(Digital) Marketing - Why You Should Go Digital

It's no secret that the world is going digital.  This transformation process has been happening throughout my entire life.  But does that mean that marketing is following suit?  And furthermore, does that mean you should too?  The answer to those questions is a resounding yes.

For evidence to support my answer, look no further than Maria Velasco's article, entititled "Why Digital Marketing is Important for Business."  Here, she highlights the advantages of digital marketing by explaining how easy and affordable it has become to track the results of marketing campaigns.  She also credits digital marketing's wide reach to consumers as a huge benefit.  The digital age is calling for more and more digital marketing professionals each year, and many students are making the switch (including me).

Though universities across the country offer marketing degrees, few offer digital marketing degrees, and even fewer can provide students with the training they actually need.  Luckily, I'm here to help out any aspiring DM professionals.  The University of Michigan - Dearborn's digital marketing program is by far, the best digital marketing program in Michigan, if not the entire country.  Trust me, I go there.

Digital Marketing Breakdown: Part 4 - Web Analytics

Congratulations, you've reached the final topic of my Digital Marketing Breakdown series!  You're an SEO expert, you know all about social media marketing, and you've mastered search and display advertising (if these are unfamiliar to you, please head back to post one by clicking here).  There's only one topic left that will set you on your way to earn a Michigan digital marketing degree: Web Analytics.  Businesses can't maintain an effective marketing campaign without knowing how their users interact with their website.  Numbers people, welcome to heaven.

Web analytics is a generally simple concept, though its processes can be extremely in depth.  The ultimate goal for web analytics is to optimize a website by collecting and analyzing data about how its users interact with it.  Data typically collected can range from how long users stay on each webpage and how they arrived at the site, to which links they clicked on while surfing the site and what page they were viewing when they left.  By collecting this data, web administrators can tailor the site so that it provides its users with the best possible browsing experience.

Though I don't consider myself an expert web developer by any means, I'm quite fascinated by the collection and analysis of web browsing data, and I'm interested in learning more about this topic in my marketing classes at school.  If you're interested in this topic too, and would like some info about the best digital marketing degree in Michigan, check out U of M - Dearborn's digital marketing degree overview for a comprehensive explanation.  I can assure you web analytics will be discussed in one class or another.

Thanks for viewing my digital marketing breakdown series!  Check back often for more posts about all marketing things digital!

Digital Marketing Breakdown: Part 3 - Search and Display Advertising

Whether or not you're familiar with my next topic, I can assure you that you're probably exposed to it on a daily basis.  In Part 3 of my Digital Marketing Breakdown series I'll be informing you about search and display advertising...better known as the text ads that pop up first in your Google search results, and the pretty ads displayed on the perimeter of your favorite websites.  Advertisers use each type of ad for different reasons, though an effective digital marketing strategy combines both to create one seamlessly structured ad campaign.  Let's talk about how each of these work.

Search Advertising

Also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), search advertising involves creating text advertisements and purchasing the right to display the ad when users search for specific keywords in a search engine.  Having the ability to select which specific keywords to market to, along with a barrage of other targeting tactics based on location, demographics, and time of day, search advertising provides start-ups and large corporations alike with an extremely effective method for placing their content in front of their target customers.

There are different search marketing platforms created specifically for different search engines, like Yahoo! Search Ads, Bing Ads, and Google AdWords. It's definitely beneficial for aspiring digital marketers to familiarize themselves with each one.  In the context of this article, I'll be referring to AdWords because I'm most familiar with it.

Possibly the most important aspect of effective search advertising is what AdWords calls quality score.  AdWords ranks each ad from 1 to 10 (10 being the highest) based on factors like how relevant the ad is to the keyword or the page the ad points to.  This quality score will directly affect your ad's rank among other similar ads, so relevancy is crucial when creating a search advertisement.

Display Advertising

Rather than appearing on search engine results pages, display ads appear on websites.  The websites you target for your display ads should be ones that are relevant (does that word sound familiar?) to what you're trying to promote.  These ads can be made up of text, images, videos, and even interactive messages called rich media.

Both search and display ads provide extremely effective methods of marketing for modern-day businesses.  Not only are targeting options conveniently provided to digital marketers making it simple to reach (and avoid) certain types of consumers, digital advertising platforms make it easy to track the performance of ads as well.  Want to know your the number of times users click on your ad out of all the times your ad is viewed (called Click Through Rate)? You can do that.  Want to know how relevant your ad is? Look at its quality score.  Search and display advertising is gaining popularity because of these targeting and tracking methods, and it doesn't seem that trend will stop any time soon.

At U of M - Dearborn, you can learn all about search and display advertising in the Digital Consumer Search and Marketing class.  I can assure you that there are no digital marketing degrees in Michigan that are more RELEVANT than the degree that UMD provides its students.  You can view more about the program here.  My only question for you is...why go anywhere else?

Digital Marketing Breakdown: Part 2 - Social Network Marketing

Part two of the Digital Marketing Breakdown series is here!  If you haven't already read through part one, STOP IMMEDIATELY! There's no excuse for skipping ahead, so click here to go back and learn about SEO.

Unlike its marketing counterpart SEO which is more of a "behind-the-scenes" tactic, social network marketing aims to gain viewers attention via content posted on various social media sites. Popular forms of content that businesses often produce include YouTube videos, Twitter posts, Facebook pages, and pictures on Instagram, though new ways to reach consumers are constantly being utilized.

Small and large businesses alike are finding that social network marketing isn't just a marketing supplement, but rather a necessity.  It not only allows companies to quickly and inexpensively reach many of their customers, but also provides a platform for them to communicate with customers and receive feedback. This customer interaction is extremely valuable for two reasons: 1) It helps create a sense of customer loyalty that can be difficult to maintain otherwise 2) It provides businesses with another opportunity to further suggest their products/services to potential customers.

Think about this example.  It wouldn't be uncommon to see a tweet like, "feeling tired, need some #coffee." Starbucks can use Twitter's advanced search feature to find tweets with the hashtag "coffee" and respond with something like, "Hi so-and-so, why not try out our pumpkin-spice latte? It's the perfect way to add some spice to your day!"  That would be a great, albeit cheesy way sell to a customer and simultaneously show how much Starbucks cares about its customers.

Though there certainly are a wide variety of social media platforms, this doesn't mean that businesses should have a presence on all of them.  It's way more beneficial to commit to a few and really focus on creating a profile that understands and communicates effectively with the target audience.  No customer wants to follow an Instagram page that gets updated twice every month.

I can say from my own personal experience that The University of Michigan - Dearborn is far and away, the best digital marketing school in Michigan.  UM - D will provide you with the most comprehensive, informative, and exciting digital marketing classes, and you will definitely learn about social network marketing...I promise.

Check back next week for Part 3 of the Digital Marketing Breakdown series!

Digital Marketing Breakdown: Part 1 - SEO

Welcome to the first lesson in my Digital Marketing Breakdown series.  To kick off our deeper analysis of digital marketing, we can begin by understanding our first topic, search engine optimization, and how this process might occur in an agency.

SEO can most accurately be defined as a technique used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by earning a higher ranking in the results page of a search engine.  I couldn't begin to cover the many different factors that go into increasing a site's rank, so we will look at three of the vital few.

Keyword Usage

Buried deep within the stupendously intricate algorithm that Google uses to rank page results is an analysis of keywords on webpages.  For each individual keyword searched, Google will rank a page higher if it determines that the content on that page is relevant to that searched keyword.  For example, if I were to create a website for my car repair business, I would make sure to also include keywords on my site like "collision repair", "auto repair", or "local car repair shop".  It helps to think about what terms you might search if you wanted to find that information.

URL Creation

This step is extremely obvious, and yet so easy to forget about.  When developing the name of your site, it is critical that the URL name makes it easy for people to understand what your site is about.  The URL "www.worldsbestrollercoasters.com" makes the purpose of your site obvious to Google and your potential site visitors as well.  

If your website contains few pages, it would be valuable to spend some time making sure that other links on your site are easy to understand as well.  "www.worldsbestrollercoasters.com/cedarpoint/milleniumforce" is much more relevant than a combination of numbers and letters that appear as the default for that page.

Links

While it can be beneficial to your readers if you provide a link to another source on your own page, including these outbound links to your site may not be directly optimizing your site.  On the other hand, it is quite valuable for another page to link directly to your site.  Links from third parties to your site indicate to Google that your link is relevant, and links from sites with supreme authority (espn.com, ehow.com, nytimes.com, etc.) can be game changers.  Building a network of trustworthy, relevant links is tough, but it's extremely beneficial for SEO.

If this topic interests you, I would strongly recommend checking out the University of Michigan - Dearborn's Digital Marketing program.  The Digital Consumer Search and Marketing class will teach you much more about SEO, as well as other extremely valuable tools necessary for earning your digital marketing degree.

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, visit Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO for an excellent resource.  Check back soon for the next post in my Digital Marketing Breakdown series!

The Digital Marketing Breakdown Series

Ditigal Marketing.  It's a relatively self-explanatory term, not nearly as complex as other majors like biochemistry, metallurgical engineering, or ecogastronomy (look it up, this actually exists).  But if you delve a little deeper into what makes up this emerging degree program, you might change your mind.

Digital Marketing is made up of lots of subfields, some of which I mentioned in my previous blog post.  It is critical for a Digital Marketing degree program to teach the basics to its students so that they are fully prepared to solve marketing problems with new digital solutions.  In my upcoming series, The Digital Marketing Breakdown, I will highlight four of these basic subfields under the digital marketing umbrella:

1) Search Engine Optimization
2) Social Network Marketing
3) Search and Display Advertising
4) Web Analytics

I look forward to discussing each of these topics in depth, while simultaneously informing you about how U of M - Dearborn's digital marketing program hits on all these topics and more.  Stay tuned...

Digital Marketing: An introduction

Hello and welcome to my blog, your primary source for all things digital marketing!  My posts will cover the various components that make up digital marketing, as well as provide comparisons of different degree programs.  I also intend to put to rest any disputes about which business degree is the best and where the best place to earn that degree is. 

The constant development of cutting-edge technology has enabled businesses to reach consumers through new mediums, and it is now more vital than ever to train aspiring students to use this technology.  Look no further than the University of Michigan - Dearborn for all the training you'll need.

Search engine optimization (SEO), search and display advertising, and social media marketing are just a few of the important keywords I intend to delve into eventually.  For now, I suggest you check out U of M - Dearborn's Digital Marketing program.  Here you can gain a basic understanding of the makeup of an excellent digital marketing degree.  I'm currently over half way through this degree program, so I'm excited to provide you with insider information as my pursuit for this degree progresses.  Stay tuned!