Evaluation of BBC Earth's Digital Media Marketing Strategies Report

This report provides a detailed analysis of BBC Earth's digital marketing strategies, focusing on their communication practices, audience engagement, and the challenges they face in promoting eco-friendly content. The report begins with an introduction to the rapidly evolving landscape of digital media marketing and the specific context of BBC Earth, a leading wildlife documentary production house. It then critically evaluates BBC Earth's digital and marketing communications, examining their market analysis, content marketing tactics, and social media presence, including the use of short-form videos and key performance indicators. The analysis extends to the evaluation of audience and consumption patterns, utilizing communication models such as Schramm's and AIDA to understand how BBC Earth engages with its target audience, particularly young viewers. Furthermore, the report identifies challenges BBC Earth faces when promoting eco-friendly content, including technological shifts, competition, revenue generation, and the need for personalized customer experiences. The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of adapting to digital marketing trends and maintaining creative and informative content to reach the target audience.

Running head: DIGITAL MEDIA MARKETING
DIGITAL MEDIA MARKETING
Student’s Name
University Name
Author note

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Introduction
Digital media marketing communications are changing at a rapid rate due to the
development of technologies and emergence of new technologies. The purpose of this report
is to evaluate the digital marketing practices of BBC Earth. BBC earth is a service provider
offering wildlife documentary production house in the world.
Discussion and analysis
TASK 1: Critical evaluation of digital and marketing communications practices of BBC
Earth promoting its products and services
Market analysis
There has been a shift from traditional mediums to digital forms of communication.
The consumers are more inclined towards their Smartphone devices, computers and laptops
giving up television (Holliman and Rowley 2014). The channel viewers are more inclined
towards the internet. There has been a shift in the viewing habits of the consumers. There has
been a rise in the alternate media channels. With the evolvement of new digital platforms,
there has been a distinct shift in the behavior and preferences of the consumers. There has
been an increase in the demand for content with quality (Jefferson and Tanton 2015). In order
to crater to this trend and changing preferences of the consumers, video making has become
popular which is an increasing opportunity for BBC Earth. Therefore, BBC Earth implements
different forms of content marketing tactics (BBC Earth. 2020).
Digital and marketing communications practices
The brand offering their services to the consumers have been focusing on social
media platforms to increase their reach to the consumers, especially if the content is
particularly targeted towards the younger consumers. BBC Earth has been providing short

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form video in social media platforms for both the local and global context. They believe in
“fishing where the fish are” (BBC Earth. 2020). They focus on building viewership for the
content. The brand drives traffic into the content through Life Story series. It also used a call
to action that is “tune in and experience the full series” (BBC Earth. 2020). These digital
communications practices drivers the audience to watch the whole series of the video content
on its network. The short form video content enables the brand to reach to wide group of
consumer segments (Leeflang et al. 2014). The documentary videos enable the brand to reach
to wide audiences driving the people on their websites and persuading them to tune in.
Furthermore, the brand provides new stories each day along with their short form videos. The
brand focuses on key performance indicators for the marketing team such as number of likes,
views and shares (Leeflang et al. 2014). BBC Earth also has a YouTube channel with Google.
The content is posted on all the social media platforms and develops a detail marketing
strategy to keep the content exclusively(BBC Earth. 2020).
TASK 2: Using marketing communications models, critically evaluate BBC Earth
audience and consumption patterns
Schramm’s Model of Communication

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Source: (Schramm 1955)
As per Schramm’s model of communication, information is useless until its meanings are
effectively communicated to the target audience. Schramm stressed on the importance of
encoding, it initiates the process of communication by converting the information into
meaningful content (Ullal and Hawaldar 2018). The overall effectiveness of the
communication is dependent on whether the recipients have decoded the information in the
way the speaker intends to communicate. Henceforth encoding and decoding are two most
important factors of communication. Schramm’s models are based on the above principle
(Ullal and Hawaldar 2018).
AIDA model of communication

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AIDA (Strong 1925)
Source: (Narula 2011)
As per the AIDA model of communication, there are four main stages a consumer
goes through while they view an advertisement. The main aim of the advertisement is to
attract the consumers and gain their attention (Narula 2011). The second step is to invoke the
interest and desire of the consumers in the minds of the consumers. The advertisement must
be effective and creative enough to involve desire in the minds of the consumers and enable
them to make a purchase or subscribe (Narula 2011). The last step is to incorporate an
effective call to action to enable the consumer to take a favourable action towards purchasing
the product.
Audiences that engage with social media content
BBC Earth targets the young viewers who are mostly active on the social media
platforms. As per data and research, it has been identified that the local young citizens favors
the beauty of the natural world. The episodes of BBC Earth have attracted the viewers

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between the age group of 16 to 35 years (Royle and Laing 2014). The digital marketing
strategies such as the video footage of all the Earth’s oceans made it widely famous among
the young consumers in the UK. Considering the global context, both the young adults and
teenagers had viewed the contents provided by the company. Therefore, it can be said that
social media has driven success for the brand (Tagg 2015). The young audience can share and
comment the content provided by the brand. With the UK based prodco’s blue chip series, the
number of audience viewers went up drastically.
Engagement patterns of the consumers in both local and global contexts
Mobile phone and social media contents have been boosting the growth of streaming
ideas among all age group people among the local and global consumers especially among
the Generation Z and millennial (Ullal and Hawaldar 2018). The young consumers
(millennial and Gen Z) has been spending more than 3 hours in a day consuming the video
contents and shows on their electronic devices as confirmed by Trifecta Research Group
(research and advisory firm). The young consumer’s behavior and consumption patterns
drives the content providers to alter their marketing strategies and optimize their contents to
adjust with the smaller mobile phone screens to infiltrate the industry and cope up with the
declines in TV subscriptions (Vernuccio and Ceccotti 2015). The young consumers having
interest and passion for natural history are more inclined towards the wildlife and other
informative contents. BBC Earth ensures that they align their content with the interests and
preferences of the age groups and stay young in mind and spirits. The brand has inclined their
content towards the younger generation by providing emotionally engaging and immersive
experience on screen. The young consumers are more interested to experience on air and
other elements which can be brought forward online via social media platforms (Ullal and
Hawaldar 2018). It saves them time, effort and money. The young consumers are impatiently

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and distractive, therefore they demand for short and concise informative but innovative
contents. Consumers look for resonant and relevant contents (Ullal and Hawaldar 2018).
Task 3: Challenges and issues BBC Earth faces when promoting eco-friendly contents
on social media
The brand mainly faces challenges in technological perspectives. There has been a
shift in the trend of standard definition to High definition video contents with extensive focus
on higher image quality and higher resolution image. Therefore, all the video contents offered
by the brands need to be of higher resolutions (Vernuccio and Ceccotti 2015). Further, there
are various governmental media policies both in local and global countries. As per the latest
trends, there has been an emergence of 3D technology; however, the home devices such as
mobile phones are incapable of 3D content consumption. The brand has extensive digital
media marketing strategy, however, the challenge lies in keeping the audience attracted and
grabbed on to the broadcasts or contents (Yasmin, Tasneem and Fatema 2015). With the
emergence of social media marketing, there has been a rise in fierce competition from the
competitors. The minds of the target audience especially the younger generation on social
media can be easily diverted by the competitors. They can easily switch the brands based on
their interest and preferences. Therefore, it is a challenge for BBC Earth to hold on to loyal
customers (Ullal and Hawaldar 2018). Most important, social media contents and
advertisings or services provided by BBC Earth bring in less revenue. Majority of the
consumers also prefer going in for free contents rather than subscribing or downloading the
whole series. This saves them time and money. The millennial and generation Z consumers
are hesitant to pay for the videos or contents provided by the brand especially considering the
number of competitors offering better and high quality videos (Royle and Laing 2014). The
challenge also lies in connecting with the target audience on both individual and personal

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level and improves the customer experience. It is believed by Royle and Laing (2014), that
creating and publishing content on the social media sites are not enough for the brand.
Partnering with alliances, generating interest, gaining loyal consumers and promoting the
content is a different challenge. Enabling the consumers to share the content and follow their
pages is highly time-consuming (Tagg 2015). Quality visuals of the cointents are one of the
most crucial factors of social media marketing. It requires skills and creativity to create them
and get it shared on the social media platforms. Social media marketing strategies are needed
to be switched from time to time irrespectively of valuable and relevant content. It needs to
be highly entertaining, relevant and information considering different formats (Ullal and
Hawaldar 2018). It is recommended to implement emotional appeal and great story to
maintain its standards on the social media platforms.
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above analysis it can be concluded that BBC Earth has tactfully
shifted their focus from traditional channels of communication to digital promotions and
advertisements. They are targeting the young audience while ensuring creative and
informative content. The report has analyzed the challenges and issues faced by the brand in
social media platforms.

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