**8.1. Overview**

**2.** Create consistent, integrated, and platform-agnostic experiences for your customers

• Responsive design and optimization is an area that must be addressed.

**3.** Maximize effectiveness by leveraging multi-platform synergies

and are complementary across platforms.

competitive) fashion.

tising landscape.

publishers and advertisers can

platform targeting strategies;

those metrics changes over time.

likely to consume content on various channels;

• optimize their content and determine the best marketing mix.

tomers are actually visiting, engaging, and converting.

**5.** Reevaluate your business metrics and KPIs to better optimize your strategies

efficiencies

32 Marketing

• Strive to build products, content, and marketing experiences that operate seamlessly

• However, optimizing performance channel by channel creates inefficiencies that are a drag on ROI, which can be remedied by managing them in a more holistic (rather than

• Provide key employees with third-party multi-platform data that can still help a business take a broader look at its own current and potential impact on the media and adver-

**4.** Understand demographic differences between platforms to drive audience targeting

Because not every audience segment behaves in a same way across media platforms, both

• enhance the efficiency of how they capture their core audiences with holistic multi-

• layer in these additional platforms and channels and evaluate campaigns in an integrated fashion, marketers can attain their reach and frequency objectives more efficiently;

• develop their content strategies to better position with the audiences who are more

• As change business KPIs may need to be updated to reflect that. The downside of continuing to optimize to the wrong or outdated KPIs is that it can lead businesses further and further away from the optimal business strategies, especially as the meaning of

• As platform proliferation raises: visitor metrics get expanded while conversion and average engagement metrics drop, thus reevaluating your KPIs to get a sense of how and when this may be appearing is the first step to fix the problem. With a unified view of the digital consumer that takes into account their behavior across platforms, businesses can bring order to this chaos, measure their businesses according to the best metrics, and develop product and marketing strategies that align with how their cusManaging and sustaining the platform strategy to a great level is determined by the nature and type of platform, but more specifically on the governance of the platforms. For the platforms, which are created by a firm for the sole purpose of serving their products and services, the governance issues will be extensive compared to those, which are outsourced. When it comes to managing platform strategy that applies the outsourcing strategy, the important issue will be to monitor their performance using their own tools and other organizational feedback mechanisms.

Approaches to platform management must consider the way value is created. While traditional business models would incent managers to maximize the price for each product or service, different approaches are needed to management platform [11]. A greater value may be created by offering low or even offering products or services for free to one side of a market if it can attract the participation of another valuable customer.

Platform firms face the formidable task to orchestrating complex ecosystems and to design and develop the governance systems and organizational capital needed to make them succeed. The traditional lever of action of controlling centrally what is done within the firm is exerting power over supplier will not be sufficient, as much of the value is created outside the traditional boundaries of the firm [11].

A fundamental new capability for firms will be the ability to articulate business model not just for themselves but for members of their ecosystem, which are mutually compatible and even self-reinforcing at the organizational level, siloed organizations will fare worse than those who can harness cooperation across technological divisions and business divisions [11].

Identify useful platforms that have yet to be established and choose whether to create those unilaterally or by forming consortia. All should survey the platforms arising in their markets and consider the degree to which they will be active participants in them. According to Hagel (see [13]), the strategic choices for platform are based on the four major kinds of benefits they expect to gain from platforms:


• Shaping strategies: the ability to change how an entire marketplace operates—and seize more value by doing so.

is the interdependency between a stable core or a "platform" that interfaces with a dynamic and heterogeneous set of complementary components to generate a stream of derivative products. Platforms spur innovation and efficiency in diverse sectors such as computers, video games, mobile phones, automobiles, payment systems, and e-commerce. Platforms' successes require coordination and integration across organizational units and firms that often have

Marketing Platform Strategy

35

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.77947

Platforms raise interesting and complex issues that strategic management scholars are exclusively equipped to address. At the same time, platforms offer new kinds of contexts for strategy scholars to reexamine existing theories of organization, cooperation, competition, and decision making. Platform owners must consider their own competences, technologies, and processes as well as those of their suppliers and rivals to design for modularity and interoperability. Meanwhile, the strategies of platform participants influence how they contribute value to the platform ecosystem and how much of that value they will be able to appropriate. Consequently, managers must understand the nature of competition and collaboration in platform-based ecosystems. Such a strategic decision making goes beyond issues such as critical mass, switching costs, compatibility, and network effects and encompasses a broader set of social, cognitive, and technical aspects. Hakansson et al. (see [22]) support this framework by suggesting that a

network analysis of business evolution takes into account resources and web of actors.

Platforms create new connections and new opportunities for trade, but also there have been concerns of its dominance on competition [23–25]. Being a savvy, successful participant may offer a path to profit without the enormous risk of managing the platform itself, if you are willing to cede the glory in favor of growth and stability [24]. In addition, there is the issue of governance of the platform ecosystem, which considers who has access to platform, how to divide value between ecosystem members, and how to resolve conflicts or manage sometimes increasingly different objective [26]. The goal is to arrange complementors and consumer rules to create and sustain vibrant ecosystems. Policies must ensure value creation and also highquality participation on platform. At the same time, the right mix of incentives is required to encourage joining and good behavior. Platform ecosystems are thus gaining ground through the digitalization of products, services, and business processes in the process of shaping the

The platform strategy is a growing area, which has provided the business firms with multiple opportunities for generating value. Whatever a platform does, it only comes down to two main issues, which are relationship building and solution delivery (products and services). Within this line is where a range of other things come to feature. Platforms thus form an important part of the marketing strategy. Dynamic and demanding environments will favor those who are able to learn best and fast. Business leaders who understand this will likely seek out platforms, which make work lighter for their participants, but also grow their knowledge, accelerate performance improvement, and enhance their capabilities in the

conflicting interests and requirements.

global landscape.

**10. Conclusion**

process.

#### **8.2. Measuring performance of the platform**

The platform can be measured in terms of the level of activity or the number of users in the platform.

Measuring the performance of a platform is important for ensuring the value for money and to ensure the achievement of the intended objectives. For most platforms, the switching cost varies extensively, thus marketers need to keep track on their choices and the changes within the entire platform ecosystem. For the online-based platforms, there are several metrics that are provided by the systems, but they should be evaluated from both technical and marketing perspectives. The number of viewers, for example, may seem as an attractive measure but may have less to do the increase in sales.

#### **8.3. Influence and control platforms**

Marketers can strategically influence the way people behave and interact in the platform. This can be done by the ability to synchronize the principal and secondary value of a platform. Most of the value generated from the platform is an outcome of the activity level that platforms generate. Segmenting, targeting, and positioning the products and services with a right platform member should be done by an external looking (focusing on the users). This will guarantee that the marketing activities are allied with the platform context.

To some extent, the ability to control platforms will be contingent on the nature of governance (dedicated vs. referrals). Even though there is value that can be generated from a platform, there is a need for organization and to provide a soft control mechanism which will ensure that the primary role of the platform is sustainable and the secondary is achieved. Failure to balance the two will have negative results on the other. Another form of control is the control of supply. Normally, the supply control can be done with the non-digital platforms or in combination of digital. For example, imagine that you are traveling within a ship, and in this controlled environment, your only choice on what to buy will depend on what is available. This is what I refer to as an artificial scarcity, which can be strategically established within a platform.
