Analysis Of Digital Marketing Mix Of NAPCO Group In An Essay.

About NAPCO

Discuss About The Analysis Of Digital Marketing Mix Of The NAPCO Group?

Digital marketing can be used a term that collectively includes all the marketing activities that are done utilizing the technology. It uses digital channels such as social media to market its products.  Today’s organisation utilise digital marketing to achieve new heights of success. The major motive of digital marketing is to create brand awareness and engaging the customers. Social media promotions have turned out to be the most important and productive medium of digital communications. This report deeply analyses digital marketing mix of an Saudi Arabian company NAPCO group which deals in packaging. It also studies the marketing mix of its competitor firm. The report involves recommendations for the company that could be taken for the betterment of the digital marketing mix.

Company Overview:

NAPCO is one of the leading manufacturing groups in Saudi Arabia. As seen in the appendix the company has well designed , simple and  attractive logo. The company has its headquarters in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. NAPCO is a commercial organization working to maximize its profits. Today the company conducts its business around the globe and it is one of the top ranked companies of Middle East. The group owns 10 companies with over 5540 employees. It basically deals in three strategic segments consumer products, flexible packaging, and paper containers. (NAPCO 2017). From the appendix it can be seen that NAPCO’s consumer products brands range from baby care products to family care and household products. NAPCO’s brands are licensed from INDEVCO. NAPCO’s flexible packaging segment serves the Europen, GCC, Middle East in African markets. This segment consists of 7 companies situated in Dammam and Jeddah in Saudi. The paper container segments serve European, GCC and Levant markets. This section produces a wide range of corrugated containers to serve the needs of various industries. The major competitors of the company are  FIPCO, Saudi Pack, Al Sharq Flexible Packaging Factories, Al-Ghadeer Group, Saudi Arabian Packaging Industry WLL, Noor Carton & Packaging Industry and Gulf Packaging Industries Ltd.  The customer base of the company includes both B2B and B2C companies. The company’s current digital marketing practices include responsive website design and social media presence. The company is does not have well developed digital marketing activities it is working in this field to enhance its digital marketing and grasp more opportunities. The company is a popular name in the Middle East.

Three opportunities

Three opportunities:

Middle East is on the verge of digital revolution. Digitalisation has increased with high smart phone adoption rate and increased use of social media. The Middle East companies are ready to lead digitally enhanced lives. Although businesses and government have still not exploited those opportunities (Elmasry, Benni, Patel, Jan and Moore 2016).Three opportunities presented by changes in external environment-

This is the most emerging opportunity in Saudi markets. This technology will replace the old search engine optimization. The new SEO trend would provide a better way to target the potential customers (Albhaishi, Wahsheh and Alghamdi 2014). The online audience optimization will encourage the target audience participation by social media networks, innovative and creative blogs and informative online articles. This technology will help not only in advertising but also effectively integrates mobile strategy (Lee, Jalali and Dasdan 2013). This is a kind of new digital platform is an emerging opportunity for NAPCO group. It can implement this technology. This technology provides the benefits of linking to the potential clients more effectively and efficiently.

The use of mobile phones has increased worldwide. More and more people now own a smart phone. This provides the businesses and opportunity to do their marketing and reach to the potential customers through smartphones. According to a report, 90 per cent of the sales of the connected device will be smartphones and tablets by 2020 (Lunden 2015). To exploit best from this opportunity the companies should provide a mobile friendly content on their websites. Also, they should approach their customers utilizing this technology. It is necessary to provide a great experience to the customers that are browsing company’s websites through mobile phones. It provides benefits of enhanced customer relation, maintaining a constant touch with the customer and gets more genuine clients than the competitors (prolines 2015).

Another opportunity is available in the field of content marketing. To exploit this opportunity company must publish high quality and informative content on popular websites (Järvinen and Taiminen 2016). For Saudi markets optimizing unique Arabic content will help the firm to attract more B2B customers. The Arabic content marketing strategies such as press releases, blog posts, articles, newsletters etc. will help to reach millions of customers. This will ultimately enhance the profitability of the firm (prolines 2015).

In today’s era customer is considered as the king of the market. Today’s customer does not rely only on to a single firm. He has a variety of options available in the market. The customer does not rely only on the company website and marketing force for getting information about the products of the customer (So, King, Sparks, and Wang, 2013). The customer has various other sources such as review sites, blogs, and social media to gain information about strengths and weakness of the product.  Today’s customers have complete control over the buying process. Therefore today’s marketers need to develop effective digital marketing strategies to create an outstanding experience for its customers. The customers now are now well informed and they have various choices therefore if the company does not want to lose its customers it needs to be customer focused.  Right digital marketing strategies can only be developed if the company is customer focused. It is also very important to analyze customer behavior if the company uses customer behavior statistics it will be able to create hyper specific digital marketing strategies. The company’s digital marketing strategies will only be successful if it helps customers to discover the value. To make the appropriate digital marketing strategies for the customers it is required to get insights about customer behavior so that the ideal experience in terms of customers can easily be predicted. NAPCO should identify different needs of its customers both for the B2B segment and B2C segments. This will help the company to build different digital marketing strategies that will effective strive at each of the segments. Also, it needs to develop different digital marketing strategies for markets of Europe, Middle East, Africa and GCC. Consumers in every market have different characteristics and analysis of these character tics is necessary to develop effective marketing strategies.  Analyzing consumer behavior is more important for determining effective digital marketing activities because it gives the ideas about the trend in the market (Polizzi 2016). Example: 80% of targeted customers use smartphone they are tech savvy, will help the firm to develop digital marketing strategies taking smartphone as an important tool. Therefore, importance of being customer focused and understanding the consumer behaviour for developing effective digital marketing strategies cannot be neglected.

The importance of being customer focused

Digital marketing mix of NAPCO

How company uses digital marketing across marketing mix

The digital marketing mix of NAPCO can be categorized into 4Ps. The digital marketing mix is simply an adoption of traditional marketing mix it is impacted the growing use of the internet.

The company has expanded its product portfolio. Initially, the company just manufactured just paper products but now the company has expanded its product portfolio to consumer products, flexible packaging, and paper containers. The effective product can only be developed by using technology and conducting online surveys (Gruner, Homburg and Lukas 2014). These online surveys helped the firm to know what customers actually want and saves the time and efforts. NAPCO also does research and development using technology.

Online sources have given the firms access to know how much the product actually costs and they can also really know the prices of the competitors. NAPCO does not make use of online sources to determine the prices of the products. It has adopted the value based pricing strategy and prices are quoted according to the value that it provides to the customers (Armstrong, Kotler, Harker, and Brennan 2015).

Company’s products are available in the Middle East, European and African market. The company takes orders online but it does not have a well-established e-commerce website. It takes B2B orders through emails. The company does not take retails orders online. The company also do not have a proper product catalog with prices on its website. It just sends the catalog to its regular customers.

The company makes an effective use of digital marketing activities for the promotion of its products. Apart from the traditional sources such as TV, Radio and print media, it is using various other sources for promotion. The company is shifting its focus from traditional promotional sources to digital marketing. It is using social media, content writing and providing a responsive website to its customers.

The digital marketing mix of the company demonstrates although the company is effectively using digital media in research, development and promotional activities it is not using it effectively to determine the price. The customers of the company also expect an online e-commerce website so that it becomes easy to shop for the products but currently the company does not hold any such website. The company should make more effective use of digital marketing to stand up to the customer expectations.

Digital Marketing Mix

Gulf packaging Ltd is the competitor of the company. The digital marketing mix of Gulf packaging is given below:

The firm does not have wide product portfolio. It produces all types of BOPP films (gulfpack 2015). The product portfolio of NAPCO is much wider than the Gulf packaging. The company works in its selected portfolio and does not use technology for further research and development.

The firm uses the technology to fix the prices of its products. It constantly monitors the prices of its competitors and the market trends and frames its prices accordingly. It charges different prices in the different nation by drawing information about each of the nations.  This helps the firms to generate more profits.

The firm sells its products in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. This firm does not accept online orders they accept the big orders from the regular customers over the phone. The company do not provide product catalog to the customers over the website it sends the quotation for different products over the email, on demand.

South American Commercial premises of the company are responsible for marketing and promotional activities. The company is engaged in traditional promotional activities basically using print media. The company does not use much digital marketing activities from the promotion. But recently the company has opted for social media marketing as a promotional activity.

Gulf packaging Ltd does not make effective use of digital marketing. It has used technology for deciding the process of its products and also uses social media marketing for the promotion of its products. The digital marketing mix of the company is not well developed.  The firm does not sell its products online. The digital marketing mix of the company is just in the growing phase.

The digital marketing mix of the company is can be improved in various ways. It can be improved if a company the company learns few things from its competitors. The company should use technology for determining the prices of its products. It should learn from its competitors they use the same strategy to earn its profits. Also, the NAPCO is in the beginning phase of digital marketing. The company should engage in activities such as press releases, use LinkedIn profile this will help to build a network and attract more B2B customers (Hannouz 2015). The customers of the company expect an online website for buying and selling of products. The company should pay attention to this expectation and offer its products for sale online. The other measures that can help the firm to improve its digital marketing strategy are finding creative ways for customer acquisition by using digital media. The company should utilize its data efficiently to create a personalized experience for its customer’s web analytics solution can help the company in collecting and analyzing the data.

The firm is already engaged in social media marketing activities, the firm can make use of live streaming to develop its digital market mix. Live streaming is the recent trend in digital marketing but the content chosen in live streaming should be really brainstorming (Shoolian 2017). Another way in which firm can effectively use the ephemeral content. Now a day’s websites such as Instagram, snap chat, and Facebook provide the opportunity to upload data that automatically disappear after a set time period.  This can help the companies to upload special offers and deals.

SMART objectives of the company:

SMART objectives of the company can be defined as the goals which are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time bound (Bjerke and Renger 2017). The two objectives for the company to enhance online customer experience are:

Achieve online 10% online revenue contribution within 2 years

To increase the online revenue by 10% NAPCO needs to work very hard. First of all, it needs to set up its e-commerce website. The company needs to take feedbacks from the customers about the website and make all the possible changes required. The company needs to effectively manage the delivery time so that the orders are reached to the customers within the time range. The companies should also provide a column for customized orders from the customers. The next step is spreading awareness in the customers about the online availability of products using the digital media for advertisement. The company should also provide some offers at the initial stage when the website is launched. All this will help the company to achieve 10%online revenue contribution.

To increase the brand awareness of NAPCO’s product the company needs to increase the number of followers on twitter. It needs to achieve the target of 1000 followers within a year.Twitter is a powerful business tool and could be a great help if utilized optimally (Moody 2016). There are many ways NAPCO can increase the number of followers on twitter by using tools such as Hootshoot and Sproutsocial. NAPCO can also use Twiends to find the new users whom the company can connect. Another strategy that can be adopted by the company to increase the number of followers on twitter is following more people because there is a correlation between numbers of people followed and the number of followers (Demers 2015).

The above two stated are SMART objectives that should be the key targets of the company to develop the digital marketing mix. The company should lay emphasis on enhancing customer experience.

Suggested digital marketing mix for NAPCO to improve its online customer experience:

Product

The company has wide product portfolio. It can enhance its portfolio by using technology for research and development. It can use integrated tool set for SEO, email and lead intelligence tools to get consumer information and design more customized product to satisfy individual customer demands.

Price

The firm operates on value based pricing strategy. To earn more profits the company should use technology to determine the appropriate prices. NAPCO should constantly obtain upgraded data by using information technology to gain information about prices of the competitors and current market trends.

The company y needs to sell its products on an online platform. The company should sell its products on the online website to reach a large number of customers. The company can use online network partners to enhance the availability of products at various products (Lien, Wu, Chien, and Lee 2017).

The company uses digital marketing activities such as social media marketing. The company should adopt more digital marketing promotional activities such as innovative and creative blogs, search marketing Pay-per-click advertising (PPC), Affiliate marketing and email marketing.

People are the main aspect for the success of every company. The company needs to hire some specialist from the field of computers and digital marketing. It also needs to provide training to its staff about successfully implementing digital marketing processes in the organization (Parmenter 2015)

There is the need to effectively manage old processes and implement some new processes needs to be implemented. The company needs to implement a new process to start the online sale of its new products. It needs to effectively manage the product delivery process to ensure that goods are delivered within the stipulated time (Stadtler 2015).

The suggested changes will also help to attain the above stated two SMART objectives for the company the changes made should help to increase the number of followers and also increasing the online revenue generations these changes are directly related to the Smart objectives. These tactical activities will provide direct benefits to the consumer and thus help to improve online customer experience.

The company can monitor and control the recommended marketing mix by various metrics and methods.

The company can use Google analytics to monitor and control the recommended marketing mix. This tool provides a huge summary of data related to your website (Cain 2012). NAPCO can analyze this data on the weekly or monthly basis to analyze the effectiveness of the recommended marketing mix. For example data about people that visit the website will help to monitor the trend about brand awareness.

Another effective method is designing a response-attribution infrastructure to support all channels. Digital marketing mix uses multiple channels, therefore, campaign hierarchy must account for each channel along with the appropriate roll-ups so that measurement aligns with business goals (Ewald and Krishnamurthy 2009). It includes developing a framework to measure each and every step is monitored individually.

The company can also use automated tools for analytics and visual reporting. Nowadays there are a variety of tools available in the market that help to regularly track selected metrics. NAPCO can get access to these tools and effectively analyze its reports regarding the operations. The recommended digital marketing mix for NAPCO has suggested changes in the process by using the latest technology these changes can be effectively monitored if the company uses the automated tools.

Their company can monitor and control the effects and performance of recommended marketing mix but there is no set unit of measurement for this. Although the measurement can be done on the basis of ROI and online revenues this will only provide with the estimates, not the exact figures (Holloman 2014). This is because the recommended marketing mix involves both qualitative and quantitates terms. After implementing the recommended marketing mix the company should analyse its ROI and online revenues time to time to know the effectiveness of the process.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that NAPCO does not have a well-developed digital marketing mix. The company is in its beginning phase regarding the use of technology in marketing. It has grown tremendously but now it has come to a stagnant position. Its customers now demand online selling of products. The company only takes online orders that also through emails, but not it needs to set up its e commerce website for growing further. The company already uses social media marketing but now it needs to design and use social media marketing campaigns more creatively. The company has already adopted the path of digital marketing, now it just needs to make some recommendations efforts to achieve the corporate excellence.

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