Digital Marketing
What is
digital marketing?
We believe the question is about where to start learning because it is all around us, everywhere in the world, and the number of mobile web users continues to increase. Take a look at Internet facts live to get an idea of what’s going on.
By ‘digital marketing,’ we mean a wide range of different channels, not only for acquisition but also for retention. Below are some well-known (non-exhaustive) marketing channels that you can break down as follows: email marketing, retargeting, digital advertising, content marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEM), shopping, marketplace, affiliate marketing, inbound marketing, marketing automation, and search engine optimization (SEO), which is evolving into search experience optimization (SXO).
Google Ads
Google AdWords is now one of the cornerstones of the acquisition strategy for most digital marketers.
The system is quite simple; you bid on a list of selected keywords, pay per click, and Google has only one goal: to maximize revenue. They have thus created the ‘Quality Score,’ which is a secret recipe to maximize their profit, primarily based on the click-through rate.
Google Analytics
Google and the freemium approach to their product… Google Analytics was free for a very long time with no traffic limits. Now, GA has added many offline analyses like ‘signals,’ allowing you to track users who click on digital ads and visit your store! Pretty cool.
It’s a very powerful analytics tool, very easy to set up for the most open-source platform, but it needs to be linked to Google Tag Manager to obtain relevant information (based on events + goal setup).
Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is the new thing! It will save you hours of unnecessary reporting so you can focus on analysis. It’s Google’s FREE automated reporting solution that allows you to use data sources from, of course, Google’s marketing platform like Analytics, AdWords, Search Console, Google Sheets, YouTube, and external data sources, including file uploads.
If you’re not tech-savvy, you can use external tools like Supermetrics or Funnel to make your connection with Google Data Studio easier.
Youtube Ads
According to CISCO, online video will represent 80% of all online traffic by 2021. A quick look at YouTube’s numbers clearly shows that every brand should create videos: over 3 billion searches per month, and 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute!
There are 3 types of video ad categories: TrueView ads, non-skippable video ads, bumper ads on YouTube. Depending on your industry, target audience, you should try the most suitable advertising format.
Google Shopping
The setup of Google Shopping is linked to your Google AdWords account. Consequently, products are searched, viewed, and compared by internet users or mobile users. The products can appear on the main search engine results page or under the ‘Shopping’ tab.
To use this conversion-focused channel, it’s important to create a ‘product feed,’ which includes the attributes of the products for sale.
Microsoft Ads
First, Microsoft adCenter, then Bing Ads, and now Microsoft Advertising! Microsoft has been searching for the right economic model and is now moving towards personalization and artificial intelligence.
From the perspective of digital channels, it’s a smaller search engine with good returns because it provides a targeted audience. However, you can use their marketing platform for the entire Microsoft network, such as Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees.
Facebook Ads
Well… over 2 billion users… should we say more? Advertise, connect with potential customers, prospects, users.
Facebook’s definition of its Ads tool: “Business Manager allows advertisers to manage their marketing efforts in one place and share access to assets within their team, partner agencies, and vendors.”
To set up an effective advertising campaign on Facebook, 6 main formats can be used: carousel, single image, slideshow, canvas, single video, and shopping (with product feeds).
Linkedin Ads
LinkedIn has over 575 million users, with more than 260 million monthly active users. It’s a very interesting digital channel with a good return on investment if you know your persona well.
“Microsoft began integrating audience data graphs from LinkedIn and Microsoft in 2017 and made LinkedIn data available for targeting in the Microsoft Audience Network, then in search ads in 2018.” from SearchLand.
Emailing
How to optimize, send, and manage triggered emails, marketing emails, rented emails, and much more? There are multiple platforms for sending mass emails or SMS, so it will depend largely on the stage your website/application and product/service are at.
I can’t help but think that using MailChimp could be a good start from a budget perspective.
Sending emails has been challenging to appear in the right tab on Gmail, for example. Moreover, strict compliance with GDPR rules in Europe has been mandatory.