Digital marketing is the most innovative, fast-moving and creative marketing topic. Lessons are extended and developed often. The social media audit is an important part of the digital marketing planning process. Social media is an opportunity for consumers to generate their own content, and many of the top-ranking results of an Internet search will result in social media content — in relation to companies, brands, and products and services.

So what a digital marketer needs is a tool to audit social media within the competitive environment, i. This is where a social media audit fits in. Keith Quesenberry developed a social Media auditing tool based upon the principle of the Five Ws, which is an approach used in journalism: I keep six honest serving-men They taught me all I knew ; Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. Who is creating content using the digital medium?

Is it an influencer? Is it a competitor? Where is the digital content? Which digital media platform is being used for content? Such as You Tube or Facebook. What is the content on the social media platform? Is it textual content, and video, a photo, is it a story, etc? Does it use a ranking system? What is the feedback like? When was the social media posted? How often does it get posted? What was its reach? Why is the content generated? What was its purpose?

The next step is to rank and prioritise your observations based upon these five criteria. How important is it to your social media marketing strategy? For more detailed information, we recommend that you revisit the original article. Please print out the social media audit template from Marketing Teacher. Finally rank or score the importance of each element using numbersor Booz balls. Persona marketing is where a business creates a false personality for social media marketing.

Some would view the use of false personalities as unethical, whilst others might see it as a form of focused marketing. Persona marketing is a rather cutting edge technique for understanding your ideal customers. Identify a person of influence that already connects with your target market through social networking websites 2. Understand the kind of content these individuals share that gets the best response from their followers 3.

Identify the personality traits of the person of influence 4. Combine the above data to create your own, fictional persona for marketing purposes.

This technique is highly effective and extremely controversial. It involves developing a fictional persona but presenting it as though it is a real person. Managing these personas is a very delicate process. For these reasons it is recommended that you stick to only one persona at a time while mastering the technique.

Any social networking or social media website will work. The best sites are: Flickr With each of these sites you want to find accounts that are frequently creating or introducing content that is liked and shared by large numbers of followers. Facebook and Flickr are more difficult. As you review all of these resources you need to gather information. Find out as much as you can about them. The more you know the easier it will be for you to create your new fictional persona. Ideally you find and study three persons of influence before creating your own unique personality for marketing purposes.

Now that you know exactly what kind of content your prospects find interesting and what kind of person is already sharing it successfully, you can begin to mimic their traits and content trends. Create a character based on the information that you gathered while doing your research. Mix and match some aspects from each of the three or more individuals you studied. Give this person a name, history, hobbies, and anything else that will help present the image of having a well rounded personality.

From there you can create your social media accounts and begin gaining followers and subscribers. As you build a list of followers you can subtly introduce your products or services into the mix. This is the overall goal, after all. Mention them subtly and link to them. For instance you might post a Facebook status update that reads: You can link to your site, but it might make more sense to leave it as plain text the first time you introduce it. A few days later you can add a second status that reads: False reviews using persona marketing are looked down up e.

The dilemma only surrounds the fact that it is a fictional personality. You have to decide how you feel about this. So what is a persona? We all have a personality. We are born somewhere, work somewhere, eat something, like and dislike, hate and love, fear and loath and we love buying certain brands and avoid others. That is the total sum of our personality and this is critical for marketing evaluation information. Based on our personality information and buying preferences, a customer profile is created by marketing specialists, which in turn is instrumental in the formulation of marketing strategies.

An approach to marketing is persona creation, a combination of raw personal data about buyers and educated guesses to project a virtual image of a classic present or potential buyer. The projected virtual image called a PERSONA is the model on which the whole marketing or advertisement is subsequently focused.

Creating one is a very business specific concept. The characteristics of each business persona may be different but the general process of evolving a persona can be somewhat similar. The template helps the marketer to create a virtual image and understand what that particular person likes, dislikes, values and how best to approach that personality. This might subsequently form the basis of a focused tag-line or slogan which must prove irresistible and compel the individual to engage and answer a call to action.

Here is a quick overview of what is included in a general template details may vary depending upon marketing or advertisement objectives in individual business cases. Name the person 2. Based on this information, a persona of a prospective or present client is created complete with a name and a visual image sometimes comical. This is a very basic and introductory model of persona creation. Digital advertising, also known as online advertising or Internet advertising, is essentially using the online opportunity to communicate marketing messages to consumers or visitors.

There are many new and emerging formats for digital advertising, although it is commonly accepted that it would include e-mail marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, more general types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. There are three main types of digital advertising: Online advertising is growing massively all over the world. Display advertising is what we generally think of as online advertising, for example logos, text, graphics, animations or similar.

The idea is that users are targeted by specific keywords that appear in search results or on specific webpages. If you decide to read a few pages by experts recommending garden tools, then it is likely that they will have small advert placed on their pages whereby they earn a few cents per click. This is essentially display advertising. To be specific there are many types of display advertising and here is a short list. Search Engine Marketing or SEM, intends to get your website to the highest position possible in an Internet search.

So a marketer intends to improve the position of webpage based upon a typical keyword. Essentially SEM uses marketing approaches to improve the position of a webpage in the SERPS.

For example better copy and content, but not really any mechanical or technical changes to a page. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is similar to search engine marketing and the two terms are often interchangeable; however SEO is more involved with the mechanics of the page and its content; for example headings and subheadings, content and keywords, HTML tags in images and videos. Social media marketing is a technique that employs social media to take advantage of content created by everyday people using easily accessed technologies such as blogs, social networks, Wikis and similar technologies.

New technologies and social media marketing emerge almost daily, and it is always worth checking to see how technology is changing and developing. Remember that different countries use different platforms. Mobile advertising is communication delivered through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

For example advertising delivered through your iPad or your Android smartphone is mobile advertising. However hear-in lies the dilemma; that whilst mobile devices are small and handheld then there is an argument to develop bespoke content for mobile advertising; however tablets are ideal for looking at traditional websites, and therefore mobile advertising is simply traditional online advertising such as social media marketing, Search Engine Marketing and banner advertising.

Mobile advertising will surely merge with other forms of digital advertising as time passes. Fundamentally, it is one of the first digital advertising techniques; however today it really suffers a crisis in the wake of perpetual spam bombardment, so many of us are very cautious about how we opt in to e-mail.

E-mail marketing and advertising is still a fundamental tool to the marketing manager, especially when it comes to long-term customer relationships. Think about your own e-mail and those companies from whom you welcome e-mails, versus those that you instantly delete.

What is the difference in the way the dialogue is maintained between you and the e-mailing company? This is the basis of e-mail advertising and marketing. There are other forms of Internet and digital advertising which you will find details of on this website. These include but are not limited to affiliate marketing, adware, online public relations and your website itself.

Affiliate marketing is basically a process where a brand or supplier, for example a book retailer, attract customers by rewarding the third-party or affiliate for marketing their goods and services, and driving traffic to their website. The affiliate relationship is based upon the conversion; the conversion is the action on the part of the consumer which forms the central reason for the affiliate relationship. The conversion or the action can take a number of forms; so for Amazon this might be the sale of the product; for others it might be the placing of an online bet, or booking a holiday.

Within the affiliate relationship are the merchant, the brand or seller and the consumer or customer. The merchant is the brand or retailer; there are lots of examples such as Amazon and others.

In fact today affiliates come from all sorts of companies from any industry, including travel, gaming, smart phones, marketing research, not-for-profit, and the voluntary sector.

The affiliate is your digital salesman. Your digital salesforce owns websites, social media, blogs, mailing lists, and other digital marketing media, and they recruit customers for a merchant. Finally the consumer is at the blunt end of the business; they are the target market or customer and we often talk of a sales funnel which will begin with the affiliate; an obvious example would be a blog which offers advice on weight training, whereby the customer learns how to lift weights, and the blogger recruits you as a customer for weight training books and supplements supplied from the merchant; the website or blog never takes title or owns the products; they take a commission from the merchant.

As time moves along and affiliate marketing becomes more commonplace there will be more and more industries and sectors that take advantage of its benefits.

There are currently a number of different types of affiliates and will look at a few of these now. Obviously there will be a prophet in terms of sales of product from the merchant less the cost of online advertising.

For example websites that review college education are often affiliates for colleges and universities. Essentially these sites compare prices and products from a number of suppliers and display them in one place. In a nutshell affiliate marketing as the basic process. The first step is where the user visits the affiliates blog or social media site website, twitter, and so onindividuals arrive at a purpose-built landing page, receives an e-mail, use their twitter page, use a PPC advertisement, sees a viral advertisement and so on.

Often it is difficult to tell that you have left the affiliates website at all; for example Amazon. There are a number of ways of doing this. Using cookies the merchant and the affiliate workout how many people have clicked through. Finally the consumer or user books a holiday or buys a book; the code embedded on the affiliate website indicates to the merchant where the sales come from and to whom commission is owed.

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Some affiliate have quite complex affiliate management software which is accessible by the merchant and the affiliate; for example an affiliate can work out how much money he is making, and can optimise various pages through digital marketing to improve conversion rates. Digital marketing communications are essentially the digital marketing equivalent of the traditional marketing communications mix. Traditionally the off-line world would employ a marketing communications mix which included public relations, advertising, sponsorship, personal selling, direct marketing, and sales promotion amongst other tools such as exhibitions, trade shows and so on.

Digital marketing communications will employ some or all of these tools which are adapted to the online marketing challenge. There will of course be new and innovative online tools which are also employed within the digital marketing communications mix. The online equivalents are known as digital media channels, and are employed in many online and off-line campaigns. Digital marketing communications tools will include display ads, pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation, and affiliate marketing amongst others.

Social media marketing is all marketing which goes on within social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and many more. For example Facebook has quite a complex social media advertising program, which allows the advertiser to focus on over 1 billion people, based on their location, age and other attributes.

There are other sections on marketing teacher with more detail on Facebook advertising programs. Opt-in e-mail marketing is exactly what it says on the tin. Visitors or clients are encouraged to opt in, or in other words sign up for an e-mail newsletter.

It is that simple! The idea is that participants opt-in with permission, rather than simply being added to a database without their knowledge. This is also known as permission marketing. Again Marketing Teacher has plenty of information to help you learn about e-mail marketing.

Display advertising is often the first type of advertising that springs to mind when thinking about the Internet; display advertising is simply the adverts that you see when you visit any website. Examples could include banner adverts which run across the top of Page, or far more rich and complex adverts such as video adverts; many of the banner adverts and display adverts that you see are part of large programs such as Google AdWords, or similar.

Online public relations, or Digital Public Relations DPRtend to be digital marketing communications which encourage a positive perception or profile of your business or organisation. There are lessons on public relations on Marketing Teacher if you need a refresher!

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However the business will be aiming to generate positive blogs, re-tweets, Facebook shares, and similar online PR. Be aware that PR whether online or off-line does have a cost, and public relations is not free. In order to generate favourable content written on your behalf, there is a large investment in terms of effort and cash.

Your online public relations might be a mention on a news channel, either in text or video, you might also receive positive commentary on podcasts, although these are becoming less popular. Viral campaigns whereby an interesting or entertaining fact or video is circulated by e-mail or social networks is probably a better example of a contemporary public relations approach. There are examples of viral marketing on Marketing Teacher. Search Engine Marketing, or Search Engine Optimisation SEO, employ marketing tools which attempt to gain the best position possible for your business in search engines such as Google or Bing.

Once you have attracted a new visitor, the positioning of text or Calls-To-Action CTA will keep a visitor on your site for longer, and will start to move them along your marketing tunnel. There are a number of other online relationships which come under the heading of digital marketing, or digital media channels. These will include an array of other approaches. Here are some popular examples:. Obviously some comparison sites are more open and honest in terms of the results that they deliver, whilst others are less so.

Amazon has a very successful affiliate program whereby small site owners can place code upon their site to advertise books which Amazon sources and delivers. So you might have a website which focuses upon market gardening, and you might advertise books which explain how to grow tomatoes.

Google especially considers strong or informed links to your website as a benefit when deciding upon your position within search results. Obviously many Webmasters have caught on to this and tried different linking strategies to falsely claw their way to the top of the search engine results.

All links need to be natural. Customer engagement is important when thinking in terms of digital marketing channels, or in other words your digital communications mix. The concept of customer engagement relates to continuous and repeating dialogue which goes on between the company and its customers.

As the dialogue and communication continues the depth and breadth of customer relationship develops at physical investment, emotional and psychological levels. So if you managed to attract a customer or visitor to your site for the first time, well done! However challenge for marketers is to engage with visitors so that they become repeat visitors, and loyal customers.

Visitors and customers most engage in a continuous dialogue and communication to make custom engagement effective. There are a number of ways in which marketers need to deal emarketing lots cash make online fast of this conversation; for example if a customer goes straight to Facebook to complain about a poor product then you need to be ready to comment as quickly as possible in order to turn a negative into a positive i. Customers will comment on blogs, on YouTube videos, on your own website or the website of others, such as Trip Advisor.

Trip Advisor is an example of a third party website which engages customers based upon their experience of hotels, flights, restaurants and similar. The site itself gets more than million unique monthly visitors, all largely using reviews to inform the basis of their holiday decisions. So if you have an excellent experience in a particular hotel, you would go to Trip Advisor and post your comments.

Others will do the same either negating or emphasising your points. One thing is for sure, business owners take Trip Advisor very seriously. A poor rating might lead to poor bookings and less profits.

Digital Public Relations DPR is the use of digital and social technologies to manage the awareness and understanding, reputation and brand of a company or organisation, through the purposeful influence of exposure via digital media. Okay, so Digital Public Relations will use many of the typical digital marketing media in order to manage its reputation convincingly; again tools such as content marketing, permission marketing, and customer engagement are central to the public relations purpose.

Tools will also be typical and will include social media approaches, blogs, websites as well as traditional media such as newspapers, television and magazines. So one of the key tools of digital public relations is the media release or press release.

The National Rifle Association in the United States will use lobbying techniques to persuade politicians of the need for guns, for example. Electronic laxmii forex law college road pune such as Facebook pages, customer surveys and polls, websites and a plethora of other digital marketing approaches are employed for the purpose of digital lobbying.

Digital sales promotion encompasses a huge range of creative promotional ideas and approaches. In fact there are too many to list here; so this short lesson on digital sales promotion will give you some ideas, but it is certainly not limited to this small number of approaches.

Just think about the multitude of different sales promotion activities that you are exposed to in the everyday terrestrial world, I think that these could be 401k currency foreign forex guesswork income mlm no residual trading into the digital world or even combined with digital activities.

The online experience is ideal for digital self-promotion. Again many of the topics which are covered in other lessons on Marketing Teacher raised their heads again, it is digital marketing communications is integrated; so yes SEO and SEM can be part of a sales promotion campaign. Companies such as Spotify are good examples of this. As you can see from the examples above there are many different withholding tax on buyback of shares exciting types of sales promotion that can be combined and extended in order to generate new types of digital self-promotion.

The smart money in marketing is watching mobile advertising very closely. The main issue is that there are approaches to advertise on mobile phones, but today most mobile or smart phones are more like minicomputers which display the Internet. The smartphones are used for entertainment and for information gathering, and they also generate data themselves such as the geographical position of the user. So as technology develops smartphone usage and consumer behaviour will change, panty and stocking cosplay shoes hence the advertising will focus upon usage in behaviour.

Social media advertising relies upon the relationships generated within social media websites to target and deliver advertising campaigns to users. The advertising itself is more about the mechanics of social media advertising, because you know social media relies upon continuous engagement in communication with users and customers.

As with search marketing, the digital world place plenty of information about users and their online habits. Facebook shows adverts to specific groups of engaged users by their desktop or mobile. The idea is to target your ads with a creative idea, then they get lots of likes, comments and shares.

So a successful campaign will target ads at specific groups of people so that they are more likely to see the adverts every time they use their social media platform.

As with forex near hwy 7 and yonge forms of marketing communications your Facebook campaign needs a purpose albeit to generate sales, increase brand awareness, target specific groups, or reach specific individuals. As with Google there are a number of different types of adverts that can be shown in how to make money in futures market places; and can be shown in various positions on page or in a newsfeed, or other places depending on who you are targeting or the types of devices using.

You have the option to target based upon a series of factors such as location, age, gender, interests such as tennis or cookery, broader categories such as parents, or a variety of other related connections such as dinar stock market value who like or share your page.

So based upon these factors you are more likely to target specific consumers. Facebook offers a very interactive user interface, and you can get started very quickly with your advertising campaign. Other social media platforms such as Twitter, have similar approaches to social media advertising. Banner advertising has its roots in the early Forex scalper trading. Early websites would have a section at the top like a masthead which would contain an advert; these would be the first things that consumers would see, and from a practical point of view they were easy to insert.

Banners then went on to include skyscrapers and similar, which are simply vertical banners. Today most banner type advertising is simply PPC served through third-party advertising companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!

Most popular today are third-party advertising systems such as Google Adwords whereby ads are served from a hosting system onto a particular section on a web page or site. For more information on search marketing and SEO take a look at other lessons on the Marketing Teacher website. The advert once clicked will take the visitor through to the website landing page, or to a stock broker sales assistant resume designed microsite [which is purposely designed sub-website, specifically designed for promotional purposes]; these are the typical banner type ads, social media advertisements, and mobile adverts that everyone is used to seeing on the Internet today.

Digital Marketing

Display advertising gives the advertiser a direct response i. This obviously has a number of advantages over traditional media where the channel is much longer and time-consuming.

Also adverts are seen but not clicked upon and this gives the advantage of disseminating your brand to enhance awareness and interest. Also the online ads can be mixed and integrated with other online and off-line promotional activities. Display advertising can be highly targeted and costed, and advertisers can make adjustments and changes to any campaign based on data received during the last campaign. Also bear in mind that online users and consumers are wise to online advertising and that sometimes click through rates may be comparatively low or relatively expensive.

Banner advertising Social media advertising Mobile advertising Display advertising formats. Content marketing is the management of content to engage visitors and customers.

So any medium which is on a webpage or social network can form the how to earn from forex trading of content. There are lots of examples of such how to make money collecting aluminum cans and approaches; content my relate to material on a social networks such as Facebook; it might be social streaming through iTunes or Spotify; content could be social publishing such as blogs or a personal website; it might be social knowledge such as Wikipedia; content media might include social search such as Google Product Search; there are other examples such as social bookmarking sites including delicious and Reddit.

So content marketing controls text and video, and other tools such as games, maps, vouchers and so on, so that the visitor is engaged in communication and dialogue; this supports our longer term relationship. Permission marketing is a term calling by Seth Godin in his successful book called Permission Marketing. In fact there is a free of charge copy of the full audio book below.

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In the past this would have been a simple agreement to receive an e-mail newsletter, and the permission element simply meant that the visitors agreed that he could use his or her e-mail address the more unscrupulous would simply help themselves to your address. Just think about it, every time you go to the store you see thousands of brands; each time you open your e-mail there is unsolicited communication from all sorts of organisations; each time you look at the website there will be banners and other marketing messages.

Therefore to breakthrough the background noise, the permission marketer builds a relationship with his consumer via a dialogue.

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An excellent example of this is ASOS. ASOS is a global fashion and beauty retailer; it was originally based upon the concept of As Seen On Screen, whereby you would see a movie and seek out similar products. However the brand has come a long way since then. ASOS uses permission marketing to engage customers on their website and uses social media.

Products can be viewed in different colours and sizes, and there is information about the product itself and how to look after it; then consumers can tweet about it, pin it, Facebook like it or e-mail a friend. This is all part of the permission conversation.

Search Engine Optimization SEO is commonly seen as the golden key to huge amounts of website traffic. Marketers need to be aware that SEO is a structured process that on many occasions will improve the amount of traffic that you get your site, but that there is no magic formula to success.

Earn free pokerstars money are only three lawyers therefore you should get a top space. However if you are a lawyer in New York City, you are in a much more competitive environment.

Where there are thousands of lawyers and law firms even if you have the services of the best SEO expert, your chances of getting a top space are remote. In this situation you are better off paying for a placement or sponsored link. Most webmaster design their SEO for Google. The rest of this lesson will look at SEO, with an invaluable tip regarding Google at the bottom of this page; something to look forward to. Search marketing can include many aspects of digital marketing and traditional marketing, although it is generally seen to encompass paid placements, Pay-Per-Click PPC and Search Engine Optimization SEO.

In reality the most direct route to gaining a high rank in any search engine is via a paid search, using an approach such as Pay Per Click PPC.

The most popular approach to PPC is via either Google AdWords or Microsoft Bing and Yahoo! PPC has quite a few similarities to traditional advertising in the way that you pay for an advertising position; you will have seen paid search whenever you do a Google search for a popular keyword term for example Christmas. At the top of the results, and along the options futures and other derivatives 8th edition solution manual of any results you will see a series of paid for or sponsored adverts; these all belong to Google and are paid for by its advertisers.

So if you want a prime position on scottrade download stock data search results then you pay for search using PPC.

You do not pay for the advert until somebody clicks on it. The position of your PPC advert generally relates to the amount that you bid; the more you pay the higher you rank, at least in theory.

However others believe that the way that the advertisement is composed might make it more attractive than some of its competing ads; therefore a more popular advert in terms of click through rate might rank higher and therefore make more money.

As with much digital marketing, because it is fairly new search marketing has a number of pros and cons:. Companies can target by time-of-day, geographical location, keywords and keyword groups, as well as other more refined targeting approaches. So there may be many exposures which might create awareness or desire, before a user actually clicks through and you pay; this is an extra added value dividend to the advertiser.

If your advert is not compelling users will consider it irrelevant; in fact in some keyword groups the adverts are more relevant than others. Some keywords and niches vegan cashew cream cheese in the vitamix very expensive, and at popular times when keywords become competitive one can spend a disproportionate amount on advertising online.

Social networks are a very important digital marketing channel, so it is important that marketers understand the essentials of social networking. They are particularly important when creating a community, based on communication and dialogue with our customers. The social network might be for your brand, product or service, or it might be for your own personal networking.

The starting point would be a Facebook company page. The benefit of creating a hub for your business on Facebook is multifaceted.

As Facebook puts it, it makes emarketing lots cash make online fast of business discoverable when people search for you on Facebook they will find you. It connects your business so bombay stock brokers sushil finance you can have one-to-one conversations with your customers, who might like your page, read your post and share them with their friends, and they can check on you every time they visit.

Timing is also one secondary market facebook stocks the benefits of Facebook as a social networking tool, since your page can help you reach large groups of people frequently, messages which are specifically directed to their needs and interests. You can also analyze your page using insightful analytics tools, which give you a deeper understanding of your customers and how successful your marketing activities are.

Facebook actually gives you a web like address, which you can put on how can i get a job as a stockbroker business cards, website and on your other marketing tools e.

As with other social networks, twitter takes its business pages seriously. Twitter can help you connect your business to what people are talking about at the moment.

So twitter offers you a powerful medium to connect your message to what your customers are talking about in real-time. You have characters to get your point of view across; and your campaign can be innovative and maybe even viral see the other lessons: For example American Express lets people use their card numbers to claim gifts such as travel tickets; companies such as Burberry are very innovative when it comes to social media, where one example would be their Tweetwalk fashion show.

LinkedIn company pages allow you to showcase your business and to target your audience; you may even have personal pages for yourself or your marketing team. You create a company profile by offering a company description and overview; this needs to be quite short and salient and it needs to show what your company does, why it is different and what it specialises in. You might add your employees as followers in the first instance and encouraged them to add your company to their own profiles, which starts to give it a viral focus.

You can add your company profile to other marketing channels such as websites, e-mails and newsletters. Followers are your influencers and your customers, and LinkedIn will encourage day trading ervaringen to invest time and resources to establish a robust follower base. Then as with other social networking tools you need to devise rich content to share with your followers; this means that you are beginning your dialogue.

For example by posting company updates you start your conversation and word of mouth marketing begins to develop engagement; you can check company news, articles and even hot topics.

Hence the next section on YouTube is closely aligned to this discussion since Google owns YouTube. There are simple series of steps to get going. You Tube channels give your business the opportunity to record and publicise videos. The medium gives you the opportunity to network with more than 1 billion people worldwide who visit YouTube monthly. So you need to ask yourself what you want to get from YouTube and integrate it into your marketing communications plan. Finally you may wish to coordinate the usage of your social media approaches, and for this you need a social media management tool such as.

Viral marketing is the equivalent of online word-of-mouth. Viral marketing campaigns are often spread via e-mail or social media and here we include YouTube as well.

The campaign can reach a large number of individuals in a relatively small amount of time, and marketers seek to harness this very powerful effect. There are a number of mechanisms that can be used for viral marketing, which are known as agents, mechanics or execution types; these include, but are certainly not limited to, images, jokes, quizzes, video clips, games, e-cards, micro-sites, and others.

Viral marketing will help a business boost a cost-effective amount of brand awareness, and it could also plant the seeds for consumer awareness or interest in an alternative marketing communications campaign; for example it could be a teaser campaign. Digital personal selling is an exciting and emerging opportunity for the marketing organization.

Personal selling generally happens when a person sells a product, service or solution to another person or organisation; therefore there has to be a degree of one-to-one, simultaneous, asymmetric communication in order that personal selling can happen. The digital opportunity provides salespeople with the chance to exploit two key areas — direct digital communication and digital information.

As discussed in another lesson on marketing teacher, traditional personal selling can be thought of as a five stage process:. So at each stage the digital salesperson needs to decide whether he or she will use the digital marketing opportunity to either gather information to make decisions, or to communicate in order to see through the five stages of the personal selling process.

The Internet is ideal for prospecting! The salesperson can prospect using popular search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. Then of course there will be online databases that can be used and refined in order to start the sales process. Making first contact used to be by telephone, letter or personal visit.

Digital marketing gives the opportunity to the digital salesperson to use an array of first contact tools for communication; the digital salesperson might use targeted e-mails, social media messages, or social networking using platforms such as LinkedIn. The sales call traditionally is face-to-face, or by telephone. The more adventurous digital salesperson might even use Second Life and undertake personal selling using an automaton or avatar.

Software also gives the opportunity to control digital sales forces. These are often called Customer Relationship Management or CRM software packages, although there are more about monitoring and measuring sales success than the traditional perspective on CRM which considers long-term communication.

However CRM software and a trained salesforce will have the opportunity to communicate with and develop relationships with prospects. This lesson looks at ways of increasing the popularity of your website by looking at external sources of Internet Advertising. Google Adwords is a cost-per-click CPC online advertising program. Essentially that means that you decide upon a keyword that relates closely to your product or service. Affiliate Marketing is where an organization offers and incentive to other web-based organizations to market the products or services that it offers.

So a company selling surfboards could have an affiliate program that is offered to other web-based organizations that offer information on surfing destinations. Put simply — affiliate marketing is a basic agency arrangement. There is rarely any pay-per-click cash, but affiliates tend to take a commission on any goods sold as a result of the click.

What does it look like? When the advert attracts a click, the visitor is taken through to the site that originated the affiliate program. No cash changes hands until there is a sale, but affiliate rewards tend to be higher than regular pay-per-click. Commission Junction CJ is a well-known example of an Affiliate Marketing company. CJ acts as an intermediary between affiliate program. So if you have a successful website, that does well in the search engines and is popular with visitors, you should register with CJ and place affiliate adds onto your site.

Click here to visit Commission Junction. Of course to promote website you should also consider offline promotion strategies such as those used by non- Internet businesses. Our Lessonstore contains lessons on Promotion as part of the Marketing Mix and also Marketing Communications and its own mix. You then allocate a budget, and pay Google by credit card. You can control the length of your campaign, or end it as soon as the money runs out.

Alternatively, companies often opt for the services of a specialist agency in PPC management Pay-Per-Click management or recruit a verified Google Adwords Professional. You only pay for adverts that get clicked — not for page views — so you pay nothing if your advert is simply viewed. Adwords is a very targeted and controllable way of online advertising — hence the huge rises in income and profit for Google over recent times.

Click here to go to Google Adwords. Now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing, Overture has a series of sub-products that make up its digital marketing program. Here are some examples:. Again, as with Adwords, the advertisers bid against each other to obtain the position that will generate the most convertible traffic to their site. Popular keywords will cost more — obviously. So if you wish to promote products in specific regions next to specific search keywords, this is a very targeted geographical service.

Overture has many other similar services such as Search Submit, Product Submit, Travel Submit and Directory Submit that could be considered.

Click here to go to Yahoo! This lesson looks at ways of increasing the popularity of your website by looking at the internal optimization of the website itself. It considers many important ways of building your traffic, including Search Engine Optimization SEO approaches. Write good quality content that visitors value and that keeps them coming back. This is a golden rule. Try to make sure that you have substantial content before putting your site online.

No site is better than one that is poorly prepared. Make the content easy to read and digest. Keep it focused upon keywords, and keep content up-to-date. Remember, your site is not an online brochure or gimmicky sales promotion. On the other hand, in order to save the trouble, many companies simply employ the services of an SEO Consultant. Your domain name should be innovative and does not necessarily have to say what your site does. For example British Airways has an online ticket websites called Opodo.

When building the site, keep the design simple. Flash, Java and Javascript look great but have been known to confuse spiders. Keep It Short and Simple KISS. Remember that not all visitors will have fast Internet connections — much of The World still uses 56k modems. Search Engine Optimization SEO is important.

This will help search engines to read your pages. There are many ways to do this — try to include keywords in your title, in your description tag, in your heading tag, in your URL if possibleand some would also say try to represent your keyword in content — in bold, in italics, and high in the page.

Try to link between your pages. Then add links to the top pages of your site a. Try not to be more than two clicks away from root pages. This makes it easier for visitors to stick around. Submit to search engines where you can. However this is becoming more difficult. Today it is more likely that the search engines will find you — when you obtain in links, spiders and bots will come through your site as they follow outbound links form other sites.

You could also try to get listed in directories such as DMOZ. Once your site is online monitor its progress. This is how you control your online presence. Links To your site — especially form higher-ranking sites — are very important. Links need to be from sites that have similar keywords to those of your pages. This is time consuming and you need to build slowly.

Contact sites and offer to exchange links. However, try not to offer too many outbound links because visitors need to be kept on your site as long as possible. Digital marketing is essentially part of marketing. But what is the difference between digital marketing and Internet or web marketing? What are the digital marketing tools? And how do marketers plan for digital marketing? This lesson aims to answer these questions. The marketing plan in either case is the next step, whether focused upon digital marketing or all marketing.

The next lessons focus upon a tailor-made digital marketing plan which conforms to the acronym AOSTC from our generic marketing planning lesson. So the place to begin defining digital marketing is to consider where it fits within the subject of marketing.

The American Marketing Association AMA definition is as follows:. Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.

Therefore digital marketing by its very nature is one aspect of an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. As such an aspect, digital marketing has its own approaches and tools that contribute to the achievement of marketing goals and objectives.

This also helps us to differentiate between digital marketing and E-commerce, since E-Commerce is simply buying and selling online. There is no real difference between digital marketing and internet or web marketing.

On the other hand, others would see digital marketing and internet or web marketing as subtly different, for example Chaffey below:. Internet [or web] marketing is achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies.

Digital marketing is achieving marketing objectives through use of electronic communications technology. Whilst this distinction is wholly acceptable, it is difficult to see where the distinction lies between digital technologies and electronic communications technologies, especially with the convergence of technologies such as mobile devices. The situation analysis for digital marketing bridges the internal audit and competitor research.

It answers the question where are we now in terms of our digital marketing internal v external perspective? The analysis literally considers your digital marketing situation by considering the fit between internal and external factors. There are similarities with traditional concepts and techniques, but you need to focus upon digital commerce.

Some of the problems that you may encounter with SWOT are as a result of one of its key benefits i. Since SWOT analysis can be used in a variety of scenarios, it has to be flexible. To overcome these issues, one should employ a Power Swot. The Customer Life Cycle CLC is a tool that considers the creation and delivery of lifetime value to customers i.

CLC looks at products and services that customers need throughout their lives. It is market oriented rather than product oriented e. Key stages of the customer relationship are considered. SWOT analysis is a tool for auditing an organization and its environment. It is the first stage of planning and helps marketers to focus on key issues. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Two previous tools for product decision-making have been introduced — Product Life Cycle PLC and the Three Levels of a Product.

Both of these tools are equally applicable to the context of digital marketingand can be easily applied to include digital marketing and product. For example a product marketed solely online will go through a life cycle in the same unpredictable way as a product marketed through any traditional channel PLC. Products marketed online will have a core benefit to the consumer, be an actual tangible product, with augmentation that adds value such as insurance, warranties and so on Three Levels of a Product.

It represents an additional tool for audit that bridges existing businesses and new online start-ups, and existing products and new products. It allows marketers to categorise those marketing on the Internet as an Online Extender, an Online Alternative, an Online Innovator Existing Businessor an Online Innovator Online Start-Up.

An Online Extender is an existing business that has a strategy whereby it extends its marketing activities to the Internet. It could be any traditional, terrestrial organisation that has historically grown through using traditional channels of distribution to get existing products, brands, services or solutions to market.

The Online Alternative is a new start-up that uses the Internet as an original channel of distribution to get products, brands, services or solutions, currently available elsewhere, to market.

Some segments may be better targeted with this online alternative, for example remote or fragmented markets. However, the Internet has influenced how online businesses price in a number of ways.

Of course the Internet marketer still has a whole selection of other more traditional pricing approaches to choose from that can be adapted to digital marketing scenarios:. The digital marketing space consists of new Internet companies that have emerged as the Internet has developed, as well as those pre-existing companies that now employ digital marketing approaches as part of their overall marketing plan.

For some companies the Internet is an additional channel that enhances or replaces their traditional channel s. For others the Internet has provided the opportunity for a new online company. The digital marketing Mix is essentially the same as the marketing mix. It is simply the adaptation of priceplaceproduct and promotion to the digital marketing context. Of course one could also include physical evidence, people and process when marketing planning for an online service.

For some companies the Internet is an additional channel that enhances or replaces their traditional channel s or place. The starting point for any digital marketing planning is the internal audit. We are seeking to answer the question, where are we now? This is a consideration of internal resources and the effectiveness of our eBusiness based upon a number of factors, as such as those that follow:.

You would also need to play close attention to your marketing audit. So competitor research for digital marketing is essential when attempting to answer the question where are we now external perspective? There are a number of approaches that can be employed, with the emphasis on each approach shifting depending upon the nature of our eBusiness and market.

Here are some key tools of competitor research for digital marketing:. So what is e-mail marketing? In a nutshell you send an electronic communication which contains a message to your customer or client. It could be a message about some updates regarding your business. It could contain a voucher for a particular promotion. Other popular calls-to-action i. Today Information Technology IT means that the high cost of traditional direct marketing or mailshots is reduced substantially.

In fact if you recall your first direct online dialogue with a company, you will probably recall that e-mail was the first social interaction which you had via the Internet. So e-mail marketing is one of the cornerstones of social media marketing as we know it today. E-mail is still a powerful medium of online communication. It is simple, straightforward and your visitors and clients are familiar with e-mail, where they may not be so familiar with Facebook or LinkedIn and other popular social media solutions.

However you want your e-mail communications to be focused and targeted, and ultimately to retain customers and keep them buying from you. To your loyal customers your communication has value, and so does e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing is a foundation of Customer Relationship Management CRM and there is plenty of material on the Marketing Teacher website about CRM.

A popular definition of CRM is Customer Relationship Management is the establishment, development, maintenance and optimisation of long-term mutually valuable relationships between consumers and organisations. CRM is designed to recruit and retain customers, and to extend products and services to them over their lifetime. E-mail marketing is a fundamental approach for this. Skip to content For marketing learners, teachers and professionals.

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Digital Marketing Digital marketing is the most innovative, fast-moving and creative marketing topic.