Abstract
Digital marketing has been a major trend in the business world. Many companies have implemented digital marketing activities and/or strategies to start up, explore and/or expand their businesses. In applying digital technologies to marketing, companies can achieve their marketing objectives more effectively. Academicians and practitioners have widely discussed the trend of changing marketing channels from traditional approaches towards digital marketing channels in advanced countries. Literature available in the markets associates the evolution of marketing to the industrial revolution, evolving from traditional approach to digitalization approach. This book comprises the essentials of digital marketing. It includes theories, concepts as well as terminologies and relates them to current trends, opportunities and benefits. This book is written in plain English which enables readers to understand and learn about the content more easily. This book is designed to give the readers a general introduction to digital marketing and how digital marketing activities, strategies and content are implemented in a contemporary business environment. Furthermore, it inspires readers to discover more about the subject with their newly acquired knowledge.
This book has interpreted digital marketing as the marketing of products and/or services with digital technologies, such as online shopping, smartphone applications, display advertising on websites, social media and any other digital medium (Waite & Perez-Vega, 2018). Digital marketing refers to using digital channels, devices and platforms (regardless of the online presence of users) to build or promote marketing messages and conducting marketing activities (Yamil, 2019). Furthermore, digital marketing also includes achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2012). Some users might perceive digital marketing as similar to online marketing. Online marketing is the subset of digital marketing. For example, when a smartphone user uses an application on his/her phone, the application is working independently from the Internet and thus considered a form of digital marketing.
This book has covered the main topics related to digital technologies and digital marketing, such as crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, online customer engagement and metrics and analytics. The book contains 12 chapters and gives readers a good ‘place to start’ by arranging the topics accordingly. It starts with a basic introduction to the digital marketing mix, followed by discussing the processes of digital technology adoption, online customers’ experience and engagement, contemporary digital marketing trend as well as online marketing strategies. The latest digital marketing analyses are also covered in this book and includes, for instance, metrics and analytics for websites and social media metric and analytics. Moreover, the opportunities, challenges and constraints faced in promoting and expanding digital marketing are discussed in this book. It explores, for example, the digital marketing skills gap, maintain e-services quality and designing digital content. Theories, concepts and actual examples have been integrated to deliver a robust understanding of this exciting new digital area.
The book includes a discussion on contemporary issues related to innovation theory and innovation adoption process (Rogers, 1995). It would have been more interesting if the authors discussed a case study based on digital marketing activities and/or strategies employed in the real business world. This would have benefited the readers on ‘how’ to respond to specific challenges arising from such actual situations instead of discussing generally. Additionally, it is suggested that this book includes a chapter discussing about the integration of both digital marketing strategies and digital platforms in order to penetrate and/or expand to new markets. Digital marketing platforms have ultimately created great opportunities to marketers and manufacturers in achieving their marketing objectives. Overall, the implementation of digital platforms have changed the traditional ways of doing business and evolved from bricks and mortar to digital channels such as online marketing, App stores, online shopping via Internet or smartphone, e-transaction and e-commerce. There is a general belief that by moving firms towards digitalization world and selling products or services through digital platforms will enhance their capabilities and increase their financial performance. In fact, this reasoning is not only limited to firms involved in selling and buying through digital platforms. There are many factors that influence the success or failure of digital marketing of an individual, team and/or firm. It will be beneficial to the readers if they can take advantage of the book in order to diagnose the critical factors, such as innovation factor that is required to achieve a successful enterprise.
In conclusion, this book has incorporated rich content and information throughout the chapters and has subsequently discussed the digital marketing opportunities, practices, challenges, risks and constraints faced by the business world in promoting and expanding digital marketing. Moving to the 21st century, it is clear that the world is towards digitalization and every country and organization has been willing to digitalize their operations. However, we are still a long way towards achieving the alignment of par digital marketing practices, digital marketing platforms’ infrastructure development in every country in the world and the society’s attitudes towards adopting information technologies. I highly recommend this book as the main reference resources for universities’ students and/or for readers who would like to know more about digital marketing. This book is very useful and it will assist in raising further awareness and attention of individual, team and/or firms to integrate digital marketing into their businesses.
