Effective Digital Marketing

Welcome to the first post on Navigating Through Digital Marketing! Before we move on to the nitty gritty details, what is Digital Marketing exactly?

Digital Marketing, simply put, is the marketing of products or services through the use of information communication technologies (ICT). For example, search engine optimization, email newsletters, content marketing and social media marketing, are some types of digital marketing.

I'm sure that each and everyone of you has encountered some form of social media marketing -- experts say that we are exposed to as many as 4,000 advertising messages each day on the Internet!

However, how many of these messages do you actually remember? 1? 2?

Do you even feel like you were exposed to as many as 4,000 advertisements online each day? Why not? Is it because they were irrelevant to you? Or was the ad uninteresting? Did you have Adblocker on?

Social media marketing is probably the most familiar form of digital marketing to everyone -- we are all social animals. A study by Hootsuite reports that we spend 1 out of every 3 minute online on social media platforms! With this, marketers today are spending more money on social media marketing, with advertising budgets projected to increase by 32% in 2018.

However, as social media advertising budgets increasing, marketers need to ensure that they attain a favourable ROI with each marketing investment. This brings me back to an article written in 2010 by Kaplan & Haenlein, which discussed ten pieces of advice for companies deciding to use social media marketing.

Ten Pieces of Advice for Companies deciding to use Social Media Marketing:
1. Choose Carefully
2. Pick the Application/Make Your Own
3. Ensure Activity Alignment
4. Media Plan Integration
5. Access For All
6. Be Active
7. Be Interesting
8. Be Humble
9. Be Unprofessional
10. Be Honest

To which, I would like to add an additional piece of advice to companies deciding to use social media marketing.

11. Measure Your Results

It is extremely important to measure your social media marketing results -- you need to know how much you are getting back from your investment, whether in terms of engagement rates, likes, follows, shares or clicks. As digital marketers, we need to know how effective each social media advertisement or campaign was and how we can improve our next campaign -- through measuring results. With the digital marketing environment moving at the speed of light, we need to be able to measure results efficiently and effectively, removing ads that don't convert and place greater emphasis on ads that do.

One great facilitator of measuring social media marketing results is the Facebook Ad Manager.



For businesses using Facebook advertisements, you will be able to accurately target audiences based on demographics such as age, gender and location, as well as view results such as engagement rates and reach per campaign. With this, you are also able to compare between different campaigns and remove those that are less effective.

In addition, having measurements gives you the ability to set targets for your marketing campaigns, allowing you to push your campaigns to greater heights through effective management of the different campaigns, instead of simply blindly pushing out content without knowing if the advertisement is doing as well as another.

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In my subsequent posts, I will be sharing and analysing certain digital marketing campaigns that I believe to have utilized digital marketing effectively or ineffectively and how it can be improved or applied to other industries.

Stay tuned to my next post!