MKT6800 Digital Marketing Plan: Marks and Spencer Strategy Analysis

This report details a comprehensive digital marketing plan for Marks and Spencer (M&S), a British retail outlet specializing in clothing, home products, and food commodities. The plan begins with an overview of M&S's digital marketing process, emphasizing customer personas, goal setting, content strategy, and platform selection, particularly social media. The organization and its digital marketing platforms are examined, highlighting the use of advertising, website content, and a dedicated app. An environmental analysis, including SWOT and PESTLE analyses, assesses M&S's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, as well as political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors. The digital marketing plan outlines objectives such as increasing online sales, reducing bounce rates, and enhancing organic traffic. Implementation and control strategies, including Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), are discussed to ensure goal achievement. Competitor and market analyses are also included. The report covers budget considerations and post-launch performance evaluations. Overall, the report presents a well-structured digital marketing campaign to be presented to the Board of Directors.

DIGITAL MARKETING
STRATEGY

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
Overview of digital marketing process of M & S.......................................................................3
Overview of organization and its digital marketing platforms...................................................3
Step 1 Environmental analysis....................................................................................................4
Step 2- Marks and Spencer digital marketing plan with Digital business..................................6
Step 3 - Objectives of Digital marketing.....................................................................................7
Step 4 - Implementation and control of Digital marketing.........................................................7
Step 5 - Budget of digital marketing...........................................................................................9
Step 6 - Post Launce performance of digital marketing..............................................................9
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................10
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................12

INTRODUCTION
Digital marketing plan is the document that contains all the details of planning of digital
campaigns. It is conducted to achieve organizational objective and goals at digital level. Key
components of digital marketing plan is email marketing, content writing, mobile marketing,
advertising, paid search, search engine optimization etc. These campaigns are conducted to by
businesses to cope up with changing circumstances of market and to meet customers'
requirement in effective manner. Marks and Spencer is a British retail outlet that gives services
of clothing, home products and food commodities. The M&S significantly uses digital market for
its smooth functioning of its organisation (Verhoef and Bijmolt, 2019).
MAIN BODY
Overview of digital marketing process of M & S
Digital marketing process of any company starts with creating customer role. M & S
make customer persona in order to identify segment of its targeted audience on the basis of age,
gender, location etc. Next step is making goals and objective of company in order to make
process of marketing clear (Kannan, 2017). So that organization can measure it in terms of
quantitative and qualitative data.
Making content of strategy in easy manner so that every participant of targeted audience
can understand the aim of subject matter is third step (Herhausen and et.al., 2020). After that
Marks & Spencer finds the automated platforms of marketing like email, content or social media
marketing whichever is suitable for the company. Social media marketing channel is the best
strategy for Marks and Spencer to meet the competitive environment. Developing strategic
marketing funnel is the important step of campaign. In which company make three stages like
awareness, consideration and conversion. For successful digital campaign it is essential to
determine budget (Kannan, 2017).
Overview of organization and its digital marketing platforms
Marks and Spencer is a retail outlet that deals in clothes, food products and home
commodities. It was founded in 1884. It is a public limited company. It has 959 stores across
UK. Its 615 stores are specialized in food products. It is specialized in providing luxury items of
foods. It's using those strategies of marketing that help it to select suitable platforms of digital
marketing. Many other competitors of similar industry try to compete it on those platforms.

Company uses advertising form of marketing on television, it has created its own company's
website with creative content writing to give satisfactory experience to its customers. It also have
an app of its own through which it deals with buyers (Saura, Palos-Sánchez and Cerdá Suárez,
2017). Marks and Spencer uses social media to improve its customer relation management. This
social media marketing is used by company to increase awareness of its product and upcoming
changes in websites so that customers can get connected with company to feel belongingness.
Content marketing on its website by redesigning its structure is main source of digital marketing
of M&S. All these methods are adopted top achieve success and compete rivalry in market to
make strong position. Attracting customer is main motive of every type of digital marketing
(Chaffey and Smith, 2017).
Step 1 Environmental analysis
Environmental analysis is defined as the analysis of the environment or the area wherein
the company is operating. This is essential as companies operate in external environment and if
company does not analyse changes then this affects working of company.
SWOT analysis
Strengths
There are several key areas of M&S that provide it favourable situations. It is good at
following the latest technology, have high infrastructure facilities, effective corporate social
responsibility, it mainly focuses on customer demand, serves high quality products and have
great relationship with employees (Gürel and Tat, 2017).
Weakness
It has various lacking areas such as weak financial performance, decline customer
confidence due to product recall, lacking of Segmentation, high cost of production (Elavarasan
and et.al., 2020).
Opportunities
It is good at grabbing domestic and international opportunities like planning for foreign
direct investment, changing their clothing segment, easier their operating model, and introducing
new technology (Hajizadeh, 2019).
Threats

Threats are uncontrollable situation such as high Competition from Tesco,
Sainsbury,Zara, environmental changing circumstances such as increasing Pollution and
innovations as per customer demand that are face by M&S (Falcone and et.al., 2020).
PESTLE analysis
Political factors
If Marks and Spencer want to sell its good in other country where rate of tax is high. It
may lead to Heightened production cost which affects the company’s profit. In such situation it
can reduce its cost of production by using digital marketing. A traditional way of marketing will
increase more cost so the company can compensate its expenses by managing budget of digital
marketing (Perera, 2017). Currently because of Brexit the international trade relatin of UK has
been affected to other EU member countries and this also creates issue of M&S to deal with
countries who are member of EU.
Economic factors
The current market trends in UK is shifting towards small store. Then Budget stores are the
direct threats to marks and Spencer. The majority of the population is purchased from the local
stores. It reduced the sale of the company so the economic factors affect badly (Nandonde,
2019).
Social factors
Consumer purchase are influenced by cultural, social, personal and psychological characteristics.
So as per changing requirement of the consumer’s marks and Spencer have to start selling food
online for become a multi-channel retailer (Shtal and et.al., 2018).
Technological factors
For long run sustainability in the market marks and Spencer have to be focused on creation of
new technologies and operating model which would help the company in exploiting new
technologies (Barik and Kumar, 2018).
Legal factors
Laws are always changing and it is necessary for the company to follow all the rules and
regulations driven by the laws. Company Keeps up to date with every legislation regarding
health and safety. Make sure company does not involve in any legal disputes, otherwise it
declines the brand image of the company (Christodoulou and Cullinane, 2019).
Environmental factor

Marks and Spencer is a luxury brand due to this they are highly concerned about environment
effects. Company have to promote the concept of sustainable development and sell fair trade
products.
Every firm need to do social responsibility work for sustained in long-term (Islam and Mamun,
2017).
Competitors analysis:
M & S is a public limited company deals in selling cloths, home products, food beverages
of its own label. It also offers online food delivery service. Waitrose is company which is
subsidy and has its own brand products, including the supermarkets, convenience shops. It sells
the groceries to various nations with high quality of product and services. For its product
portfolio company uses competitive pricing strategies in its marketing mix. For its product
portfolio Waitrose uses matching pricing strategy. Marks and Spencer uses print media, TV ads,
mobile ads and other social media campaign. M & S uses its own website for promotion of its
own brand and Waitrose also uses the strategy of marketing like ads, social media.
comparatively, its strategies are similar to M&S (Shatskaya, Komaristaya and Kafian, 2017).
Market analysis
Market analysis helps the company to identify its size of organisation compared to other
competitors, customer segments and buying pattern of customers. Sales of Marks and Spencer
has increased as compared to others competitors. this analysis helps the company to evaluate not
only market trends but the lacking of company that is stopping it to grow in the market.
comparing sales and market share assist M&S to form strategies (Sadchenko, О. and et.al, 2020).
In retail industry the market analysis of M&S provides the list of competitors like Tesco, ASDA,
etc. to know improvement areas.
Step 2- Marks and Spencer digital marketing plan with Digital business
Digital marketing plan of any company focuses on building strategies that are essential
for it to promotes its products and services on electronic platform. The tools that M &S uses for
its promotion is goods is social marketing platform. Business based platforms like Facebook,
twitter, Instagram, google, yahoo, LinkedIn and you Tube makes customers aware about the
trending products and services (Imran and Ghouse, 2017). After seeing product online customers
starts considering those goods that is beneficial for the companies as their conversion rate of
sales increases through platforms. Marks and Spencer uses some of these platforms like twitter,

linked to make buyers aware of its products that it is launching with the aim to fulfil need of
customers. Using Facebook, Instagram, and you tube is also good option for retail industry as
youth are mostly active on these platform (Chaffey and Smith, 2017). And targeting that segment
of market will be advantageous for the company. Digital marketing allow firm to serve
customized marketing services according to need of market. Sending email to customers with
customized content is an effective strategy to grab the attention of customers.
Step 3 - Objectives of Digital marketing
Digital marketing helps company to reach its objective in better manner with fewer
efforts and resources. It is a smart way to achieve goals of organisation. There are several
objectives that can be obtained with help of digitalized way of marketing. Some of them are as
follows
1. Increasing online sales up by 20% with high conversion rate of Marks and Spencer by
using digital marketing campaign.
2. Reducing online bounce rate up by 10% in the social media marketing of M&S.
3. Enhancing organic traffic volumes up to 30% by March 2020 to increase online presence.
Step 4 - Implementation and control of Digital marketing
Justification
Increasing sales of company is main objective of organization. Achieving goals of
organization with help of digital marketing is easy as compared to traditional marketing.
Enhancing conversion rate by using business based platform not only allow it to analyse its
performance but also make easy to find lacking areas. This can be done by using social media
platforms which will make company able to achieve its objective of increasing sales
Bounce rate is that percentage of people who visit the site but leave instantly without
viewing other pages due to non-availability of their necessity information (Warokka and et.al.,
2020). This objective can be obtained by enhancing clarity of content of page.
Enhancing organic traffic performance can be achieved by knowing those keywords that
are commonly searched while using search engines. It is very important for company to
optimized search engine by using simple keywords so that people can notice us. There are
several tools available that help company to know that which keywords enhance their organic
traffic.

For this an online strategy will also be used by M&S wherein the company will conduct a
survey online. This will assist company in getting the views and suggestion relating to the
product and services of company. this will provide a clear view of the product and their usage
among consumers. If this will not be liked by the consumer, then they will share their views and
company can implement it in business.
Implementation and control of plan to make sure that the process used by company is
able to achieve its smart objectives or not. Marks and Spencer uses KIP tool to implement and
control its strategic plans of promoting products. Key performance indicator assist firm to
analyse its long term performance. Increase in sales can be measured by numbers by conversion
rate of customers that visited the website and also ordered product online, number of trial
purchase, numbers of registration on website in particular period of time. Reducing bounce rate
can also be controlled by innovative appearance of online store and performance can be
measured by calculating number of customers who have not spent much time on website
(Kingsnorth, 2019). Control of digital marketing platform can be done by using various tools that
are available online. Performance of enhancing organic traffic can be measure by tools of SEO
tools (Market Analysis for Marks & Spencers, 2020.). There is a various way of implementation
to achieve this objective but using appropriate keywords and applying negative keyword can
help M&S to reduce bounce rate and enhance organic traffic.
STP and Digital marketing mix
Segmentation, targeting helps company to identify its segment of market that it wants to
target for sales of its products. the major segment of M&S is the demographic and behavioural.
This is selected because of the reason that this divided consumer on basis of age and behaviour
that is attitude and lifestyle of people.
Under targeting the major target of company is based on income that is upper class
people and middle class people.
Further for position section M&S will majorly focus on the quality issue and make the
product and services make easily available to the consumers.
Digital marketing mix plays important role in economic functioning of digital campaign.
Marketing mix includes price, product, place, promotion, people, process and physical evidence.

 The price is main factor that play important role in influencing customer buying decision
so that company should make such pricing strategy so that customers can feel to buy. The
pricing strategy opted by company is penetration pricing as with help of this company
enter with low price and as market is captured price is increased (Charlesworth, A.,
2020).
 Product involves the different range of clothing and related goods.
 the distribution of place of product should be easily reachable for buyers and for M&S
both physical and online options are available to consumer.
 Creative method should be used by business to implemented marketing strategy along
with digital marketing strategy is used by M&S.
 Process of conducting these strategies should be easy and simple.
 Physical evidence can be the quality of that product so that company can make sure that
services and products are up to the mark. This helps company to identify effective
strategy that can save its monetary, human and technical recourses from being exploited.
Such type of decisions makes the firm to increase its strengths, it helps in declining those
elements that serve as weakness to company and enables organization to be more effective and
efficient so that it can be more competitive (Hanlon, 2019).
Step 5 - Budget of digital marketing
Budget plan of digital market should be made with proper allocation of funds according
to trending requirements. Plan should be made with such estimation that customers find
promotion and marketing of plan useful and pay attention towards information of company.
Using platform in such manner that it can attract customers more and more also investing in that
type of platform can provide it high return on investment. organization should make budgetary
plan before conducting any digital activity to know difference between estimation and actual
expenditure so that profit margins can be calculated properly.
Step 6 - Post Launce performance of digital marketing
Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is used to measure the post-performance. it is widely
used by all scale of business to check that they have achieved desire outcome of their pre-set
objectives. KPI is used by firm to evaluate performance at level and it is sometimes used to
address whole business performance. Digital market campaign can succeed for marks and
Spencer (Vishnoi, S. K. and Bagga, T., 2020). It's a big retail firm that have efficiency to

optimize its sources in effective way. Spending in marketing and promotion through digitalized
way will be beneficial for the business. Plans can be created based on market and competitor’s
analysis. Campaign of digital marketing makes the process of comparing easy and simple for
company. Low cost budget can also useful for DM so it does not pressurize business to invest
huge amount of money. KPI is serviceable to know improvable areas of business structure. So
monitoring and controlling become more effective with usage of KPI.
To know post performance evaluation of objective which is reduction in bounce rate, the
company conducted the online survey from which it came to know that people have started
engaging with organisation. Online survey was conducted as they are getting the required
information on landing page. Online survey also gave information to company that it has become
easy for customers to get their needed information through appropriate keywords. Key
performance indication help the company to check its current performance and enable it to
compare with previous results.
Further for post launch performance market research can be conducted and with help of
different survey and feedback taken from consumer the success of performance of digital
marketing campaign can be evaluated. This will assist M&S in gathering views and opinion of
consumer and this further can be implemented in the future strategies and will assist company in
fulfilling their objectives.
CONCLUSION
From the above report it can be concluded that digital marketing campaign is very
essentials strategy. It is a systematic process of marketing using various business based platform.
Digital marketing campaign of marks and Spencer would be effective in influencing its customer
to buy its products and service. The report also focuses on analysing its political, economic,
social, technological, legal and environmental factors to assess its strength and weakness,
opportunities and threats of industry. Ways to achieve smarts objectives of company through
social media marketing and other platforms are also specified. The report also gives estimated
budget to form a digital marketing campaign. KPI is the best performance indicator to measure
actual results with estimated outcomes.

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