Geographic Marketing in Support of Decision-Making Processes

Nowadays, geographic information and spatial aspects are essential elements for the definition of companies' strategies. With the use of different sources data, companies were able to obtain insights that they could not obtain without the spatial component and were able to use them to optimize their business. Then, geographic marketing presents itself as an added value for companies, one of the key factors being its role in supporting decision making. The main attributes of geographic marketing or GeoMarketing allow us to identify and present through digital maps the behavior and trends of certain variables based on characteristics of a market. The meticulous study of spatial and demographic information generated by GeoMarketing are crucial for important strategic adjustments in the business plan, such as definitions related to the location considered ideal for the business, target audience, price and growth prospects, among other factors. In this context, GeoMarketing will be introduced, exploring its scope, applicability, and relevance of its use in support of the decision-making process.

What Makes People Share?

Digital marketing has become an important tool for businesses to reach a wider audience. Many companies, therefore, apply online ads in order to gain new customers. However, since the number of companies that try to benefit from digital marketing is very high, the online ads sector is now more competitive. Drawing consumers' attention is not easy anymore. Therefore, this study focused on the factors that make people share. For this purpose, this study conducted a survey with 253 consumers. The results show that attitudes toward online ads, search intention, and social media product browsing have positive impacts on consumers' sharing intentions. In this study, the authors also wondered, how do online ad types differ from each other in terms of shareability? To understand this, this study did 15 face-to-face interviews and found that consumers prefer to share online ads with text and image rather than video ads. Easiness to share, brief information, and being understandable are the three factors that lead consumers to prefer to share text and image-based online ads.

The Perception of Employee Effect and Brand in Industry and Services

Employee brand effect is a process that values the management of human resources in organizations and contributes to a real and concrete diagnosis of the relational environment inside organizations by promoting internal marketing in people management. This process results from the increase of actions in the domain of interpersonal relationships, which result from the informality of social exchanges in the organization. The present study covered 30 Portuguese organizations from the center region of Portugal in the services and industry areas that responded to a questionnaire survey measuring the process. The results show that in the industry sector there is a greater variation in the employee branding process through mentoring and helping relationships and also a greater variation in the organizational integration domain through the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, which consequently leads to the perception that employee branding effect is more positive in industry employees.

Marketing to Gamers

Video game streaming has introduced to consumers a new method of creating branded content. Popular streaming platforms receive millions of broadcasters and viewers every month, and the current chapter examines the influence of this type of user-generated content on consumers' attitudes and behaviors. The goal of this study is to understand how video game streams function as a marketing tool. To investigate this, a quantitative survey was designed and measured participants' video gaming habits and their perceptions of credibility, usefulness of content, group identification, and purchase intention. Heavier gaming habits were found to be positively related to perceived credibility in a user-generated stream condition. Group identification and stream familiarity were found to be positively related to perceived credibility. These findings hold implications for using video game streams as a marketing tool as heavier gamers were found to perceive user-generated streams as a credible source of information.

Country Marketing Strategy

Tourism has become one of the most active areas for digital marketing strategy development. Nowadays, almost all players have developed some kind of digital approach in order to publicise or promote their product. Trying to reach the European tourism market, the national travel and tourism authorities of small Cabo Verde have asked for a strategy based on digital media for global communication results. Their goal is to empower their touristic potential throughout social media and any others digital channels. This work presents a possible digital marketing strategy developed throughout social media dynamics generated by users´ interactions.

Search Engine Marketing to Attract International Digital Traffic

This chapter discusses search engine marketing (SEM) techniques that companies should implement in order to stimulate digital traffic. Those techniques include the attraction of organic traffic by search engine optimization (SEO) as well as search engine advertising (SEA). The authors used SEM techniques to a specific case of a company with the purpose of attracting international traffic and develop external marketing. The research discusses the effectiveness of SEM techniques in the case developed through an experimental method. New insights emerged from the experiment and are presented with contributions for international managers who want to de develop international digital traffic.

Digital Marketing

This research aimed to identify the most developed themes in the field of digital marketing from 2010 to 2019. A total of 898 publications were selected from the Scopus database from the Business, Management and Accounting and Economics, Econometrics, and Finance domains. A bibliometric analysis was carried out using VOSviewer software and the term co-occurrence technique was used. Three clusters were identified. The first cluster relates digital marketing to the changes and adaptations of society and the economy since the emergence of the internet. The second cluster relates digital marketing to information technologies, e-commerce, and consumer behavior. Finally, the third cluster relates digital marketing with markets, social media, users, tourism, and electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM).

Digital Era

The explosive growth of new media and the multiple and diverse means of communications are changing consumers and brands. Digitalisation is a growing reality. As per April 2019, there were 4.437 billion internet users (around 58% of the worldwide population) and 3.499 billion active social media users. Not only is the setting changing, but also consumers' profiles and roles. Researchers have identified some emerging trends that are leading firms to change the way they communicate to consumers and develop new and innovative businesses. In this chapter, the authors present a general perspective of marketing communication and how it will affect business innovation, discuss the existing paradigm shift in marketing communication, and introduce a case study which applies some of the more recent techniques.

Digital Influencers and Follower Behavior

The advent of new technologies, the massification of internet access, the availability of personal computers in the market, and the entrance of smartphones into citizens' daily lives all have constituted a revolution that has led to a change in consumer behavior. There is no need for an empirical study, since it is enough to enter some social networks to observe that companies are using these networks as a marketing vehicle. Digital marketing constitutes a great tool to attract new clients and customers, be it by means of content or paid advertisements in browsers, blogs, videos, Instagram, etc. Hence, the aim of this study is to understand the role and importance of digital influencers in consumers' daily lives. For this, the authors developed an exploratory, quantitative, observational, and transversal study based on a non-probabilistic sample, composed of 161 individuals who integrated or interacted with someone who integrated the academic community of a higher education institution.