Updating Your Digital Marketing Skills
Digital Marketing Is a constantly evolving business or segment of your organization. Have you and your team evolved with the industry? If your team has been handing your digital marketing for years, it may seem like you have it all under control. But do the results still show growth in brand awareness?
Staying Relevant to Your Customer Base
A large number of B2B and B2C executives believe their customers are changing faster than they can change. Today, we need a more encompassing perspective that includes the full lives of customers as their needs change. It’s called a life centric approach and its critical to successful marketing. Some organizations choose to focus on the relevance of sustainability. They share with their customers their eco-friendly or charitable activities. Others are working on better brand building through their online content, culture and commerce.
Still others have begun working with a what next approach based on the demographics of their customer base. This is about truly connecting to your clients, understanding their wants and needs and working to communicate, interact with, and strive to deliver products of value.
Adjusting to Changes in Industry Terminology
There are several industry terms you should become familiar with if you aren’t already. It is important to be able to discuss your digital marketing needs in a language professionals understand.
A/B Testing
A/B Testing is the process of testing two different versions of digital content with your target. By measuring the convergence rate or click through rate, you can see which marketing approach gains better traction with your target market.
Affiliate Marketing
An affiliate marketing strategy rewards third parties – people or an organization outside the business – for bringing new customers or visitors. This is done through a promotion like ads or content on the affiliate’s website for a commission based on the number of customers generated. When you see a recommendation by an influencer, it is commonly the result of an affiliate marketing arrangement.
Brand Positioning
We often discuss building a brand identity with our clients, but the industry term for this is brand positioning. The act of developing your brand through social media presence, voice, tone, logo, and design builds reputation and culture of your firm both within the company, to existing customer base and elsewhere. Everything you do should support your reputation, or at least adhere to the brand identity.
Content Strategy
When you have thought through your brand identity and decided how to define it, you will need to plan and implement digital content so it works toward your end vision seamlessly. This includes planning, creation and distribution of content for digital marketing campaigns. Campaigns usually include blog and/or vlog posts, social media posts, explainer videos, podcasts, and e-books. Often content performance is gauged through tests such as A\B Testing mentioned earlier.
CTA or Call-to-Action
CTA is short for “Call to Action”. In content, a CTA is the part that motivates visitors to take a specific action, like subscribing, joining, signing up or buying something. CTAs lead visitors through their buying journey and influence conversion rates.
CTR or Click Through Rate
The click through rate refers to the percentage of users who click the links in ads, posts, blog articles, websites and social media pages and other publications with links. CTR is used to measure engagement with linked content:
Conversion Rate
The percentage of users who completed the desired action; calculated by dividing the overall size of the audience with the total number of ‘convert’ users; for instance, those who clicked on an ad – conversion rate percentage is used as a metric upon which marketers try to improve further growth. Digital marketing strategies are almost always data-driven, and this digital marketing term is one of the most common parameters measured to determine the performance of any campaign.
Get to Know Changing Digital Marketing Terms
There are hundreds of industry specific terms with meanings that change with technological transformations. For instance, before AI, hallucination was a false reality believed and experienced by people with a mental condition. With the advances of artificial intelligence(AI), a hallucination is a confident response by an AI that isn’t justified by its training data. Keeping in mind all the changes daily, it is worth taking the time to make sure you are up to speed on current digital terminology.
How 3rd Party Cookies Have Changed
Adobe discovered recently that 75% of marketers still rely on data from third-party cookies. For roughly 45% of marketers, about half their budgets are going to third party cookies. Safari and now google chrome allow the user to opt-in …or out of this. Google has plans to continue the reduction of third-party cookies. If your digital marketing plan is still reliant on third party sites, it’s time to re-evaluate that possibility.
Skillset Requirements for Digital Marketing Have Changed.
Today, digital marketers have to unlock strategies to create more immersive experiences and maximize audience targeting. Where once posts on social media might or might not include pictures, today they tell stories using a mixture of videos, reels and memes. Having the skills to produce engaging content is a requirement to succeed today.