Assessment type: Business report.
Word limit: 3,000 words (+/- 10%) excluding executive summary, charts, tables, graphics, and references.
Introduction
For digital marketers to engage in effective planning, we need to analyse and understand our market, competitors, customer experiences, digital marketing performance, and potential risks. Digital marketing analysis is cyclical in nature, and is conducted as part of every planning cycle, usually at the beginning of the strategic marketing process, and is used to inform the development of a digital marketing plan and guide decision-making. Without conducting detailed analysis, marketers risk developing a digital marketing plan which underperforms. This assignment is designed to build and assess your skills in conducting digital marketing analysis.
Client briefing:
Click here to view the client briefing.
*_Instructions
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1. Watch the client briefing and review materials
Before you start the assignment, please ensure you carefully review all of the materials provided by the client, and the assignment instructions.
2. Conduct a market and competitor analysis
Conduct a brief analysis of the macro level factors impact the client's market or industry. Use an established framework to conduct this analysis (e.g. PESTLE), but make sure you keep the analysis focused on digital trends and factors.
Conduct analysis on one of the client's closest competitors, and draw meaningful insights about their target audience, digital marketing strategies, and performance. Use publicly available information, your own observations, and free analysis software to understand how the competitor performs when it comes to digital marketing initiatives. Summarise your findings in a SWOT table.
3. Map the customer journey for your key persona
From the three audience personas you developed in assignment one, choose the one that you think is most attractive for the client to target, and briefly justify why you have selected this persona as the most viable.
For the persona you have selected, analyse how they currently experience the client's offering, and develop a customer journey map to provide an overview of their end-to-end experience. Use one of the customer journey map templates provided to you as part of the coursework in this unit or find your own template online (lots of free templates available). As part of the analysis, focus on identifying potential pain points in the customer journey where improvements could be made using digital initiatives.
4. Audit digital marketing performance
For each of the digital touchpoints you have identified in your customer journey map, conduct a digital marketing audit to understand how the client is performing, and identify potential improvements that could be made in the future. Use data provided by the client, your own analysis, and free analysis software (e.g., Google PageSpeed Insights, SimplyWeb, UberSuggest, SocialBlade, SEMRush, among many others) to analyse performance and provide evidence and support for your conclusions. As an example, depending on the client, you could audit their website, app, search engine optimisation, content strategy, social media marketing, direct marketing (email and mobile), digital advertising, or any other aspects you feel are relevant and insightful.
At the end of this section, you should have identified a number of problems or areas for improvement in the client's digital marketing efforts. If you get to the end of your audit, and you have not identified any problems at all, then you need to be more critical in your analysis. Even the best organisations only improve by identifying areas where they can improve.
While it is OK to use your judgement about whether the client is performing or underperforming, it is always best to find a benchmark or point of reference. For example, if you say that the engagement rate for the client's website is low, you might also need to look up Google's global benchmarks and state how the client website compares or analyse the client against their key competitor(s).
5. Analyse the client's impact
Think critically and reflect on the client's industry, competitors, audience, and digital marketing tactics. Identify and briefly describe three integrity, ethical, or legal issues that could pose a risk to the client, their audience, or society more broadly. Briefly suggest how each issue could be mitigated by the client to reduce risk and negative impact.
6. Make recommendations to inform your digital marketing plan
Provide a brief summary of the most important insights from your digital marketing analysis. For each one, briefly recommend how this insight could be used to guide decision making and inform the development of a digital marketing plan in assignment three.
Recommended structure:
Your assignment should be presented in business report format and include numbered headings, such as the following:
Executive summary (1 page max)
Table of contents
Introduction
Market and competitor analysis
Customer journey mapping
Digital marketing audit
Impact analysis
Recommendations
References
Appendix (if applicable)
Important notes:
The report, references and appendices to be assembled in one document and uploaded as one electronic file to Canvas.
The key to successfully completing each step in the assignment is to integrate theory and demonstrate learning from this unit to structure your research and analysis (insight). Integration means using relevant marketing and digital marketing theory, concepts and frameworks to structure your research into insights that are comprehendible by a practicing marketer. It is not cut and paste of theory, but rather the use of theory to build and frame the logic of your arguments and insights. You are integrating theory to demonstrate your understanding and learn how to use these tools to solve business problems.
You may not know everything you would like to know about the client's target audience or brand when completing this assignment. When you do not have enough information, make some reasonable assumptions or use logic to develop the answer, based on the evidence you have available to you.
Your work should be supported by evidence from a range of sources and the more relevant evidence you provide, the better. A minimum of 5 references is expected, including at least 1 academic journal article.
To fit within the word limit you should focus only on crucial information, write succinctly, and use charts, tables and graphics to present your analysis and evidence.
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