Introduction to Digital Marketing Strategists
digital marketing strategists is a recent talk of the town. One must be ready with the methodical part of a website. As a digital marketing strategist, you need to have the latest SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (Pay per Click), and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) strategy in place and must methodically track the unique visitors and implement the strategy to meet the project needs.
All the client-handling and reporting should be done at the same time. The recent technological advancements, such as computers, smartphones, cell phones, tablets, and game consoles, are to be taken into considerations. Besides, websites, e-mail, apps, and social networks are other important facets to be handled properly. The message must reach the target audience – efforts are made to reach not just the target prospects but the decision-makers who make a purchase decision.
Still, some areas are neglected while in times of creating digital marketing strategists. digital marketing strategists guesstimate sometimes and rely on intuition, and their strategies would become outdated and without any touches of reality.
Below are seven such cases where digital marketing strategists’ efforts need thorough supervision for two basic reasons – those have enormous implications for the industry, and those are often ignored. These seven facts will help digital marketing strategists see the unseen areas of major improvements.
Facts for Digital Marketing Strategists
Following are the different digital marketing strategists:
1. Content is not the ‘king’ but the utility and interactivity
This has been very much risky to comment the Content is not the King. There are cases where websites have been spammed and penalized for wrongly understanding this because they did build unrelated links as they meant this unnecessary content is the king.
Fig 1: Segregation of content and no-content
The following sites are popular because they not only give persuasive, relevant, and consistent information to the audience, but also give them chances to interact and use the content as tools.
- Google.com
- Facebook.com
- Twitter.com
- Godaddy.com
- Youtube.com
- Adobe.com
- Blogspot.com
- WordPress.org
- Wikipedia.org
- WordPress.com
People can have the opportunity to create something with these tools – most important sites prioritize tools, communities, and interactive platforms before the content. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, BlogSpot, WordPress, and Wikipedia all offer the target audience the chance to make and distribute their own content. Google permits people to search the whole web for information. Adobe and GoDaddy are essential tools that many webmasters have to use to have a website at first.
All these sites are well-known today not just they built the links or post wonderful link bait. The Mashable, Buzzfeed’s, and HuffPost surely do well, but they take the second precedence.
Still, some digital marketing strategists, moreover, do not believe sites like YouTube and Wikipedia get links because of their content. They consider content surely is not the only way success factor to invite natural links; it is simply just a way to attract links with minimal resources. As we see there is a shift towards resource-intensive campaigns and enterprise-level SEO content along with other useful factors that dominate this situation.
- Apps, both web-based and mobile
- On-site forums and social networks (not off-site ones)
- Meme generators and parallel interactive tools
- Games
- Wikis
- APIs
We are now at such a level of digital marketing where the smallest amount of interactivity, which, obviously goes ahead of commenting in blogs, works well. A careful digital marketing strategist never misses this chance.
2. E-mail marketing turns out more effective than social media reach
Though social media is effective, some digital marketing strategists are of the opinion that e-mail marketing is more powerful than social media in reaching an existing target audience. In the words of Mailchimp, more than 21 percent reach is there is the case of e-mail marketing that in the case of social media marketing is only about 6 percent only.
Fig 2: E-mail vs. Social Media
In another study by Mailchimp, it is found that average e-mail click-through rates nearly cross 3.1 percent while Twitter click-through rates in 2012 were only 1.64 percent, and now, it is even worse. Monetate studies show the average e-mail conversion rates are 3.19 percent, whereas the social media conversion rates are just 0.71 percent.
All these studies do not signify that social media is not great. It is very much effective. Social media is quite effective for viral marketing to reach the influencers and new potential customers, but not the existing prospects.
3. Being mobile in case of one-third web traffic
While there is the widespread popularity of social media marketing all across the digital marketing world, people still have not found the greatness of the mobile medium. They strongly neglected this medium.
Fig 3: Mobile reaches more than web
Some fortune 100 companies, in 2013, June, had only 6 percent mobile-compatible websites. Things still have not changed a lot. For many accounts, this has been very serious. A 2014 StatCounter study shows a 31.08 percent of web traffic comes from mobile. On the other hand, Movable Ink, states more than 66 percent of emails are opened on a tablet or smartphone.
Nearly 30 percent of shoppers, as per the Quick Sprout study, will decline in any online transaction if the sites are not compatible on mobile. So, we see mobile as the new age of technology should be given equal, or sometimes more, importance with the normal desktop and laptop.
4. Apps more than online
Majorly, it is found that digital marketing strategists quite often missed the mobile Apps in their efforts to reach the target customers. All they are concerned with is the online marketing needs. But in one study conducted by Flurry in 2014 March, it is found that 86 percent of mobile time is used on mobile Apps, not online.
Fig 4: Brower n’ Apps
Apps were not given due importance once and were considered as the youth style statement. But that scenario is totally changed now. Mobile online traffic is increasing along with faster improvement in the usages of mobile Apps. Another study that was done on US consumers shows that daily on average they spend 2.19 hours in the Apps. And most of these Apps are connected to the internet opening the obvious ways of inbound traffic.
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5. Apps more than PCs
A recent estimate was done by Nielson, more than 29 hours per week people are connected to the net through mobile Apps. Comparatively, they use 27 hours to access the web from their PC’s (personal computer) browser. And only 5 hours per week is spent accessing the mobile browser.
This figure might be conflicting when another study says “30 percent of the web traffic is mobile.” This is just about the time spent, not about the frequency of visits.
This surely indicates the importance of mobile Apps, which are equally effective in connecting the internet as browsers like PC or mobile. Those who are still in the confusion should start giving due credits to the mobile Apps and work on this. There is a major shift in the use of the internet
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Fig 5: Mobile browser vs. PC browser vs. Apps
Earlier, it was thought of as an open sharing area, but now, with the advent of mobile Apps, those open areas have become a fenced sea of information, which would be accessible through mobile Apps and devoted to a handful of properties.
Below is a study was done by Flurry that shows segregation of time spent on different channels:
Fig 6: Time spent on iOS and Android connected devices.
This figure shows nearly 32% is taken by Gaming, while social media get 28%, and YouTube received 4%, and the rest of the 36% is distributed among entertainment, utilities, productivity, news, and other miscellaneous apps.
This is clear from the above demonstration that while small businesses cannot identify the potential of mobile Apps, big businesses and a few major players, have already taken advantage of mobile Apps as the latest medium to connect to the internet.
Given below are the Apps Retention Rates (ARR, i.e., the average number of times an app was used) that would show while ARR is improving 39%, people open these particular Apps 11 times or more. Please find some interesting data about ARR (Localytics study):
- The Apps usage percentage had been fixed at 20% in 2014, while in 2013 it was recovering by about 22%
- The Apps-opened-only-once percentage has progressively decreased by 6% in the last four years from 2011. By that time, 11 times people opened Apps just for one time (enhanced by 13%) picking to 39% 2014
- Android has the larger number of people opening an App for 11 times
- An improved focus and realization of the user involvement have actually made the developers create more useful and customized Apps
Fig 7: ARR (Apps Retention Rate).
Sports and Games have the maximum percentage of usage rate for 23% and 22%, correspondingly, whereas Social Networking and Weather apps have the least percentage of apps only used once. The below find would give more insight into this:
Fig 8: Percentage of Apps used only once.
Though there is a terrific possibility in the world of Apps, developers must understand that only the creation of content Apps will not be sufficient in attaining this height. The Apps need to be immensely genuine and modern. You can give Ads in the mobile Apps as well.
6. The greatest volume of traffic and highest conversion rate through Organic search than any other sources
Fig 9: Organic search for converting traffic.
The Marketing Sherpa study reveals nearly 43% of the traffic is generated out of organic search, but some other data shows 29% of the converting traffic is sourced. E-mail marketing sits on the second stage of converting traffic.
The study finding unearths:
- SEO has been underrated for a long as the huge source of revenue
- Always proper branding is accountable for switching search traffic as the SEO is the second most usual tool that the public use to navigate to the particular sites, after the direct sites
- E-marketing proves to be very reliable to ensure many conversions like the organic search
- Organic social networking sites and other referral sites work best neck-in-neck
The properly designed organic search engine strategy is able to reap the highest advantage in the form of converting a larger number of search traffic, resulting in healthy profits.
7. Do not consider social media sharing is equal to user commitment
A traffic measurement company hints that few people, in fact, read the articles they share. If you spend much time online, you perhaps are not shocked.
As per Upworthy’s report, some people are very prompt in sharing online stuff they liked online, and they do not even read what they shared. While as per the Friday report in the Verge, the company Chartbeat investigated, “there is no correlation between people actually reading articles and tweeting about them.” The same trend is true in the case of Facebook. Josh Schwartz, the Chartbeat data scientist, said,
“There is obviously a correlation between number of tweets and total volume of traffic that goes to an article. But this is just not a relationship between stories that are most heavily consumed and stories that are most heavily tweeted.”
In another study, it is found that the majority of links posted in Twitter were not actually read by the people who posted them. The contradictory and striking figure indicates a massive social involvement: more than 3,600 tweets, 1,900 Facebook shares, 600 LinkedIn shares, and 1000 Google Plus shares. If this it is true, the social stats are not dependable indicators that anyone really read the posts before sharing.
Fig 10: Relationship between attention minutes spent and sharing.
Contrarily, Daniel Mintz, Upworthy, discovered people who are involved with an online post were more probably to share it. MIT Professor Henry Jenkins puts it “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” Social sharing is evidently an effective way to assess what the world really cares about a post at any given time. Chartbeat’s data is related to only the reading time. Non-correlation is meant the average length of time a reader spends with each story. Clicks might have also come from mobile devices where readers generally stay less time on the page.
So, we find a difference of opinions as long as a post is shared on social media. The point in majority cases is focused: just because a post is extensively shared does not mean readers read them before sharing and liking. Similarly, a ‘genuinely read’ post could be shared.
Therefore, we are again back to square one – the usability of content is nothing if it is not targeted to the potential readers, who would become prospective buyers, or if at all targeted to the right audience, they did not spend the expected time on it before sharing. In this connection too, it would be unethical to comment, ‘content is not everything.’ What it basically means is to develop such content that would finally make a difference in the form of Tweets, Facebook posts, and headlines.
digital marketing strategists now develop a captivating, incredible, funny, eye-catchy, relevant, stimulating, and small piece of content, such as titled images, to be posted on Facebook so that readers can promptly get the essence of the inside story. Images and infographics, here, play a decisive role in deciding the fate of those posts; people see first and then read and believe. So, the readers will quite easily find interesting data, read, and share if they really like it. These images will be linked to the ultimate blogs. The blogs must be ethically and honestly created to serve the customers, and this would lead to audience retention. Another crucial point is concise content. Many times, even though they like a post after initially reading a few lines but cannot complete them just because those posts are lengthy, and they have limited time. So, every time a bite-size piece of information is good either in the form of the text or image links.
Conclusion
Having discovered all these neglected areas that require due consideration while working for the digital marketing, successful digital marketing strategists must take note that whenever he/she creates the digital marketing strategists, those should be in sync realistically with the marketing objectives they have set so far. If they understand what they want to achieve, they must be able to find how they would need to chalk out their plan. Recheck properly every step with a view to spotting any gap that could be missed. As digital marketing strategists you grow with the number of projects handled successfully, the following projects would be easily and fundamentally mapped for the sake of greater company advantages.
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