5 Common Misconceptions About Digital Marketing - A Beginners' Guide

5 Common Misconceptions About Digital Marketing - A Beginners' Guide
x

5 Common Misconceptions About Digital Marketing - A Beginners' Guide

If you know what digital marketing is, you should know how effective it has become today. Well, sometimes it is found that beginners face a few common misconceptions about digital marketing. And eventually, they have to taste early defeat in this challenging market. Believe it or not, I have also gone through the same situations. This is why; I feel I must tell you what things can primarily have negative impacts on your digital media marketing efforts.

It is no doubt that in this technology driven world, digital media based marketing has given the business development a new boosting towards faster growth. But following are some common mistakes that a newbie should avoid:

1. Higher time consumption versus fewer results: The first thing that disappoints a beginner is time against results. It is a fact that there is hardly any short cut to success (except pay-per-click advertisement) in the digital or the online marketing sphere! When you begin to start market your business online, you have to wait and watch for results for some time. After a few outcomes, rework on strategy can lead to expected results. But this does not mean that you should stop working on digital media based marketing ploys. One thing you must remember or convey to your superiors that results of digital marketing stay for a long time. Once the flow of business beings, it does far better in revenue collection than off-line marketing processes.

2. It is too technical and hard to track or measure: I can personally tell you that I have come across people who simply try to negate digital or online marketing as it is a bit technical. Some of my friends and even clients are heard to say, "You people better understand things as you have the technical knowhow". But let me tell you my friends, I am not at all technical person and I do not hold any technical degree. Yet, Googling around and with the help of some of my friends, I am now easily handling my own site's online marketing process. And talking about the tracking process, I can say there are so many tools to analyze and trace the output of your digital marketing efforts. For example, there are many keyword analysis tools that help you know the best keywords or phrases that would help you move forward and outperform your competitors on Google search results.

3. You need to invest lump sum money for success: Another setback that can really affect a beginner to take the first firm step in the domain of digital or online marketing is a money issue. Some people have a big misconception that digital or online marketing means an investment of a considerable part of your marketing budget. But this is not at all true. Whether you employ any digital marketing expert or yourself begin to work in this domain, very nominal investment can start showing you greater results. You can expect better results from other conventional marketing ploys even. There are so many free techniques that can be implemented to get firsthand results.

4. SEO is going to die so stop this nonsense: There are so many Big Brothers who have grown some deep knowledge in themselves about Google and SEO. They have the judgment - Google now does not allow or adhere to conventional practices of optimization of web pages (Meta tags, content etc.) so it is not necessary to invest your money in digital or online marketing (SEO is certainly the part of it). It would be better to follow other techniques. These types of conceptions are nothing but misconceptions about digital marketing! The on-page SEO (working on Meta and content) still has importance to Google and other search engines. Those ploys guide search crawlers to index and show the best results against the user queries. Yes, SEO techniques are becoming advanced to bring the best results to the customers and it is not going to die till the search engines are in the market.

5. Social networking is all digital or online marketing: In this era of 'Facebook', 'Twitter', 'what's Up' people are growing a deep misconception in themselves. They have started to think that social media marketing is all in all in digital marketing. If you can market you business in social channels, you then do not need to do anything else. But for the beginners I must say, stop thinking likewise! If you search, you would find there are so many other techniques that help in bringing results. Do not indulge your time entirely on social media marketing. For example, you have to know and work on making your online presence mobile friendly to reach the greatest number of people. And to do that, you have to know some key techniques that stand as a part of digital media based marketing.

Well, there are so many other misconceptions about digital marketing processes. But I have tried to put forward only 5 misconceptions that can lead a beginner to defeat! I have personally burnt my nail falling in a few of such damaging misconceptions. So I think, everybody should research well and find out the truth. There are so many blogs of experts that can guide a beginner to success in digital and online marketing. For example, Google's Spokesperson Mr. Matt Cutts has a blog where he shares his good thoughts on digital and online marketing good practices. Such blogs and helps are innumerable and following those, success is bound to come for a beginner. I wish the above points would help you all be successful in avoiding common misconceptions of digital marketing. Know the truth and get the success.

Original article: http://ezinearticles.com/?5-Common-Misconceptions-About-Digital-Marketing---A-Beginners-Guide&id=8592726

Why It Makes Sense to Outsource Digital Marketing

As a business owner or entrepreneur, managing a business is always challenging, requires a lot of focus, planning and managing of various work aspects, you even don't plan for. In such situations, as a business manager or owner, it is imperative that you take certain crucial decisions of work that you plan to manage, delegate, build teams for or outsource to another company.

In most cases, it always makes sense to outsource specialized work not core but complementary to your business to an expert or another company. And there are many business benefits of outsourcing such work. In today's digital world, when companies are transforming the way they do business and making it digital-centric, it is important to have captive digital knowledge in-house but it makes a lot of sense to outsource your digital initiatives.

Outsourcing to another company or agency helps in many ways. Who offer specialized digital services like Search Engine Marketing (SEM) on Google and Bing, Pay per Click Ads (PPC) on platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Video Ads on YouTube and other platforms?

There are several benefits for brands in outsourcing digital marketing and have shared a few that are most important:

Firstly, the brand team is able to focus on key business priorities and related objectives given the focus required and resource management required for the same. By outsourcing specialized areas like digital marketing, a brand or small business owner does not have to worry or spend time trying to hire someone or a team to manage your stuffs. And doing this removes the worry of head count or associated costs or managing aspirations of such specialists in your team post-hiring them.

And this works best when that specialized function like online advertising is not cored to your business but is an enabler. So rather than build a digital team in-house, it makes sense to outsource the work. And the longer term has one person on your team who builds captive knowledge and also coordinated and works with the outsourced company to manage these digital initiatives. This also reduces hiring worries, costs or retention challenges for the organization.

When you outsource your digital marketing, you also hope to enhance your overall marketing efforts with expert advice you get on digital strategy from the outsourced agency who are experts working on initiatives across sectors for multiple clients. So your outsourced digital marketing partner comes with a lot of experience which can complement your own thinking and strategy resulting in better results over time for the brand

Having a digital marketing partner also longer term helps you save money as digital marketing requires the right expertise, knowledge and experience to manage media buying and planning and helping in savings there.

An outsourced digital marketing account also results in efficiencies in better budget allocation resulting out of data analytics and re-allocation of budget basis efficiency of return on ad spends. Only a team with considerable experience and expertise can manage this such that decisions are taken at the right time to achieve continuous improvement and benefit for the brand in its digital marketing media spends.

The critical need to stay updated in the ever-changing digital marketing world goes away when you have a perfect partner to whom you have outsourced all your work. Not that being updated is not important, but having someone do that helps you focus on your core product, service or customers. Being in the know of all that happens in the digital world across platforms and mediums is a hugely time-consuming task. Which can easily take its toll when it is managed in-house. So outsourcing helps brands have a partner who helps the brand be updated without spending the time and effort required for it.

The last but equally important another critical benefit of outsourcing digital marketing is saving time and resources on all operational aspects of managing it. Right from interacting with publishers, ad platforms to account management, e-commerce tracking, analytics and reporting.

When all of these benefits are added up from the saving in time to resources and money, the decision to outsource digital marketing makes a lot of sense. Now begins the challenging task of finding the right partner.

Original Article : http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-It-Makes-Sense-to-Outsource-Digital-Marketing&id=9934636

Digital Advertising Blog | 5 Steps to Optimise Digital Advertising Campaigns

Digital Advertising Blog | 5 Steps to Optimise Digital Advertising Campaigns

In this article, we list the 5 Steps on How to Optimise your Digital Advertising Campaigns.

Step 1 – Targeting Strategy

To begin with, it is important to have your campaign set up with individual strategies for age, demographics, interests, behaviours, or any other target criteria you are using. This is so that each parameter can be tracked individually and you can optimise them in and out depending on the performance.

Make sure that your targeting strategies are in-line with the campaign brief provided by your client so that you can give them insights on the things which are most important to them.

Step 2 – Advertising Research

Simultaneously derive insights from qualitative market research based on the product you are advertising and the consumers you intend to target.

Additional information from market research in relation to the product and the psychographics of the audience will broaden the targeting funnel which will further assist in serving better results.

For example, Sparcmedia ran a campaign for a chain of family health clinics in Brisbane who were trying to promote an offering for skin cancer awareness. Through qualitative research, we found that Brisbane had an audience segment of students from Japan who were highly conscious about skin cancer due to the high rate of skin cancer in Japan.

Armed with this market knowledge we tested a strategy, utilising a small amount of the client’s budget to target Japanese students. This strategy was a success and resulted in increased conversions for the campaign, with an eCPA much lower than other strategies.

Step 3 – Advertising Insights

Start observing key activities such as the impact of the time of day, the day of week, placements and performance of URL/sites as they play an important role.

You should also be tracking consumer reaction towards each component of the advertising campaign. For example, if you have five creatives in circulation, instead of bundling the engagement rate and seeing the overall for all five, have them split out so that you can understand which executions get greater levels of engagement. Pause the ones that are less effective and focus spend on the 2-3 which have the greatest success. This will ensure that you get a greater engagement rate overall, plus get insights on the types of creative which your audience responds to.

Once the campaign is up and running analyse it for a period of two weeks before making adjustments. You need to ensure that the optimisations you are making are based on a statistically relevant level of data.

Step 4 – Optimise

After two weeks, optimise the campaign towards the parameters mentioned in Step 3

The process of optimisation can include:

Higher bidding or allocating more budgets towards the URL’s that generate higher engagement (CTR, views, conversions.)

Pausing the under performing line-items.

Bidding higher at the most active hour of the day that is providing maximum engagement.

Increase spends towards the best performing strategies (gender/age/interests)

Optimise spend on a daily basis until the campaign ends.

Step 5 – Analyse 

When the campaign has finished, analyse the results and deliver post-campaign insights that will help the clients grow their business with effective decision-making. Useful insights include: Information around the engaged audience in comparison to the targeted audience, information on which creatives performed and why, information on which strategies performed and why. Wherever possible, overlay this with market data.

Instead of patting yourself on the back for a great click through rate or for the number of sales you achieved, start understanding why you got that result, because when you know that, it will be easier for you to replicate the result again and again on an ongoing basis.

Articcle source: http://www.articlebiz.com/article/1051643983-1-digital-advertising-blog-5-steps-to-optimise-digital-advertising-campaigns/

Internet Marketing Should You Try It?

Internet Marketing Should You Try It?

In this article I hope to share with you some insights related to internet marketing for those of you that haven't been able to see success or for those that are considering trying it. I would like to give some bullet points on what I am learning at Wealthy Affiliate (an online internet marketing university).


Personally I was initially turned off by the phrase wealthy affiliate (though I now love the training) because I associated it with get rich quick scams and I also began to look at internet marketing not with the intent of making a lot of money (though many make a lot or enter into it with that intent) but as a means to provide a second income from my home or wherever I was at in the world.


But anyway, getting back to what I was saying earlier, here are some points to offer help for those that are looking into IM (internet marketing), have doubts about it or have not been able to see any fruit from their labors. So here are some nuggets that I offer from my experience. I hope they can be of help to you:


Writing is essential.

Some may disagree with me on this but if you want to do this right and be in it for the long-haul you are going to have to write (unless you have money you can spend to outsource this). I was hoping this would not be the case because I really have never enjoyed writing (though it is beginning to grow on me). The internet feeds on content. And yes, images, videos are very important but a lot of SEO and article marketing is dependant on quality, unique content.


You can learn to write.

The good thing is that you can learn to write better and you can learn to write in a way that is just your natural self and if you find a passion you can write about it. This will make your writing easier and more enjoyable and you will be more consistent. At Wealthy Affiliate where I am receiving my training the owner Kyle wrote something that I now agree with. Those who write consistently succeed. Of course, there are other pieces to the puzzle but writing consistently is key.


Commit for a year. What helped me keep at... this might sound strange... is that I paid for a whole year of training. I am committed to learning for a year. I am treating this as if I was studying in the University. There is enough people that are able to make this work for them so I decided to find the best training online I could receive and commit to learn and apply for a whole year.


IT TAKES TIME... and effort. At first I tried to make everything work quickly and would jump from one thing to another. I am finally coming to the point where I am committing to one thing at a time. I am learning to take small steps to learn and then to take action. In fact I have been taught to spend 50% of my time learning and 50% of my time applying, taking action (So if I have 8 hours a week to give to this I spend 4 on learning and 4 applying)

Ask questions from those who are doing it successfully. I have loved the forums at Wealthy Affiliate. I have learned a lot from people that live doing this full time. Reading and asking questions from real people and from current posts (the internet changes a lot) has been extremely valuable.


Write out weekly goals and stick to them. This is what I am doing now. Writing out my goals has made a big difference. Otherwise I tend to get distracted and go from one thing to another or I get lost in all of the information and options that are available.


TAKE ACTION. To make this work you need to take consistent action and the right type of action with the proper training. Keep at it both in learning and in taking action and you should see fruit to your labor.


Article Source: http://www.streetarticles.com/affiliate-revenue/internet-marketing-should-you-try-it