How Media Companies Can Leverage Digital Marketing and Integration to Grow the Business

Today’s media companies are expected to be at the forefront of innovation, both when it comes to the content they produce and to the ways they market that content.

Remember Netflix’s Black Mirror episode where you could choose the ending? It was beyond cool. But it was also SO last year!

What can media companies do to quench consumers’ thirst for innovation? How can they win consumers’ hearts (and wallets)?

This guide goes in-depth analyzing digital marketing tactics and integration  — all in an effort to help your media company gain the spotlight.

What Is Digital Marketing?

While today’s digital marketing simply means marketing, it goes beyond the use of conventional methods of promoting and selling goods and services. This type of marketing entails the leveraging of online marketing techniques such as email marketing, search marketing, and social media marketing — to name only a few of the tools at your disposal. Additionally, strategies like social media scraping are employed to gather valuable insights from online platforms, further enhancing the effectiveness of digital campaigns.

This is exactly how modern businesses are making themselves and their products are known to their target audience. 

The beauty of digital marketing is that its benefits cut across all industries, including the media industry. By media companies, we are not only referring to organizations that offer print, television, and radio broadcasting services. Not at all!

The media industry is massive! It covers a wide array of streams ranging from advertising, networking, broadcasting, news, print and publication, digital, recording, as well as motion pictures.

The media industry is estimated to attain a worth of USD 2.6 trillion by 2023. See the graph below.

Image source: Statista

With such a promising future, media companies must not become complacent, but instead, align themselves accordingly to reap the projected harvests moving forward. One way of ensuring business growth is leveraging digital marketing and integration. 

Why is digital marketing something that businesses mustn’t miss? 

As digital marketing continues to evolve its benefits become more apparent. Here are some of the reasons media businesses must adopt various digital marketing techniques. 

1. It is the most powerful form of marketing in the digital era. A survey conducted by Forbes revealed that 82 percent of modern consumers conduct their product research online. At the same time, Tech Crunch reported that 79 percent of consumers shop online. How then can media companies get hold of these consumers, if it isn’t through digital marketing? 

Image source: LYFE Marketing

2. Digital marketing is the most measurable type of marketing. The ease of measuring the return on investments (ROI) of a form of marketing should be among the first factors you consider when devising a marketing strategy. Media companies shouldn’t use a marketing strategy just because everyone is doing it. With digital marketing, you don’t have to keep guessing whether your efforts are working or not. Unlike traditional methods of marketing such as radio and billboards, every digital marketing tactic is measurable. As such, it is easy to tell what is working, what isn’t, and how well to blend various techniques to generate the highest ROI. 

3. You can target and reach the kind of customers you want. Every business aims for an ideal situation – being able to target and reach the right buyers. Digital marketing has made this possible. Of the utmost importance is to identify your ideal buyers, use the various digital marketing techniques appropriately, and boom! before long, you begin seeing positive results. Search engine optimization enables businesses to reach consumers who search the web for topics and content related to your business. On the other hand, display, pay-per-click, and social media advertising make it possible for brands to target individuals who might be interested in their products based on the general characteristics as well as demographic information. 

Image source: Smart Insights

4. Digital marketing allows for the highest level of personalization. Nowadays, consumers are highly liberated, and with competition intensifying day by day, they are more demanding than ever. A customer wouldn’t think twice when moving to your competition when they feel you aren’t giving them personalized attention. Not to worry, though. Digital marketing enables you to personalize customer experience so that every customer feels welcome and appreciated. 

4 Ways of Leveraging Digital Marketing to Ensure Business Growth 

In this article, we take a look at some highly-effective, easy-to-implement techniques that you can adopt for your media business to help you make the most out of your digital marketing efforts. 

• Personalization

Personalization entails paying attention to the needs and preferences of your target market. This strategy helps media companies to market the right products to the right person and at the right time. It makes your customers feel that they are being heard, which generates more meaningful interactions, and in turn, increased conversion rates. 

As already mentioned, modern consumers are keen on finding personalized services. That’s where they are most likely to give their loyalty. You can easily achieve this through digital marketing. Begin by linking your database to your website – if you haven’t done it already.

Each time a person re-visits your website, welcome them with targeted offers. If the greeting yields return purchases, use the information you gather to refine customer profiles, an effort that will help you market more effectively to them. 

You don’t want to deal with the aftermath of customers ditching you for the competition. It is, perhaps, the most unpleasant thing to happen to any company.

For instance, in 2017, 41 percent of consumers switched brands, citing reasons such as lack of trust and poor personalization, according to Accenture. The reiteration cost organizations in the United States a whopping $756 billion. 

That is how important personalization is amongst modern consumers. It shows that the appetite for personalized products and services is bigger today compared to the past decades. The appetite has grown so much that consumers have shown readiness to pay a premium price for products they consider unique to them.

Unlike in the past, they do not mind sharing personal data as long as they can receive personalized offers and recommendations.

The premium consumers are prepared to pay for a customized product or service by category

Image source: AB Tasty

Above you can clearly see the percentage of people who would be willing to pay more than the market price in exchange for a customized product/service. Pay extra attention to the books, music and entertainment category at the bottom of the graph.

A whole 34 percent answered in the affirmative as far as their willingness to pay 10 percent more for a product/service is concerned. Your media company cannot afford to ignore these interesting, eye-opening statistics. 

Netflix and YouTube have reaped massive benefits from personalization. Their ability to create one-to-one marketing experiences for their customers is one of the reasons they continue to conquer the world of media. 

Ready to do the same?

It begins with the collection of ample and qualitative data about your target audience. Note that the volumes of recommendations you get are dependent on the experiences that your customers have with your brand. Make it worthwhile. 

However, do note that nothing is perfect, not even AI/ML-based personalization. Some of the personalization issues have become memes:

Image via Reddit

Those two aren’t quite related, right?

Right!

This was an undeniable glitch on Netflix’s recommendation engine, right?

Right!

BUT the fact that this is NOT the only meme about Netflix recommendations (or Netflix in general) tells us two things:

1. People are SO accustomed to media companies getting their preferences right that the occasional glitch is funny just because it’s so out of the ordinary.
2. As a media company, you have to offer at least this level of personalization. People may offer their personal data willingly but only because they assume they will get something (read: spot-on personalized recommendations) worthwhile in return. 

• Go Social

According to We Are Social, the number of internet users across the globe has grown by 400 since October 2018 – a 10 percent yearly growth. Out of the 4.388 billion global internet users in 2019, 3.484 billion are social media users. The number of people using mobile phones grew by 2 percent to 5.112 billion. 

Image source: Smart Insights

The world’s biggest social media platform, Facebook, has 2.4 billion users, with WhatsApp and YouTube also enjoying a huge following in excess of one billion. The world population stands at about 7.7 billion people. With over 3 billion people spending time on social media, this spells good news for businesses. 

Irrespective of the reasons for this growth, the figures are undoubtedly quite encouraging. Internet and the rise of social media have changed and continue to change the world. The diagram below illustrates the number of social media users by the platform.

Image source: Our World in Data

Media companies must seek to squeeze maximum value out of their social media marketing efforts. Consider taking ample time to determine the most effective platform to pay the most attention. Do not stick to only one social platform. Determine which platforms can back up the major one depending on the traits of your audiences. 

While Facebook remains the market leader, other platforms such as Instagram are also exhibiting exponential growth. Instagram’s visual nature comes in handy when targeting younger generations. You cannot ignore the value that Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat bring to the table.

The same goes for ‘dark social outlets’ (social media networks where you can’t easily pinpoint the source of traffic or shares) like WhatsApp. The most important thing is to understand your target audience first, establish their social media patterns and behaviors, and then create a digital marketing strategy around these elements. 

It doesn’t end there. You also need to show the world, and especially your target market, that you have built relationships with recognized players in the industry. 

This is where influencers come into play. Influencers are people who enjoy a huge (or at least above average in the case of micro-influencers) social media following and are renowned personalities in the media industry. 

If you are currently working on scaling your media firm, one of the greatest moves for your company right now is identifying an appropriate influencer. Influencer marketing is top on the list of the best and fastest ways of building a brand online and also raising awareness among a company’s target audience. It is even growing at a faster rate than digital ads. 

Other benefits of influencer marketing are found in its ability to enrich your company’s content strategy, reach the target audience effectively, offer incredible value to the customers, and the fact that it wins win-win partnerships. 

Image source: SIDE BUY