand advertising information, but have the initiative to search for information they need online. Influence marketing strategy brings more traffic and exposure to the brand, which definitely brings more conversion. By obtaining audience data from customer avatar, brand is able to find out who the influencer is in the field and more accurately define the marketing contents for targeted audiences. Influencers who are suitable and aligned with the brand image can make the recommended contents more credible and can reach consumers effectively who may purchase the product. (Nazerali, 2017)

For instance, the makeup company Morphe collaborates with the famous makeup artist - James Charles for its product promotion. On James’ YouTube channel, 25.6M subscribers are recorded. (see Figure 5) They are enthusiastic about the contents of James’s channel and have established a mutual trust relationship with James. Because of James’s promotion in his channel, Morphe products have then created a good impression among James’ audiences.

In the video “Unleash Your Inner Artist Makeup Tutorial”, James demonstrates how to use his Morphe collections to do his makeup. (see Figure 6) The video has also included the product information with the incentives discount code for viewers. There are 355K “Like” and viewed more than 8M times, the collab product mentioned in the video were sold out after the first day of launching.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Take Morphe as example again. The brand wants to get better keyword ranking in search engines. Through the settings of backlinks, the brand can redirect the traffic brought by influencers’ video to the brand’s website. Backlinks work like referrals to another website. (SeoClarity, 2020) The more people recommend the brand’s website, search engine like Google will rank it higher as a high-quality website that deserves a better ranking. Certainly, the numbers of recommendations and the reputation of referrer are also factors determining success.

Since SEO is aimed at users with specific search needs to optimize website rankings, influencer marketing can target audiences more precisely to enhance audiences’ click willingness. This can also increase potential customers’ trust in brand effectively.  As James posts the brand backlinks in the message box of his YouTube channel, his audiences can be more easily taken to the brand’s website and such practice can definitely stimulate their consumption desire.

Fig 1: The 50 Most Visited Websites in The World, Visual  Capitalist (D. Neufeld, 2021) You-tube, the second largest website after Google, has recorded 34.6B monthly visitors. This media is in categorized of TV movies and streaming.

Fig 2: The most popular types of Youtube video, Mediakix (Mediakix, 2019) Product review and how-to/ tutorial videos are ranking 2 and 3 of most popular types of YouTube videos after those commentary types.

Fig 3: Product review video watch time statistics (Think with Google, 2019) The data shows that the percentage of people who are learning and collecting information before their purchase on YouTube videos.