Digital Marketing and Wordpress

Abstract

DigitalMarketing–definedMichaelPorterhas said:Thekeyquestionisnotwhether todeployDigitalTechnology–companies
have no choice if they want to stay competitive – but how to deploy it. Digital marketing describes the management and
execution of marketing using electronic media such as the web, e-mail, interactive TV and wireless media in conjunction
with digital data about customers’ characteristics and behavior. Mass customization is a necessity today and hence digital
marketing is yet another channel that provides touch points for improved customer relations. Digital marketing is one
effective way to address this necessity with various touchpoints/sub-channels like FaceBook, LinkedIn, Blogs, Twitter,
and the website itself. In modern parlance, it has now been accepted that customers are exposed to 3 screens: 1st Screen:
Television, 2nd Screen: Computer Monitor, 3rd Screen: The Mobile Handset. Does that mean that we have to create content
for each of them separately? Fortunately, with the advent of strong CMS like WordPress, this duplication of work is now
a thing of the past. Atleast, the last two screens are clearly addressed by the responsive themes of WordPress. Today
there are a few smart TVs in the market that can connect to the web and there are no issues with WordPress delivered
content. Methodology: The first study of the paper would analyze the role of WordPress and its advantages. The second
study would highlight on the study of SEO plugins and its importance while using WordPress. The third study would focus
on whether WordPress as a standalone system can address the CMS and how “plugins” can enhance its application and
usability. The above studies would be dealt using secondary research data like research papers, journals and websites.
Conclusions: Currently, DD India covers over 92% of the population. But the penetration of TVs has not kept in tune with
this. On the flipside, TVs are viewed in groups. Given that DD India was established in 1959, it has been over 65 years before
this could be achieved. The internet launched in mid 90s has 243 million internet users in the country to people who use
computers and laptops.(8) What is astounding is that smart phones which came in several years later today has already
achieved a penetration near to 50% both in rural and urban areas of India. Given this trend, it is only a matter of time that
Mobile penetration exceeds that of Doordarshan – The 1st Screen. What is more relevant is that each Mobile is a personal
product of an individual unlike the other two screens

Full text

Abstract











Methodology



Conclusions: 





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*Author for correspondence
Indian Journal of Science and Technology, Vol 8(S4), 61-68, Febuary 2015
Digital Marketing and Wordpress
Semila Fernandes* and A. Vidyasagar
Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bangalore (Constituent of Symbiosis International University) #95/1,
95/2, Electronics City, Phase-1, Hosur Road, Bangalore-560 100, India; semila.fernandes@sibm.edu.in,
vidyasagar@sibm.edu.in
Keywords:,
1. Introduction and Motivation
Michael Porter has said:
e key question is not whether to deploy Digital Technology
– companies have no choice if they want to stay competitive
– but how to deploy it.
Digital marketing describes the management and execu-
tion of marketing using electronic media such as the web,
e-mail, interactive TV and wireless media in conjunction
with digital data about customers’ characteristics and
behavior. e success stories of certain companies captur-
ing a higher market share by adopting the digital medium
recognizes the fact that we need analyze the strategic
importance of digital technologies and develop a planned
approach to reach and target the customers to migrate to
online services through e-communications to match their
individual needs. Hence companies should have a robust
Internet presence to prosper or possibly survive in the
competitive world.
ISSN (Print) : 0974-6846
ISSN (Online) : 0974-5645
DOI: 10.17485/ijst/2015/v8iS4/60375

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Indian Journal of Science and Technology
Vol 8 (S4) | Febuary 2015 | www.indjst.org
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In modern parlance, it has now been accepted that
customers are exposed to 3 screens:
• 1st Screen: Television
• 2nd Screen: Computer Monitor
• 3rd Screen: e Mobile Handset
Does that mean that we have to create content for each of
them separately? Fortunately, with the advent of strong CMS
like WordPress, this duplication of work is now a thing of
the past. Atleast, the last two screens are clearly addressed
by the responsive themes of WordPress. Today there are a
few smart TVs in the market that can connect to the web
and there are no issues with WordPress delivered content.
2. Methodology
• From Broadcast to Addressable – Shi from
thinking about mass audience to individuality and inter-
activity where by even if there are millions of people with
the same type of device, you can still connect with them
as individuals displaying their buying habits and prefer-
ences.
• From Schedule-Driven and Location-Bound
content to Time-shied and Borderless –Freedom from
scheduling, freedom geographic boundaries, freedom to
scale and freedom from formats.
• From Mass messaging to opt-in messaging –
Messaging to consumers should be on opted – in basis
which directs towards individual needs and preferences.
• From Traditional media planning to New media
planning – e traditional media plan included signage,
billboards by including a telephone number. But by mak-
ing the billboards digital we mean that we can display a
video and not a standard image which would make the
billboards more interactive.
• From managed PR to Digital Inuence – It is
more to do with image management. It is necessary that
marketers map real-time conversations of consumers by
monitoring blogs, disseminating new information digi-
tally and responding to blogs rather than only concerned
of image control.
• From integrated marketing to unied marketing
– Unication of individual customers experience by using
individual customer data to support continuous partici-
pant dialogue.
According to the eMarketer research rm, 4.55 billion
people across the world are going to use a mobile phone
in 2014 and the Smartphone users would total 1.75 billion
in 2014 by surpassing the global Smartphone audience of
1 billion in 2012. (Figure 1 and Figure 2).
e trajectory of Smartphone is going to grow faster
through 2017 and the penetration among mobile phone
users globally would near to 50% as per the eMarketers
forecast period. is has made it possible because the
Smartphone is getting aordable with the adoption of 2G
and 3G networks. It is also expected that more than 2.23
billion people globally or 48.9% of the mobile phone users
would go online via mobile at least monthly in 2014. It is
also estimated that total number of mobile phone internet
users will increase to 16.5% in 2014.
• e rst study of the paper would analyze the
role of WordPress and its advantages.
• e second study would highlight on the study of
SEO plugins and its importance while using WordPress.
• e third study would focus on Word Press
Responsive themes which supports in handling the
requirements of all the 3 screens.
e above studies would be dealt using secondary research
data like research papers, journals and websites.
3. Objective 1
e future evolution of marketing is termed as
‘DigiMarketing’ where-in there is a shi from mass
broadcast to digital, participatory, two-way and primar-
ily viral. e Digital Darwinism will force marketers to
engage the customers continuously by adopting new
media and digital channels thereby re-craing the way we
approach marketing.
• From Viewers to participants – Consumers are
no longer just docile viewers but are likely to be partici-
pating and watching by expressing their opinions through
blogs, podcasts and web.
• From Impressions to Involvement – Involvement
is necessary today and hence SOV (Share Of Voice)
becomes key driving force for marketers. Creating ongo-
ing engagement is needed which is not just by logging
many times on the channel but by continuously interact-
ing and responding and connecting emotionally to the
discussions.
3.1 e evolution of Digital Marketing
3.2 Growth of Internet Sites and
Smartphone

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Indian Journal of Science and Technology
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ese forecasts are made based on the worldwide and
local trends in the economy including technology changes
and population changes and changes in the companies
including demographic trends and trends in consumer
behavior1.
e top countries which are fueling the internet growth in
the order of importance include China followed by India
although a small percentage i.e. 11% of the total popula-
tion of India being online2.
It was in 2003 that blogging platforms like Word Press
got started which brought blogging to the mainstream by
2005 as 32 million Americans were seen reading blogs.
Around this time the process of blogging increased even
more with greater than 152 million blogs being online
and active by the end of 20103.
us the future of blogging in growing rapidly as it has
become an integral part of one’s online culture with the
advent of social media and social networking which is
seen in the last 5 years.
Blogs are denitely going to have a bright future to the
extent that the content available through blogs bring in
growth and innovation which will need a system create
content, manage content, publish content and present it
nally3.
is gave birth to the process of CMS which facilitates
the process of creation, management, distribution, pub-
lishing and discovery of corporate information. e most
common use where-in CMS is put for is to manage web
content and hence in some instances these systems are
called web management systems4.
Figure 1. Smartphone users and penetration worldwide 2012-
2017.
Figure 2. Mobile phone internet users and penetration world-
wide, 2012-2017.
3.3 Advent of Blogging as a Social Media
and Birth of CMS (Content Management
System)
e term’blog’ was coined in the year 1997 and the word’s
creation is attributed to the process of ‘logging the web’
as one browsed. e early 2000s was seen by a period of
rampant spurge for blogs and by 2001 ‘meta-blogs’ (blogs
about blogging) made a substantial portion of the popu-
larity of blogs.
3.4 WordPress Blogging – Leading to
CMS
WordPress started in the year 2003 having a single bit
code to facilitate the typography and writing skills with
fewer users. Today it has grown tremendously to be
the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the entire world
adopted on millions of sites and used by tens of millions
of users. WordPress is an open source project which is
being worked on by hundreds of people and is free to use
either for homepage or website without paying anybody
licensing fee5.
e keystone element in the Marketing domain has
been the word “Content”. Signicant changes have been
brought about by Technology for numerous processes
in terms of supporting the collection and publication of
information on varied forms and mediums. All these set
of processes collectively are known as content manage-
ment. us the term Content Management System has
been evolved through the sheer necessity of managing
and maintaining the enormous data available on blogs,
WebPages and websites.
e 3 most popular CMSes online are Drupal, Joomla
and WordPress. All the three are open source and built
on PHP + MySQL and dier signicantly with respect to
features, capability, exibility and ease of use.

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WordPress themes are responsive themes that auto-
matically adjust the layout to t into mobile screens.
is eliminates the need to create a separate web-
site to meet mobile/smart phone requirements.
3.5 Advantages of WordPress as a CMS
Even traditionally less innovative organizational bodies
like government owned businesses and funds (e.g. pen-
sion fund) could benet from the developments in big
data . Lev Manovich opined that humanists should use
data analysis and visualization soware in their daily
work, so that they can combine quantitative and qualita-
tive approaches in all their work22.
3.5.1 -Importance of Plugins While Using
WordPress
WordPress Plugins allow easy modication, customiza-
tion, and enhancement to a WordPress blog. Instead of
changing the core programming of WordPress, you can
add functionality with WordPress Plugins5. Plugins can
extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imag-
ine and primarily supports in enhancing WordPress as a
CMS.
3.5.2 -Importance of Widgets While Using
WordPress
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple and
easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of
the WordPress eme to the user, which is now available
on properly "widgetized" WordPress emes to include
the header, footer, and elsewhere in the WordPress design
and structure5. Widgets primarily support in enhancing
the look and feel of the webpages.
3.5.3 -Ease of Use While Using WordPress
• It is an easy-to-use authoring environment set-
ting especially designed to work like Word.
• It primarily supports creating new pages and
updating content without using the technical platform of
HTML4.
• Plugins are tools which extend the functional-
ity of Wordpress. e core of WordPress is designed to
be lean, to maximize exibility and minimize code bloat.
Plugins oer custom functions and features so that each
user can tailor their site to their specic needs5.
• Look & Feel - e web site can be kept fresh by
easily changing the site layout and appearance by swap-
ping themes. One can plan layouts for holidays or special
events etc – all by clicking on one button.
3.5.4 -Ease of Use While Using WordPress
3.5.5 -Ultimate in SEO Friendliness
• WordPress code is streamlined without exces-
sive HTML code that Google nds very easy to index.
Also, it is relatively simple to customize every page
to give you the highest possible probability of get-
ting your pages in high search results positions.
In addition, there are plugins that help in rening the process
even further which would be discussed in the later section.
• WordPress can enhance search engine rank-
ings there by supporting in showing on the rst
pages of search results using Google or Yahoo6.
4. Objective 2
Over 6 million websites with over 8 billion WebPages
constitute what is now called the World Wide Web. In
order that the desired customer makes his way into our
website, it is important that our webpage appears in the
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when the customer
searches for a keyword or phrase.
All search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo, have developed
algorithms which enable the visitor to zone into those
links that are mostly likely to provide him additional
information and content based on relevance and author-
ity. is process in general is called SEO.
SEO helps improve the websites interaction with the users
and the search engine. SEO supports onsite visibility in
search engines by appropriate usage of keywords, mak-
ing the content the most relevant to the users. SEO also
provides osite advantage to the website by building
authority to the website via link building i.e. the more
other websites oer my website by backlinks, the more
the authority my website gains.
As mentioned earlier Word Press code is streamlined
without excessive HTML code that Google nds very
easy to index. However, in order to make it more eective,
there are quite a large number of plugins that can fur-
ther help in improving the position of the page in search
results. Built-in Features: WordPress encourages the web
designer to make use of the menu and the categories so
that each page can address a particular topic or subject.
4.1 WordPress & SEO in Digital
Marketing

Semila Fernandes and A. Vidyasagar
Indian Journal of Science and Technology
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Vol 8 (S4) | Febuary 2015 | www.indjst.org
e use of categories helps in further classifying the
pages. is enables the website creator to use keywords
precisely in each of the pages and subcategories which
help the google spider to index each page accurately and
thus enable a better search rank.
WordPress also allows the creator to caption and give an
alternate text to multimedia that further aids the search
engine spider.
Creations of tags and slugs are yet another feature that is
quite simple to implement.
4.2 Role of WordPress in Digital
Marketing
Digital marketing landscape has gained tremendous
importance during the last decade and has played
a pivotal role in creating ‘relationship marketing’.
Technology advances have punctuated the evolution of
communication of businesses with their customers. What
is important to note is that none of these later advances
in communication has actually depreciated the ones that
came before. Infact, they have actually supplemented them.
Even today, the earliest forms of com-
munication are still around and thriving.
e advent of newer technologies has been exploited
by marketers to use Digital marketing as a new tool to
woo their customers. Digital marketing has also been
bolstered with the proliferation & penetration of mobile
phones. Over 250 million Indians are currently using
phones to browse the internet. Digital Marketing has
been built around the emerging technologies – be it
internet expansion or the mobile revolution. e web-
site has become the centre of this universe with various
technologies deployed to lure the customers to it.
4.3 erefore, the Key Requirements for a
Comprehensive Digital Marketing Solution
is that it should Enable
• Search Engine Optimization
• Search Engine Marketing
• Social Media Marketing.
Having attracted the prospect, it then becomes important
that the customer is engaged on the website that could
result in some pre-determined call to action like down-
load, purchase etc. With “content” being the core creative
activity of increasing customer engagement, it is impera-
tive that an easy yet comprehensive solution be available
that simultaneously performs the two tasks of creating the
required content and enabling users at all levels – experts
to novices - in propagating the content to the custom-
ers at large. Figure shown below: It is in this context that
we have examined the various CMSes. WordPress “the
darling of google” is fundamentally a CMS package that
provides the fundamental benets to both a novice and
an expert in web designing. (Figure 3)
Figure 3. WordPress “the darling of google”
5. Plugins
5.1 Value of Plugins and its Importance
While Using WordPress for SEO, SEM &
SMM
A few Plugins that aid SEO plugins in WordPress are:
5.1.1 -WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast
is plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk
and his team at Yoast to improve your site's SEO on all
needed aspects. While this WordPress SEO plugin goes
the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimiza-
tion, it rst and foremost helps you write better content.
WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword
when you're writing your articles, and then makes sure
you use that focus keyword everywhere. Using the snip-
pet preview you can see a rendering of what your post or
page will look like in the search results, whether your title

Digital Marketing and Wordpress
Indian Journal of Science and Technology
Vol 8 (S4) | Febuary 2015 | www.indjst.org
66
Contact 7 Skins plugin which makes it easy for the WP
user to customize the look & feel of the contact form. By
using Flamingo – another plugin, the user can track the
user’s details when they comment on a page.
is too long or too short and your Meta description
makes sense in the context of a search result. is way
the plugin will help you not only increase rankings but
also increase the click through for organic search results.
In addition to the above plugins which actively help in
SEO, there are a lot of plugins that enhance the func-
tionality of WordPress without aecting SEO. We
have listed 10 such plugins that make using WordPress
a great experience. Some of the plugins also help in
search engine marketing and social media marketing.
5.1.2 -NextGen Gallery and Lightbox Plus
NextGen is a plugin for image gallery management.
You can dene lots of things such as the image's title
and alt tags, which solves any SEO image problems.
e two plugins have been combined into one entry
because they work hand-in-hand. Lightbox Plus uses
Colorbox – a lightweight jQuery image gallery script
that is the friendliest for performance and doesn't hin-
der on-page SEO. Lightbox Plus oers a lot more options
for the appearance and behavior of Lightbox's execution.
5.1.3 -Meta Slider
Meta Slider is the most popular slideshow plu-
gin for WordPress. Creating slideshows with Meta
Slider is fast and easy Meta Slider enables creation
of SEO optimized responsive slideshows with Nivo
Slider, Flex Slider, Coin Slider and Responsive Slides.
5.1.4 -Simple Page Sidebars
is plugin gives WordPress users, design-
ers, and developers the ability to assign custom
sidebars to individual pages--without making any tem-
plate changes. Existing sidebars can also be assigned
in quick edit and bulk edit modes, saving time.
Simple Page Sidebars aims for basic, core-like func-
tionality and integration that is easy to use - it utilizes
built-in WordPress caching, so your site won't be
bogged down with additional queries. Simple Page
Sidebars also ships with a "Widget Area" widget for
pulling all the widgets from one sidebar into another.
5.1.5 -Contact Form 7
is plugin can manage multiple contact forms. One
can easily customize the form and the mail contents
exibly with simple markup. e form supports Ajax-
powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam
ltering and so on. Moreover this plugin has add-ons like
5.2 Plugins for SEM in Digital Marketing
e process of SEO to be really eective takes considerable
time and eort. In the meanwhile, the website publisher
has an option of projecting his website by incurring some
expenses in promoting his site by advertising on various
sites including search results page on a Cost Per Mille
(CPM) or Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. It then necessitates
creation of landing page. While WP has the capability,
there are several plugins that can make the task easier and
‘professional. One such is the
5.2.1 -WordPress Landing Pages/WordPress
Calls to Action/WordPress Leads
While Landing pages plugin is a stand alone, com-
bined with the other two enhances the capabilities and
eectiveness of the landing page and thus conversion.
5.3 SMM in Digital Marketing
With the explosion of Social media with over 3000 regis-
tered social media sites, peer group interaction has started
dominating the decision making process of the individual
customer. e move from WOM to “Word of Keyboard” is
pretty apparent. ere are quite a number of social media
plugins and also plugins that can display your twitter feed,
facebook like box, google+ reference and social media icons.
5.3.1 -WordPress Social Media Feather
is plugin is a super lightweight free social media
WordPress plugin that allows WP user to quickly
add social sharing and following features to all pages.
e dierentiating feature of this plugin is its focus
on simplicity, performance and unobtrusive impact.
5.3.2 -Facebook Like Box Widget
is plugin enables Facebook Page owners to attract and
gain Likes & Recommendation Comments from their
own website. e Like Box enables users to: see how many
users already like this page, and which of their friends
like it too, read recent posts from the page and like the
page with one click, without needing to visit the page.
5.3.3 -Google+ Plugin

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Indian Journal of Science and Technology
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Vol 8 (S4) | Febuary 2015 | www.indjst.org
is plugin allows WP user to post directly from G+ to
your WordPress website. e Google+ plugin supports
post formats so a hash tag system can be used to decide
on the post format.
6. Objective 3
WordPress Responsive themes are made in a way
to handle the requirements of all the 3 screens.
Example: Most smart TVs today have built in browsers which
handle websites just like the standard internet browsers.
Mobile phones, given the screen size would show distor-
tion in earlier web-designs and hence there was a need
for creating sites exclusively for mobile web browsing.
However responsive themes from Word Press
have surmounted this shortcoming and the web-
page automatically arranges itself within the screen.
is is true even for dierent screen resolutions in desk-
tops and PCs.e advent of Responsive themes in website
has truly extended the reach to customers irrespective of
the devises they use thus enabling uniformity and consis-
tency.Responsive eme is a exible foundation with uid
grid system that adapts a website to mobile devices and
the desktop or any other viewing environment. (Figure 4)
Figure 4. WordPress responsive themes
7. Conclusion
WordPress is responsible for 14.7 percent of the top mil-
lion websites worldwide representing small, medium
and big business. If you are using WordPress, you are in
company along side. e New York Times, Wall Street
Journal’s Speakeasy, Ford, New York University Library,
CNN, Harvard Law School, Ben & Jerry, People Magazine,
NASA7.Some of the other leading organizations like Bata,
CNN, and Hungton Post also use WordPress to develop
their website or blogs. What is even more surprising is
that there are quite a few celebrities who use WordPress
like Usain Bolt, e Rolling Stones, Snoop Dogg, Bill
Cosby5.is is clearly an indication of the versatility of
WordPress that it can cater to such varied segments of
users.As of March 2012, WordPress is on 72.4 million sites
in the world. WordPress.com hosts about half of them.
As of a moment today, WordPress 3.3, the latest version,
has been downloaded 12,179,538 times – which is phe-
nomenal by itself if you look at the number of versions
released to date7.Our study clearly brings out the simplic-
ity, the versatility and the value of the various plugins that
go a long way in enhancing the basic CMS soware – a
denite advantage with respect to the other CMSes and
Digital Marketing as a whole.
8. Scope for Future Research
With newer versions of WordPress coming out almost
every month, the numbers of developers are increas-
ing every day. is would culminate in higher and
more sophisticated versions of plugins. We look for-
ward to study this evolution during the coming years.

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