First Blog

Inbound and Outbound Channels Outbound marketing can be characterised as the traditional disruptive in-your-face type of advertising. Perfect examples of this style are television commercials, billboards, radio ads and ads in newspapers. Over the years outbound marketing has become less popular among marketeers. Most people are oversaturated with display ads, especially on the internet. Most people simply ignore the ads and install ad blockers on their internet browsers. Clickthrough rates for display ads are at a low point of just 0.05% (Ference, 2017).  The avant-garde of marketeers came up with a new way to attract potential new customers now known as inbound marketing or content marketing. When the old ways don’t work anymore marketeers were pushed towards finding a way to seduce audiences in a different way. Inbound marketing is characterised by pulling in potential customers with interesting content. Examples of this style are blog posts, newsletters and social...

Paid and Earned Channels Besides the paid channels, that we talked about in the previous blog, there’s the earned channels. The main difference between a paid channel and an earned channel is that an earned channel refers to media exposure that you earned through worth-of-mouth. Whether it’s the result of your fantastic SEO strategy or that creative social media post, it refers to the value and traffic of your owned media channels. You can earn media by reposts, mentions, positive reviews and recommendations (Meyer, 2019). For small to medium size businesses earned media can be particularly interesting as it is very cost effective and potentially offers a great return on a relatively small investment in time and effort. Owned content is a great way to generate earned media through your own channels like your website, social media accounts or a blog.  As discussed in the previous blog, the use of paid channels may be inevitable to reach potential new customers and...

Using Ads as a channel in Digital Marketing Strategy In the digital landscape of today it’s inevitable to use online ads as a channel for digital marketing. While most people hate to see ads on their social media timelines they have proven to be very effective. As a small business with a limited advertising budget it’s key to target the right audience. In the search for a suitable platform it’s likely to end up using Google Adwords. With 246 million unique visitors, 3.5 billion daily interactions and 700% return on investment it seems like an effective way to advertise digitally (Perricone, 2020).  Google Ads is a paid advertising platform built around pay-per-click advertising (PPC). The advertiser only pays a certain amount when a potential customer clicks on their advertisement. It’s a very cost effective way to generate traffic from a well targeted audience (Perricone, 2020).  Google Ads is only one example of an effective way to advertise online. ...

Using Social Media as part of your Digital Marketing Strategy If we take a look at our personal lives we can’t deny that we spend a significant chunk of our time staring at our phones. Often we use our phone as a window into the life of other people and to post significant or insignificant events from our own life. As the use of social media has been embraced by the masses companies are eager to capitalize on the potential exposure of their brands.  The social media stats below (Chaffey, 2020) show why it has such huge potential from a digital marketing perspective. With over 3.9 billion users and an annual growth rate of 9.2% in the number of users it’s difficult to ignore. Brands need to be mindful about how to use these channels as the use of social media by individuals primarily lies in the interaction between friends and families. Brand exposure seems the most logical approach as the younger generations tend to use social media as a way to research products. So it’s...

The 5 S’s of Digital Marketing The 5 S’s of Digital Marketing were developed by Chaffey and Smith in the early 2000’s. It’s a marketing concept that is designed to review and define goals of digital marketing (Chaffey, 2019).  The 5 S’s (Chaffey, 2019): Sell – Grow sales.  Serve – Add value.  Speak – Get closer to customers.  Save – Save costs.  Sizzle – Extend the brand online.  The main objective of any company is to optimize revenue and profitability. An effective online marketing strategy has become fundamental to any successful business in the digital age. The concept of the 5 S’s focuses on the attraction and retention of customers.  The first focus is to Sell your product across the online platforms and attract customers that you wouldn't necessarily reach through traditional marketing channels. Another important aspect is to serve your online customers. For example, you can offer online customers a 10% discount ...

What metrics should we measure for success in Google Analytics? Google Analytics is a great tool to monitor traffic on your website. The insights provided by the platform will help you to understand the online dynamics and to effectively spend your online advertising budget. The most obvious metric in Google Analytics is the number of sessions, when a user is active on your website. We can see below that this blog had 73 sessions since it was started. It’s interesting to see that 30% of traffic was generated through social channels. As pointed out, you want to know where your traffic is coming from so you can effectively distribute your budget over the several channels. The quality of this traffic is something you would like to pay attention to. As we can see the bounce rate from the social channels is very high so you might want to adjust your strategy or content. If you have set a goal you want to see if there are any differences between the various sources. We...