Digital Marketing Plan for Saleduck

This Bachelor’s thesis analyses and examines selected digital marketing tactics of a case company called Saleduck. The overall objective is to design a digital marketing plan for the case company, which would help the company increase traffic to its website and to reach higher revenues. The aim was to provide information, suggestions and improvement ideas for digital marketing to reach more consumers in Finland. Based on the wishes of the case company, the thesis focuses on content marketing, search engine marketing and social media advertising out of all digital marketing tactics. The implementation of the plan is left for the case company after the completion of this thesis process. The thesis begins with an introduction chapter, followed by a theoretical part and an empirical part. The purpose of the theoretical part is to develop a thorough understanding of the selected digital marketing topics. The section on content marketing discusses the elements and features of effective content marketing, as well as emphasizes the strong link there is between search engine optimization and other digital marketing efforts. The theory also presents effective ways of practicing content marketing. Search engine marketing consists of search engine optimization and search engine advertising, and both are needed for the effective marketing of a company’s website. Finally, the theory of social media advertising presents tactics for efficient advertising on Facebook and Instagram. The empirical part applies this theory to the case company along with the application of various digital marketing tools. This project was only based on qualitative methods. In fact, the data collection began already during the fall of 2018, when I was working for the case company as an online marketing intern. Thus, the qualitative method used for this thesis was participant observation for a period of five months before the beginning of the thesis process. During the internship, I was able to develop a comprehensive understanding of the company operations and especially of the digital marketing efforts. The thesis process lasted for a period of five months, from January 2019 to May 2019. The digital marketing plan analyses the current state of the website providing suggestions and improvement ideas to reach a higher ranking on Google with search engine optimization. Additionally, a content calendar was designed to boost the attractiveness with a variety of content types and themes to be posted on regularly. The paid advertising section includes the suggested tactics for successful advertising campaigns on Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram. Particularly mastering the targeting of the ads to the right audience allows for successful campaigns and increased ROI. Although each of these platforms can be a very effective way of online advertising, the results show that Saleduck is best off by keeping an emphasis on social media advertising over Google Ads, considering the complexity and high costs of Google Ads