What is digital marketing?
We think the question is where to start learning as it is all around us, everywhere in the world and the numbers of web-mobile users are still increasing. Take a look at internet facts live to have a view of what is going on.
Under “digital marketing” we imply a lot of different channels not only for acquisition but also for loyalty. Hereafter you will find a couple of well-known marketing channels (not exhaustive) that you could breakdown as followed: email marketing, retargeting marketing, digital advertising, content marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEM), shopping, market place, affiliate marketing, inbound marketing, marketing automation and search engine optimization (SEO) which is becoming search experience optimization (SXO).
Google Ads (Adwords)
Google Adwords is nowadays one of the bases of acquisition strategy for most digital marketers.
The system is pretty straight forward, you bid on a list of keywords that you select, you pay-per-clic and google has one goal: get the most money possible so they created the “quality score” which is a secret receipt to maximize their profit. (mostly click through rate)
Google Analytics
Google and the freemium approach of their product… Google Analytics was free for a very long time without limit of traffic. Now, GA has added a lot of offline analytics like “signals” where you can follow users that click on digital ads and go to your store! Pretty cool.
It’s a very good tool for analytics purpose, very easy to install for the most open-source platform but must be linked to Google Tag Manager in order to have relevant information (event-based + define goals).
Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is the new sh*t! It will save you hours of useless reporting so you can focus on the analysis. It’s Google’s FREE automatic reporting solution that enables data sources, obviously, from Google marketing platform such as Analytics, AdWords, Search Console, Google Sheets, YouTube and external data sources including files upload.
If you’re not tech-savvy, you can use external tools such as supermetrics or funnel in order to facilitate your connection with Google Data Studio.
Youtube Ads
According to CISCO, online video will make up 80% of all online traffic by 2021. Just a glimpse at Youtube figures makes it clear that every brand should be creating videos: more than 3 billion searches a month, 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute!
They are 3 types of video ads category; TrueView ads, non-skippable video ads, bumper ads on YouTube ads and depending on your sector, target you should try the most appropriate ads format.
Google Shopping
Google Shopping setup is linked to your Google Adwords account. Therefore, products are searched, viewed and compared by web or mobile users. Products can appear in the main search engine results page or under the shopping tab.
To use this conversion-focus channel is important to create a ‘product feed’, which includes attributes of the products for sale.
Microsoft Advertising
First Microsoft adCenter, then Bing Ads and now Microsoft Advertising! Microsoft has been searching the right business model and now it’s moving to personalization and A.I.
On a digital channel perspective, it’s a small search engine with good returns because it’s a targeted audience. Though you can use their marketing platform for the entire Microsoft network like Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees.
Facebook Ads
Well.. more than 2 billions users … should we talk more? Advertised, get in touch with potential customers, prospects, users.
Definition from Facebook about their Ads tool: “Business Manager allows advertisers to manage their marketing efforts in one place and share access to assets across their team, partner agencies and vendors.”
To set up an effective Facebook ad campaign, 6 mains format can be used: carrousel, single image, slideshow, canvas, single video and shopping(with product feed)
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn has over 575+ million users, with more than 260 million monthly active users. A very interesting digital channels with a good return on investment if you know very well your persona.
“Microsoft started integrating the audience data graphs of LinkedIn and Microsoft in 2017 and made LinkedIn data available for targeting in Microsoft Audience Network and then search ads in 2018.” from SearchLand.
Emailing
How to optimize, send and manage triggered emails, marketing emails and rented emails and much more? It exists multiple platforms to send mass emails, or SMS so it will mostly depend on the stage your website/app and product/service is.
Can’t help thinking that using MailChimp could be a good start on a budget standpoint.
Email delivery has been very challenging in order to appear on the right tab on Gmail for example. Also, it has been mandatory to strictly respect RGPD rules in Europe.