Content Marketing as a Crucial Part of Digital Marketing: Retaining its Customers Engagement

The Oretical Background

This chapter presents the related information, classified literature, and studies, which are relevant to the present study. The review of related literature in which the researcher diligently collected from different sources such as books, journal articles, internet website sources, theses, dissertations, and other reading materials served as the information of the investigation. Hence, provide a reference to the conceptualization of the present study.

Review of Related Literature

The significance and relevance of digital marketing on online platforms as part of the marketing strategy practiced by businesses of any type and size has from year to year in the era of digitalization. Major changes with the focus shifting from traditional marketing methods towards digital marketing required a rethinking of new and effective marketing strategies of businesses that wished to retain their customer’s engagement and remain competitive in the new digital era. Thus, content marketing has become the key to a successful online marketing campaign and the most essential tool of digital marketing. However, in the past years, many businesses tried in creating content marketing but did not succeed. According to Patrutio and Baltes, “content marketing is a crucial part of digital marketing”. Hence, it is understandable why many businesses did not succeed in retaining their customer’s engagement with the use of content marketing in digital channels.

Demographics

Demographic variables are the most popular bases for segmenting customer groups. One reason is that consumer needs, wants, preferences, and usage rates are often highly associated with demographic variables.

According to Daniel Schneider, Demographics are elemental to the target audience analysis, the foundation of identifying your target audience is knowing their place, age, and sex. Get them wrong and it distorts the whole analysis. In addition, the University of Wisconsin-Madison said that it is well understood that the choices or preferences for products differ across various customer groups. These preferences directly relate to the demographic characteristics of the consumers, such as the type of family, age, income, education, and ethnicity as well. Thus, the analysis and the statistical recording of the population is usually the demographics, where it covers the population in a given area and measures the parameters within that category. In the demographics of websites, the setting is your website and your users are your subject group.

Age

For marketers, age identifies which networks perform best. In marketing strategy, many businesses know the age range of their target customers, and use this as a guide to what type of advertising they will release for their target audience. Hence, demographic information is one of the most significant considerations in choosing the medium to distribute the targeted content of the business.

Gender

In using the internet for a source of online shopping, networking, and relationship management (business and its customers B2C or between a business and other businesses B2B), gender is the key variable in marketing segmentation and analysis of marketers often indicates different responses from men and women. Additionally, according to Budacia and Perju-Mitran, a deep understanding of the moderating effects of gender on different customer intentions in online marketing communication will produce and yield findings of both practical relevance and scientific understanding.

Civil Status

Individuals with different civil statuses can respond differently to the various attributes of the business’s marketing, they may want to see or purchase the product from different locations/platforms or different dimensions of value. The perception of different values like functional value, financial value, individual value, and social value can be so different for individuals with different civil statuses.

Content Marketing

Content marketing seeks to attract and retain consumers by regularly developing and curating appropriate and useful content to alter or enhance consumer behavior, according to Dr. Gupta. Andrew said that Content marketing is a technique for developing and publishing content on websites and social media as well. Materials such as blogs, images pdf white papers, and website articles are all considered as online content marketing. On the analysis conducted by Vasques in 2015, as quoted by Weerasinghee M., Content can be delivered in several formats, including articles, infographics, slide decks, case studies, white papers, e-books, quizzes, memes, and photos, etc. Similar to the study of Kim K., Digital content marketing includes the creation and publication of original content such as blog posts, photos, videos, website resource pages, case studies, or white papers to enhance a brand’s visibility. Thus, according to HiveFire, cited by Kim KyungOk in the year 2015, “One of the dominant marketing tactics in the digital online platform is digital content marketing”. Meanwhile, in today’s world, traditional marketing strategies are being left behind by digital content marketing due to a wider range of target audience users of the internet. Hence, content marketing is the present and especially the future of digital marketing and inherently to marketing in general.

Therefore, a digital marketing strategy cannot be successful without having quality content marketing. Digital content is defined as: ‘bit-based objects distributed through electronic channels’. Structured analysis is carried out based on a series of questions to define some of the distinctive features of digital content marketing.

Similarly, the literature examines the importance of content marketing through digital online platforms and how content can be presented in a variety of concepts or formats to utilize successful content marketing. Additionally, how content marketing can be effective to attract and retain customers with online engagement. In contrast, the present study seeks to examine the impact of content marketing that captures the engagement of ILoveMilktea shop customers in Calbayog City, developing appropriate content marketing through analyzing its customer engagement. In this study, the cited literature will help to identify the right content format in utilizing quality content marketing.

Thus, the aforementioned literature reveals that content marketing has a positive impact on the customer’s online engagement and therefore the authors achieved its objective.

Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is the most powerful connection between a consumer and a brand. There have been several definitions and theories about customer engagement. Based on the customer engagement theory proposed by Pansari and Kumar, if a customer is satisfied with his or her relationship with the company and has an emotional connection to the company, it can be assumed that the customer is engaged with the company. They explain how customer management has evolved over the years from a point of view, where the focus shifted from transactions to relationships during the 1990s, however, the relation with customers and a focus on profitability, loyalty, and satisfaction is not enough. Thus, this has led to the term “engagement”, meaning to engage customers in all possible ways, leading to an emotional bonding between a firm and its customers.

Arnold et al. theorizes that the effectiveness of customer engagement marketing arises from the establishment of psychological ownership and self-transformation. Anyhow, with the usage of social media channels for marketing activities over the years, marketers recognize that it is not only sufficient to understand how long the customer will remain with the brand but also to understand whether other avenues can contribute to the company beyond sales. This led to the rise of the term Customer Engagement in marketing. Customer engagement has therefore been a practice for quite some time, but only by quantifying the value derived from customer engagement can companies justify their efforts. Companies should identify, understand, and manage not only the buying behavior of customers but also the customer’s behavior to assess the value added by the engagement efforts. Thus, studying the formation and evolution of these intermediary activities – like engagement – is worthwhile to better understand the true mechanisms by which advertising affects outcomes in marketing settings. Additionally, customer satisfaction has the largest total effect on customer engagement.

Similarly to this study, it examines customer engagement in the business world where attracting and retaining customer engagement has been considered a strategy, investment, connection, and interaction with the businesses beyond what is necessary. Additionally, this study as well identifies the various factors that can help build and retain customer engagement of the business. In contrast, this study did not further discuss the associated customer’s emotional perspective and the customer’s buying behavior. Furthermore, this study focuses on the factors that capture the engagement of ILoveMilktea customers through their digital content marketing in terms of its product feature, branding, caption, graphic design, and online videos of the business on social media platforms.

Branding

Marketers have believed for many years that the target customers or audience began with a large range of possible brands in mind and methodically they will winnow their choice before they choose which one to buy. After the acquisition, their relationship or connection with the company usually focused on the use or quality of the product or service itself. Additionally, according to Kumar, J., and Kumar, V., brand engagement is emerging as a popular marketing relationship variable that enables generating company results that are promising to the market.

Caption texts

Marketing analysis in the previous articles has concentrated on deriving brand information from textual user-generated content and did not consider brand-related images to a large extent. And therefore, the aggregation and mapping of the textual data or information in the form of associative networks for resulting image clusters enable marketers to gain concrete insights through inferencing what customers think and feel about their brand about the various contents and contexts. Furthermore, according to Leduc, the importance of captioning in society is growing for a reason that captions allow d/Deaf and hard of hearing individuals to watch videos and images. Also, captions enable us to help the viewers/audience to focus on and remember the provided information more easily and let people watch it in a sound-sensitive environment.

Graphic design

According to Thomas, “a hugely important aspect of the marketing strategy is visuals for content marketers, visual content is now a vital part of any content strategy, whether it is videos, infographics, still images, or charts. Thus, the most essential part of your graphic design is that your photos and videos should always match the theme and goal/objective that you are trying to convey to your target audience because once you know that very well, it’ll be just a matter of choosing the right materials/resources to visually boost your content and be able to get more people talking about it”. Additionally, marketing managers and designers often agree that visual codes typify those product types in terms of product and content design, these ‘category-based visual codes’ refers to the structured and graphic features such as unique textures, formats, typefaces, layouts, shapes, colors of course and illustrations most commonly seen in a given category.

Online videos

According to Leduc, “It does not come to you as a surprise, but online video use is increasingly growing. Today, in one month, there are more videos posted on the web than television has made in the past thirty years. It shows that people just can’t seem to get enough of it and cause copious quantities of video flooding the internet”. Every day, more than half a billion people watch videos on Facebook, and one-third of all online activity is spent on watching videos. Thus, video is rapidly overtaking all other types of content when it comes to attracting and entertaining your target audience. Hence, in a recent study, it is no longer a matter of how effective the video is towards the target audience but it’s what you can do to make your video content more successful to reach the right people/audience as a marketer.

Additionally, owing to the success of the video, more organizations and businesses are turning to it for their promotional efforts. In a sense that it was proven true that video can boost SEO and brand awareness and as well as improve its ability to do so with captions.

Product feature

To distinguish their products and be able to achieve a competitive edge over their competitors, businesses often introduce their product features. Features are the characteristics that your service or product has or does, they would always matter for a reason that they provide your target customers/audience with hints about how well your product will deliver its benefits to them. New and unique features can provide a competitive advantage of it and when products can be so easily compared with your other competitors’ products – as the internet booms in our generation and make increasingly possible – target consumers can choose the products with the most features. Hence, product characteristics are the attributes of your products that define their appearance, capabilities, and components as well. It is a slice of business functionality for the end use of that product that has a corresponding benefit or set of advantages/benefits and therefore the product feature should be prioritized based on how well the business achieves its objectives.

Digital Marketing Platform

What channels of marketing are used most often by your visitors? Are there extremely dedicated to social media? Or are they sticking to conventional contact by email? You need to determine and identify where the target audience will be reached and how. According to Yin, digital media refers to any type of media for its creation or production, distribution, storage, and view.

The study proposes a theory-guided computational approach that will consolidate distinct sources of data spanning unstructured image, text, and video data, which systematically measures the modes of target audience persuasion and will unveil the multimedia content design marketing strategies. In contrast, the author further studies whether using the Internet Water Army will help sales, and the earlier to purchase the water armies, the more likers, bashers, haters, and neutral fans it can attract. Thus, similar to the present study, it investigates what is the best content delivery strategy for ILoveMilktea in terms of its product feature, branding, graphic design, caption or text, and videos.