By Vikash Kumar
Transcribed in July 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship, from Ravi Kumar's Modlingua Live talk on online marketing strategy and the AIDA model. Statistics and follower counts are as stated in the talk.
Source video: AIDA Marketing: The Secret to Huge Online Profits - Modlingua Live
Mass Media and Social Media
A very good evening to you all. Today we are going to learn about online marketing and social media. We will cover the very basics of online marketing and social media and understand what AIDA is - the AIDA model, meaning Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action - and how these four terms influence social media, marketing and online marketing.
Let us start with the meaning of mass media. Mass media is a traditional form of media in which an instrument is used to reach out to people with news, advertisements, movies and music. Traditional media includes radio, television and the dish antenna. At the back end, people generate news, movies and information and share them with you, and you are the consumer. There is a relationship between the mass media makers and the consumers: they create the content and you consume it.
Social media works differently. The people providing the platform are not creating any news for you. They are giving you a user experience - they have created a system in which we create the content for them. That means we are content makers ourselves and consumers at the same time. This is the fundamental difference between traditional mass media and social media, and it is what is called Web 2.0 technology: a platform where you do not only go for information, but where there is two-way communication. You interact with the machine, with the system and with people. In mass media we had the machine, information and consumers. In social media we still have machines, but we are ourselves content makers as well as consumers.
Why Online Marketing Matters
Because of these Web 2.0 technologies, the last 10-15 years have seen tremendous change - a massive disruption in the market. The marketing that we used to do through television advertisements or hoardings is now taking place online, so online marketing has become a very important instrument for everybody. Online marketing includes internet marketing, email marketing, podcasting and blogging, and social media is a very important factor in it.
Social media is not only Facebook or Google+ or the few platforms we all know. It also consists of many small blogging points and small platforms - Modlingua is one of them, a place where you interact with people, make content and share it. Modlingua is just one small example; similar platforms exist in the millions, apart from Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Online marketing is the marketing of products or services over the internet, and it ties together the creative and technical aspects of the internet, including design, development and advertising. Companies now use it for selling their products and interacting with consumers. Internet users have increased tremendously in recent years. In the USA about 74.7% of the population uses the internet; in Brazil 34.3%, in China 22.4%, and in India penetration was about 7.1% in the graph I showed. But with the introduction of the Jio SIM and other competitive players, internet penetration in India has increased many times over - it could now be 15% or 20% of the population with internet access through mobile phones, not necessarily wired or high-speed. That means most of them are now on Twitter, Facebook and similar media.
Email Marketing and Blogging
The basic channels of online marketing are email marketing, blogging, pay-per-click marketing, social media marketing, digital marketing and viral marketing.
In email marketing we send emails to people and try to reach out to them - pushing information into somebody's inbox. This is no longer considered very effective, because it intrudes on somebody's privacy without permission. Platforms including Google and Yahoo have developed systems by which marketing emails are blocked unless you have opt-in IDs; without them, your emails are treated as spam. So email marketing is in transition.
Blogging has become the most important channel. We blog, we write, we share information, and people come in - it is a way of engaging with a variety of people. Many big companies allow you to blog and then take feedback from what you do. Blogging plus a feedback mechanism helps them understand the psyche of the consumers, and that is how they retain people.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Apart from blogging there is pay-per-click marketing - PPC. Platforms including Google Ads allow you to put your advertisement on their sites; YouTube does the same, Facebook does the same, and other key players such as Yahoo do the same. You create an ad and it is disseminated to targeted people on Facebook, Google, Yahoo or YouTube. You may have noticed: if you search once on Google for, say, an air ticket to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and then visit Facebook, you start getting ads on Facebook for Malaysia air tickets. This happens because cookies enabled on your computer track your movement; the moment you switch from one platform to another, they know what you are doing. They keep putting their ads in front of you so that you click them, and the moment you click, the person who placed the ad is charged. One click can cost ten rupees, a hundred rupees, even five hundred rupees - it depends on the importance of the word on which Google is showing your ad. This is pay-per-click marketing.
Earlier, big corporates and brands used to spend 15% to 30% of their cost on advertising on TV channels and newspapers; now those funds are being bifurcated into pay-per-click. Big platforms where goods are sold - Amazon, Flipkart, eBay - spend huge amounts on pay-per-click ads, and even a small company does the same depending on its pocket. PPC is not cheap, but comparatively it is cheaper than television and other traditional spending.
Social Media Marketing
In social media marketing you try to bring as many followers as possible to a product, a brand, a name or a page - for example, Modlingua's corporate profile page, which currently has around 1,400 followers. The more followers Modlingua has, the better it penetrates the thought process of people. Similarly with the Ravi Kumar brand: the more followers I have, the more penetration I have, and the more clicks a person makes on the information I share, the better, because I am reaching out to a bigger number of people.
Even in social media marketing there is a paid element. Apart from simply blogging, you can also pay Facebook to disseminate your advertisement and increase popularity. Many times, when I create a blog that I feel is important and that can bring more people if it is disseminated, instead of just sharing it I also spend $10 on it. That $10 could mean reaching approximately 5,000 people, and if out of those 5,000 a thousand read and like it, they become a kind of passive follower for the future. That is how we engage with people on social media.
Digital Marketing and Viral Marketing
Digital marketing is equally important. It includes video channels such as YouTube, internet radio, mobile phones - WhatsApp has come in a big way - and the display of banners and ads, which are also part of digital media. Earlier we put ads on hoardings at airports or crowded places; now we put them on crowded, high-traffic points on the internet. For example, if a newspaper's blog is very important and lots of people go there, I approach that newspaper, or a person who has lots of followers, and ask them to put my ad on their blog or page. They charge me and place the ad, increasing my visibility and internet presence. That is digital marketing.
Viral marketing is a technique of using all these media to create an impact such that once you share something, it is shared not by one or two or three people but by thousands. Recall the songs Kolaveri Di and Gangnam Style - they went viral, with millions of hits on Facebook, WhatsApp and elsewhere. When content spreads beyond numbers like this, it becomes viral. Viral marketing is very important if you are looking at large-scale branding and presence.
The AIDA Model
To tie the whole online marketing strategy together we have the AIDA model: A is awareness, I is interest, D is desire and A is action. If we do not put these four aspects into our online marketing strategy, the strategy will never be complete. Suppose we create a blog and create awareness - fine, awareness comes. But if there is no interest, no desire and no action, the plan is not complete. If we create awareness and interest in our product or information but there is no desire, there will be no action. And if we achieve awareness, interest and desire but there is no action, all our efforts are useless.
So we create a strategy by which we create awareness, we create interest, and out of that interest we make people desirous of what we are doing. The moment they start desiring, they click - and after they click, it must convert as well. It becomes a complete science. Big companies have a division of 10, 20, 30 people only for creating awareness, then a division for creating interest, a division for creating desire and a division for creating action. When all these four things sync, they combine and make the plan complete - and only then can a strategic plan of online marketing be called an effective plan. If any of these four is lacking, it is not an effective online marketing plan.
