Tesco's Digital Marketing Strategy and Digital Transformation Assignment Sample

Tesco's Digital Marketing Strategy and Digital Transformation

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Introduction - Technologies that Shaped the Business World: Digital Age

Digital marketing is the use of a digital platform to promote and advertise a company's goods, services, and facilities. Many different sorts of digital marketing techniques may be characterized by the use of digital technology, such as the internet, display advertising, SEO, social media, and e-commerce marketing. An effective digital marketing strategy is based on a thorough understanding of customer behavior. In order to aid in the growth of their business, several corporations are turning to digital marketing planning, a cutting-edge and inventive method of marketing administration (Austin et al, 2016). Unlike conventional marketing, which relies on a limited number of channels, digital marketing employs all of the available digital media and technologies to reach a larger audience. Strategy and action are the two most important parts of digital marketing planning.

This report explains Tesco's UK digital marketing strategy in detail. Its customers drive Tesco, one of the world’s top retail grocery chains. This company's digital marketing approach should be based on a customer acquisition and retention mindset. The digital marketing strategy was developed using the SOSTAC methodology (Cautela et al, 2014). Organizations conferred with experts in the field and relied on their ideas and observations to ensure the research had a sound basis. To demonstrate the report's usefulness, it was necessary to gather data relevant to the industry in question.

Knowledge and Understanding

As a result of the use of new technologies, a digital transformation has occurred. However, moving all of your processes to the cloud will not immediately give your company some type of digital wizardry. Your users will not gain the benefits of a digital transformation unless your business is willing to make the necessary changes and implement them (Dufva et al, 2017).

A company's culture and practices are the most important component of digital transformation, not the technology itself. To be successful in the digital age, your company will need to rethink almost every aspect of its operations. True digital transformation requires organizations and their employees to challenge the status quo, learn to experiment, and implement changes often. Developing a digital mindset requires a willingness to try new things and a tolerance for failure (Fielt et al, 2014).

Realizing the steps necessary for a digital transformation might be difficult because it takes on a distinct appearance for every company. When it comes to digital transformations, the ultimate goal should be to build a digital platform, which can be better described.

Information revolution and the invention of the Digital Age

Government and academic institutions dominated computer IT in the 1940s through the 1960s. Workplace productivity has benefited from the rise of productivity-enhancing office tools like spreadsheets and word processors. For this reason, there is a growing need for IT professionals who can develop and implement the hardware and software needed to support corporate operations (Kenney et al, 2015).

It was necessary to build new computer languages, as well as new specialists in such languages. Databases are operated by Oracle and SAP programmers, while networking software is written in C and updated by C programmers.

IT continues to expand

In recent years, IT has evolved tremendously because of the internet. There is a wide range of devices in the present IT scene, from tablets to smart phones to voice-activated technologies to nanoscale computer chips to quantum computers, and so on.

Cloud computing, which was first established in the 1960s, is now an important part of many companies' IT strategies. In the 1960s and 1970s, the concept of time-sharing evolved to enable several users to use the same computer resources. Virtual systems that seem to be real computers, but are virtual, were first described as cloud computing in 1994 (Camilleri et al, 2018).

Logical and relational designs of the digital platform’s database

Almost all commercial endeavors rely on databases as their foundation. Consequently, businesses should put their efforts into creating better databases in order to stay on track with their projects' goals. The project might be in threat if users do not follow these guidelines. As a result, Database Design Schemas and the Schema Example have grown in popularity, making it easier for database users to grasp their concepts (Spagnoletti, 2015).

A wide variety of specialized systems is used by enterprises for unique use cases. As an example, transactional data is stored in a relational database management system, whereas raw information is stored in a database.

These specifics become more difficult for the end user when data from several sources must be mapped into a single schema as the system grows in size. However, enterprises may have a surefire strategy to manage their data pipelines and fulfill their business goals with a well-developed Database Schema.

Visitors may use both visual representations and mathematical calculations or employ constraints to create database schema designs. Developers will then use a variety of data definition languages to represent these formulae, depending on the database system.

Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD), or Entity-Relationship Model, is a graphical depiction of the connections between people, things, locations and ideas in an information technology (IT) system. A number of software programs may be used to create them (Chaffey et al, 2017). As a foundation for a relational database, an ERD uses data modeling approaches to help define business processes.

Representing Entities

Using Entity Relationship Modeling (ERM), a diagram of relationships between entities in the design may be created. In the ER diagram, an entity set is represented by a rectangle containing the entity name. This example's sales database's product and customer entity sets are shown in the following diagram.

For example, a postal address includes the street number, city, ZIP code (or three-letter code), and country as part of the postal address. Attributes that are formed of smaller components are classified as composite, whilst those that are not are classified as simple. An attribute's value may take on a multitude of forms for a single object. When a customer gives several phone numbers, the property "phone number" might have multiple values.

Using attributes, one can tell one thing from another of the same kind. Although we might use the name property to distinguish one client from another, this may be insufficient since several customers may have the same name. We need a distinguishing characteristic that is guaranteed to be unique to each consumer in order to distinguish him or her from one another. The defining characteristic or characteristics are a key.

While it is conceivable for two clients to have the same phone number, it is more probable that they do not have the same name, thus we may use the phone number and the name as a composite key.

For this reason, we choose one of the replacement (or candidate) keys to be our primary (or major) key. Attributes are depicted in the ER diagram as ovals labeled with the name of their corresponding entity. The attributes that make up the main key are highlighted in blue. Multivalued attributes are portrayed as ovals with two lines, whereas all composite attributes are represented linked to the oval of their composite attribute (Ryan et al, 2016).

Some applications need an artificial characteristic that can be used as a key since no combination of qualities can be utilized to identify an individual. Different goods might be stocked with the same name and price in our inventory and sales application. The essential key to distinguishing items is to provide each item a unique product ID number. Name, price, and a unique product ID would be assigned to each product object. This is seen in Figure ER.

A marketing plan for the organizations new digital platform and why this plan would work

Strategy and action are two of the three key aspects of digital marketing planning. Digital marketing techniques should only be used if the company's marketing and sales potential have been analyzed and evaluated (Peppard et al, 2016). As a following stage, the organization has to build an infrastructure for rethinking its digital initiatives. A plan is put into place when the budget and management mechanisms are in place. The digital marketing strategy for UK retailer Tesco Plc is the focus of this article. For this study, information about digital marketing methods, ideas, and concepts will be gleaned.

Digital Marketing Plan: Definition and Structure

When a company's digital marketing strategy is combined with traditional marketing methods like phone or email, it is most successful. However, these strategies form part of an overall marketing strategy that includes the distribution of goods, marketing communications, and more. The report will follow the SOSTAC model when it comes to the layout of the digital marketing strategy. Following the guidelines of this well-known and well-regarded paradigm, TESCO Plc's digital marketing strategy will be explained strategically (Lamberton et al, 2016).

SOSTAC Planning Model

Since its inception in 1990, the SOSTAC marketing planning process has been the most extensively utilized digital marketing planning model.

The first step in organizing a digital marketing strategy is to assess the current state of the business. Organizations must thoroughly examine their growth forecasts, competitive marketplaces, and internal and external environments in order to execute their online and offline marketing efforts. Additionally, the company's goals play an important role in defining the advantages and purposes of the activities. Without a strategy, it is impossible to attain goals. The term strategy is often used to refer to the manner through which goals and objectives are accomplished. Also included in these plans are the notions of facilitating customer acquisition, adaptation, and retention (Kaufman et al, 2014). To carry out a strategy, strategic approaches are used. A digital marketing strategy often includes the marketing and public relations mix, channel mix, and pre-planned tools. Actions taken in a timely manner are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the approaches. A tactical digital instrument is a little project in and of itself. Digital marketing planning must conclude with a test of control metrics to see whether the strategies being implemented are strengthening or weakening. The last step of control allows organizations to check web analytics facilities on a regular basis. Customers, inquiries, duration, subscription, and sales reports are tracked by this component.

Tesco: Action & Control

The last element of SOSTAC digital marketing planning is to implement and manage the tactics in order to make them feasible. If the company's policies and plans are successfully implemented, this might be considered an act of action. The management of risk is an important part of the implementation phase (Leeflang et al, 2014). Leadership at Tesco pays close attention to the company's structure and is constantly prepared for anything that could come their way. Tesco's digital marketing strategy relies on a variety of control methods, including system and process monitoring, human resource management, and assurances of external agency quality control.

The last step in this digital marketing strategy module is to keep an eye on how successfully the overall strategy is being carried out. Continuous monitoring of the company's 5S goals is essential for maximizing performance. Customers' reviews and opinions are an important part of Tesco's performance monitoring, thus the retailer tracks them on a regular basis. It is critical to monitor and oversee the success of implemented tactics by optimizing the conversion rate. However, the authorities at Tesco have established a strategy of continual and frequent reporting on the progress of the whole operation or the state of the plan. The company's digital marketing strategy is authenticated and strengthened using a digitalized platform if the activities are organized and logical.

Conclusion

According to the findings of this research, business platforms are critical in promoting new models of value proposition and intermediation between the supply and demand sides of a market, thereby aiding the continuous shift to a digital economy. Our multiple-case analysis revealed certain common patterns and traits of this sort of company, in some instances previously noted in the literature. Aside from that, there are a number of other factors that make digital platforms so important: their dematerialization, their role in intermediation between supply and demand, and their ability to generate value via network effects.

Reference

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