Digital Marketing Strategy Report: Unilever Case Study Analysis

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of digital marketing strategies, using Unilever as a case study. It begins with an overview of the digital marketing process, detailing the steps involved in creating and executing effective campaigns. The report then delves into situational analysis, including SWOT and PESTEL analyses of Unilever's market position and external factors. It explores the link between digital marketing strategy and digital business, highlighting Unilever's e-commerce growth and online advertising efforts. The report further examines the formulation of objectives, the design of implementation plans using the STP model (segmentation, targeting, and positioning), and the application of the marketing mix (product, place, promotion, and price). Budgeting and campaign measurement, including the use of KPIs, are also discussed. The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of digital marketing in driving business growth and adapting to the evolving digital landscape. The analysis provides valuable insights into the strategic application of digital marketing principles within a real-world business context.

DIGITAL MARKETING
STRATEGY

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
Digital marketing process and its overview:................................................................................1
Steps of Digital Marketing Campaigns:.......................................................................................1
CONCLUSION ...............................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION
A digital marketing campaign includes a lot of complex process that will require attention
and dedication, starts from the moment to conceive of campaign, till it is being presented to
consumers. With the help of digital marketing, there is a constant exchange of data between
business and different online platforms. There are lot more choices that one need to make when
putting marketing campaigns together. The report discuss about digital marketing process.
Further, in this report, the stages of digital marketing campaign is explain, that includes the
situational analysis, formulation of objectives, budgeting and measurement of campaign.
Digital marketing process and its overview:
Digital marketing is a process that deliver personal service to online audience that helps to
improve sales and build strong customer base and can be applied to product, brand, business. A
brilliant online presence can help an individual through purchasing or selection process. It
involves step by step process that meet the customer requirements and help Unilever to have a
successful presence on various digital platforms (Alghizzawi, 2019). The process starts with
marketing to target audience, building of trust, escorting customers and presenting the products
or services that cater the needs of its target audience.
Unilever's mission or vision statement should matched up with its marketing. Unilever should
need to identify all problems and than work on getting solutions in order to achieve its business
goals. Hence, the marketers can help an organisation to identify the problems and research with
the help of surveys and may take suggestions from folks. After process of survey completed than
Unilever can develop alternatives plans. Unilever should carefully analyse every alternatives and
need to select the possible plan among all alternatives.
Steps of Digital Marketing Campaigns:
1: Situation Analysis
A Situational Analysis is basically a review of competitors and many other things that are
happening in the marketplace, that includes trends and preferences. While creating digital
marketing plan, its imperative to consider situation analysis. Through Digital marketing plan,
Unilever is able to reach its potential customers and growing its business (Bala and Verma,
2018). While on the other hand, Situation Analysis is help in evaluating its current situation of
marketing. Later it draws conclusions on where to bring improvement based on its findings.
SWOT Analysis of Unilever
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Strength
It describe all the positive contribution to the success of Unilever. Those elements of strength
can be tangible or intangible, however that should be in control of the company. Following
strength are necessary in Unilever's consumer goods that includes, strong brands, economies of
scale and presence of strong global recognition. Unilever understands the need for right
marketing or advertising for people and they always come up with unique way of promoting
their products.
Weaknesses
Unilever has weaknesses that limit its growth in competitive market. This segment of SWOT
examine its internal strategic factors that imposes hindrance to organisational development. One
of its weakness is its limited diversification of businesses outside the consumer goods. Unilever
has strong presence on digital platforms but it may lack in innovation sometimes that fails to
attract its target customers (Chaffey and Chadwick, 2019).
Opportunities
Unilever is now putting to use of social media for its advertising, as large number of
population is largely influenced by social media presence so it can be more effective at a lower
cost.
Threat
Unilever can face tough competition in the market place from strong competitors that are
emerging on digital platforms, for example, P&G makes it more difficult to sustain in market as
its social media presence is strong and effective.
PESTEL Analysis
Political
Political stability play an important role in determining all those factors that may impact
profitability of Unilever in a certain market. Unilever should need to analyse political stability,
legal framework for contract enforcement if the company is dealing in multiple country.
Economical
There are always sharp fluctuations in the global economy in currency market. Hence,
before making strategies related to digital marking or advertising in another country, the
important factors should consider like unemployment rate, inflation rate, economic growth rate
etc.
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Social
Social analysis is important for understanding of cultural or social environment of the
marketplace. With the help of social analysis, Unilever understand consumer buying patterns and
preferences, cultural trends, analytics of populations. It provide benefits for digital marketers to
know which season is best and ultimately get best sales for the company.
Technological
Unilever should do technological analysis of the business and also speed at which the
technology disrupts the business. Digital marketer should analyse the essential factors related
with technology like recent development by Unilever and impact on cost structure in personal
goods (Chaffey and Smith, 2017).
Environmental
As a digital marketers, the understanding of environmental factors are paramount. They
should need to focus more on factors of surroundings that may create impact on the business
directly or indirectly. For example, geographical locations, environmental offsets, climatic
changes are essential factors that become useful for digital marketer and its strategies.
Legal
Legal is another vital factor that need to analyse before making any marketing plan. Unilever
should consider all the particular laws or regulations before posting any content or images as a
promotional tool on various digital platforms for example, cyber law that protect them from
occurring any theft.
2: Link of Digital Marketing Strategy with Digital Business:
Unilever's digital strategy is help to develop an informal relationship with consumers for its
brand. Apart from marketing, Unilever is enlarging its digital presence to drive growth with the
help of online platforms. Company is experience growth in e-commerce of about 30% Baker,
(Baker,R.2021). Unilever's e-commerce business consists of sales with the online platforms and
able to strong its brand image (de Ruyter and et.al.,2018). Online advertisement is still a global
recognition, as become one of the largest retailer around the world, Unilever also faces issues
related with digital marketing. Unilever revealed that its performance was negatively impacted
by bad weather and climatic conditions in Europe. However, the region did not experience a
similar situation last year. With this approach, Unilever is focus on its brand with purpose,
because it provides the company an innovative way to reach out to its customers. For example,
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Unilever is promoting its Ben or jerry ice-cream brand that has launched a social justice
campaign.
3: Objectives Formulation
Following are the objectives that Unilever will make in order to implement digital marketing
strategies:
To increase the brand awareness and sales.
To generate more traffics for its online-store.
To increase the repeat purchases for its product or services.
4: Design of implementation plan in order to meet the objectives.
STP of Unilever: STP modal helps in marketing strategy so that it become more efficient and
unique. Business will grow at faster rate when segmenting of target market, targeting potential
customer and positioning of product is done properly. Lets discuss more in detail about STP.
Segmentation
In this process, a single market is divided into smaller segments. This process is really helpful
while making strategies for digital marketing. The main reason for dividing the market is to
make it simple so that the company is able to address the needs of smaller sections of people.
Hence, Unilever try to manufacture those products as per preferences, taste or consuming habits
of consumers (Goldfarb and Tucker , 2019). For example, Unilever's beauty products largely
target young woman with age group of 16 to 35 and use famous celebrity for promoting its
products.
Targeting
Targeting is essential step in STP process. After company is clear about segments, next step
should be to aim at each segment. Company should target potential customers that is essential for
its profitability (Kannan, 2017). Unilever's surf excel follows a single-market concentration that
mostly focus on woman and that has been recognized as 'Surf Excel Mom'. However, Unilever
also follows certain types of strategies that is based on several variant, for instance, Surf Excel
Matrix is introduced for particular kind of users, and market its products with washing machine.
Positioning
It is the final step of STP process in which company need to figure out place for its products
or services. Positioning is helping in creating image of the company's brand in front of its
customers. Unilever should need to be careful about this step because now this image has to be
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such that the buyers connect with the product instantly. When positioning is on customer
oriented than Unilever should done its advertising and campaigns that are targeted at the
consumers. Conversely, if positioning is done on competitors than all the promotional strategies
try to say that their products is better than that of the competitors .
Marketing Mix of Unilever
Product
This section of marketing mix defines outputs of company, primarily refer as product mix.
Unilever has variety of products that categorised in foods, cloths, personal care or home care. Its
organisational structure depicts range of consumer goods in this product mix (Mogaji, Soetan
and Kieu, 2020).
Place
The places where Unilever handle with consumers or it target customers. The company uses
various places for distributing of its products or services. Retailers are main places of distribution
for its products, For example, Walmart become one of the largest retailer for distributing of
consumer products.
Promotion
Unilever should promotes its products, but also consider level of competitive rivalry in the
global market. Marketing mix defines the strategies in the company's approach in order to
promote its products to its target markets. Unilever uses the following approaches for
promotional activities that includes personal selling, direct marketing, advertising and sales
promotion .
Price
Unilever maintains a wide range of pricing strategies because of diversification of its products.
The main pricing strategies of Unilever are market oriented strategy that set price based on
consumer goods market forces. Further, premium price strategy includes price that is usually
higher than its competitors.
5: Budgeting
It is a process of making a plan in order to spend money. Budgeting is simply a method from
which a company balancing its expenses with its income. Budget in digital marketing involves
many important factors that includes the objectives of marketing, audit of past results etc.
Content Marketing is top the list for most of the digital marketers (Saura, 2020). There are plenty
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of marketing tactics that need to put in practice. For example, email marketing, marketing
automation, social media marketing, blogging of business, video marketing etc. Once the
company know how much is the budget than have a list ready of all the digital marketing
strategies.
6: Measurement of campaign
The marketer should first of all select correct path of goal, than choose the metrics and
measure effectiveness of online advertisement. With the help of KPIs, company can measure and
track the performance of their marketing campaigns. Digital Marketers used various tools in
order to promote its products and services (Saura, Sanchez and Correia, 2019). However,
tracking the results can be time consuming or difficult task for them. But, creating an effective
digital marketing KPIs or strategies, its become convenient to identify the goals or targets and
than measure the performance which are based on those values. Further, incremental sales
measure the contribution of marketing attempts towards number of sales. This method shows
how level of effectiveness of marketing campaigns in generating sales and it is the best method
to compare efforts of marketing.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, the above report summarised about various stages of marketing and its importance
and how digital marketing helping business to grow in this competitive world with effective use
of social media. Further, the report elaborated about SWOT that helps an organisation to
identifies its weaknesses, threats and how its mitigate them in order to increase its overall sales.
With PESTLE, it determine all essential factors that are required for marketing or promotional
strategies. Later, report prepared budget of digital campaigns that is paramount for every
company as with this the cost will be identified. The report elaborated that with the help of
digital marketing plans, a company can measure its performance efficiently.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Alghizzawi, M., 2019. The role of digital marketing in consumer behavior: A survey. Int. J. Inf.
Technol. Lang. Stud. 3(1). pp.24-31.
Bala, M. and Verma, D., 2018. A critical review of digital marketing. M. Bala, D. Verma (2018).
A Critical Review of Digital Marketing. International Journal of Management, IT &
Engineering.8(10). pp.321-339.
Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F., 2019. Digital marketing. Pearson UK.
Chaffey, D. and Smith, P.R., 2017. Digital marketing excellence: planning, optimizing and
integrating online marketing. Taylor & Francis.
de Ruyter, and et.al., 2018. When nothing is what it seems: A digital marketing research
agenda. Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ). 26(3). pp.199-203.
Goldfarb, A. and Tucker, C., 2019. Digital marketing. In Handbook of the Economics of
Marketing (Vol. 1, pp. 259-290). North-Holland.
Kannan, P.K., 2017. Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International
Journal of Research in Marketing. 34(1).pp.22-45.
Mogaji, E., Soetan, T.O. and Kieu, T.A., 2020. The implications of artificial intelligence on the
digital marketing of financial services to vulnerable customers. Australasian Marketing
Journal (AMJ).
Saura, J.R., 2020. Using Data Sciences in Digital Marketing: Framework, methods, and
performance metrics. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge.
Saura, J.R., Palos-Sanchez, P.R. and Correia, M.B., 2019. Digital marketing strategies based on
the e-business model: Literature review and future directions. Organizational
transformation and managing innovation in the fourth industrial revolution, pp.86-103.
Online -
Baker, R.2021.[Online].Available through. <https://www.marketingweek.com/digital-marketing-
boosts-unilever-brands/>
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