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e-tools and their application to digital marketing campaigns

E-tools are used by businesses and people to put it's message out to an audience to see, interact or buy a product or service. When preparing a digital marketing campaign electronic tools are used to achieve your marketing objectives. There are a wide range of tools available to successfully integrate digital marketing.



Marketing has changed dramatically since the introduction of social medias. Nowadays traditional marketing is just not enough and limits the audience that sees your products and services. It is estimated that 80% of businesses these days use some form of social media and social media marketing. No matter what you sell, and who you sell to, using social media as a marketing tool, can help you grow your product or brand, and increase sales and profits. What makes social media marketing great is the interaction with your customer base, and get a look at their lives. This could help your marketing strategy also. Various social media platforms can be used like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Facebook is the worlds leading social media platform in the world. It's tagline is that it brings family and friends together online. Businesses set up fan pages in order to spread their brand image and connect with past and future customers. Facebook is also extremely cost effective as it's completely free to set up and use. If there's a problem with a product or service, Facebook can allow you to be notified and respond quickly to a complaint or problem. And you can take steps to resolve them. In Facebook organic reach means the number of people who have seen your post through unpaid distribution. You have the option to boost or pay for more audience to see your potential posts and page. You can decide the duration of the promotion, budget and even the location. In the long run this can be expensive and time consuming. It's all about interaction with social media marketing, and offering something back to the public. Maybe by creating exciting competitions can get people talking about your page. It's a great way also to ask about peoples opinions. It's also important to add relevant images and video content, to enhance the visual impact. Insights works like analytics. You can clearly see fans based on gender, age, location etc.

Twitter as a tool for social media can often be overlooked. Some marketers could feel limited by the 140 letter count on twitter. Twitter has more than 250 million monthly users. Your brand is not truly represented unless you engaged in most areas of social networking. Twitter is a powerful marketing tool. The landing or home page is one of the first thing that new followers will see. You should have a bio that tells people who you are, and include a link to your official website. The search tool is a great way to look for your competitors. Or even search for keywords relating to your brand or product. Regular tweeting is a sign of an active company. Asking your followers to retweet, follow and mention your page keeps the page fresh and relevant. Specific hashtags can be put in place and give your business a catchy tagline that stands out to the competitors. Just like Facebook, Twitter contests can be ran for giveaways, money off or free samples. Photos and videos are believed to get up to 3 to 4 more clicks. A good marketing strategy works best when integrated with your other marketing activities. All social media now have analytics built in which is a great feature. You'll be able to see what posts resonated the best, what days the most interaction happened and also the demographics of your followers.

 Instagram and also the other social medias mentioned above are powerful tools for smaller brands and businesses in growing your reach and presence. It's been said that brands on Facebook only reach 6% of their followers per post. On Instagram it's believed to be 100% reach. This is because organic marketing reach is down significantly of both Facebook and Twitter. The percentage of Instagram users who regulary engage with pages is more than double that of Facebook. With Instagram it's all about the visuals. Users are more likely to act if they can easily recognise a brand or product. The quality and style of your images should be consistent. Even things like colour schemes and filters should be taken into consideration. Images should be kept simple with little captions. Think about motivational and inspiring images when uploading. It's all about been different, creative and unique. Hashtags aren't just great for twitter. They can help users find you. The maximum number of hashtags you can added is limited to 30. You could even use your own campaign specific hashtags, instead of the usual generic ones often seen. For example if your areal estate business then the hashtag #realestate would be appropriate. Another thing is links in your Instagram posts aren't clickable, so you need to take advantage of the one place where they are, in the bio section. Most use this link to link to their website, but it could be changed often depending on different events/promotions or new product launch. Social medias can also be scheduled in advance with sites such as Hootsuite and buffer.

Many more social media sites can also be used to utilize your digital marketing strategy including

  • Pinterest 
  • Google +
  • Snapchat
  • Reddit 
  • Linkedn
  • Stumbleupon 
Blogs
Blogs are are great way to fuel your other social media sites, and increase sales. Your blog content is completely yours from the start. A blog can be used to get your message out there 24/7. It's a great way to build a community with people been able to comment and interact however they like. They can be used to showcase what you have on offer. For example a blog post of how to use your product or service, and provide information that's needed. It's important to know who your writing your blog for, and what they're interested in reading. It should be easy to read and layed out in bite size information and use photos to attract attention. The content should also be promoted to your best ability. Maybe enable readers to receive your blog through emails. Share your content across all social media platforms. Another great addition is to add social sharing buttons to allow readers to share your blog on Facebook, twitter etc. It's critical to have a plan and resources in place along every step of the way. Different blog sites can be used such as Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, Squarespace and many more.  

Rich media is known as an advertising term for an ad that includes video, audio or other elements, and encourage users to interact and engage with the content. Rich media offers many more ways to involve your audience with advertisements. It's all about the user experience. Rich media can have a much higher click rate than standard media.Because they have functions like video or some sort of movement, may it be when your mouse or cursor hoovers over something interactive. You have much more space also to display photos, offer more call to action ideas and get more people engaged. Youtube is the main example which in recent years has grown incredibly with over 800 million users per month and 2 billion videos played per day. Rich media ads are more complex and allow greater creative freedom. They also do not force the user to leave the site, which means not having to interrupt what might have been a pleasant online experience. Other examples of rich media could be Spotify, social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter. 


Search Engine Optimisation 
Search engine optimisation (SEO) involves achieving the highest position or ranking in the natural or organic listings as the main body of the search engine results pages across a range of specific combination of keywords (or key phrases) entered by search engine users. Most search engines like google, bing and yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.  SEO, is a important part of any digital marketing strategy. It drives more traffic to your site and can lead to an increase in sales. Like many other steps discussed above demographics play a big part in SEO. Think about what your market is searching for, and where they are located.
The more tuned in you are to these, the more effectively you can target your seo. Mobile phone optimisation is very important. Creating a website that fits the new style of online browsing. If potential customers are looking for you using mobile devices then make sure that you provide a quality user experience. A user friendly website with clear navigation, seo keywords and optimised with relevant, quality content is what is really going to build up traffic. A good seo strategy is to follow how it is working. Google analytics or other analytic tools can provide valuable info for understanding how changes affect your traffic volume and your conversions. Some examples of seo tools are Hootsuite, Google Trends, Keyword Planner, and Google analytics.

Email Marketing
Email marketing is the way to reach consumers directly through electronic mail. It's a great way to reach thousands of potential customers and at a low cost, compared to other forms of marketing advertisements. You can use a good mix of images, text and links. It's also a good way of tracking how effective it is. You can easily keep track of how many hits your website gets after emails are sent out. New and existing customers who usually wouldn't see your business or products, can see what you have on offer. It's very easy to unsubscribe for people also with the option on the bottom of nearly all newsletters you receive. A feedback option could also be sent out, where people could tell you directly what they liked and disliked about your marketing campaign. One advantage of email marketing is that you have the complete attention of potential customers. Usually they can become distracted or disrupted by pop up ads or other advertisements. A call to action button can be put in place may it be to sign up for the website, or new offers and discounts. With newsletters its usually about one main topic may it be like said above offers, announcements, event invitation etc. Writing long text heavy emails is not the best approach, because people have a short attention span. One program that comes to mind for email marketing is mailchimp. It's a simple piece of software that gives you a number of easy options for designing, sending and saving templates of your emails. You can easily create newsletters and mailchimp allows options for sharing them on social media like Twitter or Facebook. It can also track your results so you can check your responses. Some other tools could be active campaign, getresponse, constant contact and many more.


Online Advertising
Online advertising is a marketing strategy that involves the use of the internet as a way to obtain traffic to your website, and target and deliver marketing messages to the right potential customers. Online advertising has become part of our daily life and a major part of the internet. one example that came to mind was the use of google search ads. they are ads that appear alongside the search engine result page. These ads are whats known as PPC(pay per click), in which advertisers pay for each ad click.

You will advertise on someone else's website to drive traffic to  your own and achieve an end goal. Many types of online advertising exist, and all have different advantages and disadvantages included.

  • Offline advertising means you pay a fixed fee for your advert to appear on a website for a fixed period of time. There is very little point in advertising online like this. In a way you are taking all of the risk and the company displaying your ad is taking no risk at all.

  • Affiliate marketing means your advert is displayed for free. If a visitor clicks on your advert to visit your site, that is free also. You only pay if that visitor buys from your website buys from your site, or signs up to a mailing list etc. You can offer a commission on sales and it's entirely up to you what you offer. 


Online advertisements can come in many forms like pre-roll video ads. Like seen on youtube, when you have to sit through an advertisement before you can watch a video. they are usually short promotional videos. Also banner/display ads on websites cost very little to display and can generate big clickthrough rates when incorporated correctly. Related content ads are also a popular choice. These usually include small thumbnail pictures with persuasive titles, as well as a call to action link that encourages you to click and read more. Social media ads give advertisers a huge variety of targeting options for campaigns and are very customisable. Other examples include contextual ads where it places display ads beside relevant content. For example reading a blog post on how to save money, and then spotting an advertisement for a credit card beside it. A good idea is to look at what your competitors are using, where they are advertising, and the type of ads they are using.

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