Digital Marketing Reflection Report: Theories and Concepts

This report is a reflective analysis of digital marketing concepts and theories, grounded in the student's personal experiences as a consumer. The paper delves into various aspects of digital marketing, including social media marketing, content marketing, and network theory, providing real-world examples to illustrate these concepts. It examines how businesses leverage digital platforms to engage with consumers, the effectiveness of different marketing strategies, and the importance of ethical considerations and legal compliance. The student reflects on their learning journey, highlighting the impact of the course on their understanding of digital marketing tools and their application in the business world. The report also touches upon the significance of direct communication and customer feedback in enhancing business operations and customer satisfaction, emphasizing the role of digital marketing in shaping consumer behavior and market trends. Finally, it underlines the importance of adhering to governmental and ethical standards in digital marketing practices for successful business outcomes.

Running head: DIGITAL MARKETING
DIGITAL MARKETING
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1DIGITAL MARKETING
The advent of internet has not only had a huge impact on the society but has also had
a huge impact on the business of companies and organisations. Majority of the organisations
have incorporated digital marketing in their operations in order to spread awareness to a wide
range of audience within a short span of time. Kannan (2017) opines digital marketing uses
the internet and digital technologies that are online based like mobiles phones, computers and
other digital platforms and media in order to promote their services and products to their
target audience. I, in this paper, will be reflecting on the things I have learnt about digital
marketing in my course.
Digital marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies that businesses
these days are taking up so that can reach a wide range of audience within a short period of
time and which is cost efficient in comparison to traditional marketing strategies. Initially
clothing brands like Zara, H&M, Forever 21 and many more use to operate via the physical
stores they had however, now with the advent of internet and the high usage of the internet
these brands have not only come up with online shopping facilities but also promote their
products via social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. According to
scholars, digital marketing has built a bridge between the companies or the business and the
consumers encouraging direct communication (Samran et al 2019). I believe that
communication is very important and this has helped in consumers getting the direct access to
address issues that they are facing or compliment and provide positive reviews to the
company. Social media presence of the companies has led to direct feedback which is helpful
for the company or the organisation. Hasson, Piorkowski and McCulloh (2019) states
feedback helps businesses to understand their weaknesses and make positive changes in the
business to combat the issue and also to gain overall customer satisfaction.
Digital marketing has been a boon for the business operating these days however
there are certain issues which can crop up like social issues, ethical, security or legal issues

2DIGITAL MARKETING
which can have major impact on the society as well as on the customers. In the class I have
learnt about the legal issues that companies and organisations need to be aware of and the
three major areas that companies need to consider are intellectual property, privacy and data
collection issues and also the rules of FTC and consumer protection bodies. These issues also
lead to security issues and according to reports many customers had to bare repercussions
because of security issues which led to their personal details getting compromised.
There are many social issues that rise in digital marketing; one of the famous ones
that I remember is of the company Dove that received a lot of negative backlash because of
their marketing strategy which did not go down too well with the consumers. In one of the
social media posts they had posted a picture of black woman turning white after using Dove
body lotion. This post not only contradicted their brand value which is to empower women
for what they look like irrespective of their body and skin colour. Racial and colour
discrimination is one of the social issues that people face these days and thus marketing
strategies that contribute to the social issues not only affect the customers but also the society.
Initially, I had some knowledge only about social media marketing as I was actively
present on social media sites and witnessed many companies and organisations embracing
social media and having strong social media presence where they would market their
products or services however in this course I came to know about various different concepts
of digital marketing which I was unaware of before and how it worked. One of the digital
marketing concepts that is widely used is content marketing. According to scholars, content
marketing is a kind of marketing which generally involves in the creating and the sharing
online materials like blogs, videos and many more (Du Plessis 2017). We have been taught
that this does not promote a service or brand directly but helps in stimulating interest in the
products and services.

3DIGITAL MARKETING
I have also learnt about different theories in this course and one of the most
interesting that intrigued me was the network theory. The network theory basically studies all
sorts of relation like between people, things or animals. Social network analysis is considered
to be tool which helps in learning about the different patterns which develop within the social
networks and how these influences the behavior. Busca and Bertrandias (2020) states digital
marketing channels like Twitter, Groupon, Facebook allow and help marketers to understand
the needs and demands of the consumers and then allow marketers of a brand or a company
to leverage power of the influential users to promote or spread messages on various
platforms. Companies these days promote their brands through social media influencers in
order to reach out to wide and proper target customers. A healthy food brand may approach a
fitness blogger or influencer to promote their food so that they can easily reach out to people
who are fitness conscious as they follow a fitness blogger.
Learning digital marketing helped me gain a lot of knowledge about the use of digital
media as a marketing tool and how it has become the most effective marketing tool in
comparison to the traditional marketing tools. Organisations have incorporated digital
marketing methods and strategies in order to reach out to a huge range of audience in very
short time. However, companies in order to successfully carry out digital marketing should
comply with the governmental laws and other ethical laws in order to provide customers full
satisfaction. The different concepts and theories have helped me in understanding why some
businesses use different marketing strategies and their usefulness which I would like to
implement when I work for a company in order to help them market their products in
successful manner which will help n bringing organizational benefits and help me in my
professional development.

4DIGITAL MARKETING
Reference
Busca, L. and Bertrandias, L., 2020. A Framework for Digital Marketing Research:
Investigating the Four Cultural Eras of Digital Marketing. Journal of Interactive
Marketing, 49, pp.1-19.
Du Plessis, C., 2017. The role of content marketing in social media content
communities. South African Journal of Information Management, 19(1), pp.1-7.
Hasson, S.G., Piorkowski, J. and McCulloh, I., 2019, August. Social media as a main source
of customer feedback: alternative to customer satisfaction surveys. In Proceedings of the
2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and
Mining (pp. 829-832).
Kannan, P.K., 2017. Digital marketing: A framework, review and research
agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), pp.22-45.
Samran, Z., Wahyuni, S., Misril, M., Nabila, R. and Putri, A., 2019. Determination of Digital
Marketing Strategies As Effective Communication Techniques For GoOntravel Brand
Awareness. Journal of Research in Marketing, 9(3), pp.752-757.