DIGITAL MARKETING

In this presentation, I’m going to talk about what is digital marketing and all the aspects that go into it the different techniques, some of the background of digital marketing, and related things that are it based but still kind of related to digital marketing.

Concepts of Digital Marketing

Traditional Marketing

So first let’s go over some concepts of marketing in general. First, what is traditional marketing so we can compare it to a digital marketing. There are basically three main types of traditional marketing. The front first would be print, this would be things like newspapers, magazines. The second would be broadcast, this could be TV or even radio. And then the final third one is direct mail. This is basically the junk mail that shows up in your mailbox every single day.

Why Digital Marketing is Better?

So why is Digital Marketing better than traditional marketing? Well, first, it is focused on the customers. Unlike traditional marketing, for example, a TV show or a radio, just because you’re on it doesn’t necessarily mean your customers are listening. Yes, on a TV show, you might be able to get certain demographic information, especially if it’s a cable show, magazines, you can maybe tell based on the topic of that, whether or not your customers doing that. But you really aren’t focused on the customers, you’re just sort of hoping. But what digital marketing really provides is that you can target things. For example, in specific paid advertising methods, you can actually look exactly to your customer information that they’re with search. Again, people are looking for what you’re looking for. So these are all targeted, interactive. Digital Marketing, such as social media actually allows you to communicate directly with your customers. Same with like a website where they can actually ask you a question. And finally cost effective where if you were doing a TV or radio spot, you’d have to buy that scheduled on it in advance, things like that. Create all your medium. But with digital marketing, you can actually tweak that as you go. You can increase your ad spend, you could develop smart content and things like that. So, ultimately, digital marketing is better because you have a lot more control over what’s going on.

Inbound vs Outbound

Another concept of marketing that is different is the difference between inbound versus outbound. What do I mean by that? Well, outbound is more of interruptions, a TV ad, of course, we’re watching our TV show and an ad comes up, you’re being interrupted radio ads, print ads, cold calling, get those phone calls. I guess Robo calling is a form of cold calling, social media ads, email blasts. You also of course, have direct Now it shows up in your mailbox and billboards. But the key concept of interruption marketing is that you’re doing something else. And then an ad or a marketing effort interrupts you. On the other hand, permission based marketing is when you’re out actually looking to find something and or will give your permission to get future information. So for example, you might be searching and you’re reading a blog, and then they asked you if you’d like to sign up for their newsletter. You’re watching YouTube and other videos show up. You may or may not have signed up for a webinar where it’s a online based training that you actually wanted to see websites. Again, you’re searching for different information. The whole concept of search engine optimization is again you’re looking for information, and then the search engines provide that information back to you. keyword targeting. keyword targeting basically is the idea that we can look to present information when people are searching for specific things. landing page. Again, people are landing on a specific page of our website, we’re offering them something, again, how these relate to permission based marketing. And finally, email marketing. When someone says Yes, I’d like to receive some email. And then we send out either a newsletter or some other email campaigns like that.

Set Goals

One of the important things about marketing is that we really do need to set goals before we embark on our marketing campaigns. Goals are important, using the principle of smart where you have a specific goal, he makes sure that goal is measurable. Obviously, make sure the goal is achievable, that it’s relevant to what you’re doing and actually as a time thing, so it goes back again to being able to do be measurable. The key here again, is setting goals before you actually start implementing things.

Target Audience

One of the most important concepts of marketing is that you actually target your audience. Unlike traditional marketing, where we’re doing more broadcast, think, again of a TV or radio, you can actually look at specific audiences you want to do and then find the appropriate digital marketing technique that allows you to do that. targeting your audience involves two things. First, is just doing market research, gathering information about what your customers may need or their preferences. There’s also this concept that really helps with your digital marketing or marketing in general, is what’s called a buyer persona. Basically, this is a semi fictional representation of what your ideal customer could be. It could include demographic information, location, information, habits, things like that, that help you actually keep in mind who you’re actually looking to market to.

Marketing Stages

There are a number of stages on the marketing path. The first is just raising awareness using marketing to raise awareness for what you’re trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, awareness only takes it so far, you would like to convert that awareness into actually getting leads, leads or people or potential customers that might be interested but aren’t ready to buy it. But through different techniques, such as nurturing, you can actually move them further along within the stages. You’ve probably heard the word qualified leads, again, moving it through leads process, but ultimately, marketing does want to end up at sales. This could be in the form again of selling your product or selling your services, but again, marketing’s goal is to get sales.

Business Cycle

So where does marketing fit within the business cycle? marketing’s a start, as we talked about in stages previously, then we move into leads, hopefully leads convert into sales, sales move into your operations where you may again fulfill the product perform the service. After that has been done, there is a customer service side, hopefully the customer satisfied. If not, you need to try to work to fix out. As we’re seeing more and more the idea of reputation is coming up in this business cycle. These could be in the form of reviews, word of mouth and things like that. But interesting reputation is one thing that is related to marketing. So what’s really the point here is that marketing is one aspect of your business cycle, but they all are interrelated.

Advertising Message

You’re actually looking at specific part of marketing advertising. This is important to link about your actual advertising message. You need to reach your potential customers through a public They’re having, again, what is their need? What is their pain point where their frustrations. The next thing is to provide them a solution to those needs problems and frustrations. This again could hopefully is fulfilled with your product or service. And then finally offer them your product or service. But the key point here in this method is again, if you start with the offer, but haven’t actually described their problem, you’re probably going to miss communicating to them through your advertising.

Digital Marketing – Websites

So let’s move into one aspect of digital marketing, which is your website. Your website is your primary presence on the internet. I, again, we’ve had websites around for decades now but it is really the foundation of how we think and use the internet. Thus your website is that presence where you presence on the internet where you can explain your business and provide the information to your potential customers, and also can act as a virtual salesperson. It’s available 24 by seven, internet never goes down. So you can provide a lot of information. Hopefully, depending on your service or product, you can actually have forms that can be filled out and receive more information. Or if you can do an e commerce solution, you can actually sell directly on your website.

Website Examples

So there’s many different ways to get a website up. There are website builders, you may have heard of companies like Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy. These allow you to drag and drop and move objects around. In order to build your website. You may have heard the term content management system or CMS, one of the most popular ones is WordPress. This is much more of a do not necessarily do it yourself. But you can have much more control over what you’re doing, you would host the website yourself. Basically, either yourself or a web developer can pretty much determine Look, the feel the functions, the features and things like that. If on the other hand, you’re specifically looking at e commerce and realizing you got to take payments and inventory or shipping, there are other solutions dedicated to that one, for example, Shopify, it takes care of a lot of those things for you. But finally, just need to point out that a website is not a Facebook page. Yes, you can have a presence on the internet with a Facebook page. But it doesn’t give you all the flexibility and ultimately, it’s on Facebook’s platform and you don’t have as much control.

Website benefits

So what are the benefits of having a website? Again, as mentioned earlier, the virtual salesperson concept if you can come up with a way to sell or at least gain information to get a quote or an estimate, your website can handle that you have complete control over your website. Again, you might go easy with a website builder to Get something up. But ultimately, that’s just a choice of a builder. You control the website, it’s yours. Finally, or secondly, or third, excuse me, it makes you look professional website is something people expect nowadays. They look at your name, they look at your business name and they wonder who you are. And finally, you can actually get some web statistics be with tracking and different things like that you can actually learn a lot of information about the people that are coming to your website.

Business Listings

The next digital marketing technique is what is called business listings. Business scenes are places where you would actually put your information on the internet in the form of your business name, your address and your phone number and other related information. What this is very important as search engines are actually trying to get this information and immediately Supposed to their results. So not having these listings really puts you at a disadvantage. If you have a physical location, business listings help because of the address on different mapping websites like Google Maps or Bing Maps to actually show where your business is located and pro, again, provide different information. This greatly is impacted by the fact that everybody has a smartphone now.

Business Listings Examples

Probably the biggest business listing example you need to worry about is what’s called Google My Business. This is Google’s solution to provide business listings. If you search on their search engine, you’ll see it or if you search on the map, you’ll see it. Why is it the biggest it’s only because Google is used the most of all the different search engine technologies, but there are other ones to look at being places being the search engine for Microsoft also does the same kind of thing as much search engine Traffic as Google, but again, people do use pain. Another one is actually Yelp allows you to either create or claim a profile on Yelp. Even though Yelp is permanent or is thought of mostly as a review website. Again, it is another form of your business profile and people could go to Yelp first looking for your industry and us find your business profile. If on the other hand, you’re in specific type of things, say is home services like plumbers, electricians, a website, like Angie’s List will also offer you a chance to create a business profile. And again, these are just a sample of some of the major ones. There are many other ones that are available.

Business Listings Benefits

So what is the benefit of focusing on creating businesses since will first assist easy information? these listings are available. You just need to claim them or create them. You put in your business description. Maybe founding date, Howard Locate obviously, address, phone number, maybe an email contact your website, again is makes for their. Secondly, if you’re searching for an industry, these things as insights actually show your competition too. So if you’re not there and your competition is and a potential customers going to one of these websites, well, you’re not found on different things actually provide social proof in the form of sometimes reviews but also again, if you don’t have a business listing, hmm, what’s wrong? And finally, because most of these services are free to their customers, there is options actually for advertising, so you can pay for better placement or the competition might be doing it instead.

Paid Advertising

The next digital marketing technique we’d like to look at is paid advertising. So what is paid advertising basically, paid advertising is any advertising on the internet Sometimes this is actually referred to as PPC or pay per click this rates to the actual pricing model where you actually don’t pay until they click. There are many different types. One, the kind of one of the first ones was what are called banner ads, the again, the things that are the lawn narrow strips at the top of websites, they’re now actually more referred to as display ads. But they can also be different forms depending on the medium. So for example, it could look like a Facebook post or a promoted tweet if it’s on a social media network.

Paid Advertising Examples

One of the ones that many people use for paid advertising is actually Google search. If you’ve ever noticed in a Google search result when you type in a term, sometimes you’ll see results at the top with little small indications of the word ad. Those would be a form of paid advertising people are paying to be placed there at the top of the Google search, Facebook ads is another example. These are actual ads that look like a Facebook post and actually show up in your Facebook feed. Google Display is a way to have those banner ads or other ads show up on different websites, or even on YouTube. And many other platforms have their own ad technology. So this could be social media. Other specific sites like Yelp or Angie’s List also provide opportunities for paid advertising.

Paid Advertising Benefits

The benefits of paid advertising is you can directly show your content in front of possible customers. With Google search, you’re actually putting ads that show when people are searching for specific terms. For display, you’re actually showing your ads based on different demographic information about those people. And that way, again, they’re targeted, you can actually look to have your ad show up Either specific keywords, profiles of the people that are logged in. One of the other benefits related to search in particular is you can be at the top, people click on the top results. It’s just one of those things that they’ve tested. And when your screen gets even smaller, for example, on a smartphone, you may not even scroll down to the other search results. And lastly, one of the big benefits is flexible budgets. Unlike other traditional advertising things where you’d have to set a budget, wait for a target date and things like that. You can change your budget almost instantaneously stop ads, start ads, increase your budget, reduce your budget.

Digital Marketing Conversion Rate Optimization

The next digital marketing technique I would like to go over is conversion rate optimization. So what is conversion optimization? Basically, it’s a process that looks at the different conversions that occur within your business and find ways to optimize them.

Conversion Rate Optimization Examples

What are some examples? Well, as we talked about the business cycle, start with leads, how many leads are actually converting from your marketing efforts. So for example, let’s say you have put a paid ad out, did that paid ad actually result in a lead, that’s a conversion, you can look at sales. This is where how many leads actually convert to sales. So once you’ve got through marketing got your lead, now you’re looking at your sales, how many sales were directly a result of specific leads, there are some physical ways that this can be accomplished. One would be putting a form on your website. This way you can capture customer information. Again, this could be in the form of a get a quote, or get an estimate and things like that. If you’re not using a website, but she’s get a lot of information through phone calls, um, you might actually want to look at setting up a call tracking system in order to provide some of that information on where those phone calls are coming from. That you could actually, again, look to see how your conversions are going with your phone calls.

Conversion Rate Optimization Benefits

The benefits of conversion rate optimization, first of all with things like website forms is you don’t have to have any involvement. These are systems that can be automated through marketing into leads into actual sales. The beauty of all this is that every step of the way can provide data for how your sales cycles and Salesforce are working, and actually provide information to go back and see where you can improve it, hence the optimization. One other ways you can do this through improving your customer education because you have this data, you can actually look at different things your customers may be asking for, or having problems with. And again, help them answer questions that may help them convert better. And finally, again, you’re able to provide A lot of customer information through this entire process. If again, you say, start with a lead, capture a little bit information, get an entire sale where you have to capture all the information to provide the service or sell the product and then through the business cycle actually work on customer service and reputation in order to go through the whole cycle.

Email Marketing

The next digital marketing method will look at is email marketing. Email Marketing is communicating with your pinch potential or current customers using email. Unlike just sending a simple email, like we’ve all done, the real key the email marketing is automation. Especially if you can use email instead of phone calls which would drastically reduce the amount of time it would take a physical person to call people. This automation could be in the form of multi step campaigns. And this campaigns can actually be altered based upon actions taken by the user within the email.

Email Marketing Examples

So some examples of email marketing that might work in your business one simple newsletter. It’s a way to have regular communication with your clients. You can give them information, maybe try and upsell, but the key is you’re keeping that communication going. If you have a service or a product sale type of business, emails, great for sending out invoices, sending out receipts, and I seen written survey questions. One key about email marketing is again getting an opt in. If somebody is willing to give you their email address in exchange for something, you can send them out a different informational source. Or you could ask them for additional information. One of the final examples is a concept called nurturing. This is where you actually send out a series of emails To move a lead through the sales process. Now the word nurturing probably makes sense. Each along the way can explain more information about your product or service, if they interact with email and again, back to the automation that could actually cause a different branch within your email campaign.

Email Marketing Benefits

The benefits of email marketing is allows you to stay in contact, instead of finishing the sale and just letting them go, you can actually keep that going. Now one that could be for up-sells. But it also could be because your product requires an ongoing type of thing. Email for all intensive purposes extremely inexpensive. The services do cost money to help send the email but the email itself is practically free. The other big benefit is you don’t have to do a phone call. This works really great for confirmations or follow ups, things like that. And finally, the entire email marketing can be automated so that there’s very little need for your staff to actually be involved with it.

Reputation Management

The next digital marketing concept is reputation management. reputation management is basically how your company looks on the internet based on reviews. What are reviews? reviews are the new word of mouth before you would ask a friend or a co worker. Hey, have you heard about that company? Or have you heard about that product? Now many different ways on the internet we can find reviews about a product or a service or a company.

Reputation Management Examples

Some examples of this probably the most popular one is Yelp. It’s a website dedicated to reviews mainly for local businesses. There are also specific websites dedicated to things like Home Services. Those would be things like Angie’s List or homeadvisor. They again provide different types of review Google actually is part of their business listing that Google My Business profile have actually now integrated reviews within that system. And additionally, if you have a Facebook page, Facebook has also integrated reviews within that Facebook page for your company.

Reputation Management Benefits

What are some of the benefits um, actually reviews are great for interacting engaging, reviews do seem like they are one sided, where the customer leaves your review, potentially negative. But actually most of the systems have a way that you can respond back. Think of this as a way to address the things that are in that review. If is negative, or if was positive, just saying thanks for the great review. Because reviews do sometimes bring up customer service issues. There are an important part of customer service to really be doing reviews. trust factor actually comes into more play today. People reading reviews about your company they’re looking to see because they probably don’t have a relationship with you should I trust this company to buy their product or do their service. And finally, there’s again another opportunity just to provide company information on these different review sites. So again, you can have your location, your phone number, your contact information, ours and some business descriptions.

Digital Marketing Social Media

The next digital marketing technique we’re going to look at is she also shows social media. So basically, what is social media, it’s communities that are people sharing information. This is a new way. Internet has allowed for these different communication methods, tradition, or it started out with social media being person to person, but actually because companies have not come on, come on in. It’s a way to actually interact with your customers, but it’s also a way to humanize your business so that you can actually put, you know, quote unquote real people behind your business on social media.

Social Media Examples

Some different examples of social media. The big one, of course, is Facebook, Instagram, it’s more dedicated images and video. But again, companies can join Instagram, Twitter. It’s a social network predominantly of short messages with images and some videos. But if you’re focused more on a business, communication, social network like LinkedIn might actually help. It does also have a kind of a job seeker component to it.

Social Media Benefits

So what are some of the benefits of social media? It is a new way but it’s one we need to embrace. People are using it. Business companies are showing up on social media and people are expecting this kind of two way interactions. It can definitely help crease increase your brand awareness by having an active social media profile. Again, humanizes your business by responding directly to people. And if used correctly, you can actually use social media to increase your website traffic. Because most of these social networks aren’t going to have very elaborate ways to communicate your business, and its services or products, but usually have the way to link back to your website.

Search Engine Optimization

The next digital marketing method we’re going to look at is search engine optimization or SEO. Basically, this is the process by which relevant content on your website can be ranked higher in the search engine result. Again, search engine you’re going to look to find information optimization, putting information together to try to make it more relevant to that search. ranking is the position of your website compared to the other results.

Search Engine Optimization Examples

So what are some examples of Search Engine Optimization. First Google because most people just search on Google. So a lot of the techniques are there. Google has been doing search engines for the longest, and so most people look to optimize for that. But being is another second largest search engine actually powers Yahoo’s search results too. So it’s not something that completely forget about. There is actually part of the Google search results that are specifically related to local businesses, sometimes called a snack pack. These are usually related to a map listing of where you’re currently located. And actually, finally, one example of taking into account search engine optimization is the fact that a lot of the search engines do show paid results above the normal organic search results. So pay per click actually does have an impact on search engine optimization also.

Search Engine Optimization Benefits

So what are some of the benefits. It has been shown that people click on higher ranked results on search engine results than lower few people actually go off the first page of search engine results. Because you’re competing with your other companies in your industry ranking above them does matter on as far as who gets those clicks. Ultimately, though, the search engine are trying to provide what are more relevant results. So if you can help by optimizing your content on your website to be more relevant, then the search engines reward for that. And finally, there is no cost. Now, that’s not exactly true. There’s no cost to rank higher in a search engine there’s cost to do the processes to optimize your site. But again, there’s no direct cost as the difference from a paid per click or paid advertising campaign.

Content Marketing

Next is your marketing technique is what is called content marketing. So what is content marketing? content marketing is really creating content that is targeted to a specific audience. That content can take many formats from text, images, audio or video. Again, it’s kind of an industry term for what we just consider things we interact with. We read text, we look at images, we listen to audio, we watch a video.

Content Marketing Examples

What are some examples this? Well, first text, words, things that we see in a website or maybe in a tweets or on a blog. images come in many different forms from graphics that are produced photography is taken or interactive, images, gifts, things you’ve seen like that. Audio, one of one of the best ways to interact with audio is through things called podcasts. And finally, video probably where most people get involved, so things like YouTube, but again, these could also be in the form of videos that provide training or going live? Just putting a live video up on a different social network?

Content Marketing Benefits

What are the benefits of content marketing, if you provide the right content that your audiences are looking for, they’ll want to interact with your content. Providing this content and in different volumes of it actually shows to search engines and people in general that you have authority in that subject and provides more credibility to your purpose for why you are creating the content. Because you have more content and can generate more traffic to your website and other different things. And ultimately, this content may help in the buying process because you’ve explained your service or your product, even though you didn’t exactly give them an offer or try to sell them on something immediately.

Analytics

The next thing we’ll look at for digital marketing techniques is analytics. So what are analytics. Analytics is basically looking for meaningful patterns of data that then helps you make decisions. This data can be almost anything within your marketing or business processes.

Analytics Examples

Some examples of analytics for marketing would be information that you might find on your website, data that comes through your advert paid advertising campaigns, and information that might come from your business listings that drive traffic to different points. Again, leads, these are your potential customers. There’s many aspects of the lead process that would have analytics have data that you can then look at to analyze sales, the actual customers you have, you’re going to get a lot of information from the sales, customer information, services, product, sold, timing, things like that. And finally, your operations, the fulfillment of the product. assesses your services or your products will have a lot of data there too.

Analytics Benefits

So how can analytics provide benefits to your company? One is by first recording it. Again, setting up systems or processes to have this information. But once you record it, you can actually look at it. All this data can then be put into reports and shows different data characteristics and things like that. But the real key is when you put your recorded and you put in report, and you look for the relationships of how that data relates to other parts of it, because then finally, from these relationships and all the data, you can actually make decisions in your business to improve change or get rid of different processes that actually aren’t accomplishing your goals.

IT Systems

Email Hosting

Digital Marketing does have some related IT systems that will greatly help in your digital marketing efforts. The first is actually email hosting seems very simple, but your email address does actually matter if you have a website with your company name.com, but you don’t have an email address relates to it, it kind of seems a little off. It’s easy to set up a Gmail account or it’s easy to set up an outlook.com. But again, you have a website, why not have email related to email hosting is available using your actual company name or your domain name through Google. So you can have basically a company Gmail account, or Microsoft through their program office 365.

Customer Relationship Management

I don’t think that greatly helps your digital marketing efforts is a customer relation management system or a CRM. But basically a CRM allows you to do is store contact information about potentially leads that come through your marketing efforts, the CRM can actually help with qualifying those leads to where they then move into your sales process. And then a CRM can help throughout that entire sales process to capture all the information about the process as you move to hopefully, an actual sale.

Line-of-Business Solution

Line of business solutions actually are the things that are much into your operational aspects, but they allow you to store a lot of your business processes, for example, work orders, invoices and payments. These can actually be linked back to your CRM without having one of these systems. There’s really no way to see or measure all the data that’s inside your business. You just don’t have it anywhere.