Digital Marketing: Simbound Game Report and Industry Practices

This report provides an in-depth analysis of a digital marketing simulation game, focusing on the application of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques within the Simbound platform. The report begins with an introduction to SEM, including its various strategies such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, and keyword research. The main body of the report explores current industry practices and the author's experience with the Simbound simulation, detailing the creation of landing pages, the implementation of various campaigns (including search engine marketing and email campaigns), and the analysis of key performance indicators (KPIs) such as Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and conversion rates. The report also discusses the effectiveness of different tools and techniques used within the game to drive website traffic, enhance brand awareness, and achieve marketing objectives. The author reflects on the importance of landing page optimization, email marketing strategies, and competitor analysis. The conclusion summarizes the key findings and insights gained from the Simbound simulation, highlighting the practical application of digital marketing principles in a risk-free environment. Finally, the report includes a list of references to support the information presented.

Digital Marketing
Simbound Game Raport

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................1
Current practices in industry and experience of Simbound Simulation game.............................1
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION
Search engine marketing is tool that used to enhance the visibility of website in any of the
search engine results (SERPs). It also known as paid search or pay per click (PPC). It involves
the process to generating website to purchase ads on search engine (Lui and Au, 2017). For
example, google is search engine which advertise companies through broadcasting ads on
software. It is best way to use tools and techniques and make it more better experience on this
platform. It has many techniques and strategies that will be used in digital marketing such as
SEM keywords research, Search engine optimization, Pay per click advertising. It is an umbrella
that used to increase the brand's search visibility and make the brand to appear more frequent in
search. It involves a paid SEM strategy and SEO strategy or both. The most commonly used
platform are google and bing. Google ads is famous SEM platform, billions of google accesses
use this platform a day, that will be useful to get in front of large variety of audiences. Bing ads
is another widely used platform after it. There are many campaigns and Ad groups and going on
this platform that they has their own unique goals, budget, bid strategy and targetting settings. As
in this report Yellow Website apple has created and some campaigns are going under this relate
to like Search engine marketing, E-mail campaign and created landing pages for that website.
Through this experiences many tools and techniques were used in order to increase the visibility
of website among all. The report include realistic view of performance in campaign and how an
individual is showing marketing plan, campaign, google ads, keyword research and competition.
In this report covers overall experience of simbound simulation game, in which search marketing
technique has been used to sell its product without impacting real money and brand.
MAIN BODY
Current practices in industry and experience of Simbound Simulation game
Search engine marketing
It is kind of digital marketing that include the promotions and improving the visibility of
website through using search engine pages by using paid advertising. It incorporates the search
engine optimisation (SEO), that facilitates in website content and its architecture to get better or
higher ranking in search engine page to foster pay per click (PPC) listings (Clarke and et.al.,
2018). Its importance has increase due to number of website on searching platform in late 1990s,
it helps the people to find the information quickly. The term “search engine marketing” was
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popularized by Danny Sullivan in 2001 to use many functions that involve SEO, paid listings at
searh engine, development of online marketing tactics and strategies for businesses and
individual. It helps the companies focus on driving more traffic to targetting key areas on the
website. It uses in generating new leads, sell product, build the brand. Many business people
search their problems, vendors and potential purchase that use this technique. To use search
engine effectively an individual needs to create the strategies and look for long term goals for
that it required amount of traffic, need budget and marketing objectives. Generating new list of
keywords to optimize launch paid campaign and optimize the website, generate in bound links
and implementation of internet campaigns and last step is start testing paid search.
Advantages of search engine marketing in digital marketing are as follows-
 Helps in reaching to the clients- It comes in the use to describe paid google search ads.
This tool is best for short term strategies to achieve fast visibility in product and services.
This is easier to get quick results to reach target consumer as compared to search engine
optimisation (SEO).
 Drives the traffic- It is useful in increasing the traffic on website as they appear on the
top position of search engine results page- SERP above the organic results. With the help
of proper search engine results, advertising bidding and appealing ad message.
 Monitoring if performance- Paid ads gives opportunity to check ads performance and
monitor the outcome that was collected for campaign (Lui and Au, 2017). Google ads
provide access to depth data on best performing advertisement.
 Targetting audience- Search engine optimisation is efficient tool to reach target
customer based on their search intentions. Having right decision regarding keywords for
which ads are focussed to appear helps most likely better ads.
 Enhancing brand awareness- It is very useful for those businesses who are willing to
enhance brand name in advertisement tag line, description and showing URL or
extension. Hence these paid ads contributes in achieving high brand awareness especially
and facilitates them to show on the top of google search results.
Tools and techniques used in search engine optimisation are as follows-
 Keywords research- It is main base of search engine marketing tools and doing
comprehensive research is a part of keyword management strategy before to choose good
and effective keywords. There are some keywords which are high profitable and
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commercially intent that every researcher is doing such as Buying, Discount rate, Deal,
Coupon, Free shipping of product and others.
 Pay-per-Click Advertising- In nowadays it become the most effective strategy and no
one is proven as good as this. There are two types of PPC advertising , google Adwords
and Yahoo/Bing. Google ad words helps the customer to market their products in google
search engine.
 Shortened URL- This is digital application that tranforms long URL into condensed
form (Capatina, A. and et.al., 2018). Some post has some character limits for example
Twitter, Some URL shorterner has aesthetic appeal and comes with traffic monitor and
through which can count number of clicks the URL has got during the period.
 Web analytics- It is useful in measuring the simple traffic counts in more detail and it is
step to control and eventually to improvement in increasing the costumer traffic. Drafting
a web analytics framework will facilitates in focusing on the desired goals. As in
achieving the goals need to be monitor the data and measuring the performance is quite
necessary to further improvement in outcomes.
 Infographics- It is most effective link building in search engine marketing techniques. It
concern with visual content marketing. It will be costly a bit and an individual can also
make own infographics to avoid the excessive cost consumption (Carvalhosa and et.al,
2017). There are some points to create effective infographics such as writing unique
description, including of raw data sources , website link in infographics source code,
using attracting design, information must be precise and crisp and using statistics that will
grab more attractive audience. Sharing infographics in social network an lot of creativity
to make make website or campaign successful.
 Links- It is most essential factor in building website for search engines. The website
popularity are monitoring by search engine of inbound links the site is having. Many
times has happened when search engine include the popularity as using the aspect of
ranking algorithm.
 Site design- It is essential strategy of search engine marketing strategies that will be
useful in developing the best website and it could be proof as first impression that can
impress the viewers. Some of the site are so attractive and catchy that make the viewers
more likely to visit more due to beautiful website and this could be through details or
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quality content available on site. During making of beautiful website it is important to
build such website to attract the attention of costumer and the grab the attraction of them.
 Reverse image search- This is new link building method and proof as one of the best
way to get the links (Makrides, Vrontis and Christofi, 2020). From the some of the
important points that need to be consider as or in name of URL, after getting the image
on site and clicking the image the details. Competitor's backlinks- Finding out the top competitors in the prevailing market will
help the in knowing the ideas for quality links and targetting the costumer. After finding
their targetted keywords which put them into backlink tool and getting the list of
backlinks for site. Some of the important ways to target the costumer is using the best
techniques that will helps in knowing the what and how to make strategies to build better
backlinks in the comparison of competitors.
Experience of Simbound simulation game
It is interesting, bootstrapped educational start-up that provides cloud- based simulation-
based techniques to teach students that hoe effectively use different online marketing tools. This
proof as best method to grasp the online marketing campaigns that set-up from email marketing.
It is risk free environment where it include the learning by doing. In our own experience of
simbound simulation game there are many steps that need to be started with, in first round was
about to create landing page (Key, 2017). In the process of digital marketing, landing page is
stand-lone web page which is created for the advertising the marketing advertising campaign and
the name of website is Yellow Homes. In which we started the campaign in order to drive more
traffic and also done some researchers regarding keywords and I appointed the one that leads to
most of the traffic. In the second round I created three campaign for website, with the initial
budget of 1500 pound and then divided 300 pounds to each campaign. According to the cpc we
decide on 2 pound and following results are 2394 clicks, cost is 1143.4 pounds and profit is
321pounds and conversions is 44. My main propose is to has high ROAS and our case the results
are sakes 239 and leads is 87. As ROAS is mainly “return on ad spend”. After completion of
second round the, the third round is focusing on e-mail campaign with the help of A/B rest that
helps in achieving the more better results and maintaining the traffic as compared to others. As in
this round the it optimised the landing page and I was more focusing on email- sign ups. As,
conversion are more important and needed to be appear more to increase it and when someone
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sign-ups then it consider as one conversion no matter how much they make purchase and making
it more profitable. In this campaign we get the 50 conversions as this was quite good experience
and we are happy from getting the required results (Domazet and Neogradi, 2019). Many of the
viewers are sometime interested in seeing the product and services and when they click on
similar product than it is counted as number of clicks on website as we got 230 clicks from the
email campaign. This required were more less then search engine marketing as there we got
around 2394 click which is much higher than email marketing. As from this result we got the
experience of how things works there and what are techniques that will be useful in achieving the
target. After completing the four round our team has decided to build more landing page for our
website the name of this is “Yellow website apple” to increase the campaign and awareness. In
this we were successfully able to get the clicks around 6814 clicks which is higher than earlier
one and profit is 1072 pounds which is again a good amount of profit we receive as compared to
other. As from it we realised the importance of landing page and also that it is necessary to make
it more attractive and site design. In email marketing the the total email has sent over 31778 out
of which 1767 were opened and conversion rate is 50 and clicks were 230 which is same as
earlier. The matrices between email delivered and email sent is higher. Through from this
learning progress we as a team has learner the importance of some techniques and tools that will
be useful in this simbound simulation game. Some techniques that were so important that we
could use for example using PPC tool that is Pay-per-click and using appropriate keywords
research that will be useful in making the website on the top search and using other helpful tools.
I learned online marketing stimulate the real life digital marketing experience and lean to manage
the many activities such as making budget, formulating the marketing strategies and sort out
difficult part that could be faced in real time marketing campaigning. This gives an idea about
how things were going on and an individual is using certain marketing tactics to sharpening the
skills that were useful in various results that comes with certain methods (Staton, 2016). It
depicts the real world business scenario that facilitates in playing in interactive game and those
who want to make career in it. As search engine marketing campaign that we use in this
simbound simulation game we choose is quite effective and with that also we can use other tools
and techniques such as keywords research, PPC landing page more effectively. Other than that
some measures are needed to be required to use in this game such as effective campaign
marketplace and Yellow website apple performance is average from all other website that is 1.33
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and highest is 1.65 that was gained by Red Hawk company (Melović and et.al., 2020). So,
overall experience is very good and get to know the importance of this game and learned many
valuable tools and techniques without using losing and gaining of real money which is quite
interesting.
CONCLUSION
From the above report it is concluded that Search engine marketing refers to certain
methods that will be useful in nowadays to advertise and it is one of the digital marketing tool
that is used widely and its importance is increasing. Some of main techniques and tools that were
use in this techniques is PPC, site design, infographics, keywords research, URL Shortend, links
and web analytics, reverse image search and this are some tools that were very beneficial and
make the campaign more attractive and successful. It helps in reaching the clients, enhancing
brand awareness and facilitates in driving the traffic and there are many other benefits of using
this in order to achieve the targetting audiences. Apart from that simbound simulation game has
been done and share the experience of it while doing this. This is web marketing activities which
carries games like environment and give the experience of real game and helps the student in
learning the digital marketing simulation game that is being used by many of learners who wants
to make career in this online marketing simulation game.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journal
Lui, R. W. and Au, C. H., 2017, December. Designing simulation games for information systems
education—A case study in teaching for digital marketing. In 2017 IEEE 6th
International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering
(TALE) (pp. 290-295). IEEE.
Clarke, T. B., Murphy, J., Wetsch, L. R. and Boeck, H., 2018. Teaching search engine marketing
through the google ad grants program. Marketing education review, 28(2), pp.136-147.
Capatina, A. and et.al., 2018. Tracking precursors of learning analytics over serious game team
performance ranking. Behaviour & Information Technology, 37(10-11), pp.1008-1020.
Key, T. M., 2017. Domains of digital marketing channels in the sharing economy. Journal of
Marketing Channels, 24(1-2), pp.27-38.
Domazet, I.S. and Neogradi, S., 2019. Digital Marketing and Service Industry: Digital Marketing
in the Banking Industry. In Managing Diversity, Innovation, and Infrastructure in
Digital Business (pp. 20-40). IGI Global.
Staton, M. G., 2016. Improving student job placement and assessment through the use of digital
marketing certification programs. Marketing Education Review, 26(1), pp.20-24.
Melović, B. and et.al., 2020. The impact of digital transformation and digital marketing on the
brand promotion, positioning and electronic business in Montenegro. Technology in
Society, 63, p.101425.
Makrides, A., Vrontis, D. and Christofi, M., 2020. The gold rush of digital marketing: assessing
prospects of building brand awareness overseas. Business Perspectives and
Research, 8(1), pp.4-20.
Carvalhosa, P. and et.al., 2017, April. Pervasiveness in digital marketing–a global overview.
In World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (pp. 391-398). Springer,
Cham.
Lui, R. W. and Au, C. H., 2017, December. Designing simulation games for information systems
education—A case study in teaching for digital marketing. In 2017 IEEE 6th
International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering
(TALE) (pp. 290-295). IEEE.
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