Case Reports: 2020 Vol: 26 Issue: 2
Priyanka Shrivastava, St. Mary’s College of California, CA, USA
The primary subject matter of this case is related to Digital Marketing. Companies are going through digital transformation and business models of many new players are completely digital, which makes companies sitting on large amount of data. The proliferation of new technologies such as mobile, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) have transformed customer behavior and disrupted marketplaces-both for B2B and B2C markets. It makes imperative for marketing educators to equip students with knowledge on digital marketing strategies, which is the subject topic of this case. Secondary issues examined include keyword search performed on search engine platforms and importance of tracking click through rates (CTR) and Transaction conversion rates (TCR) to optimize Digital Marketing efforts of any organization. The case has a difficulty level of including it in graduate level courses and Executive MBA programs to teach Digital marketing or Marketing Analytics courses. The case is designed to be taught in a 4 hours class and is expected to require 2 hours of outside class preparation by students.
Digital Marketing Strategies, Marketing Analytics
Information about the Case Synopsis
Mr. Vinay, Chief Evangelist, You lead India understands the importance of using Digital Marketing Strategies for its start-up You Lead India. Digital Marketing strategies are imperative for such new age companies to combat competition in emerging economies like India in limited budget. He outsources this task to the Media House which is known for its conservative spending. Mr. Vinay was very satisfied with the partner media house for their efforts but knew they could do better. He sets up a meeting with executives in the media house managing account of you lead India. The agenda for the meeting was to understand how they can better optimize digital marketing numbers for you lead India.
Mr. Vinay, Chief Evangelist, You Lead India, was going through the report of last month’s paid search campaigns as part of his digital marketing initiatives. He wanted to be careful on his media spent which was managed by an outsourced service provider. Although, he was satisfied with the efforts of the media house, he wanted to understand if he is getting optimized numbers for amount spent on search engine marketing campaigns. He sets up a meeting with the media house executives to understand their future plans of digital marketing efforts. Due to shorter timelines set by Mr. Vinay to see a constructive change in numbers, the media house was in high pressure. The key challenge in front of them was to optimize return on advertising (ROA) of search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.
Body of the Case
Companies are going through digital transformation and business models of many new players are completely digital, which makes companies sitting on large amount of data. The proliferation of new technologies such as mobile, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) have transformed customer behavior and disrupted marketplaces—both for B2B and B2C markets. It makes imperative for marketing educators to equip students with knowledge on digital marketing strategies, which is the subject topic of this case.
Mr. Vinay Shrivastava, Chief Evangelist and one of the founders of You Lead India (YLI) Foundations wanted to understand how to optimize the digital marketing spend and performance. He launched the company with a dream of nurturing young minds to develop their leadership skills Founders started with the dream of developing emerging economy India which could be achieved if every person develops the leader hidden inside them. You lead India offered many personality development courses, webinars and guest lectures to develop the hidden leader in young minds.
You lead India: Company Background
You lead India, registered as YLI foundation was established as a non-profit organization working to create future leaders. The company was established to contribute towards developing leaders, who are critical to India’s development story. India is seen as densely populated nation with population of 1.2 billion people. YLI foundation wanted the create a legacy of nation building by engaging citizens in building social unity, economic prosperity and political stability in an inclusive and democratic way. To nurture the leader in young minds, YLI foundation believed in using art and self-management as two primary mediums of self-development.
In any nation building exercise, youths are most important segment of the population, who need to be engaged. 1.2 billion Population if India, making it second largest populous emerging economy has higher percentage of young folks which makes it seen as Young India. Focusing on youths, YLI foundations development many personality development courses to nurture young minds. These young folks when channelized well, leads to following benefits:
1. Increased skilled work force that enable India to take advantage of low cost economies
2. Increased household income levels that will enable an upward lifestyle shift
3. Increased boost to the financial sector
4. Increased tax pay out that will enable investment in infrastructure and public utilities.
YLI foundation offered leadership building through self-management and leadership building through art by using Speaker sessions, webinars, workshops and internships. They have partnered with individuals, corporates and educational institutes for developing leadership skills on young folks.
Transformation of Ad-Industry by Internet
Irrespective of business model, thriving in today’s digital world requires a media strategy that makes sense. There no winning formula to follow but how you’re paid, earned and owned media strategies line-up certainly has a bigger role to play.
Paid media is defined as any media space purchased-whether physical or digital-to promote a brand, idea, person, campaign or organization.
In digital world paid media includes:
Search engine marketing
1. Sidebar search engine ads are commonly seen on Google, Bing, and Yahoo triggered by search engine keyword query.
2. PPC ads can also live on a website, but are also triggered by keyword query.
Banner ads
1. Visual banners displayed across various websites at varying sizes and levels of interactivity
Paid social media
1. LinkedIn Sponsored Content
2. LinkedIn Text Ads
3. Facebook ads
4. Instagram ads
5. Twitter ads
6. YouTube pre-roll ads
Native
1. Any digital advertisement displayed on a website or elsewhere online (can be social media) that matches the form and function of the property on which it is displayed.
Search Engine Display Ads
1. Similar to pay-per-click, but strictly visual in nature
2. Can be displayed across variety of websites using remarketing technology leveraging data stored using cookies from websites.
Owned media is content you publish or distribute via platforms you own. The key here is having complete control. You are deciding when, how, and exactly what is getting published. Common owned media outlets include:
Blogs
1. Many social media practitioners consider their blog a “home base” for all their social activity.
2. Blogs allow authors to test content types, gain search engine ranking, and provide thought leadership and advice to their customers or audience.
Websites
1. Websites allow marketers to position their brands online through customized experiences, content, and search engine visibility
Events
1. Many marketers host their own events where they control programming, venue, overall experience, in order to develop targeted relationships
Magazines
1. When marketers regularly publish digital (or physical) magazines containing unique content completely customized and owned by the brand.
Social "owned" assets
LinkedIn company pages, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are just some of the channels through which marketers can control their posts, content and message.
Caveat: social platforms have a tendency to change over time, which means you won’t “own” this content in the same way you would if it existed on your own blog, or website.
Earned media-also commonly referred to as word-of-mouth advertising, PR, publicity, or media relations-is an unpaid means of gaining greater recognition and exposure. It is often the result of providing customers with a valuable product, service, experience, or content. Earned media usually comes to fruition as a third-party news article, interview, or online review. Earned media includes:
Links
By providing valuable web-based content, other websites link to your blog post, asset, or website.
Third-party article or content
When a blog, news outlet, podcast, or organization writes content featuring you, your campaign, or your organization.
Word-of-mouth referral
Post in an online community
Businesses that offer consumer services often seek to have third-party users post reviews or mentions on sites like Reddit, Yelp, TrustPilot, or Yell.
Social mention
When a customer or business mentions you in a LinkedIn post, Facebook mention, Twitter reply, or Snapchat; gaining followers via social media is also considered earned.
Organic SEO
By providing valuable web-based content, search engine algorithms (might) rank your content above others thereby bringing an authority to your business and greater reach via organic search exposure.
Influencer activity
When someone with great influence in your shared area of expertise mentions you online, via social media, or posts content in response to your activity.
Media House
The company was known for providing data driven strategies to optimize to deliver results for its clients. They were driven to deliver results and constantly try new strategies to improve its performance. The level of information that they used to share with their clients was very granular with campaign wise data. Mr. Vinay got data in terms of clicks, impressions and other related information regarding internet advertising. When he approached Media house discuss their future plans to optimize efforts for return on advertising spent, they were happy to discuss and plan innovative ways for improving performance.
Challenge
The media house got directives from Mr. Vinay to optimize future campaigns in a short time. Although they knew that one strategy can be use branded keywords, but it was also apparent from numbers that unbranded keywords produce a larger percentage of single click conversions. What should be the approach for optimizing Return on advertising spent (ROA)? They also wanted to evaluate whether broad or focused keyword searches would be more profitable. Thinking deeply through the problem, the media house research team understood that this is well beyond only examining numerical data, they need to understand consumers better to know which campaigns would make sense to consumers in Table 1.
| Table 1 Snapshot of Data Shared by Media House | |||||||||
| Publisher Name | Search Engine Bid | Clicks | Click Charges | Avg. Cost per Click | Impressions | Engine Click Thru % | Trans. Conv. % | Total Cost/ Trans. | Total Volume of Bookings |
| Yahoo - US | $6.25 | 1 | $2.31 | $2.31 | 11 | 9.09% | 900.00% | $0.26 | 9 |
| Yahoo - US | $6.25 | 1 | $0.63 | $0.63 | 6 | 16.67% | 100.00% | $0.63 | 1 |
| MSN - Global | $0.00 | 1 | $0.39 | $0.39 | 9 | 11.11% | 100.00% | $0.39 | 1 |
| Google - Global | $7.50 | 59 | $2.31 | $0.04 | 401 | 14.71% | 3.39% | $1.16 | 2 |
| Overture - Global | $0.25 | 8 | $2.20 | $0.28 | 318 | 2.52% | 12.50% | $2.20 | 1 |
| Overture - Global | $0.13 | 42 | $5.25 | $0.13 | 722 | 5.82% | 4.76% | $2.63 | 2 |
| Google - US | $6.25 | 3 | $5.21 | $1.74 | 13 | 23.08% | 33.33% | $5.21 | 1 |
| Overture - US | $0.33 | 47 | $11.80 | $0.25 | 547 | 8.59% | 4.26% | $5.90 | 2 |
| Google - US | $6.25 | 2 | $2.69 | $1.34 | 24 | 8.33% | 50.00% | $2.69 | 1 |
| Google - US | $0.71 | 10 | $9.94 | $0.99 | 80 | 12.50% | 10.00% | $9.94 | 1 |
Introduction
Mr. Vinay, Chief Evangelist, You Lead India gets in touch with the Media house managing its Digital Marketing efforts. He tasks the company to optimize the return on Advertising dollars spent and improve the performance of various digital campaigns run by the company. The media house is set to analyze data on search engine campaigns to make future plans to optimize return on advertising spent. This case suits well to be used in Graduate level or Executive MBA level Digital Marketing or Marketing Analytics courses.
The case provides a background of digital marketing strategies used by You Lead India, a strat-up in emerging economy India. Digital Marketing strategies for You Lead India involved Search Engine Marketing initiatives run in various search engine platforms managed by an external media house. The Media house has campaign wise granular information on Clicks, impressions, conversion %, total costs and no. of bookings. Students are required to work on important matrix like CTR (Click through rate) and transaction conversion rates (TCR) to come with the recommended future strategies.
Discussion Questions
Instructor should use the case after discussing concepts related to search engine marketing (SEM), which is combination of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC).
Below are some specific questions to consider while discussing the case:
1. Which publishers deliver best campaign results?
To answer this question instructor can discuss some important metrics to compare various publishers. Some important metrics to be discussed are CPC-Cost per click, CTR-Click through rate and TCR-Transaction conversion rate. Depending on the objective of the company a combination on metrics can be chosen to decide on the publisher delivering best results.
2. How do you recommend budget allocation for future?
Publishers performing better in the chosen metrics should be allocated better funds for future. Some platform not performing well should be removed for future consideration.
3. Discuss strategies recommended to publishers to improve its performance.
Publishers doing good on Click through rate but low on Transaction conversion rate should improve their website side copy.
Publishers doing well on transaction conversion rate but low on click through rate should improve their ad copy
Publishers doing low both in terms of CTR and TCR should be checked for the cost, and costly publishers in this category should be removed from future considerations.