Digital Marketing Strategies of Netflix: A Comprehensive Report

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Netflix's digital marketing strategies. It begins by outlining the differences between traditional and digital marketing, setting the stage for a deep dive into Netflix's approach. The report then explores the customer touchpoints and journey of Netflix subscribers, illustrating how the company interacts with its users. A significant portion of the report is dedicated to analyzing the digital marketing data generated by Netflix, including personal, engagement, behavioral, and attitudinal data. It explains how Netflix uses this data, often with the help of artificial intelligence, to understand user behavior and preferences. The report also examines how Netflix uses this data analysis to improve company performance and enhance customer experience through content recommendations and personalized marketing. The conclusion highlights the importance of digital marketing and data analysis in achieving sustainable business growth and customer satisfaction. The report draws on various sources, including books, journal articles, and online resources, to support its findings.

Digital Marketing - Netflix
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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Main Body.......................................................................................................................................3
1. Difference between traditional and digital marketing........................................................3
2. Customer touch points and journey of Netflix subscribers................................................4
3. Analysis of generated digital marketing data by Netflix....................................................6
4. Analysis of data by Netflix to improve company performance and customer experience.6
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................7
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Introduction
Digital marketing refers to the advertising and promotion of products and services
through online media channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, mobile
apps, etc. It has helped businesses to interact with their targeted audience in real time (Chaffey,
2019). This report is prepared in the context of digital marketing channels used by Netflix.
Netflix is an American technology and media service provider. It distributes and produces films,
original series, web-shows, etc. in various languages from across the globe (Netflix: Statistics
and facts). Netflix is reported to be a customer centric company. This report discusses the
various customer touch points presented by Netflix in journey of its subscribers. It also presented
the highlights as to how company uses it digital data to improve its performance and customers'
experience.
Main Body
1. Difference between traditional and digital marketing
Marketing mix is a framework which provides useful insights to review strategies and
policies of products and services offered by a company (Thomas and Housden, 2017).
Marketing Mix Traditional Marketing Digital Marketing
Product It includes marketing of tangible
products and the intangible services
business is dealing in. It includes
highlighting features and services of
the products which make it appealing
to the customers. For example, of
DVD-by-mail rental service by
Netflix.
Products here refers to marketing of
intangible products or tangible
products offered as services. For
example, of all the films, series, etc.
that Netflix airs on its application
and websites are its intangible
products. Company websites
highlight product's features and
services as soon as customer visits
the page.
Price This includes all the pricing
strategies that are planned for the
products of the company right from
Pricing here includes all pricing
strategies that company offers online
such as free first month trial period,
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penetration pricing to customised
subscription plans. For example,
Netflix uses competitive pricing
strategy and regularly run consumer
focus to update its DVD pricing
policies which is still quite a
successful venture for the company.
discount codes, online vouchers and
various service packages and
bundles offered by Netflix.
Place It includes places used in traditional
marketing for promoting products of
the company like billboards,
newspaper, radio, etc. which Netflix
used to promote its products.
Place here refers to internet and
digital space. For example, Netflix
distributes their products virtually to
most of the world on their
smartphones, laptops, smart TVs,
etc. (Lobato, 2019).
Promotions Traditional promotions include TV
advertisements, Radio, newspaper,
etc. Netflix includes celebrity
endorsement, billboard
advertisements, etc. in its traditional
promotional mix.
Digital promotional includes
methods such as email, social media
marketing, etc. Netflix is quite
active on social media platforms and
regularly engages with its followers
to give them a sneak peak of the
upcoming content and to know what
they would like to watch next. For
example, to promote their content,
they design customised GIF and
stickers and promote their usage on
social media to have an incremental
usage publicity for their product.
2. Customer touch points and journey of Netflix subscribers
Journey of Netflix from DVD subscription company to online streamer has been inspiring
(O’Donnell and Huntington, 2020).
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Customer touch points
Customer touchpoints are areas where customers and potential customers interact with
service or products. Netflix identifies its customer touchpoints, gets feedback and improve
customer satisfaction: Produces original content – Netflix produces relatable and varied “original” content
which streams exclusively on its platform to build an emotional connect with its users. Feedback review – Netflix regularly engages in improving its services based upon
feedback from its users.
 Personalising customer experience – Netflix uses the 'watched by user' data to suggest
related content and genre to make it more personalised for user.
Customer journey
Netflix targets to provide quality services to its customers in their journey which can be
characterized in below mentioned three channels: Pre-purchase – This is customer's first interaction with Netflix either through
personalised e-mail or social media. It is followed by customer's decision to sign up with
Netflix.
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Illustration 1: Customer journey touchpoints of Netflix

 Purchase – It involves decisions related to purchase such as appropriate plan, time
period, number of screens on which subscription has to be exercised, etc. Payment is
decided and processed accordingly.
 Post-purchase – Netflix suggests popular and recently released contents to initiate the
process and then, further make recommendations in accordance with the interests and
preferences of consumers' watched history.
3. Analysis of generated digital marketing data by Netflix
Netflix uses data such as personal data like location, gender, age, device, etc.;
engagement data like most frequent interacted page, email opening rate, click through
advertising, etc.; behavioural data like subscription details, average watch time, etc. and
attitudinal data likes customer feedback, preferences, etc. All data is then analysed using
artificial intelligence to predict future behaviour (Ruiz-Navas and Miyazaki, 2017).
Based on analysis, they use content-based recommendation system and collaborative
filtering recommendation system. For example, Netflix analyse their data on the basis that how
many customers watch the complete series of a certain show and it turns out to be 70%. Then,
they would try to find why 30% of the users did not finish, why the gap, how to improve the
engagement rate, etc.? (How Netflix Uses Analytics To Select Movies, Create Content, and
Make Multimillion Dollar Decisions, 2020).
4. Analysis of data by Netflix to improve company performance and customer experience
Netflix focuses on creating content that can have emotional connect with all its users
(Smits and Nikdel, 2019). They design their strategies accordingly to produce and promote their
products. They also use innovative and personalised channels of digital marketing to live up to
their brand name. Interactive content and valuing customer feedback has earned a competitive
advantage for the Netflix.
Conclusion
Technology is proving to be a game changer for businesses. One such technology is
digital marketing that has changed all the conventional norms of marketing and promotions. All
companies now prioritise digital marketing and researches to reach wide array of people in no
time. Data analysis from these researches help them design better strategies that can get them
placed better in minds of their customers for customer satisfaction which can lead them to their
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way of sustainable business growth. All efforts taken on the part of company to enhance
customer experience results in positive effect on company's performance as well.
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References
Books and Journal
Chaffey, D., 2019. Digital marketing. Pearson UK.
Lobato, R., 2019. Netflix nations: The geography of digital distribution. NYU Press.
O’Donnell, R.H. and Huntington, H.E., 2020. Stranger things have happened: Digital marketing
lessons from the eggo–netflix collaboration. SAGE Publications: SAGE Business Cases
Originals.
Ruiz-Navas, S. and Miyazaki, K., 2017, July. Adapting Technological Capabilities for World
Digital Business: The Case of Netflix. In 2017 Portland International Conference on
Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET) (pp. 1-10). IEEE.
Smits, R. and Nikdel, E.W., 2019. Beyond Netflix and Amazon: MUBI and the curation of on-
demand film. Studies in European Cinema. 16(1). pp.22-37.
Thomas, B. and Housden, M., 2017. Direct and digital marketing in practice. Bloomsbury
Publishing.
Online
Davos, T. (2020). Stranger Things, a success story born out of data analytics [Online]. UK:
Acrotrend Solutions Publishers. Available from:https://www.acrotrend.com/stranger-
things-a-success-story-born-out-of-data-analytics/ [accessed 02 November 2020]
Patel, N. (2020). How Netflix Uses Analytics To Select Movies, Create Content, and Make
Multimillion Dollar Decisions. [Online]. USA: I'm Kind of a Big Deal, LLC Publishers.
Available from: https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-netflix-uses-analytics/ [accessed 02
November 2020]
Watson, A. (2020). Netflix – Statistics and facts. [online]. Available from:
https://www.statista.com/topics/842/netflix/ [accessed 02 November 2020]
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