Study of digital marketing channels and promotion plan for BooksTALK

Abstract

As part of this project, we worked closely with BooksTALK Audiobooks Private Limited, an audiobook publishing company based out of Bangalore. Our overall objective of this project was in studying various digital marketing channels available, prioritizing few channels for BooksTALK and executing an online marketing campaign using Google s Adwords. We started the project with a discussion about BooksTALK with its founder Mr. Jai M Zende to understand the business model, study the value chain and challenges faced by BooksTALK. BooksTALK was looking for suggestions in developing their marketing strategy specifically to develop a positioning and promotion strategy. This project was aimed to focus on the digital marketing aspects for BooksTALK including but not limited to executing a paid search marketing campaign. We started with the study of marketing incongruent products like an audiobook. Based on the research we conducted, we understood marketing of incongruent products can be through positioning, functional attributes and bundling. We suggest BooksTALK to concentrate on positioning, brand building and functional attributes as the core objectives while designing their marketing strategies. Considering we are trying to create a new buying category, these parameters are congruent with BooksTALK s motive. We have kept this in mind while designing campaigns and providing other recommendations to BooksTALK. Our second objective was to study the various digital marketing channels available and understand how they can be utilized from a small business perspective and also to achieve the above mentioned objectives for BooksTALK. We studied multiple digital marketing channels specifically design of websites, Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Link Building Strategies, Viral Marketing and building communities for engagement. Detailed recommendations and suggested messaging are provided for each of these campaigns. Our high level recommendation is to tap the huge Facebook fans that BooksTALK has, engage more with them and utilize Facebook to convert more leads and also create the audiobook category. Email marketing cannot be completely avoided and BooksTALK should focus its efforts in building an email cadence. Paid search marketing may not be a channel that BooksTALK want to try out at this point; however BooksTALK should significantly invest efforts for search engine optimization and link building. We also conducted a market research to understand the acceptability of audiobooks, evaluate online platform as a sales channel and what our chosen target segment looks for from an engagement perspective. Our recommended target group is urban young professionals who are tech savvy and would like to spend their time more effectively. Based on our market research specifically factor analysis, multi-dimensional scaling and discriminant analysis, we have come up with the marketing messages for audiobook/non-audiobook users, value propositions and other recommendations in utilizing various digital marketing channels.