This will be my last blog for this website. While I believe that it is best not to cry because its over, rather smile because it happened 🙂

However, like all us budding entrepreneurs, when conducting activities like this, it is crucial to look back on what we have done and review what went well, what didn’t go so well and if we were to do the exercise again, how would we do it differently? Otherwise, what is the benefit of doing something if you aim not to improve! As a future full time marketer, I see this as pre season training before I embark on the season of work ahead and that laying a solid foundation now will only lead to a successful work career, provided that work is undertaken there also.

Through this, I think I have learned heaps about Digital Marketing and its several areas it encompasses, if you were to ask someone on the street, they would mainly say its just social media. However, through taking such a practical unit like this, I have been able to dive deep into the many areas the general public don’t know or understand. The three main things I will take away from this unit are.

1. The next big wave for digital marketing is through AI and AR/VR
2. Many business need to quickly catch up to the digital age or risk poor performance
3. In such a fast moving world, businesses need to invest highly in consumer experiences that capture these consumers quickly

While these take aways are rather general, they need to broad as the digital world applies to almost everyone and these take aways encompass that.

Im more importantly interested in discussing below what areas of Digital Marketing you found most valuable and how it impact not our lives moving forward, let me know below!

Through the digital age, the amount of data available has grown and become one of the most sort after pieces of information available to businesses. This is through business being able to use this data to discover more information on their target markets and help with business decisions. However, if you generate this data, and its worth a massive amounts of money, is it ethical or even legal to sell this to businesses?

With people’s privacy at risk when businesses sell data, we are thankful enough that global powers to step in and assisting in protecting its people. The GDPR in the Privacy Act, protects people by giving people who violate data breaches with massive fines. These people include attackers who go after this sort of information to sell on the black market. However, businesses need to be able to protect themselves from hackers and their various forms. While businesses believe that it cannot happen to them, it can happen to all of us, from big to small. An example of this is that is with one of the biggest digital company’s Facebook experiencing one of the world’s largest data breach’s.

This cost the business over $1.6bn in a fine as well as the damage to reputation of both the company and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg pictured below.

With the power of data being as strong as ever and the price of this information being higher than ever, it is more important now than ever for people to protect themselves, government to protect its people and businesses to protect this information or they could end up in similar trouble to Facebook. Has you heard something like this happen to you, someone you know or a business you know? Let’s have an interesting discussion below!

With new technologies emerging at a faster rate now than at any stage previously, presenting many opportunities for businesses to adopt some of these new technologies in order to develop a competitive advantage over its rivals. This can be seen in the retail industry also where competition.

One of the fastest growing technologies that can make a major impact on the retail industry Virtual Reality (VR) in which can assist consumers along the buying process. This can be seen from apparel retailers implementing an app and use of a camera to show what a shoe or top looks like on a person or even a furniture retailer and how a couch looks in a space, as seen below.

While this can be seen to be rather costly to implement, with these costs deriving from ap and product development to the constant fixes to add or remove products you no longer sell. However, if businesses are able to introduce and market this value add service correctly, then they are able to provide almost a sample of the product before they buy and assist in the decision making process. This is something seen as valuable and potentially a competitive advantage a large business like IKEA could implement over its smaller competitors such as Plush.

However, the question is posed on if this is the future of retail sales and if not, how can retail businesses innovate to get ahead of rivals.

After discussing social media marketing in week 8, it really surprised me about how much businesses can poor into these channels, sparking an interest in particularly influence market and how much is seen as too much? This sparked the miniseries of blogs, ending with this one where I wanted to find out how much the ‘big dogs’ of social media influencers get paid per post.

Thus, I went on a journey to discover what some of the highest following people on instagram get paid for promoting a product, starting with arguably the most famous family in the world, the Kardashians. It didn’t take me long to find a ballpark figure when on this link you can see the figure is “definitely six figures”. This is an obscene amount of money in which many old school marketers would argue as a gigantic waste. However, is there any other method that can reach 78 million people (Kourtney’s current instagram followers)? It would be a struggle to find a platform for that cost.

Compare it to the Super Bowl for instance, where 98 million people watched the game. A 30-second commercial cost a business $4 million. When you think about it, the “six figure” cost doesn’t seem that much…

This platform is still seen to be successful today, even with the recent scrutiny over its costs. This article here by none other than Forbes, helps outline why it is still very relevant and growing today. However I’m personally a skeptic, what do you think?

While this blog has generally been progressing through the bit. I recently read about the current issue with Chloe Roberts and Legacy cafe in Camberwell. Seen through the article attached at the bottom, there was a falling out as fitness model and influencer, Chloe Robert, was paid between $200-300 per photo upload to her 126k followers. Chloe deleted these posts after a period of time. Posing a question on if it worth the invest of $200 a post if the exposure for only a period of time? Is the investment in influence even worth it? Chloe believes that she can charge up to $1200 a post for the advertising. At what cost becomes too expensive to use the power of influence.

Personal belief on the matter is that it is very hard to measure the effectiveness of influence advertising. From Legacy’s point of view, how do you know how many people came in because they saw an instagram from Chloe Roberts? Without a survey undertaken by customers its extremely hard to measure.

With the example of Legacy and Chloe Roberts, where she would receive between $200 and $300 for a instagram photo like below.

With the average two people sitting spending around $45, the question arises that if her post towards 126k would make 7 people bring someone else and visit the cafe? Personally, I would believe so, making the investment worthwhile if they have a positive experience.

However, what if that figure was up at $1200 like she believes she can demand? Would that be seen as a positive investment? I don’t believe that a post from Chloe could result in 27 people bringing a partner to go get brunch at that cafe. Furthermore thats just to cover the costs in revenue, let alone profit! Do you believe that the power of influence is that strong that people can charge $1200 a post? Let me know below!

Link to article here

When using social media as a platform to market, there are many different methods. One of the fast growing methods in which many large businesses are now implementing is influencer marketing, that is paying a person with substantial followers to post and promote your product. However, questions are being raised by these businesses about how is best to go it, mainly of who is the right influencer and whether to develop a relationship with an influencer or just a single post.

The answer to the first question will require the business to use as much data as possible to create a connection between the influencers followers and their target market. With the example of proactive, where their target consumers are generally young females ages between 15-35. They were able to use their large marketing budget and data to reach that the ideal candidate. Kendall Jenner, who’s 108 million followers are seen to be in accordance with who proactive want to target and thus, leverage her instagram profile as an IMC tool. This is seen through the photo below.

From this decision of which influencer you choose, the business must choose how to do it. May this be though a single payment for a post, or a relationship with the influencer where she posts several times and becomes a bit more of a brand ambassador. Personally, I think that it is best too develop a relationship with the influencer and develop a partnership with them. This can have several benefits in which this weeks class reading from the harvard business review (https://hbr.org/2019/04/how-brands-can-build-successful-relationships-with-influencers) in which breakdown the many benefits that are available for this to happen. These include the ability to leverage the trust an influencer has with its audience, consecutive representation to the target audience as well as it being relatively cheap when compared with other forms of IMC.

Through all this, I think the long term relationship with influencers is the best way businesses can pay to advertise through social media. Only if it provides solid ROI to the business and can be justified to higher management. Interested to hear if you think something differently! Let me know below 🙂

It is fair to say that the world is going one way when you discuss technology in everyday society, its presence will only increase as time and new technologies emerge. One of these rising technologies is artificial intelligence. While this is seen to be a large positive to society, through making it easy for consumers to search questions, buy items online without a click of a button, change songs and calls while you are driving etc. While this is seen as such a positive, this causes many businesses to adopt certain practices to stay relevant and thrive in the next wave of technology.

This growth can’t be denied through the vast array of stats available. Through this article by Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/01/12/10-charts-that-will-change-your-perspective-on-artificial-intelligences-growth/#7ccfa5bb4758) there has been well over $3 billion invested in 2015, a vastly different number almost no money only 20 years ago. As seen from this graph below, one can only imagine that this figure will increase as time prolongs.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non- paid) search engine results” (moz.com). This essentially is a mechanism that helps businesses appear higher in google searches. My personal belief is that many businesses need to undertake SEO marketing in order to grow their organic search history, drive traffic to your website and overall, grow sales.

This is seen through the Shopify article (https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/seo-product-descriptions) you can see at the start that businesses such as BlackJoy and TULA’s saw organic traffic grow by at least 100%, which even at a minimum assists in brand recognition, something that many businesses struggle with.

Therefore, with all the signs and evidence leading most business personnel to believe that AI is here to not only stay, but grow dramatically. Through this business should take great care on their website to ensure they stay relevant on organic searches to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing technological world.

The first customer journey is seen to be the most critical of all customer journeys as if it is a positive journey, the business may gain a customer for life. This is done through the consumer have many connections or touchpoints that can generate either a positive or negative experience with the brand and influence if/ when / how frequent a consumer buys the product.

Many of these touchpoint are outside the businesses controls such as reviews, customers wearing the brand or the brand is seen in the street. However, they brand owned touchpoints are the main areas in which the company must enhance to draw customers to buying, rebuying and advocating the product to others to grow the business. This can be done through many avenues, such as initially providing a high quality product. Having a great product will always draw customers to the business and through positive word of mouth and these customers actively advocating the quality will also draw attention to the product and raise awareness and enhance the consideration phase of the customer journey.

Another avenue would be providing good advertising content for the mass market to see. This can raise the initial awareness stage. Depending on your business, advertising to the mass market can significantly raise the amount of touchpoints businesses have with the brand and start the consumer buying process, hoping that buy the purchase stage, it is with your business.

On the opposite side of this is that if the business has produced poor product and poor advertising content, businesses will place themselves at a serious competitive disadvantage and be at a amor threat of poor business performance.

In order to understand how in recent years (or decades) digital businesses have changed the greater business society, it is first to understand what a business model is before we explore how they’ve changed lately. A business model, a definition given from the workshop this week, is a plan for the successful operation of a business, identifying sources of revenue, the intended customer base, products, and details of financing.

Business models have traditionally been quite elongated. With a longer chain of command paired with an autocratic management style, people within the organisation found it hard to create change. However, with the emergence of the digital era such as google in 1998 and Facebook in 2004, these digital companies have created a different norm of business models and business practices. These companies have adopted a far flatter business model, giving many of their employees freedom to explore opportunities and create change. Evident through many of google’s newer initiatives such maps and news was created through employees creating and exploring their own ideas.

These businesses have been able to create these inventions through their business models and how they are able to gain revenue to fund their employees ideas. Both Google and Facebook have adopted an advertising model, in which they generate money from businesses promoting themselves through these platforms. These businesses have now paid the way for many digital businesses to enter and thrive in their respective marketplaces, altering the business world forever. Does anyone see a different point of view regarding business models and how are they are in 2019? Do you think it is sustainable or just a fad?

Retailers and restaurants alike do not have the ability to hide anymore. With the recent emergence of online platforms such as Zomato, Facebook and Instagram giving the everyday consumers a stream to voice their opinions, empowering consumers and causing B2C businesses to optimise their interactions with customers in order to obtain or maintain a good reputation with customers.

As a consumer myself, I have had the opportunity to witness this powerful impact Digital Marketing or more specifically, social media has had not only on businesses but also on consumers themselves. From the business point of view, these platforms give a channel to connect with the largest audience in the world, Facebook has 1.74 billion active accounts. With this ability to reach such large numbers, business try to capitalise by promoting the products of their business in the most appealing of ways, such as below.

While this can be seen to be a crucial source of marketing for businesses such as your local cafe. It is my personal belief that it has had a far greater impact on consumers. As it has given them a large voice to voice their positive and negative opinions on these businesses. This power has become so great that it has greatly assisted in the emergence of the “influencer”. This is a person seen to have high followers on social media networks such as instagram, receive either free merchandise, food or even getting paid for a ‘post’ advertising their product. This is demonstrated below;

Although not an actual example of an influencer’s post, this is an example how an influencer takes photos to actively promote the business at hand.

This is something that is actively seen in modern day society, have you ever created a review for a restaurant or business of any type? Interested to hear what you wrote and your motive behind that decision!