Developing Digital Marketing Strategy For JCW: Theory And Practice Essay.

Recognise and be able to recommend digital technologies and e-marketing practises for developing Customer Relationship Management strategies and reaching new potential customers

Appreciate the impact of social media marketing and justify the marketing opportunities it presents

Analyse, critique and evaluate examples of digital marketing from a ‘real’ world context

Apply digital marketing theories, concepts and models to e-marketing examples implemented using digital technologies

Critique various companies’ website designs and formulate comparisons to review best practise for traffic building.

Propose and evaluate academic and practitioner commentaries including arguments identified by e-marketing

JCW: An Overview

The following report is based on the incorporation of digital marketing strategies into JCW’s business. JCW is a supplier of risk management, audit professionals and regulatory compliance to the clients across the industry. The purpose of the report is to develop a digital marketing strategy besides the existing offline communication strategies for JCW. The report also provides suitable e-marketing theory that helps firm in the implementation of digital marketing strategies. The report helps to understand how digital marketing strategies help to reach new potential customers in a wide market.

JCW is a niche supplier of risk management, regulatory compliance and audit professionals reaching the wide industry. The firm provides a global reach from London and operates as a supplier of choice to several multi-nationals (Jcwresourcing.com. 2018). The firm maintains a consistent track record on a permanent and interim basis for the mid to senior space. The firm is holding a biggest risk and governance recruitment teams in UK, which enables the firm to undertake high-volume projects. Since the inception of JCW, the firm widely focuses on developing its business to the point where it can claim that JCW is the leading governance recruitment organization internationally by all useful measures. So far, JCW made great strides towards its goal over the intervening years, but it is yet to achieve it. The firm has a number of major plans to ensure that it acquires the top spot within a short span of time –five years. The organization expects to develop its expansion plan not just through development in its existing market but also through developing commercial operation in new industry and geography. However, the firm did not pay required attention to digital marketing strategies that certainly lead the firm to reach the global target market. Thus, the present report is conducted to develop suitable digital marketing strategies for the firm.

Risk management failures at the large corporations have acquired the headline for several years, majorly in the financial sector. The significance of an effective risk governance framework was underlined Committee’s report from 2009 on “The corporate Governance Lesson from Financial Crisis (Lam 2014)”. As put forward by Aebi, Sabato and Schmid (2012), effective risk management is not just about omitting the risk taking, which is indeed a core driving force in business as well as entrepreneurship. Similarly, the need to reinforce the risk management practices has been one of the major lesions from the financial crisis. However, there is a limited evidence that listed organizations paid more attention to the risk management in the present years. For instance, in a 2011 survey conducted by McKinsey, where it was found that almost 44% of respondents mentioned that their organizations or the boards simply review and approve management’s recommended strategies (Tao and Hutchinson 2013). Only, 14% of the respondents have mentioned that their organizations have a complete understanding of risks their organizations faced (Aebi, Sabato and Schmid 2012). Hence, the overview indicates that least number of organizations spend time for risk management and governance. There are several organizations that hardly know about risk and governance firms. It is certain that risk and governance firms help large organizations to identify the risk in the businesses. Nonetheless, the risk and governance firms did not take appropriate initiatives to remain in the limelight for helping the firms against the potential business risks.

Risk Management and Governance Practices

Digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that help the organizations to achieve business goals through online marketing. Hence, the strategy remains as the plan of actions to achieve the desired goals and actions consist of digital marketing strategies (Holliman and Rowley 2014). The digital marketing strategies of JCW should involve multiple goals as well as several moving parts, which helps the firms to remain focused on meeting the organizational objectives.  Here, the digital marketing campaigns remain as the building blocks within the digital marketing strategy to lead the firm to meet the goals.  For example, an organization might decide to operate a campaign with the goal of sharing the best-performance gated content on Twitter, to create more leads through that channels.  Hence, this campaign remains as the part of the strategy to generate some significant leads. In this context, Tiago and Veríssimo (2014) mentioned that if a campaign runs over the course of couple of years, it does not make it a strategy, it is still a method remain beside other campaign to generate the strategy.

The digital marketing strategies are effective and provide positive benefits to the organizations because the technique always includes the achievable goals. While developing the goals, the firm might want to incorporate more customers, more recognition to get ahead of the competition. Here,  Wymbs (2011) commented that whatever the context may be, starting with a solid goal in mind increases the chance of gaining success. Both practically and theoretically, digital marketing remains as the significant way for small businesses. Several strategies go into digital marketing and having a concise goal helps the firm to learn what focus on. As put forward by Royle and Laing (2014), digital marketing provides a wide reach to the businesses, through which the business can reach its target market or customers.  Digital marketing strategies often includes a marketing funnel to map out a client’s journey from when a customer is a complete stranger to when they turn into a lead and then particular strategies in place which could encourage the marketers to move through the funnel.

  As put forward by Freng Svendsen et al. (2011), digital marketing could benefit the business of all sizes by providing access to the mass-market at the most affordable price. It is identified that unlike TV or print advertising, it creates the platform for personalized marketing. Thus, risk management and governance practice is one of the mostly required services demanded by the large local and multinational firms (Tsitsi Chikandiwa,  Contogiannis and Jembere 2013). Thus, if JCW is able to find the right platform, it can excel its operation faster than existing pace. Thus, to find that platform, JCW should apply the recent or the most effective strategy, which is digital media.  Each market is surrounded by technology and every organization uses technology to speed up their operation; thereby, the digital media is certainly a great choice for JCW. Following are some of the significant factors or reasons associated with digital marketing through which JCW can be benefitted.

Benefits of Digital Marketing Strategies for JCW

Global reach- A website or social media channels could allow JCW to find new markets and trade internationally by making a small investment.

Low cost- A properly planned targeted digital marketing campaign might help to reach the right customers at the much lower cost compared to traditional marketing techniques.

Track-based and measurable results- After the implementation of digital marketing strategies, JCW can measure online marketing with the help of web analytic as well as other online metric tools making it easier to develop the plan accordingly. The firm can acquire detailed information regarding how clients could use the website or provide responses to the advertising. Moreover, web analytics could be developed to learn how much money can be earned from each digital strategy.

Personalization- If the customer database is linked to the website, then when a user visit the site, the firm can greet the users with the targeted offers. The more clients buy from the firm, more the firm can refine its customer profile and the market efficiently.

Openness- By being involved with the social media as well as managing it effectively, JCW could develop their customer loyalty and establish a reputation for being easy to engage with

Social currency-Digital marketing could allow JCW to generate an engaging campaign with the help of some rich media content. Likewise, these contents on Web obtain the social currency, which is being passed from users to users and being viral.

Digital communication definitely provides a large platform for the organizations, which means the organization could reach its target market or target clients quite easily Each nation has widely involved itself in the technology development; thereby, due to the technological advancement, people have become more attached to the technology and internet. Moreover, due to the advancement of internet technology, millions of users are regularly involved social media channels. One of the major significant needs is, reaching a wide market with the least possible time. The firm like JCW, which operates its business by offline communication channels find it difficult or take plenty of time to achieve its goals.  In addition, traditional communication channels, the firm is restricted to a particular market or it cannot run the operation in a global market. However, Järvinen et al. (2012) also mentioned that large organizations often go with the traditional method when it comes to hiring a risk management and governance, as they have gained success through that method only. Nonetheless, proper implementation of digital communication strategies of some large companies like Tesco, Starbucks and others has proved the efficiency of social media (Kim and Ko 2012). Digital marketing strategies have the ability to influence consumer behavior; moreover, through digital media communication, the marketers can keep the track of consumer behavior and based on that record organizational strategies can be developed.

Digital Marketing Strategies and E-Marketing Theories

Develop buyer personas

For any marketing strategy-offline or online, the firm needs to learn whom it would be marketing to. As put forward by Ashley and Tuten (2015), the best digital marketing strategies usually developed on the basis of detailed buyer’s persona. Hence, JCW first needs to create them. Consumers’ personas represent ideal customers and the firm could do it through research, survey and interview of target’s audiences. In order to gain a right picture of the persona, the firm’s research pool should include the blends of consumers, prospects as well as the people belonging to the outside of the database who can be aligned with the target audience (Verhoeven et al. 2012). The following are some of the steps helping to identify or differentiate the client base.

Location-The firm could use the web analytics- such as the Google analytics to find out what location the website traffic is coming from.

Income- This helps to collect the sensitive information such as personal income. When, the user is identified and if it found to be a large firm, there is a high chances that client is looking for a risk management and governance solution.

Goals- Depending on the need, the product or the service was created to serve. For example, JCW deals with risk management and governance practice; the firm already has the idea of what objective the persona is thinking to achieve.

Challenges- Hence, again the firm has the opportunity to speak to the customers, sales and the customer service representatives to learn what the audiences face.

Figure 1: Buyer Personal

(Source: Kim and Ko 2012)

Identifying goals and digital marketing tools that JCW needs

The marketing goals need always to be tied back to the core objectives of the business. For example, if business’s goals is to generate online revenue by 20%, the goals as the marketer may be to create 50% more leads through website than the firm actually did in the last year (Royle and Laing 2014). Hence, whatever could be the overreaching goal; the firm must know how to measure.

Figure 2: Digital marketing tools

(Source: Wymbs 2011)

Evaluation of existing marketing channels and assets

At the time of considering available digital marketing channels, which could be incorporated into the strategy, needs to be determined.

Owned media

This is referred to the digital asset that JCW owns. The firm can incorporate a website or it can use a social media profile on Twitter, blog content and some other channels that JCW has a complete control over.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned digital marketing strategies recommended for JWC is an appropriate one as through digital media marketing techniques, a complete marketing funnel can be created which would help to map out a client’s journey from when a client is a complete stranger to when they become a lead. Then, they need to put some particular strategies in place, which could encourage them to go forward through the funnel. The firm can think of the marketing funnel in four different parts such as Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action

Awareness- Even though the potential customer is aware of the service, they are yet the strangers but they visit the website for a reason. At this stage, first must have to attract the consumers by showing them that they exactly need. For example, hence, the firm could use a lead magnet to give visitors a valuable resource related to JCW’s service.

Interest –When the customers are adequately expressing interest in a particular type of the products or service, the firm should supply them with some further information that should be more tailored to their particular needs.

Figure 3: AIDA model

(Source: Kim and Ko 2012)

Desire – When the visitors have taken the interest in a particular service offered by JWC and now the firm has supplied them with the information particular to what they are looking for  or they have found the product from the host or the firm, the firm should further invite them. This means the firm needs to invite them through call-to-action to tell more about the service and how it can benefit them.

Action-This is a final stage, which is about purchasing. In this stage, the firm has to be able to turn its potential customers into to a significant lead.

Table 1: Budget required for implementing the strategy

Conclusion 

The above-mentioned discussion presents the fact that JCW is supposed to expand its operation by expanding into the global market, which helps the firm to create a large client base. In order to do so, the firm is suggested to incorporate digital marketing strategies, which helps the firm to focus on the wide market within a span of time. As the firm is small in size, it will implement the strategies through a step-by-step process.

References

Aebi, V., Sabato, G. and Schmid, M., 2012. Risk management, corporate governance, and bank performance in the financial crisis. Journal of Banking & Finance, 36(12), pp.3213-3226.

Ashley, C. and Tuten, T., 2015. Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1), pp.15-27.

Freng Svendsen, M., Haugland, S.A., Grønhaug, K. and Hammervoll, T., 2011. Marketing strategy and customer involvement in product development. European Journal of Marketing, 45(4), pp.513-530.

Holliman, G. and Rowley, J., 2014. Business to business digital content marketing: marketers’ perceptions of best practice. Journal of research in interactive marketing, 8(4), pp.269-293.

Järvinen, J., Tollinen, A., Karjaluoto, H. and Jayawardhena, C., 2012. Digital and social media marketing usage in b2b industrial section. Marketing Management Journal, 22(2).

Jcwresourcing.com. (2018). Home | JCW. [online] Available at: https://www.jcwresourcing.com/ [Accessed 20 Jan. 2018].

Kim, A.J. and Ko, E., 2012. Do social media marketing activities enhance customer equity? An empirical study of luxury fashion brand. Journal of Business Research, 65(10), pp.1480-1486.

Lam, J., 2014. Enterprise risk management: from incentives to controls. John Wiley & Sons.

Mahan, J.E., 2011. Examining the predictors of consumer response to sport marketing via digital social media. International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, 9(3-4), pp.254-267.

Royle, J. and Laing, A., 2014. The digital marketing skills gap: Developing a Digital Marketer Model for the communication industries. International Journal of Information Management, 34(2), pp.65-73.

Tao, N.B. and Hutchinson, M., 2013. Corporate governance and risk management: The role of risk management and compensation committees. Journal of Contemporary Accounting & Economics, 9(1), pp.83-99.

Tiago, M.T.P.M.B. and Veríssimo, J.M.C., 2014. Digital marketing and social media: Why bother?. Business Horizons, 57(6), pp.703-708.

Tsitsi Chikandiwa, S., Contogiannis, E. and Jembere, E., 2013. The adoption of social media marketing in South African banks. European Business Review, 25(4), pp.365-381.

Verhoeven, P., Tench, R., Zerfass, A., Moreno, A. and Ver?i?, D., 2012. How European PR practitioners handle digital and social media. Public Relations Review, 38(1), pp.162-164.

Wymbs, C., 2011. Digital marketing: The time for a new “academic major” has arrived. Journal of Marketing Education, 33(1), pp.93-106.