Blockbuster's Demise: A Case Study in Digital Marketing Strategy

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DIGITAL MARKETING: Case Blockbuster
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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................4
1. Traditional and Digital Marketing.........................................................................................4
1.1 Difference between Traditional and Digital marketing.......................................................4
1.2 Importance for Blockbuster to invest in digital marketing..................................................5
2. Website Optimisation.............................................................................................................5
2.1 Discussion and demonstration of utilisation of website optimization technique by
Blockbuster for improving performance of website..................................................................5
3. Search engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing....................7
Critically discuss how Blockbuster have used Search Engine Optimisation, social media and
content to attract, retain and engage with customer...................................................................7
3.1 Search engine Optimization.................................................................................................7
3.1.1 Key Concept......................................................................................................................7
3.1.2 Technical optimisation......................................................................................................7
3.1.3 On Page optimization........................................................................................................8
3.1.4 Off Page optimization.......................................................................................................8
3.1.5 Analysis.............................................................................................................................8
3.2 Social Media Marketing.......................................................................................................8
3.2.1 Social Media marketing Key Concepts.............................................................................8
3.2.2 Key Social Channels.........................................................................................................9
3.2.3 Social Media Advertising..................................................................................................9
3.3 Content Marketing...............................................................................................................9
4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising and online Display (& video).........................................10
4.1 Pay-per-click advertising (PPC).........................................................................................10
4.1.1 Online display advertising Key Concepts.......................................................................10
4.1.2 Keyword Research Tools................................................................................................10
4.1.3 Keyword research process...............................................................................................10
4.1.4 Campaign Process...........................................................................................................10
4.1.5 Campaign management...................................................................................................11
4.2 Online Display and Video Advertising..............................................................................11
4.2.1 Online Display advertising key Concepts.......................................................................11
4.2.2 Display Ads.....................................................................................................................11
4.2.3 Publishers........................................................................................................................12
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4.2.4 Remarketing....................................................................................................................12
4.2.5 Planning...........................................................................................................................12
4.2.6 Laws and guidelines relating to online display advertising............................................13
5 Email Marketing....................................................................................................................13
Outline the way Blockbuster can incorporate Email marketing into their digital marketing
strategy to attract and retain customers....................................................................................13
5.1 Email Marketing Key concepts..........................................................................................13
5.2 Data....................................................................................................................................13
5.3 Email Design......................................................................................................................14
5.4 Filters..................................................................................................................................14
5.5 Reporting............................................................................................................................14
5.6 Laws...................................................................................................................................14
6 Analytics...............................................................................................................................15
Discuss the ways through which Blockbuster could have made use of ongoing analysis and
management of digital marketing methods discussed within this report.................................15
6.1.1 Web Analytics Key Concept...........................................................................................15
6.1.2 Google analytics..............................................................................................................15
6.1.3 Metrics.............................................................................................................................16
6.1.4 Tool.................................................................................................................................16
Conclusion................................................................................................................................16
References................................................................................................................................17
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Introduction
Digital marketing has opened different way to market and became one of the integral parts of
any business. Lately it has become a trend that an individual spend average 2 hours on social
media on a daily basis while average time increase to 9 hours for teenager. 37% of this total
time user spend for interacting with brand or branded content. For millennial social media
represent majorly relevant ads to them and greatly influence their buying behaviour.
According to Ryan (2017) digital marketing strategy influence the way organisation run their
business. This report includes significant aspects of digital marketing such as website
optimisation, Search engine optimisation, Social media marketing, Content marketing, Online
Display Advertising, Pay-per-click advertising and email marketing. Moving further, this
report discuss and evaluate the way Blockbuster can use digital marketing strategy to prevent
bankruptcy. The aim of this report is to critically evaluate digital marketing strategy for
business growth and profitability.
1. Traditional and Digital Marketing
1.1 Difference between Traditional and Digital marketing
Lately, digital market is gaining prominence in the proximity of marketing; however it is not
same as traditional marketing as digital marketing is capable of attracting client and construct
a brand picture better than traditional marketing. Though, the primary objective of both
traditional marketing and digital marketing is same despite differences in their basic
principles (Todor, 2016). Chaffey and Smith (2012) opined that developing digital marketing
strategy is not different from creating any other marketing plan as customer do not look for
separate plan for both digital and offline platform. Atwal and Williams (2017) arguably stated
organisations must look for developing marketing plan that outline the digital channel
strategy for each major market to build focus and future direction. From this idea the basic
difference that can be identify suggest while traditional marketing focus on developing client
base and better brand picture, digital marketing focuses on developing strategies for various
online channels, targeting the vast market of online service.
Some of the significant differences that can be evident between Traditional marketing and
Digital marketing are cost, tracking, easy analytics and ongoing results.
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Cost of traditional marketing is slightly higher than the cost of digital marketing. For
instance, companies pay million dollars to promote their product through TV, radio, print
media, daily newspaper and magazine, while the cost of digital marketing or promotion
through social media channel is limited. Internet marketing can similarly add cost to the
company, however, still some digital marketing technique are free unlike traditional
marketing technique. Similarly, tracking or evaluate group of viewers is comparatively
difficult in traditional marketing than digital marketing (Atwal and Williams, 2017).
Organisation need to direct overview to track down the result. This is different in digital
marketing as with the help of Google Analytics, organisations can easily track down the
number of viewers. Analytics is easy and simple under the digital marketing technique where
organisation out much more effort to analyse results under traditional marketing.
1.2 Importance for Blockbuster to invest in digital marketing
Blockbuster video which was one of the iconic brands in video rental space was at the top of
their performance in the year 2004 and within the next six year (2010) filed for bankruptcy.
Blockbuster failed to understand the online market and its significance for their business and
turned down the offer made by Netflix in 2000. It was important for Blockbuster to invest in
digital marketing to engage the digital generation. Further, digital marketing could have the
helped Blockbuster to increase the brand value of the company in the market. Ryan (2017)
opined that due to lack of presence in multiple platforms, many companies fail to understand
experience of their existing customer and gradually the brand start to obsolete.
2. Website Optimisation
2.1 Discussion and demonstration of utilisation of website optimization
technique by Blockbuster for improving performance of website
For any digital marketer, websites is the right place of business because it helps to promote
every ads campaign and reaches new customers for business. However Chaffey and Ellis-
Chadwick (2019) arguably stated that for a digital marketer their website is not just online
brochures to inform people about company and its product. Rather than just using websites as
online brochures Blockbuster can consider their websites as a conversion engine for the
traffic the company gather through other digital marketing actions. Blockbuster can use its
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websites for information customer about company, product and services with a conversion
goal in mind. Every activity on the website should be done to achieve conversion goals.
Building effective website is important for convergence of two elements and they are
business goals and need of the target customers (Ryan, 2016). Developing a website that
contents these two elements contribute towards developing an effective websites. Through
the website optimization technique Blockbuster can bring a change to their existing business
through convergence of their business goal and the online customer. However, before
developing an effective website through website optimization technique, Blockbuster must
identify and understand the rationale behind building their website, target customers for the
website, usability and accessibility into the websites and competitors. It is critical for any
business success to understand and identify their competition and find what other competitors
are trying to achieve through their websites (Baltes, 2015). In order to develop a successful
and effective website through optimization technique, Blockbuster need to understand how
competitors are performing with their websites and also, that report must included success
and failure rate of websites.
Website optimization technique also includes choosing a right domain name for the website.
Every website has a unique address which is called IP address and those are neither very
informative nor easy to remember (Jagadeeswaran and Annamalaisami, 2015). Initially those
IP address were series of number, however with a developing need transformed into human
readable name such as google.com instead of a series of number. In order to establish a brand
value, every business just has their individual domain name. However Mahjoub and Mathew
(2019) arguable stated that having a domain name that is difficult to remember or
unprofessional will not help the business with search engine and tarnishes business image.
Developing a catchy, memorable and attractive domain name which can be access easily by
online user will generate more traffic for the business. Blockbuster can use a memorable and
catchy username that can encourage more users to remember their domain name and search
for their website.
Website optimization should be the top priority for Blockbuster as there is too much of online
competition and its website will get only one opportunity to prove value and credibility to
users. Some of the important pages such as homepage, blog landing pages need to be
impressive because these pages are responsible for creating the first impression to the user
(Aizpurua et al., 2016). Considering the fact that quality of website design can impress and
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attract a lot of online user, using website optimization technique can be a major business
strategy for Blockbuster.
3. Search engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing and Content
Marketing
Critically discuss how Blockbuster have used Search Engine Optimisation,
social media and content to attract, retain and engage with customer
3.1 Search engine Optimization
3.1.1 Key Concept
SEO is the abbreviation form of Search Engine Optimization- a process of increasing the
quality and quantity of traffic to the desired website by organic search engine results
(Ledford, 2015). One of the advantages of SEO is that it helps to get in top of the Google
search result page and transforming the site name into a brand name. Similarly, Blockbuster
can use the SEO technique to be in the top if the Google Search result page to recover from
the declined sales rate. However, SEO require long time and huge investment to gain a decent
Return on Investment (ROI).
3.1.2 Technical optimisation
SEO tags have significant impact on the ranking however tags have one of the most debatable
aspects of on-page SEO (Park et al., 2015) . For instance Google Meta tags are snippets of
text that describe the content of the page; it does not appear on the page but on the page code.
Site speed decides how fast a websites respond to web pages. It is important to speeding up in
SEO as faster sites create happy users while slow sites turns user into irritated resulting
limited user activity of the site. Similarly, sitemap is also important for SEO because through
Site Map companies can list Web Pages of company site and instruct Google along with other
search engine about the site content. Googlebot further read the file to intelligently crawl the
site.
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3.1.3 On Page optimization
On page optimisation is a practice of optimising individual web pages to rank high and attract
more relevant traffic in search engine (Zilincan, 2015. Selection of key word is one
significant element and more than one page with similar keywords can create confusion in the
eye of search engine and make ranking process more difficult.
3.1.4 Off Page optimization
Off page optimization dictates Google about what other thinks of the website of the company.
For instance, there are several valuable links that pointing to a specific company, Google will
assume that the website has great content. Majority think off page optimization is the best
technique of building link and it happens even outside the site through links. Link building is
possible through articles, contents, video, social network, blocks and bookmarking (Holsman
and Darya, 2016). For instance Blockbuster can write blocks or promote through social media
for off page optimization.
3.1.5 Analysis
Blockbuster can use various KPI to measure the SEO effort and get the sense of how much
data are there to work with. Organic Search traffic is one of the useful KPI that helps to
measure the success of SEO through measuring how much new customers or lead has been
generated under the SEPO strategy.
3.2 Social Media Marketing
3.2.1 Social Media marketing Key Concepts
Social media marketing address the process of gaining traffic or attention by suing social
media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Social media
marketing allows companies to target large number of active social media user (Sajid, 2016).
Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms which add million of users on a daily
basis, giving an opportunity for companies to target those million of customer and build a
string customer network. However, competitors can study the business method through the
social media site of the company making the marketing process vulnerable.
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3.2.2 Key Social Channels
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube are some of the
universally used social media platform with more than billion active users. Blockbuster can
use any or every social media platform for developing their business and developing online
customer base.
3.2.3 Social Media Advertising
Companies must follow some basic principles of social media advertising are advertisements
should be developing keeping the need of online users, ad topic should be relevant with the
company products (Lee et al., 2018) . Companies can target new customer through social
media channels.
Facebook ads are designed with the aim of achieving one three types of campaign objectives
and they are awareness, consideration and conversion. Through Facebook ads, companies
like Blockbuster can raise awareness about the product among user. Various types of ads are
included under the Facebook ads, such as collection ads. Collection ads highlight the product
in the Facebook feeds. This type of ad includes photo, video reflecting the pricing and other
details of products and allow user to learn about the product without leaving Facebook.
3.3 Content Marketing
Content marketing involves the creation and sharing of online materials that do not product
the product or the service of the company directly but intended to stimulate toward its
product and services (Liu et al., 2018). Content marketing are generally used by eminent
brands such as Microsoft, John Deer and P&G. The primary reason for brig brands for using
content marketing is to gain benefits like increased sales, cost effectiveness and attracting
loyal customers. Regardless of the type of marketing, content marketing need to be the centre
point of any marketing. Quality content is the underlying factors of any digital marketing
success because it quality of the content ensure better traffic generation for the company.
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4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising and online Display (& video)
4.1 Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
4.1.1 Online display advertising Key Concepts
The biggest cause of downfall of traditional marketing is because there is no way to know
how many people view an advertisement and how many of them taken the action after seeing
it. Through the PPC advertising it is not only possible to know ads impression, click per ads
and conversion but also possible to measure viewability for any new ads campaign for new
products (Kapoor et al., 2016). However, click fraud is one of the limitations of PPC
advertising. Click fraud happen when competitors click the ads just to increase the cost of the
advertisement or online user click on ads unknowingly and without any shopping intention.
4.1.2 Keyword Research Tools
Blockbuster can use several keyword research tools to such as Google Keyword Planner,
Ubersuggest, and Google Analytics for keyword analysis (Sullivan et al., 2016). Further there
are tools like KeywordSpy that allows organisation to analyse the performance of PPC
keyword of their own and competitors.
4.1.3 Keyword research process
The purpose of keyword research is to identify phrases and words that users are searching in
Google and other search engine and these terms are linked with products or services that
offered by the website of the company. Google keyword tool is majorly liked by keyword
planner and it helps the SEO to identify and develop keywords that are capable of generating
more traffic for the websites.
4.1.4 Campaign Process
The first step in campaign process is to defining campaign strategy along with campaign
setting location (Spears et al., 2016). Blockbuster need to understand the location and select
the language of the campaign based on that. For instance, if Blockbuster is targeting Chinese
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customers then the ads campaign must be on Chinese language. Further, Blockbuster need to
be careful with their campaign key words as inappropriate key words can fail the campaign
objectives.
4.1.5 Campaign management
Organisation need to be identifying the conversion rate. Conversion rate address process
when a visitor complete desired goals, like filling out campaign forms or making a purchase.
Bidding for space to publish the ads campaign is another critical task of campaign
management.
4.2 Online Display and Video Advertising
4.2.1 Online Display advertising key Concepts
Display advertising is a type of advertising that expresses commercial messages using text,
logos, photograph, videos and other graph with an aim of continuously targeting online users
with definite traits to develop the ads effects. The biggest advantage of online display
advertising is that it helps business to connect with the customers. The online display adds
offer enormous opportunity for companies to reach out customer who are active internet user
and connect with various communities through social media platform to buy product or
services. Despite some potential advantages, online display advertisement has certain
limitations, such as emergence of online ads blocker and lack of sufficient premium ads
spaces within groups (Kireyev et al., 2016) .To get a premium ads space businesses need to
invest higher cost, similarly presence of ads blockers are drastically impacting the sales
through online ads of business. Therefore, business organisations need to indentify adequate
source of budget in order to find some premium ads space in groups.
4.2.2 Display Ads
Most marketing campaign includes standard text ads, image and rich media, banner ads and
video ads. Each of these ads are available is various shapes and sizes and aiming to gain
optimum performances. For instance, Blockbuster can display video ads across the web and
YouTube is the most popular platform. Through video display ads Blockbuster can present
ideas about the company to their target customer and promote the service they provide. The
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biggest advantage could be a business can take as much time as they want to narrate their
story, but have to keep it engaging. Blockbuster can use social media channel like YouTube
to promote their video display ads connect with millions of active user.
4.2.3 Publishers
Display network are sites that can be used by business targeting to display ads in predefined
context to specific audience and particular location. For instance Blockbuster can use the
Google Display network to reach customer when customers are browsing their favourite
websites for some other work purpose. Google display network is designed to assist business
to find the right audience for their product.
4.2.4 Remarketing
Remarketing is the method of connecting with visitors to the designated website who have
not made any immediate purchase or query. Remarketing allows a company to position
targeted ads for defined audience who had previously visited the company website while they
browsing online for something else. Blockbuster can us the remarketing technique and
connect with the potential customers while they look for something like movies or videos
online. Blockbuster can use remarketing tool to connect with the online user and transform
the conversation into sale. However remarketing is not similar as retargeting, as retargeting
target potential customer based on their previous internet action.
4.2.5 Planning
Organisation need to come up with well defined steps in order to develop successful online
display campaign. The first that audience must take is identifying the target audience for their
service of product. For instance, Blockbuster needs to identify their target audience for their
video rental service. The second step is to identify the ads campaign objectives or goals
which include developing brand awareness, growing website traffic and lead production.
Third step is to set the budget for the ads campaign that is needed for buying space in media
for the ads campaign. The final step is to track campaign performances. During the ads
campaign organisation need to track their Key performance Indicators multiple times in a
day.
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