Digital Marketing!
Today, digital marketing play’s a very large role similar to the role of technology. It is a part of our everyday life, from when we wake up, to checking our text messages to when we need to share a picture of a fun night out.
Anson Alexander’s video, “Marketing Tools: Digital Marketing” provides tips about tools that can be used to help businesses advertise on different networks to reach their target market.
Areas of Digital Marketing
It is important for businesses to outline their goals as it would help choose what digital tools to invest in. The various areas of digital marketing are underlined in five different categories:
Social Media: social media is inherently free and reach a wide range of audience however, you can pay for ads, if need be.
Two ways of paying ads are paid posts and display ads.
- Paid posts – rather than publishing regular posts for free, the company can pay to have it boosted to reach a larger audience.
- Display ads – when someone pays for a banner that will show up on the homepage of a website or the sidebar.
Email Marketing: this type of marketing is the most effective for display ads.
Video Marketing: this can help drive momentum and the business can pay for video advertising.
SEO(Search Engine Optimization): it drives traffic to websites.
Affiliate Marketing Tools and Programs: When a company pays an outside person to market their products and services.
Tips for Selecting the Right Tool
There are many tools to choose from and it’s essential to pick the tools that have a history of success. Alexander suggests that one should take full advantage of free trials, this way you can try out different tools to see which one would benefit you the most before committing to a payment.
As your company becomes more successful, you will need a tool that can help increase your growth therefore, finding the right tool that fits with your organization will help you in the future to prevent you from wasting time and money on unnecessary tools. And for that, you will not have to learn a new process every time.
Anson Alexander mentions that, it is best to find a tool that has multiple purposes to help solve different problems. He continues to say that, if one can solve multiple problems with a single platform or tool then it’s just going to make their life easier and they will have more money and time to pursue more digital marketing efforts (Alexander, 2019).
Social Media Marketing
What is organic social media marketing? Alexander describes it as, the updates that are posted to Facebook, Twitter, or some type of social platform without paying to promote those posts, and without paying for display advertisements (Alexander, 2019).
Basically, these posts are being used to increase awareness or build connection with your customers (Alexander, 2019).
Simply put, organic means authenticity, businesses use these platforms to show that they are genuine and that’s how they build relationship with their audience.
When it comes to organic social media the most important thing is to be authentic, no one wants to feel lied to, be general so everyone can see your advertisement, provide your customers tips and solutions, be consistent with your posts so others who didn’t see your post in the previous week will see it in the current week, and make sure you’re getting value out of the time you put in (Alexander, 2019).
Promoting Content in Social Media
There are a few pays to approach promoting Content on social media, a person can either post their normal, organic posts to their social profiles, or they can pay for display advertising in the sidebar of Facebook or as a video in front of a YouTube video (Alexander, 2019).
This can help start-up companies immensely and can be useful to gain some traction for the future. The three most popular social media networks are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, which all have an option to boost ads/posts.
On Facebook you can use that option by clicking the “boost post”, this can help you reach a wider range of intended audience, Facebook and Instagram gives you options to add the demographics, interests, or behavior, topics of interest.
Twitter is somewhat different because by clicking on “promote your tweet” and you can target based on the location.
Social Media Automation Tools and Suites
Below are the top platforms that a person can use to automate their social media posting and combine their social media accounts to one platform, so they don’t have to go back and forth from Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram (Alexander, 2019).
- Schedule posts
- Monitor interactions
- Detailed Analytics
- Can have multiple teams working on the same social profile
- Can be expensive
- Free trial
- Similar to Hootsuite but has Customer relationship management system
- Offers a free plan
- Reviving Evergreen (specifies content on your blog or website)
- Free plan for 3 social media platforms
- Upgradable
- Schedule posts
- Manage accounts
- Can create team
Digital Advertising
There are four different methods a person can use for digital advertising which are, Display, Search, Video and Mobile advertising.
Display advertising is a paid ad that appears on the top of a website or an ad in the side bar of a website. A helpful tool to use for display advertising is Google Ad Manager, Facebook Ads Manager, Bing and Yahoo ads which is a combination of DoubleClick and Google AdWords into one tool (Alexander, 2019).
It is a free tool that can help many businesses with their display advertisements. Even though you have to pay for the advertisement, this tool will help with how the ads appear on mobile devices.
The second is the search engine marketingwhich is when you pay to get a link at the top of search engine results (Alexander, 2019). You can also use Google Ad Manager for this method. The ideal way for a company to start a campaign would be with Google as everyone uses it.
Videos are also important and many of the advertisements are visuals. It could be beneficial to create a memorable video. This will help the company stand out from their competitors. Below are some tools you can use for videos ads.
Advertise on:
- YouTube
- Partner websites
Oath– Do cross – platform advertising such as iOS and Android
- High quality ads
- Selective on ads to show
- Personalized experience
- Cross – platform video marketing tool
- Advertise on websites and television
Facebook – Upload a video use Facebook.com/business/m/facebook-video-ads
Today’s generation is attached to their mobiles at all times and are constantly checking either their messages, calls or social media, it is something we use every day.
And, businesses can benefit from Mobile Advertising Platforms to reach their target audience. Such tools as Google AdMob can help you create great mobile apps to help your company cover a wider range.
Content Creation and Curation
Anson Alexander (2019) mentions that, when creating content for your marketing campaigns, a helpful tool to use is Adobe Spark. It is a free tool in which you can create graphics, videos, slideshows etc. Adobe is known for producing graphic design software, but Adobe Spark is one of their newest products, and it’s free (Alexander, 2019).
You can also upgrade and install Adobe Creative Suite, if you’re looking to do all of the very detailed, complex content creation (Alexander, 2019). They have photoshop option, which is best for editing photos. Can also do mobile designs along with websites (Alexander, 2019).
There is also Adobe Illustrator, which is great for layouts and for videos, you can use Adobe Premiere.
Conclusion
There are many tools that can be used when we talk about advertising. Anson Alexander mentions quite a few in his video. For example, Social media, Email marketing, SEO, Video marketing. He describes all these tools as way for businesses to advertise to attract more audience and spread awareness for their products.
The restaurant I work at uses email marketing and paid social media ads to advertise their products. As I am scrolling through Instagram, I will see a paid ad that shows all the food and services the restaurant offers and at what cost. This is effective because not a lot of people know that restaurant exists, so these ads are a way of obtaining more customers.
References
Alexander, A. (2019, January). Marketing Tools: Digital Marketing. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.lynda.com/Marketing-tutorials/Discover-top-digital-marketing-tools/753915/5021042-4.html?srchtrk=index%3a4linktypeid%3a2q%3adigital+marketingpage%3a1s%3arelevancesa%3atrueproducttypeid%3a2
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