By Meghna Pandamukherjee
A few days ago, I found myself wanting to do something useful and fun in quarantine. That's when I saw one of my friends post about completing an online digital marketing course. I was intrigued by it as digital marketing is an in-demand skill nowadays, and recruiters are increasingly giving more preference to candidates who have received recognition in the field.
But digital marketing is beyond just a skill-set
Digital marketing in itself is a fun skill to have as it allows you to gain more insight into the world of social media and helps you understand how companies trick you into buying their products and services. It is a win-win situation whether you are someone trying to build their brand on the internet or just a watchful consumer. If you complete some of these courses and can successfully apply these principles to the idea you are trying to build upon, you might be well on your way to becoming the next beauty guru on Instagram or starting your very own curry business.
So what exactly is digital marketing?
Digital marketing, though a very vast skill set, can be vaguely defined as a way to utilize technology in a way that can help us promote our products and services. More specifically, it can have to do with a plethora of elements like social media apps, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Line. Website making, blogging, online advertisements like the ones you see while browsing your favourite news sites and also search engines like Google are significant components.
For starters, one must learn to set achievable and actionable goals for a firm. The goals can be something like selling fifty cupcakes a day or getting a thousand views on a youtube makeup tutorial.
Next comes identifying a target consumer base through parameters like age, sex, location and others which in the above example may look something like people aged under thirty living around the cupcake store or females who like makeup.
The next step is figuring out the customer journey, which is essentially putting oneself into the customer's shoes and trying to understand their psychological state. A person looking for cupcakes may google "bakeries near me" and then click on a website in the search results. They may look at the pictures to decide if the cupcakes look palatable enough and look for a map to find a store. They may need contact information to place bulk orders for an upcoming event.
After this, they may drive to the store to purchase some cupcakes and enjoy them with their friends and family. As the last step, it is essential to take valuable feedback from the clients. A firm can gain reviews through surveys, email, or by judging brand loyalty.
There is more to digital marketing than what meets the eye
Establishing a company's online presence is a lot more than just creating websites and hoping for the best. Marketing experts have to ensure that the information provided to the customers is up to date, relevant and reachable through the most common means, i.e. search engines like google. It is making sure that a company's budget for online marketing is well-distributed between content creation and paid search results. Only the webpages most appropriate for the keywords in the search are going to show up in the search results. If someone is looking for a specific variety of cupcakes and enters the keywords "strawberry cupcakes near me" only local bakeries that have used search engine optimization tools and listed strawberry cupcakes on their product list will appear in the search results. There might be many such bakeries, and that is when search engine marketing can make all the difference in beating out the competitors. An impatient potential customer is more likely to click on one of the top results than scroll down to the bottom.
Learning this skill has made me a more vigilant customer and helped me make better choices while picking products and services on the web. It has added more value to my resume and made me more marketable to a potential future employer.