The rise of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has been a buzz word in the marketing arena for some time now, but one should try and understand what exactly goes into the core of this. It’s essentially a type of medium through which users can interact online through the Internet and marketers can connect with their target consumer segments. This form of medium is more accountable than the traditional marketing channels as it involves bi-directional communication and is not always initiated by the marketer. Philip Kotler’s classic definition of marketing is that “Marketing is that function of the organisation that can keep in constant touch with the organisation’s consumers, read their needs, develop products that meet these needs, and build a program of communications to express the organisation’s purposes”. In accordance with this, it is imperative to bring out this similarity with digital marketing, namely that their motives are the same to attract the end consumers. Then what gave rise to the need of having a separate branch of marketing catering just to the digital platform? Well, the current market scenario dictates the need for this. Nowadays, consumers are exposed to multiple media platforms like e-mail, social platforms like Facebook, twitter, etc as well as the traditional media options like newspapers, TV, etc and thus their effective time spent gets reduced on each of these mediums plus they also start to ignore marketing messages in such a crowded media situation. In order to address this fragmented consumer attention also called as attention economy, digital marketing helps in two major ways. First, it helps in segmenting the target audience precisely based on their current brand interactions and location and secondly, by being able to measure accurately. This two pronged approach helps in making the messages more personalized for the end users as well as helping in finding out the accountability and the effectiveness of each aspect of the digital marketing campaign in terms of the fund allocated by the marketer. Digital marketing can be better understood in terms of a Strategical Framework which can guide firms to achieve better results by dicing the target audience accurately and creating value for those segments. 

Strategic Approach to understand Digital Marketing (The TCEO Model)

• Think: This aspect of the model deals with the development of the strategic planning aims for the digital marketing initiatives. Consumer insights lays the foundation of this step which is complemented by the likes of concept development, budget planning as well as the medium to be used.
• Create: This step involves the creation and the execution of the campaigns planned in the previous step. It deals with the actual creation of the platforms through which the end users would be interacting i.e. through mobile, e-commerce websites, social media as well as building the systems required to maintain and sustain these platforms.
• Engage: This step deals with navigating the traffic onto the platform as well as involves the customer relationship aspect as well. The concepts of SEO, e-mail marketing, social media campaign management as well as media buying avenues are explored in this section.
• Optimize: This deals with the continuous improvement of the above mentioned model to make it more robust. This step involves the aspects of data mining analytics, optimization of the conversions taking place as well as the testing phase.

Airbnb and its Digital marketing Success

• Based on the above TCEO Model an analysis has been done on one of the leading firms employing digital marketing as a strategy to hone their marketing prowess. Airbnb as most of us know is a global travel accommodation provider which has been listed as one of the most innovative firms when it comes to digital marketing in numerous surveys. Its basic business model works on the principle of serving as an intermediary between hosts who are willing to provide accommodation at a given price and travelers who need a place to stay while on a visit to a new location at a given cost. It has been making use of digital marketing strategy to improve its visibility and build its brand awareness among both the travelers as well as the hosts. A few of its notable digital marketing employed tools have been listed as follows:Partnering with the Google Display Network by investing in the Google Search ads to improve its listings from a mere 10,000 up to 80,000 and thus improving on its visibility among the potential users.
• Incorporating CraigList on its portfolio of offered tools to generate more traffic for the website as well as for the end users by listing a hosts property as available for rent for a shorter period of time. This proved to be a win-win situation for both the end user as well as for CraigList and Airbnb in return.
• By being active on the various social media marketing channels like Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For example its YouTube channels served as a medium for users to post and promote unvisited parts of cities by tourists. It's campaign Don't just go there, Live there drew large attention among its potential user base.
• Introduction of a company operated blog by user content contribution. The blog (blog.airbnb.com) serves as an information provider to the end users in terms of what to do when in a given city, how to travel like a localite, etc to build the user involvement as well as the firm's brand image.
• It also has local city guides like Airbnb Neighbourhoods, a microsite called as Stories which hosts videos posted from both the hosts as well as the travelers as well as Pineapple, which is basically a print magazine which mentions about the community involvement in different locations.
• It also makes use of promotional tools like Video contests to include user generated content in terms of images or short videos about a property or its location, pricing, etc.

Airbnb has a vision which revolves around belonging and all their digital marketing initiatives have been in sync with their firm's vision. The initiatives have been designed in a manner that it engages and makes use of their potential users participation for content creation in many aspects like upload of videos to highlight properties available on rent, etc. 

Results achieved by Airbnb With the incorporation of the digital marketing tools, the firm has achieved a valuation of US $25bn in the FY'16 as well as a spike in its number of followers on Facebook to 2.75 mn and 0.47 mn. on Twitter. Its market rentals increased from 2652 in FY'10 to 16,483 in FY'14 as well as its New York revenue clocked at around US $ 450 mn. It clearly shows how an investment in a relevant marketing tool can bring significant results for a firm over a given period of time and as in the case of Airbnb, make it a market leader as well.

Airbnb's results have reaffirmed the belief in the classic definition of Marketing as a domain being associated with conversations. These could be about a commodity or a branded product or a service and the digital aspect of marketing serves as a tracker of these conversations over the Internet and how the same can be used for the improvement of the products and the services offered by the marketer. These when in in sync with the needs of the target consumer segment can result in a win-win situation for all.