2013-09-23

Useful Strategies + Interesting Statistics

Have a look at your phone book.

There are two possible reactions to this statement: either you don’t have one, or there is one, but you’re using it as a support under a table leg. And for all of your questions like where to buy old piano, or where to hire a private investigator you have Google. These days just a few people use yellow pages, probably those are some ‘dinosaurs’ from 70s who can’t adapt to modern technical things.



Image Source: Digital Marketing by Shutterstock

Since we are going to talk about digital marketing let’s see how marketing worked up to mid 90s:

➢    marketers used yellowpages;

➢    marketers used tv/radio to advertise;

➢    marketers used newspapers;

➢    telemarketing, with their annoying calls;

➢    marketers created flyers and small paper ads that are some sort of a guerilla marketing;

➢    marketers used viral effect.

So when a new product appeared marketers covered all sources listed above, they were not really thinking about targeting. Nowadays, marketers don’t need newspapers, radio, TV, all they need is a computer and Internet. All the rest will be done by machinery, I mean tools or software, etc.

Today old ways of connecting with customers are steadily going away. The times when companies fought for the first place in the yellow pages are gone, they are history, like this TV one the photo. And those yellow books are reminders of good old days. Today they are good to be used as body armor to play strikeball or a sofa.

Now we have something of another kind that’s way worse than those books – we have Google. It’s the like the Big Brother you’ve never had:) It’s been watching you since you created your first Gmail account, and uses all those Big Data tricks, to show you ads that are supposed to be interesting for you.

Today all companies have turned organic and paid search marketing to cover greater amount of targeted users, increase their social media communities and build brand awareness.

Advantages of Digital Marketing

So what’s the greatest advantage of digital marketing? With it’s help you, as a marketer can build numerous channels that will help the right people find you.

Comparing to traditional marketing digital is way cheaper, and what’s more important it’s much faster and easier to track changes or reactions caused by the new technique you’re using or some other external factors.

Digital marketing helps you connect easier with your target audience, if you have their e-mails, you can write a letter and make a newsletter giving some offer or corporate news. You can create surveys in the same newsletter and talk to the whole community of yours.

The world became digital and there is a bunch of benefits:

You can reach your audience in no time

You can talk and interact with your community

You can promote your brand easily direct ads or sponsored promotions via gmail

It’s way cheaper than traditional marketing

Effect can be measured much quicker

Planning to execution steps take not much time

Social-media network can create viral effect that’s a great thing for your brand

Your digital-marketing campaign can be changed easily, all you need is to enter your admin panel:)

DM gives an opportunity for every brand to tell it’s story

Don’t Make a Snafu

I’ve noted that people not related to marketing usually mix-up some terms, especially digital marketing and internet marketing. Seems like these notions are quite close but not very. So what exactly do these terms mean?

➢    Digital marketing is a brand promotion using all forms of digital advertising

➢    Internet marketing also called web marketing, online marketing, or emarketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet

As you can see digital marketing is a practice of product promotion using digital distribution channels to reach consumers in a timely and cost-effective manner.

The Forms of Digital Marketing

You may not know it, but digital marketing falls into two ways of application – push and pull. As with any other thing these two have their plusses and minuses.

Pull

Pull is generally what Google calls ‘organic’, it’s the info users all by themselves look for on the web. Each website can be referred to the pull technique cause there every user has a specific link (URL) to view the content.

Pros

Cons

➢     All requests are opt-ins, it allows to create unlimited amount of content. 

➢     No advanced technology required to send static content, only to store/display it.

➢     Much effort is needed for the user to find your content, this is all about SEO talks. 

➢     Because of mixed content scenarios some conteте can be blocked.

Push

The second variant required action from both sides: marketer and a user. Most vivid examples of push marketing are: Email/SMS newsletters, RSS. In each а these marketer needs a recipient for the message to be received and read. As for the RSS the content is pulled on a periodic basis.

Pros

Cons

➢     Faster content delivery 

➢     Improved targeting, only those users whomу you need will get your message

➢     Big data implementation, marketer can use info as username, demographics and psychographic data

➢     Higher cost – less popular platforms may have higher implementation costs 

➢     Lesser discoverability, smaller audience > fewer views > less visibility

Digital Marketing Strategies

Now it’s time to have a look at digital marketing strategies that really work. So, can you name one thing that makes the heart of a marketer beat faster?

If you were thinking about website traffic you were right. So what should every marketer do to squeeze out all the juices out of the traffic he/she gets?

➢     To improve the performance of the resource one promotes they need to align all elements of the landing pages, that includes copy, images, call-to-actions, page structure, etc.

➢     To spin up landing pages one needs to have a creative look at the subject matter, to be able to squeeze in all those banner ads that will appear all around the web.

➢     Don’t forget about multivariate testing, that touch upon imagery, headline, structure, CTA, etc.

➢     Keep an eye on page load times, since it’s the first thing every visitor pays attention to.

➢     Your company website: the home of your digital content. Your campaign should occupy a prime location on your site.

➢     The web-based form: for more specific prospect details, make your the content in your campaign conditional – ask prospects to complete a “request for download” form.

Some more points to consider:

➢     About your blog: Use it to promote the campaign or a new product, don’t forget about other blog where you can submit guest post.

➢     Email marketing: Market to your database by using creative email marketing to point prospects to your campaign content on your website.

➢     Google ads: Don’t forget to create new ads, and be sure to use Gmail sponsored ads.

➢     Twitter: Tweet daily, schedule tweets, auto-respond…the list goes on.

➢     StumbleUpon: make stumbls to bring audience to your campaign.

➢     Google+ and Facebook if these two are relevant for your company be sure to use them. Don’t forget about promoted posts on Facebook and communities on Google+.

➢     Youtube & Vimeo: be sure to use video content on the pages of your site, since Google gives a preference to pages with mixed content.

➢     Interlinking: Related section on your blog should always include number of recent post with similar topics.

Digital Marketing Tools

The best thing about digital era is that we have tools and apps for any possible thing! As for marketing anyone can easily find some interesting tools on the web. In this part we’ll have a look at most interesting and productive tools for every marketer.

Google Analytics



If you can’t use Analytics tool that you can’t be proudly called marketer. This is one of the best and most popular online solutions. Through Google Analytics you pull out tons of data and go much deeper into communities and social analysis.

Netvibes



With netvibes tool you’ll be able to monitor bunch of sources and easily create reports on multiple dashboards.

UberVU

With uberVU there is no need to run through dozen of dashboards to see how things are going on, this tool gathers all the necessary for you information in one place, just come and get it.

Simplify360

Simplify360 tracks messages from across the web at  blogs,news sections, discussion forums, Facebook posts, Twitter, Google+ and bunch of other places. This tool allows to connect number of social networks to track everything you need.

Ecairn

The motto of ecairn company is: “We map the social web and make it actionable for brands.” Ok, how ecairn can help you? With its help you can easily map communities and identify influencers (here) you can also use Klout. You can easily monitor brands in key verticals/communities, build and crowdsource content, listen to relevant conversations from your community, etc.

Klout for Business

This is one hell of a tool. Klout is one of the most favorite tools of internet active people, cause for being active on the net people get influence rate. The higher rate the better perks people get. As for businesses Klout can provide info to companies that are looking for those influential personalities on the net.

Digital Marketing Statistics

Well, if you still remember the subject of this blog post, there was mentioned statistics. When you need to find some interesting figures online, there are not so many resources where to have a look at them. But one of the best options in the ComScore website.

It’s an Internet analytics company which provides marketing data and analytics to many of the world’s largest enterprises, agencies, and publishers. So let’s see what these guys (and some others) can say about digital marketing.

➢    1/3 of all internet users are tweet heavily (Source)

➢    Among all internet shoppers 43% are the fans of the brands they buy (Source)

➢    Ever since Twitter was introduced, there are already more than 163 Billion tweets (and the number constantly grows) (Source)

➢    More than 80% of pins on Pinterest are repins. (Source)

➢    1/3 of all Facebook users are interacting via mobile app (Source)

➢    As for the buying behavior, 47% of all users think that Facebook is the best influencer (Source)

➢    Those companies who tweet their news generate 2x more leads those who don’t use twitter at all (Source)

➢    As for interaction Instagram is one of the first, each second, more than 575 likes are given and more than 81 comments are written (Source)

➢    After being purchased by Facebook, Instagram a 2 year old startup became more expensive than New York Times (Source)

➢    The +1 button on Google Plus gets hit 5 million times per day (Source)

➢    23% of Facebook users have no private life check the site 5 times a day (Source)

➢    As for the search queries, 20% of requests have been asked before (Source)

➢    SlideShare get 45 Mln views per month (Source)

Interested to know how many users are there in this or that social network? Follow the link to get some more statistics.

This post is provided by Alex Bulat, one of those guys willing to play with words getting the message across to the end user. This post as well as many others was written with one aim in his mind – buy a chopper;) Well, also if you need a clean WordPress theme, you can ask him where you can get one.

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