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December 20, 2019
Written by Mehraj Ahmed
Categories: Digital, Events

From 11th-12th December, I attended a two-day Digital Marketing Essentials course hosted by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). The aim of the course was to understand the basics about digital marketing, and gain confidence in the steps taken to formulate an effective digital strategy.

The course was split into the following key sections:

  1. “Planning for success” – basics to setting up a successful digital campaign
  2. Tactics to drive performance
  3. Walled gardens vs. the open internet

Personally, I wanted to get a good grounding in the basics in order to support and add value to the digital work we do at Havas Just:: such as running effective disease awareness campaigns on social media.

The following are just a few important key points that I took away from this course, acknowledging that this is just the tip of the iceberg:

1. “Planning for success” – basics to setting up a successful digital campaign

Avinash Kaushik is an entrepreneur that has put together an effective “Digital Marketing and Measurement” model for running successful digital campaigns   (read his blog here). He highlights the importance of identifying the focus of the campaign and having an objective set of measures for success or failure.

The process of driving your target audience to your webpage/content is known as “the conversion funnel”. This is the process of effectively guiding the customer journey along the following buckets:

  • Acquisition – increasing awareness and driving traffic to your website
  • Behavior – what should the customer be doing on your website?
  • Outcomes – what outcomes signify value delivered to the business bottom line? E.g. downloads, buying a product etc.

The conversion rate is the difference between what you pay for an audience (e.g. promotions) versus what you earn from an audience (e.g. buying the product). Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is being able to enhance the success of actions along the customer journey (micro conversions) in order to achieve the overall campaign outcomes (macro conversions).

2. Tactics to drive performance (of conversions)

Pay per click (PPC – also known as paid search) and SEO (search engine optimisation), are two digital marketing tools that can be used to drive the performance of conversions:

  • SEO – this is the process of organically maximizing the number of visitors to your website by ensuring that the site appears high on a search engine results page (SERP). It is determined by a heavily guarded algorithm which Google does not publish and will change over 500-600 times a year!
  • PPC – whilst SEO is mostly organic and longer term, PPC is when advertisers will pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. In order for ads to achieve the optimum placement to a viewer, they are subject to an Ad Auction (“the world’s biggest auction”) – an entirely automated process by which search engines determine the relevance and validity of ads to appear here, based on the ad words being bid for. The winner is determined by a person who receives the highest “ad rank” – a formula which combines both your budget with a search engine’s judgment on the quality of your click-through. Whilst a lot of this was tricky to follow, as it is underpinned by complex algorithms, it was useful identifying the important role it plays in digital marketing.

Furthermore, the use of social media marketing or “paid social” enables brands to put their content in front of the right audience e.g. Facebook Audience Insights. Whilst this can play an important role in retaining and re-targeting a strong customer pool, it opens up the discussion about the security of data and GDPR – which is a much bigger discussion for another blog post!

3. Walled gardens vs. the open internet

The term walled garden refers to a closed ecosystem under which all digital marketing occurs e.g. Facebook, Twitter and Google. The open internet on the other hand includes multiple platforms operating at the same time.

The main differences are that walled gardens have their own mature buying tools, such as Google Display and Search Networks (GDN and GSN). On the other hand, advertising via the open internet involves multiple buying tools (over 10,000), making it more complex.

There is a larger ongoing debate around the use of both platforms, as neither significantly trumps the other’s share of ad spend. Each has their advantages and disadvantages (in particular around the use of digital innovation, competition and data security), making it a space that needs more consideration based on the campaign outcomes.

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At the start, I perceived digital marketing to be this big scary place full of algorithms and acronyms, however the course managed to re-focus and provide a fresh perspective on the digital platforms and concepts that we have all been exposed to at some point in our careers. Being open to taking small steps in understanding the language of digital marketing can make us more confident in providing a more informed service to our clients.

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