Digital Marketing Analytics and Strategy. Essay Sample

Digital Marketing can be identified as the marketing efforts that are employed by an organization to attract, connect, as well as retain current and potential customers using different digital channels. Organizations need to create compelling digital plans that help to satisfy marketing objectives. Therefore, this paper focuses on Google Merchandise Store, which is an example of an E-commerce website that deals with Google-branded merchandise and products. The paper will also explore the digital analysis plus the incorporation of a digital marketing plan for the corporation. Furthermore, the paper will expound on the critical analysis and justification of the various aspects that are incorporated to develop as well as effectively implement a digital plan for Google Merchandise Store.

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Company Overview

Google LLC is an internationally recognised American Multinational Technology Company that offers various internet services and products such as search engines, cloud computing, as well as online advertising technologies (Ward, 2018). Fleck (2018) noted that the company earned the first spot in the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands as it received a brand value that was above $245 Billion. Currently, the company is working towards improving its customer base using new projects such as Google Genomics, Longevity, and The Liftware Spoon, (Ward, 2018).

Google Merchandise Store is identified as the official store of Google as it contains products that are produced by Google (Fleck, 2018). Currently, the organisation is trying to develop new and effective methods of marketing the website to attract customers as well as to make them aware of the existence of new products. The methods developed should also be able to help the company connect with its customer base. To accomplish this intention, a digital marketing plan needs to be developed so that the company can be able to integrate marketing communication effectively.

SWOT Analysis

Internal Analysis (Strengths and Weaknesses)

Internal Capabilities and Resources

Internal analysis can be identified as the internal capacities of the organisation that can help the company to identify its core strengths and weaknesses. The most significant internal strength of the corporation is that the company has adequate resources that are both tangible and intangible (Fleck, 2018). The company has capable of digital media that can be used to communicate with customers. Moreover, the corporation has effective equipment, modern facilities as well as access to the latest technologies that can be used to implement their digital marketing strategy.

According to Kingsnorth (2019), the major digital channels used include email marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, SEO & PPC, and content marketing. The main digital channels used by Google Merchandise Store in building visitor attraction on its website include email, content, SEO & PPC, and social media marketing. The different marketing channels enables the organisation to reach a large number of customers. Even with this strength, the organisation, has some weaknesses, such as majorly depending on advertising (Trefis Team, 2019). Although advertising is a good marketing strategy, it is not only the available method that can be used in reaching the global online retail market. The company's overdependence on advertising has raised speculation's on the firm's future. For instance, the firm made about 86% of the total revenue from projects that were advertisement related (Trefis Team, 2019). Thus, the change in income might significantly damage the company.

The firm also has a widespread reputation as well as a sufficient customer base that helps to ensure that the company will have a high customer response in regards to their digital marketing plan (Trefis Team, 2019). However, despite the numerous strengths, Google Merchandise Store lags behind and might be unable to cope with the future technological requirements of the world. Despite the resources being effective, they are limited and would become obsolete in the future due to the rapidly developing technological industry.

In terms of digital channels, the existing data and the current data on digital marketing, it is clear that customers are now dictating what they want, and where they want their products through the existing digital channels such as Google and Facebook. In other words, consumers have now become creators and critics since they ask for more personalised products depending on their taste and preferences. According to a Deloitte Review (2015) on customer engagement close to 50% of clients currently express interest on customised products, which is a great strength of the Google's merchandise store since it offers customised products and services in most locations across the globe. The Google Merchandise store offers branded apparels, among many other products. Google enjoys further strengths, such as being the king of online research, having a vast market share across the globe and generating a lot of revenues on an annual basis.

According to the Business Strategy Hub (2019), Google has a market share of 28% across all desktops searches, and in almost every month Google produces more than 1.2 million hits, making it the greatest traffic generator. Finally, on the strengths, Google has high adaptability, which means it can venture into any business and compete favourably (Business Strategy Hub, 2019). For instance, in the case of Google's merchandise store, it is highly likely that the firm will stop a nothing to ensure the dominance of the digital platform globally. Nevertheless, despite the above strengths, Google has a weakness in an excessive advertisement, which increases speculation of its next move to competitors. Besides, recently Google products have been boycotted by advertisers in the name of hate-filled content, which is another great weakness that can affect its online merchandise store.

External Analysis (Opportunities and Threats)

Macro Analysis and Micro Analysis

Marketing Trends

The macro-environment can be identified as the global environment that induces external pressure on the operations of the company. Google Merchandise Store can be identified as an online store that offers products to customers found in various parts of the world (Sasko, 2010). The corporation intends to implement its digital marketing strategy and thus is required to gain an insight into the different legislations and governments of the areas that it will implement the plan. The biggest opportunity for this organisation is that it is capable of opening new production industries as different countries such as the United Kingdom have policies that support an effective investment of the corporation. Nevertheless, one of the greatest threats that can have a severe impact on the company is that the ongoing changes within the company can affect the external operations of the organisation, which will, in turn, affect what the corporation has to offer the country of residence.

Buyer persona

Analytics is a good customer journey as it enables a company to make more money. According to Sasko (2010), customer journey mapping is currently popular. In business, making it right can boost personalised offerings and branding, result in increased marketing ROI and revenue, and upgrading marketing strategy. In bringing value to a healthy balance of quantitative and qualitative insights and knowledge on customer-facing functions concerning the market are essential. Buyer persona also acts as semi-fictional representations of the ideal customers based on data and research. They help in product development that suits the need of customers. In other words, through the buyer persona analytics, organisations are able to understand prospective customers better, which makes it easier for tailoring content, product development, and understanding specific needs and behaviours of the customers, as well as concerns of the target audience. Specifically, having a deep understanding of the buyer’s persona leads to better sales follow up. Google's Merchandise Store can utilise the opportunity of understanding buyer persona to meet the need of consumers in order to generate more sales. On the contrary, understanding the buyer’s persona brings about the threat of incurring a lot of costs for carrying out research and meeting the customer needs. These costs act as great barriers, which is a threat to the progress of Google’s Merchandise Store.

Competitor Analysis

The biggest competitor of Google Merchandise Store is Amazon Inc. Amazon is described as one of the giant online retailers. More so, there are other competitors in digital marketing, such as Apple and Facebook. However, Amazon still remains to be the greatest Google competitor. The two main competitors Google and Amazon, are in dissimilar businesses because Google is more of a search engine, while Amazon is an online store. However, Google is mainly fuelled by advertisements, which presents a great opportunity for the Google Merchandise Store since the lucrative advertising of Google is just a step away from marketing its product. Therefore, Google's Merchandise Store can boost its sales and create a global wariness because of the fact that it is a search company. Nevertheless, Amazon is not lagging behind in terms of its development, and there many other competitors in the digital forefront such as Zalando Behave, Facebook, and many other companies, which are aiming to generate more sales. Such firm’s act as a great threat to the dominance of Google's Merchandise Store.

Key Influencers

The overall goal of the Google Merchandise store is to organise retail for products across the world and make the products collectively available from the click of a button (Thompson, 2018). This goal will obviously be influenced by several stakeholders, who act as the key influencers of Google's Merchandise Store. Meyer (2017) asserts that Google stakeholders are diverse because of the firm's array of products. Google diversification starts from its products such as Google Fiber Internet, Google Glass, Google Search, among many other products and services, which are offered to the customer base. With the many stakeholders from the various products and services, the firm has to focus on research and development to remain innovative, which is a great opportunity for Google's Merchandise Store. Therefore, Google must always address the interests of its stakeholder's corporate social responsibilities. These responsibilities act as a great opportunity for the success of Google's Merchandise Store, making the platform a great contender at the global level. However, a threat exists in the fact Google’s Stakeholders can influence the strategic direction of the Merchandise platform negatively. For instance, if the users who are the top priority stakeholders view the platform negatively, the sales will greatly reduce, which act as a threat to Google Merchandise Store.

Google Merchandise Store Plan

The Google Merchandise Store deals with a lot of items ranging from apparels, bags, drinkware accessories, among many other products, as shown in figure 2. The digital store is likely to thrive mainly because the firm is a global publicly-traded company, with a lot of other investments. As such, below is a plan to ensure the success of the digital store. The plan will begin with the step of identifying objectives and the target audience.