DIGITAL MARKETING

At a high level, digital marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. Using these online media channels, digital marketing is the method by which companies endorse goods, services, and brands. Consumers heavily rely on digital means to research products. For example, Think with Google marketing insights found that 48% of consumers start their inquiries on search engines, while 33% look to brand websites and 26% search within mobile applications.

While modern day digital marketing is an enormous system of channels to which marketers simply must onboard their brands, advertising online is much more complex than the channels alone. In order to achieve the true potential of digital marketing, marketers have to dig deep into today’s vast and intricate cross-channel world to discover strategies that make an impact through engagement marketing. Engagement marketing is the method of forming meaningful interactions with potential and returning customers based on the data you collect over time. By engaging customers in a digital landscape, you build brand awareness, set yourself as an industry thought leader, and place your business at the forefront when the customer is ready to buy.

By implementing an omnichannel digital marketing strategy, marketers can collect valuable insights into target audience behaviors while opening the door to new methods of customer engagement. Additionally, companies can expect to see an increase in retention. According to a report by Invesp, companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers compared to companies with weak omnichannel programs that have a retention rate of just 33%. 

As for the future of digital marketing, we can expect to see a continued increase in the variety of wearable devices available to consumers. Forbes also forecasts that social media will become increasingly conversational in the B2B space, video content will be refined for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, and email marketing will become even more personalized.

“Digital is at the core of everything in marketing today—it has gone from ‘one of the things marketing does’ to ‘THE thing that marketing does.’”

 – Sanjay Dholakia, Former Chief Marketing Officer, 

ROI of a successful digital marketing program

Digital marketing ROI involves much more than the up-front payback of standard banner ads, organic content marketing is also a major player in the digital marketing space.

• Digital marketing reaches customers beyond advertisements. Seventy percent of internet users want to learn about products through content versus traditional advertisements (MDG, 2014). 

• Digital marketing drives content marketing. The top five B2B content marketing tactics are social media content (92%), e-newsletters (83%), articles on your website (81%), blogs (80%), and in-person events (77%) (source). 

• Digital marketing is vital for SEO. The first organic search results on Google account for 32.5% of traffic share for a search content will be refined for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, and email marketing will become even more personalized.

  “Digital is at the core of everything in marketing today—it has gone from ‘one of the things marketing does’ to ‘THE thing that marketing does.’”

   – Sanjay Dholakia, Former Chief Marketing Officer, Marketo

   Common problems that digital marketing can solveTo optimize your marketing strategies, Problem: I don’t know my audience well enough to get started. Getting to know your audience takes time, and while your marketing team may have developed audience personas that can be of use, consumers actively spending time online may not behave in the way you’d expect. You’ll need to test different language with different targets, keeping in mind that certain descriptors will appeal to different people and their place in the buying cycle. Attune yourself to your audience and you’ll build credibility that will set you apart from the competition. roblem: I haven’t optimized my channels for SEO. Regardless of your position in the marketing process, it’s important to have an understanding of SEO best practices. In addition to improving search engine ranking, SEO can reinforce and support your campaign testing and optimization to ensure you’re delivering high quality, valuable content that your potential customers want. 

  • Problem: I don’t have a social media strategy. Regardless of whether you want to develop an organic social media strategy, a paid social media strategy, or a blend of the two, it’s important to have some form of social marketing in place. While social media is excellent for branding and engagement, it can also be a useful channel for digital marketing advertisement. Find a niche and a consistent voice, be patient, and as your following increases, the impact of your ads will increase as well.
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  • Problem: My marketing teams are siloed. It’s important to break out of silos to create nimble, fluid structures. Your customers aren’t sequestered in one channel waiting for ads, so your marketing efforts must deploy cross-channel functionality with teams that bring multiple skill sets to the table to engage customers where they are. Each social network and channel includes different audiences and expectations, so marketing efforts may look completely different for each. This includes tone, imagery, offers, and even the time of day you post.
    
    
  • Problem: I’m under pressure from my CMO to report on metrics that support the bottom line. Digital marketing supports a vast universe of metrics that can be utilized to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, but these metrics should be chosen with care. Each case will depend upon your audience makeup and focus on each channel. Keeping this in mind, start by determining your goals for each channel and set metrics your CMO will want to see the most.digital is mandatory. Digital marketing can help you to get to know your audience, learn important data about them, and provide metrics that will give your marketing team credibility.

Human Resource

Human resources professionals are given a great deal of moral, ethical and legal responsibilities. In recruiting, training, reviewing, terminating and working with employees, there are a great deal of ethical ramifications. These positive or negative consequences can have a huge impact on the business at large. In a maze of complicated relationships, business associations, and personnel issues, many in the workplace look to a human resources team for guidance. 

•   Professional Responsibility

Like many other kinds of business people, human resources professionals must contribute to their organization with ethical integrity. Human resources professionals must also comply with the law, make ethical decisions, positively impact their organization and advocate for employees. They are required to commit to a high standard of professional responsibility. They must also, as a function of their profession, be familiar with many types of labor law.

•   Ethical Leadership

Human resources professionals are tasked with being ethical and moral role models. They must be familiar with "right or right" decision-making. They must also know how to be leaders. This is especially important, due to the fact that a poor ethical decision made by an HR person can affect an entire organization. For example, if you were an employee who caught an HR person stealing company office supplies, how would you feel about the company's policies against workplace theft?

•    Fairness and Justice

 Business ethics in particular is constantly changing and evolving. Arguably, most people have a hard time pointing out bad ethics until they see it. HR business people need to be familiar with basic ethics to negotiate decisions made by them or other departments. Social justice is becoming a more and more important topic for corporations and businesses, and human resources professionals need to learn about concepts like affirmative action. HR people should create an atmosphere that appreciates individuals and supports businesses. They should take an active role in eliminating bias and providing equal opportunities.

Finance

ETHICS IN FINANCE

Ethics in general is concerned with human behavior that is acceptable or "right" and that is not acceptable or "wrong" based on conventional morality. General ethical norms encompass truthfulness, honesty, integrity, respect for others, fairness, and justice. They relate to all aspects of life, including business and finance.

ETHICAL VIOLATIONS

The most frequently occurring ethical violations in finance relate to insider trading, stakeholder interest versus stockholder interest, investment management, and campaign financing. Businesses in general and financial markets in particular are replete with examples of violations of trust and loyalty in both public and private dealings. Fraudulent financial dealings, influence peddling and corruption in governments, brokers not maintaining proper records of customer trading, cheating customers of their trading profits, unauthorized transactions, insider trading, misuse of customer funds for personal gain, mis-pricing customer trades, and corruption and larceny in banking have become common occurrences.

ETHICAL CODES        

Approaches to dealing with ethical problems in finance range from establishing ethical codes for financial professionals to efforts to replace the rational-maximizer (egoistic) paradigm that underlies the modern capitalist system by one in which individuals are assumed to be altruistic, honest, and basically virtuous.

It is not uncommon to find established ethical codes and ethical offices in American corporations and in financial markets. Ethical codes for financial markets are established by the official regulatory agencies and self-regulating organizations to ensure ethically responsible behavior on the part of the operatives in the financial markets.

ethics & unethical issues in marketing

MARKETING

Marketing is more than just the advertising side of sales. The true idea of marketing encompasses “creating, communicating, and delivering value to customer that benefit the organization and its stakeholders”

ETHICS IN MARKETING

Ethics are a collection of principles of right conduct that shape the decisions people or organizations make. Practicing ethics in marketing means deliberately applying standards of fairness, or moral rights and wrongs, to marketing decision making, behavior, and practice in the organization.

UNFAIR OR DECEPTIVE MARKETING PRACTICES

Marketing practices are deceptive if customers believe they will get more value from a product or service than they actually receive. Deception, which can take the form of a misrepresentation, omission, or misleading practice, can occur when working with any element of the marketing mix. Because consumers are exposed to great quantities of information about products and firms, they often become skeptical of marketing claims and selling messages and act to protect themselves from being deceived. Thus, when a product or service does not provide expected value, customers will often seek a different source.

ETHICAL ISSUES SURROUNDING THE PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN MARKETING EFFORTS

As society changes, so do the images of and roles assumed by people, regardless of race, sex, or occupation. Women have been portrayed in a variety of ways over the years. When marketers present those images as overly conventional, formulaic, or oversimplified, people may view them as stereotypical and offensive.

ETHICAL ISSUES IN MARKETING TO MINORITIES

The United States is a society of ever-increasing diversity. Markets are broken into segments in which people share some similar characteristics. Ethical issues arise when marketing tactics are designed specifically to exploit or manipulate a minority market segment. Offensive practices may take the form of negative or stereotypical representations of minorities, associating the consumption of harmful or questionable products with a particular minority segment, and demeaning portrayals of a race or group. Ethical questions may also arise when high-pressure selling is directed at a group, when higher prices are charged for products sold to minorities, or even when stores provide poorer service in neighborhoods with a high population of minority customers. Such practices will likely result in a bad public image and lost sales for the marketer.

CONCLUSION

Because marketing decisions often require specialized knowledge, ethical issues are often more complicated than those faced in personal life—and effective decision making requires consistency. Because each business situation is different, and not all decisions are simple, many organizations have embraced ethical codes of conduct and rules of professional ethics to guide managers and employees. However, sometimes self-regulation proves insufficient to protect the interest of customers, organizations, or society.