Since this is my last post for my digital marketing class through DePaul, I thought a recap post was in order. Without further ado, here are the top 3 things I learned in my digital marketing class.
- I am paranoid. I think half of my posts were about how companies are spying on me on the internet. The truth is though, I’m not actually paranoid. I’ve known through working in digital marketing that we lay a pretty easily followed trail. Marketers have to be careful, because this trail can be used to help, but can get creepy fast. This Big Data vs. Privacy debate isn’t going away any time soon.
- Search strategies need to be thought of at the start of a business. I’ve always known that organic search was incredibly important—but this class made me realize that strategies to improve organic search results can be initiated
from the very start of building a web presence. With mobile search on the rise, Facebook trying to improve its paid search business and Google ever-evolving its core product—staying on top of these trends will be essential to a business’ success.
- Any choice a business makes needs to come back to who their audience is, what their goals are and how they can measure their success. There will always be trends to chase that will be ‘proven’ to work for other companies and business owners must select carefully—there’s probably not a need to start developing content for Google Glass right this second.
I enjoyed this class and hope you enjoyed some of my weekly musings. Thanks for reading!
After this week’s class discussion on reviews, I reflected a lot on just how much reviews influenced my selection of wedding vendors. My now husband (!) and I used Wedding Wire, Yelp and The Knot to widdle down our list of who we were considering and many times didn’t even visit a few we initially searched for due to bad reviews. Additionally, we selected one caterer over another because of such poor service reviews for one we were considering.
This is a personal example of the power of positive and negative reviews, but several recent studies validate the impact of reviews, especially their impact on local businesses. BrightLocal’s 2013 Local Consumer Review Survey was particularly interesting, as it outlined just how much people are using reviews in their decision-making as well as how use of reviews has grown over the past few years. One stat that was particularly interesting was that consumers are increasingly trusting online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and families.
With so much potential impact, I’m surprised that more companies aren’t going to greater lengths to generate more positive reviews. A recent Inc. article outlines the 7 Secrets to Getting Positive Online Reviews. These tips are helpful, but need to be backed up by a good product or service.
For our wedding, our research paid off with a great day due in large part to careful selection of vendors based on online reviews.
In this week’s class, we learned about email marketing and had a discussion about whether or not this tactic is dying. This discussion made me think about how clever marketers have to be to keep reaching their target.
Part of marketing has always been about reaching people at the right place, at the right time, with the right message. This place, time, message trio has to come together for marketing to be effective. That place isn’t always about where the consumer is at the moment, but also about the actual communication vehicle being used to reach them. This Guardian article outlines the need for marketing and technology to be better connected. Good marketers will stay on top of trends and try new things (sometimes anything) if it seems like it has a shot at reaching the right person.
The recent McDonalds campaign ‘Our Food. Your questions.’ is a valiant attempt to attract the Millennial audience that they’re losing. McDs launched a major Q&A social campaign to try and convince the world its food is not unhealthy. Overall, it was a pretty clever try. They used the right channels to reach Millennials (YouTube, Facebook) and great talent (Grant Imahara from Mythbusters). The message was certainly what their audience wants to hear—that their food is real and can be healthy.
Unfortunately, McDonalds has a believability issue because their timing might have been off—it’s possible the campaign is too late to really change perception and Millennials don’t seem to be buying the message. For McDonald’s their plan for these three (place, time, message) looks great on paper, but wasn’t able to come together (at least yet) to be effective in the marketplace.
