Development of Digital Marketing Toolkit for Media Promotion and Determination of Synergetic Effects of the Instruments’ Complex Application

This research focuses on the digital promotion of media projects on the Russian market. The object of the study is the tools of Internet-promotion, and the subject is the principles of their functioning in a convergent environment of the media market. The main goal of the study is development and verification of the classification of digital promotion tools (‘digital toolkit’) and formation of hypotheses on synergetic effects of their combinations. The authors consider a substantial aray of articles, monographs and other previous studies for the development of a generalized classification of groups of promotion tools. Further on, with the help of in-depth expert semi-structured interviews with representatives of the Russian-language media market, the classification is tested, after which a number of groups are added to it, and a scheme of their interrelations is formed with highlighting of potential synergetic effects. The result of the study is the classification of tools for digital media promotion that includes twelve groups, as well as a scheme of their applicability in current marketing practice of media projects studied and a scheme of groups’ co-influence with an expanded description of the nature of this relation. After the analysis, four groups of hypotheses were formulated, with one main hypothesis of the study on the primacy of content in the media marketing strategy, and the other three groups focusing on the issues of prevalence, subjectively perceived effectiveness and potential synergetic effects of the integrated use of classification tools. This paper also presents the methodology for testing hypotheses in further research. The academic contribution of this research is that previously a systematic approach to the formation of such a classification was not applied, and the specifics of the media market were not taken into account when considering specialized markets. For the managerial application there is a developed set of tools that can be used as a roadmap for planning marketing activities and allocating budget, as well as the identified synergetic effects of tools in complex application.