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Digital Marketing: What it is and Why Your Organization Needs It

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Marketing, as defined by the American Marketing Association is, “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Digital marketing takes those traditional marketing activities into the digital space. It is a non-traditional field that encompasses a wide range of skills and elements and is essential to achieve success in the world today.

Fundamentals of Marketing

Marketing is all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time. It’s about understanding an audience and catering to their needs. It means staying up-to-date on trends in the digital space and using those up-and-coming communication methods to connect with audience members. Digital marketing encompasses a lot of platforms and methods of communication, but it all comes down to being able to promote a product to the right people in the right manner.

  • Understand your product/service’s benefits and features. When you’re selling your product or service you aren’t selling what it is but rather what it can do for the consumer. Will it make their morning run more smoothly? Will it help them chop vegetables more swiftly? Sweaters don’t fly off the shelf because of the color selection they come in, but rather the promise an organization sells of one living their best life while wearing said sweater. Digital marketers know how to pinpoint those benefits and communicate them to a wider audience.
  • Define your audience. The main part of a marketer’s job is to understand the audience they are trying to sell to. In the digital space, it’s incredibly easy to get a message out into the world, but it’s not as easy to get that message to the right people. To define your audience, you simply need to determine who your ideal consumer is. Decide what they eat for breakfast. Figure out where they get their information. Determine where they go to get their work done. Figuring out every detail about your consumer helps you determine the right path and message to reach your target audience.
  • Craft a persuasive message/call to action. The final step to being a digital marketer is to market. Whatever it is you want accomplished (reading a blog post, buying a product, signing up for a service) you need to share it in a creative and persuasive way on the right channels so it reaches the right audience.

Elements of Digital Marketing

The amazing thing about digital marketing is that there are a handful of different avenues one can go down when exploring the field. Because the online space is constantly growing and changing, so is a digital marketer’s job. Here are just some of the elements a digital marketer must have in mind when providing services:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Increasing organic traffic to your website through search engine rankings.
  • Content Marketing: Content marketing requires the creation and promotion of your own content (think blog posts or videos) to build brand awareness and convert customers.
  • Social Media Marketing: SMM utilizes social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to promote content and generate leads.
  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Google AdWords is a type of PPC — marketers pay a certain amount of money based on how much traffic is driven to the site via ad clicks.
  • Affiliate Marketing: Commonly seen on social media, affiliate marketing is a method of marketing that requires a partnership between a brand and a promoter where the promoter is compensated for talking about the products/services online. For example, a corporation can partner with a blogger to have them promote its new nail polish.
  • Email Marketing: Used as a means of direct communication with consumers, email marketing is a popular way to promote content like discounts and events.

Digital marketing is a big world to tackle — that’s why Cabedge is here to help. We have a team of able digital marketers who consider communicating their passion. Contact Cabedge to get a personalized digital marketing plan for your organization today.

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The Basics of Google AdWords

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Cabedge is a dedicated design and digital strategy organization. Having one foot in each world, Cabedge employees have a pretty good grasp on how to make your website beautiful and functional and how to promote it to the World Wide Web. Google AdWords is a handy tool that can be used to promote organizations for an adjustable fee.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a way for companies and organizations to advertise online to connect with customers through the Google Network. AdWords makes it easy for businesses to set goals and budgets and connect with intended audiences to increase awareness of a product or service or to increase sales. Google AdWords has a bunch of features and services that patrons can use to better promote their organizations. Let’s take a look at some of those now:

  • AdWords Express: Automates managing keywords and ad placement for businesses to make AdWords management easier.
  • Google Partners: Allows users to become certified in Google AdWords. Certification is not necessary to use Google AdWords, but it teaches the fundamentals and best practices of the tool to help users utilize it best.
  • Remarketing: Enables businesses to show advertisements to users that have previously visited their website. Remarketing allows users to further segment audiences to better display advertisements.
  • Ad Extensions: Google AdWords allows for a variety of extensions that can be added to a business’s ad to better serve it’s consumers. Some extensions include a clickable phone number, the ability to leave reviews, price displays, and more.
  • Keyword Planner: Estimates the amount of traffic per-month for selected keywords and offers alternatives.

Benefits of Using Google AdWords

Google AdWords is not required to run a successful business, but it does help at the end of the day in attracting new and existing customers. Here are some of the biggest benefits of using Google AdWords to promote a business online.

  • It’s measurable. The biggest benefit to advertising through Google AdWords is that it is completely measurable with price-per-click metrics. Businesses can accurately attribute consumers actions to AdWords campaigns.
  • It’s flexible. Businesses can make AdWords applicable to any need. Users can easily add extensions (talked about previously), specify keyword matches, narrow the audience scope for an ad, and more.
  • It pairs well with SEO. While businesses can’t just completely forget about SEO, AdWords works alongside SEO to improve engagement and reach. It’s not a quick fix to get more sales, but AdWords will inevitably reach a wide range of people for a cost.

AdWords can’t do all the work for you, and it shouldn’t, but it does have it’s positives when it comes to engaging a target audience.

Cabedge prides itself on its knowledge of SEO and Google tools, including AdWords. If you’re looking for help starting or managing your AdWords campaign, look no further. Reach out to Cabedge today to talk about your goals.

Rethinking a necessary evil: Three things digital marketers can learn from the NBA Playoffs

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If you’re a basketball fan, maybe you’ve noticed feeling less compelled to flip channels during the game in recent months. Or maybe you’re finding the ubiquitous “TV timeout” (an opportunity you once used to abandon the game for an expedition to the fridge) a little more absorbing than it was in years past.

Well, there’s a very good reason for that.

Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, recently gave a fascinating interview about the analytics behind viewer behavior and some strategic changes to the way the NBA places ads within the game to keep the attention of the viewer.

Silver and his team are passionately devoted to continually examining the analytics of viewer behavior to understand how long the average user stays engaged and where viewer levels drop-off. “Not surprisingly, we lose the highest number of fans when we move off live-action, especially at halftime,” Silver noted. “And we lose fans at every commercial break. So we’re experimenting, with Turner and ESPN, with not leaving the arena completely during commercial breaks, and instead having a split-screen, where we stay with the huddle at the same time we show an ad. It’s a trade-off for our marketing partners. On the one hand, they’d like the full attention of a viewer. On the other hand, they might prefer to keep all of the viewers and find ways to create connections with their products and engage directly with the game.”

The NBA’s willingness to rethink the “necessary evil” of TV advertising has resulted in a more engaged viewer who is less apt to flip channels or abandon the game for other distractions. The viewer still sees the marketing materials and product advertisements, but it’s within the context of an in-game experience, thus resulting in an audience that’s a little more engaged as the products are being pitched. Silver also outlined other ways his team has shifted the TV experience to increase engagement such as incorporating player mics, alternate camera angles, and other data fields for users to understand the metrics behind the game.

So what can a digital marketer learn from watching the NBA Playoffs?

  1. Necessary evils in advertising may not be as necessary as you think. Putting an ad in front of your audience may be a channel of marketing you choose to take, but it doesn’t have to be flashy and assertive. Advertising can also convey content that is creative, compelling and useful to consumers, even though it may result in a more indirect path (read: more clicks) to conversion. It’s true that subtlety in marketing & advertising can result in a longer sales cycle, but it can also create lasting relationships with your customers that a more direct “in-your-face” approach may not produce.
  2. You can’t create a better user experience without understanding the places where engagement is lagging or users are dropping off. Creating a visual funnel in your data can be a great method of determining where engagement is slowing or where users are abandoning the conversion path altogether. Don’t be afraid to engage with actual consumers in order to understand how they experience your website. Oftentimes our clients are surprised in what they learn when they stop making assumptions and start talking with real, live users of their product or website.
  3. Don’t be afraid to invite your users deeper into the experience. Conveying a personality that’s consistent and feels authentic is often a road-block for many of our clients. It can be difficult to find a voice for your brand and pinpoint the fine line of just how much to share with the general public. But inviting users into a “behind-the-scenes” look at your team in action or your product being made gives an authenticity to your company and an opportunity for your audience to feel actively engaged and invested in your brand.

The bottom line is this –the key to the future of digital advertising is a better understanding of your users and a willingness to find ways to creatively convey engaging content to them. Taking an opportunity to rethink your ad content and how your ads are delivered is a good first step toward the future success of your brand.