Apply digital marketing to online newspaper vfpress vn,

STATE BANK OF VIETNAM BANKING ACADEMY Foreign Language Faculty - - GRADUATION THESIS APPLY DIGITAL MARKETING TO ONLINE NEWSPAPER - VFPRESS.VN Lecturer Student Class Student Code : Tran Thi Xuan Anh (M.A) : Lai Thu Thao : K14-ATCA : 14A7510218 20th May 2015 Graduation Thesis Banking Academy DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is result of my research work which I developed alone The work was done under the guidance of M.A Tran Thi Xuan Anh, at Banking Academy All resources and literature which I used are quoted in the thesis properly, stating the full reference to the source Lai Thu Thao – K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy ACKNOWLEDGEMENT My thesis cannot be completed without considerable support and encouragement from various people who are truly important to be acknowledged Foremost, I would like to express my sincere thanks to all the teachers in Banking Academy, who have provided me with invaluable knowledge during my time in university My deepest gratitude sends to my advisor M.A Tran Thi Xuan Anh, for her guidance and valuable comments My sincere thanks also go to my family and friends for their support and positive feedbacks throughout my course of study And also my thanks go to those who will read this thesis until the very end I hope that the result of this study will be useful for those organizations interested in Digital Marketing Lai Thu Thao – K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENT INTRODUCTION 1 Research rationale Aims of study Research questions Scope of the study Research methodology 5.1 Research process 5.2 Data collection and analysis Structure of the thesis CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF DIGITAL MARKETING 1.1 Online Newspaper & Assessment Criteria 1.2 Digital Marketing 11 1.2.1 Definition 11 1.2.2 Digital Marketing Methods 12 1.2.3 Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Marketing 20 1.3 Apply Digital Marketing to Online newspaper 21 CHAPTER 2: THE CURRENT SITUATION OF VIETNAM DIGITAL MARKETING AND VFPRESS.VN 23 2.1 The current situation of Vietnam Digital Marketing in recent years 23 2.2 The current situation at Online Newspaper VFPRESS.VN 25 2.2.1 Overview 25 2.2.2 Current Situation 26 Lai Thu Thao – K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy 2.3.3 Target Audience 33 2.3.4 Limitation and Causes 33 CHAPTER 3: APPLY DIGITAL MARKETING TO ONLINE NEWSPAPER – VFPRESS.VN 36 3.1 Techniques 36 3.1.1 E-mail Marketing: 36 3.1.2 Social Media Marketing (Facebook Advertising): 37 3.1.3 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 38 3.1.4 Mobile Advertising: 39 3.2 Tactics 39 3.2.1 Building traffic 40 3.2.2 User attraction 40 3.2.3 User retention 41 CONCLUSION 43 REFERENCES 44 Lai Thu Thao – K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Content metrics used by publishers Source: Econsultancy, 2013 Figure 1.2 Online Activities Conducted in Vietnam Source: Cimigo NetCitizens, 2012 13 Figure 1.3 The affiliate marketing model Source: Chaffey et al., 2006 17 Figure 1.4 Objectives of the digital marketing plan 22 Figure 2.1 Attitudes Towards Online Advertising Source: Cimigo NetCitizens, 2014 23 Figure 2.2 Top 50 companies spending for digital marketing in Vietnam Source: GSM Vietnam, 2014 24 Figure 2.3 Sectors of online advertisement spending Source: GSM Vietnam, 2014 25 Figure 2.4 Overview Statistics of VFPRESS.VN Source: Google Analytics, May 2015 27 Figure 2.5 Traffic Overview in VFPRESS.VN – Number of Visits by Day Source: Google Analytics, Mar 13th – May 13th 2015 28 Figure 2.6 Bounce Rate for All Visitors in VFPRESS.VN Source: Google Analytics, May 2015 28 Figure 2.7 Share of Traffic Sources in VFPRESS.VN Source: Google Analytics, May 2015 29 Figure 2.8 Top Keywords from Search Engine Source: Alexa, May 2015 30 Figure 2.9 VFPRESS.VN Entry Place & Users’ Education, Source: Alexa, May 2015 33 Lai Thu Thao – K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1 Digital Marketing Strategies for Building an Online Newspaper Website 22 Table 2.1 Top 10 Traffic Sources in VFPRESS.VN Source: Google Analytics, May 2015 30 Table 2.2 Top 10 Referring Sites to VFPRESS.VN Source: Google Analytics, May 2015 31 Table 2.3 VFPRESS Target Audience 33 Table 3.1 Marketing Plan Summary 40 Lai Thu Thao – K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy LIST OF PICTURES Picture 1.1 Pie chart showing breakdown of new vs returning visitors Source: Google Analytics 10 Picture 1.2 Google Keyword Search Result Page Source: Google, 2015 14 Picture 1.3 Different Forms of Online PR Source: Google 15 Picture 1.4 Link Building Illustration Source: Internet 16 Picture 1.5 Interactive Advertising Illustration Source: Google 18 Picture 2.1 VFPRESS.VN Interface and Ranking Source: Alexa, May 2015 26 Picture 2.2 Facebook Fanpage of VFPRESS May, 2015 32 Picture 3.1 Search result of “dien dan tai chinh” Source: Google, 2015 38 Lai Thu Thao – K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy INTRODUCTION Research Rationale In the business world, effective marketing plan is an important guideline for any company, regardless of how small or big the business scale is, to stay focused on their goals Moreover, the marketing plan gives a common direction to all staff in the company Therefore, formulating a marketing plan prior to utilizing any marketing actions is substantial and necessary However, producing a marketing plan requires comprehensive knowledge of marketing Today, according to Internet World Stats (2014), people over the world using the internet have increased from year 2011 approximately 45.8%, the internet has really penetrated deep into the society, irrespective of age, color, ethnicity Internet marketing is becoming a hot topic in every business sector, and gradually plays a truly important role in any company’s multi-channel marketing strategy However, how to apply Internet marketing especially how to utilize it to attract more visitors to a certain website is still a big question for a number of advertisers With 39.8 million internet users in Vietnam, accounting for 44.1% of the population (according to the statistical data of Moore Corp, 2014), time spending in using the Internet to read news, search for information or entertainment goes up to 310 minutes/day, quadruples the TV’s (Statistics of We are social, 2014) The Internet has become an indispensable channel of communication in the current marketing campaign For those reasons, this thesis, with the title “APPLY DIGITAL MARKETING TO ONLINE NEWSPAPER VFPRESS.VN”, covers general knowhow of digital marketing planning, and presents a well-thought, functional online marketing plan for the newspaper VFPRESS Despite the ideas generated within the company, none of the management members has the experience for Internet marketing This situation creates a need for Lai Thu Thao K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy a business-oriented student with a technical background to carry out the project since the implementation has equal importance to planning in this particular case Knowledge of IT, business management, economics and marketing lead me to the subject of this thesis In the late 2013, I started to work as a Marketing Executive for VFPRESS.VN and gathered a lot of valuable experience As this was my first job in marketing, it was the time when knowledge gained from books was tested and compared to the reality There are many articles, books and people giving presentations about online marketing, social media and other new areas of marketing, but the enormous number of these materials creates a huge clutter I choose to write a thesis where I will use my working experience combined with the theoretical knowledge to create a set of best practices how to approach social media and content marketing I found it really difficult for some startup projects to understand the usage of social media for the right and profitable purpose not just because everyone is doing it My vision of this thesis is to help companies and individual entrepreneurs to understand the potential of digital marketing and find the way to use them effectively To accomplish this goal, analysis of various tactics, techniques and tools supported by customer activities theory is needed Aims of Study The Internet has been becoming a crucial part of successful business stories in this modern technology era Many companies have already created competitive advantages by using this technology Besides many successful companies or websites, still certain numbers of them fail What are the reasons? There are many reasons for these failures A typical explanation for this is: they have failed to drive traffics or in other words to attract customers to their websites Unlike traditional marketing, Internet marketing has its own unique Lai Thu Thao K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy The chart above shows the Top Keywords bringing people to VFPRESS.VN We could clearly see the effectiveness of keyword searches Let’s recall that Search Engine Optimization is basically the process which makes a websites more readable, understandable by the search engines The result shows that “diễn đàn tài chính” keyword is the biggest contributor “dien dan tai chinh” or “finance” is the key function of VFPRESS.VN, five top search engine keywords and keyphrases are related to it Table 2.2 Top 10 Referring Sites to VFPRESS.VN Source: Google Analytics, May 2015 This table shows major sites leading to VFPRESS.VN that the first position is held by www.facebook.com The 2nd, 4th, 8th positions also come from this source thanks to VFPRESS’s fanpage on Facebook Lai Thu Thao 31 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy Picture 2.2 Facebook Fanpage of VFPRESS May, 2015 Everyday, administrator of newspaper posts 2-3 article links on Facebook’s fanpage to access around 6000 fans These activities bring back a huge amount of traffics to VFPRESS.VN through FACEBOOK as mentioned before Table Top 10 Visiting Place of VFPRESS.VN Source: Google Analytics, May 2015 Top ten visit cities shows that most users come from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City We could notice a small number of visitors are from Da Nang, Hai Phong, Bien Hoa and other provinces Lai Thu Thao 32 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy Figure 2.9 VFPRESS.VN Entry Place & Users’ Education Source: Alexa, May 2015 Analyzed information above could help marketers focus on their targeting audience: kinds of people they are, where they come from, how they find our content, and how loyal and engaged they are 2.3.3 Target Audience In surveys carried out, people said that they access VFPRESS.VN with the purpose of getting suggestion for their stock portfolio and receiving consultancy Most people work in news industry or have adequate knowledge of finance & securities Based on part 2.3.1 - the current situation of Marketing activities in VFPRESS, the target audience table below is established to optimize company’s resources: Demographics - Men, women, aged 19 – 55, live in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city Psychographics - Well educated in Finance, Stock, Business - Have been or intend investing in Stock Exchange - Informative, Interactive between members - Chances to express their knowledge Engage motives Table 2.3 VFPRESS Target Audience Lai Thu Thao 33 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy 2.3.4 Limitation and Causes Firstly, VFPRESS have never invested money in Marketing What they get so far until now is the result of sharing excellent content Company’s BOD intends to focus on Marketing & Communications in the future However, the biggest weakness of the project is the limited budget The company has to run the project in low budget; therefore, marketing team does not have much financial resource Consequently, it will affect the choices of possible tactics used in the plan In fact, it results in omitting some effective e-marketing techniques in the plan Secondly, the electronic journal has not own a professional marketing team Marketing staffs is needed to create detailed marketing plan and execute marketing activities Effective marketers could take steps to not only understand market’s needs but research users to determine how well their products meet those needs and continually take steps to improve product quality Therefore, almost VFPRESS’s activities is executed spontaneously and not follow any strategy Moreover, leaders in companies working in a financial industry, they not have much experience in the newspaper field Besides, VFPRESS does not have professional journalists and editors at the moment Most of content in website is contributed by users, this weakness does not bring great disadvantage to the image of VFPRESS Furthermore, many strong competitors have existed in the industry of financial news Customers have a wide range of choices for their favorable newspaper These drive the competition tougher and more challenging for the new player like VFPRESS The reason is that users often access their familiar e-journals, it is hard for marketers to change this habit if people not see outstanding performance from VFPRESS Last but not least, company has not establish a specified content strategy for moving forward The forum is mixture of various topics and subjects from finance to technology or lifestyle, which sometimes disturbs readers Role of media content Lai Thu Thao 34 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy analysis is very important It looks directly at communication via texts or transcripts, and hence gets at the central aspect of social interaction Lacking of a focused content strategy cannot attract potential users Lai Thu Thao 35 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy CHAPTER 3: APPLY DIGITAL MARKETING TO ONLINE NEWSPAPER – VFPRESS.VN VFPRESS is a new player in the industry This neither has any existing brand perception nor existing customer and user base This creates disadvantage in competing for user attraction, especially when the sites want to have professional journalist’s voice However, from researching, VFPRESS is currently the only player in the field of Fund Management and ETF Fund news Normally, big news publishers cover all range of news, such as economics, business, finance, stock, etc VFPRESS could concentrate on news and analysis concerning Fund Management and ETF to build first awareness Although the leading news publishers sometimes report about Funds, the news is not categorized in separate zones And the voices in VFPRESS are not from one party but from both writers and readers Overall, these differentiate VFPRESS from other players like Cafef.vn or F319.com, which leads to market opportunities for VFPRESS Using the low budget and limited human resources, company still has the possibility to jump into the market The Digital Marketing below would utilize company’s resources as well as current situation to bring a comprehensive application This plan comprises two parts: Tactics present strategies and steps to accomplish objectives and Techniques are understood as methods used for tactics 3.1 Techniques The online marketing techniques chosen are founded on the objectives of the campaigns, the possibility to reach the targeted audience and the financial resource of the campaigns Lai Thu Thao 36 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy Because they have never been involved in marketing field; this is totally a new campaign to promote this website Below are selected marketing techniques in the campaigns: 3.1.1 E-mail Marketing The most possible and effective method to reach the targeted audience with a small amount of money is email marketing The direct contact to the targeted audience helps to promote the existence of the site, to build traffic as well as attract new users to the site The list of the email addresses is adopted from user registration, not rented list from other organization Besides, after acquiring the contact via emails, other direct communication methods will be used to support e-mail marketing like sending highlight articles This movement does not only acquire traffic but also raise closed relationship between agency and members 3.1.2 Social Media Marketing (Facebook Advertising) Main platform to carry out social media marketing is Facebook There are more than million social network users interested in Finance in Vietnam (Facebook, 2015) On Facebook page of the site, marketing team will develop interactive activities with page member such as questionnaires, polls, etc Since the targeted audience belongs to specific geographical areas and interest, Google paid search or pay per click (PPP) would be the most effective technique to reach the audience Let’s look into a simple example If VFPRESS creates an advert to get more people to like fanpage on Facebook, which targets the audience only in Hanoi, the daily budget of 1.000.000 VND is estimated to be equal to 200-300 likes per day In a month, they will pay 30 million VND for about 6000 to 9000 likes The number looks good; however, 30 million VND is the basic monthly budget to run an advert targeting the audience in Hanoi, which is only one city among various cities in Vietnam Besides, that is only the price for advertising Lai Thu Thao 37 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy on Facebook In fact, the money spent for PPP is not wealthy right now, therefore we should also focus on newspaper’s content simultaneously to retain utilize our investment 3.1.3 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search engine optimization (SEO) requires no money, but mind investment because it isn’t about instant gratification, results often take months to see The first step is to identify the keywords that VFPRESS can realistically target These words are related to stock and finance like “gia co phieu”, “nen dau tu ma chung khoan nao”, “ban tin etf”, “quy dau tu” Picture 3.1 Search result of “dien dan tai chinh” Source: Google, 2015 After defining the keywords for certain fields, use these keywords in the text in articles When building content, writers should use these keywords here and there Lai Thu Thao 38 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy in the sentences Be careful about using them too much and try to make it as natural as possible However, while on-page SEO is critical to website’s keyword rankings, online newspaper still cannot develop if content is limited The more relevant content available, the greater that association, and the higher your rank for those words There are other factors, but posting focused content is one of the easiest ways to influence rank So creating lots of relevant and targeted content in keyword sets is necessary to show up high on that search engine results page In order to build rich content, VFPRESS could open a writing competition to encourage users 3.1.4 Mobile Advertising Using mobile advertising can help VFPRESS to reach the very selective audiences and deliver the information quicker than other media In the birthday of customers or some special days like Tet Holiday, VFPRESS could send and celebrate message to the customers based on the customer’s database This tool aims to build brand loyalty to VFPRESS’s target audience 3.2 Tactics Tactics are the planning details of the strategies, which include strategy details and timeline schedule In the case of VFPRESS, different tactics are applied to achieve the different goals set at each trunk of time Lai Thu Thao 39 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Objectives Strategies Building Traffic Banking Academy User attraction User retention - Social Media - Email Marketing - Email Marketing - Online PR - Social Media - Social Media - Search Engine - Mobile Marketing - Mobile Marketing Optimization Table 3.1 Marketing Plan Summary 3.2.1 Building Traffic In the early days of the site, social media marketing and online PR play an important role in building site traffic The main social media network chosen is Facebook Articles published on the site will be shared on VFPRESS's official Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/vfer.vn Other than social media sites, articles of VFPRESS will be shared widely on other blogs, forums and websites, whose content is relating to topic This unique content would be found widely in Search Engine like Google As the project would be launched with a low budget and lack of human resources, VFPRESS can provide jobs as an internship opportunity for students and covers travel and lunch expenses for the student employees Best option of employees would be business students who have good know-how of marketing and interest in writing news about finance and stock Marketing knowledge is an important criterion in selecting appropriate candidates, since VFPRESS can provide several training sessions of basic journalism Gathering news and writing contents for social network will give the marketing team background and latest information of the stock exchange, which enable them to communicate well with the targeted audience Lai Thu Thao 40 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy 3.2.2 User Atraction Email marketing is a major marketing technique to acquire new viewers to the site The content of the email is drafted by the marketing team and approved by project leader, in order to create and keep the correct impression and image of the site with the audience Especially, these actions create and maintain relationships with users Hence, building relationship and trust are important steps to persuade them to share their personal stories, opinions and voices, which have never been exposed to the world before In this stage, we also decide to carry out Mobile Marketing to support above purposes Social media is always maintained as a key tool because of fair cost and tremendous influences Moreover, VFPRESS always remains neutral in any conflict, which means it takes no stand from either side of the conflict zone As a result, all marketing messages should be neutral, not biased to any side 3.2.3 User Retention Marketers need to create a reason for them to come back to the site They must keep the site 'fresh' VFPRESS can be freshened by continuously updating content and adding new engaging features Besides, email marketing is still the main tool to maintain ongoing contact with existing users VFPRESS staffs are required to keep the site always alive, if the users themselves can't make it In addition to regularly fill the site with news, VFPRESS staffs or marketing team must get involved with new users' activities in order to raise their interest in the site Users' activities should receive certain appreciation or supporting reaction For instance, first article of any users should receive comments or even discussions concerning their topic Furthermore, new features will be added to the site to engage users The functions are mostly to improve interactions between the site and social media networks, and to augment the user-friendly environment within the site In the far Lai Thu Thao 41 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy future, the site can develop school portals for educational purposes Teachers may use articles as teaching materials and students may post new articles in response to the original articles as their assignments, which will be graded within the site Lai Thu Thao 42 K14 ATCA Graduation Thesis Banking Academy CONCLUSION Firstly, the macro and micro environment are analyzed, in order to understand the situation of the company in the market Secondly, appropriate objectives are set for the marketing plan in accordance with the given conditions of the company In this case, the marketing plan has three objectives set in chronological order, which are building site traffic, user attraction and user retention Finally, various strategies, tactics, actions are selected to reach the set objectives With interest and belief in marketing, the author produced this thesis to study digital marketing in details and apply that knowledge into formulating a functional digital marketing plan for VFPRESS.VN This work is thought to give readers both theoretical and practical concrete information about online marketing planning by answering to the main research question: "What is the most effective marketing plan for VFPRESS?” Overall, the digital marketing plan of VFPRESS is the practical outcome of the well-structured theoretical findings in the thesis The marketing plan has been partially implemented by VFPRESS staffs, including the author and received some positive effects, which are believed to lead to the short term objective achievement Lai Thu Thao 43 K14 ATCA 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