eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Marketing in a Digital World
The text is quite comprehensive and embraces important topics in eMarketing, including eCommerce, digital copywriting, digital advertising (search, online, social media), content marketing, social media platforms and strategies, video marketing, data analytics/KPIs, and SEO. In addition, the first six chapters of the book address more generic marketing and user experience (UX) topics, such as strategy (including SWOT and the marketing mix), customer behavior, market research, UX, and web development.
There are two topics that are currently missing and that I would have liked to see in the book: 1) A chapter on social media ethics (or “digital” ethics in general), and 2) an outline and sample for a social media marketing plan. However, I feel that instructors should be able to include these topics based on additional external sources.
Accuracy is high and the book provides rich detail without overwhelming the reader with technical jargon. Some textbooks tend to remain at times a bit superficial or generic, and this is certainly not the case for the current book. Overall, the author does a great job in presenting somewhat more complex issues in user-friendly ways.
I would argue that it lies in the nature of the topic that some of the more specific parts of a textbook on eMarketing/Social Media Marketing become outdated very quickly. This is indeed particularly visible for, e.g., search engine algorithms and social media platforms, which are in a constant flux. For example, the book does embrace the most important social media platforms in chapter 16 (including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest) and also comments on blogging and podcasts, but given that the last edition of the book was published in 2018, TikTok is indeed completely missing. Nevertheless, I would argue that the book is quite successful in presenting content that remains relevant for the reader and that integrating newer developments in eMarketing and social media into the course should be relatively easy for instructors, given the modular structure of the chapters and the sub-sections within each chapter.
In my assessment, the language used in this book is clear and concise, and it introduces important technical expressions without drifting towards overusing jargon.
I found the text to be very consistent and I did not see any contradictions within or between the different chapters in the book. In addition, the 21 chapters of the book are well balanced when it comes to word count/length, and they have a similar structure throughout.
Modularity between the chapters is very good (i.e., individual chapters can be easily used as independent building blocks in a course). Within each chapter, modularity is possibly a little bit more limited because it may be difficult to identify larger themes within each chapter. However, because the individual chapters are relatively short, I don’t feel that this is an issue for those instructors who only want to use parts of the book. I also feel that the current chapter structure allows instructors to rearrange them easily. For example, an instructor who would like to address SEO (currently chapter 8) more towards the end of a course or video marketing (currently chapter 19) more towards the beginning of a course should easily be able to do so.
I very much liked the organization of the text. The individual chapters are relatively short, and it is easy to navigate through them without getting lost. Sub-sections and individual paragraphs are also relatively short, which increases user-friendliness. Each chapter contains a decent number of figures (sometimes also photos), which enhances the reading experience. Each chapter contains at the beginning a table with key terms and concepts (including definitions), which is very helpful. There are some minor redundancies here and there between the different chapters, but nothing that would be problematic or disturbing.
As indicated by other reviewers, the book comes as a pdf file with two pages of the book grouped on one landscape page of the pdf. This makes navigation even on larger screens not very user-friendly, and users trying to read the text on a smaller screen will most probably not have a satisfying user experience. It might be better in my opinion to use traditional portrait pages in the pdf, and (if possible) in addition offer a web-based version that could dynamically adjust the width of the text to the reader’s screen.
Similar to other reviewers, I did not see any grammar or spelling issues (however, I am not a native English speaker). I found the text to be concise and relatively easy to read.
As indicated by other reviewers, the author of the book is from South Africa and at times some of the provided links refer back to a South African context. However, I would argue that the book is overall culturally neutral and should be meaningful in any cultural context. I did not see anything in the book that I would flag as culturally insensitive or offensive.
Contrary to “established” topics such as marketing management or services marketing, my perception is that it is still not easy to find high-quality textbooks on eMarketing and social media. The current book is in my opinion better than many commercially available textbooks from publishers such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill, or Cengage, and I am impressed by the work the author put into this content-rich and detailed book. Regarding the continuity of the textbook (which may be an important factor for instructors when deciding about adopting a textbook), personal email communication with the author/publisher (Red&Yellow) confirmed that the 7th edition is planned to be released in or about April of 2022.