The 5 S's of Digital Marketing

 Digital marketing has become ubiquitous. Virtually every single company today does marketing of their products online. Since marketing is the process of deciding on what value to provide to whom and then create and deliver the value. The final step is to reap the value to the company from customers. To ensure that digital marketing process is compatible with this mentioned process, there are five fundamentals of digital marketing that must be ensured.

They are more commonly known as the Five S's of digital marketing: speak, serve, save, sizzle, and sell.

Speak

Speak refers to all forms of communication with the customer by the brand and its ambassadors. Communication with the customer is now more important than ever before—ever-increasing connectivity between companies, customers, and customers among themselves demands that brands stay connected with the customer all the time. Customer are no longer brand loyal. Therefore, it is high time companies used digital marketing to speak with their customers. One of the classiest examples of how internet enables brands to speak with their audiences is Tesla’s Elon Musk’s communication strategy. The CEO’s celebrity status on digital platforms, mainly his own Twitter account has enabled him to utilize ‘earned advertising’ rather than paid advertising.

Serve

Serve refers to taking care of all customer needs, especially informational needs. The marketing process starts with the identification of customer needs. The internet has radically improved this stage of the process. Companies can serve customers faster, more innovatively and at relatively lower costs. One such company is Korean retail giant Tesco. Tesco bought Homeplus to turn around shoppers’ experience by creating virtual stores.  “Korean retailer Homeplus has invented a novel solution in the form of virtual stores—retail kiosks with life-sized virtual images of real product displays—placed in high-traffic areas such as subway stations, where potential customers will be killing time waiting around.”

Save

The third S stands for all the savings that companies make using the internet for their marketing activities. Tesla does not spend a single penny on advertising. Digital marketing is cost effective and has more reach and impact on consumers; hence it saves on overall process. However, saving means more than just costs. Companies use digital media to avoid a wide array of undesirable events. They use it for instant response to crisis, keep customers from switching, perform competitive intelligence to analyze how competition may steal their customers.

Sizzle

Sizzle, is perhaps the most interesting aspect of internet marketing: creating an online experience which makes customers salivate. Companies use multimedia to an extent where the online content forces customers into impulse buying. Just like the freshly cooked food sizzles (creates a hissing sound and hot steam), and intensifies hunger, brands should make customers want their products there and then as soon as they see them online. Research suggests a strong positive correlation between website aesthetics and impulse purchase. This leads to the final and most valued S, which corresponds to the value reaping function of the marketing process.

Sell

Internet marketing may not be used, in some cases, directly to sell products, but the ultimate goal, virtually every time is selling, making profit and increasing company value. Sales are the tools to get to these goals. Almost all of the Amazon’s sells are made online in all the categories it operates in. For example, Amazon and Barnes and Noble sell 85% the books sold online globally while Amazon has 90% of that share. Thus, companies can make total virtual shopping experience or can complement their physical sales by having a strong digital footprint.

Final thought

These five S's of digital marketing are to used to devise the digital marketing strategy. Companies are increasing exploiting the online resources because customers are also online most of the times, the whole marketing process from reaching out to customers to making them loyal users of the brand can be managed digitally with these five S’s of digital marketing.