Having recently completed the Digital Marketing Institute’s (DMI),  Digital Marketing Diploma, I thought I would summarise and share the contents of the course, and at the same time provide a holistic overview of the DMI’s view on Digital Marketing.

What are the top marketing trends you’ve come across?

The program consists of a 5 Day intensive bootcamp covering all the various disciplines of Digital Marketing.

First off, it’s imperative to understand, that there are many channels that make up an entire Digital Marketing Plan, and by selecting only a few of them, you could be leaving out many other crucial aspects.

Secondly, by utilising all channels, you are in effect harnessing the full power of a complete strategy, but need to do so in a fully integrated way.

The different components that make up a Digital Marketing Strategy are:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Search Marketing – The DMI covers Pay per click (paid advertising) under this section
• Email marketing
• Digital Display advertising
• Social Media Marketing
• Mobile marketing
• Analytics (being able to report on results)

The entire marketing framework, then needs to be underpinned by strategy, and thorough planning.

Aside from just understanding the various channels, the DMI continually refers to the 3i Principals, being initiate, iterate, and integrate. The basic concept is that each strategy must start off with the customer as the focus of the campaign, alter over time, as one gathers more accurate info about this customer, and finally integrate all other marketing messages in a coherent manner.

Your objective

First off, and more importantly than the channel you are ultimately going to use, is the over arching objective(s). Why you are doing it

What results are you looking for?

You need to set yourself, and your organisation, very clear, specific and measurable goals that you are looking to achieve from your online marketing strategy.

By starting with the customer in mind, you could begin to ask such things as; ‘who is my customer?’ ‘Where do they work?’ ‘How do they browse the web?’ and ‘what leads them to make a buying decision?’

Why do we need to ask ourselves these questions? Well, in order for success, your message needs to be highly targeted. The better you know your audience, the more they we feel as though you are talking directly to them.

Tell your customer, what you want them to do, by making your ‘Call to Action’ clear.

Research

Once you’ve answered these questions, you need to invest a considerable amount of time doing focused and quality in depth research.

• Interrogate the keywords that people use when looking for your product or service
• Check trending data of search volume at different times of the year for your product or service
• Explore which channels potentially stand to provide you with the best success and Return on Investment (ROI)
• Be aware of what your competitors are already doing in this space, and how you can differentiate

Plan

Once you have worked out the purpose for your campaign, and have done your research, you now need to develop a detailed action plan.

Decide how long in advance you wish to plan (3, 6 or 12 months), and then set up a calendar, with dates to take various action steps.

How will you unlock your brand’s potential?

Make sure that all your dates coincide correctly, and don’t overlook anything. An example of this would be to make sure you have designed and populated your emailer, before the date it’s due to be sent.

Execute

The greatest marketing plan in the world is absolutely meaningless, if not acted upon. So in order to get results, take action.

If your planning stage was done correctly, there is no need to second guess yourself, so trust your plan and work it accordingly. Stick to the plan and don’t deviate at the outset. You need to allow for a certain amount of action, and results before you decide to change anything.

Measure

If you can’t measure it, how can you improve on it?

In order to run any marketing campaign effectively, you will need to decide upfront what will determine its overall success.

Have you got the results you expect?

This is important, so that you can ultimately tweak the campaign in the direction that will further increase your ROI.

Decide in advance what you plan to measure in your Digital Marketing Plan, as well as how you plan to measure it. This can easily be done with a number of free or paid for reporting tools which can be found online, and taken advantage of.

Before deciding on the tools to use, first decide on the type of information you wish to measure, and what you would like to do with it, once you have it.

Conclusion 

So, while there are many opportunities and channels for Digital Marketing online, and whilst it is important to pick the rights ones for your business, its even more important to do in depth research, strategise your campaign, have an executable action plan, and then, through real-time and effective monitoring, deviate your strategy and actions, to make the most of everything that online has to offer you.

Google SERP's

Why the change?

Much is being researched and written about the many algorithmic changes that Google is making, and rather than slowing down, these changes are actually on the increase. We saw as many as 12 changes in 2012, compared to just 11 in 2011. And if that’s not enough, the latest Google Panda update #24, the first for 2013 was released on January the 24^th, 2013.

So, why the change? It is widely documented that this is Google’s continued attempt to ‘clean up the town’ so to speak. For all too long, SEO companies, practicing in both the white and dark arts, have been ‘influencing’ the results found on Google’s SERP’s. And in retaliation, Google continually intervenes to keep the search results as pure and uncontrived as possible. Most of which can be dated as far back as 2003, when they first began to ignore the keyword tags on websites

So where is this going?

The real question is, where will this end? I personally can’t see it coming to an end. For Google to remain competitive, and continue to attract users to its search engine, it is imperative that it continues to clean up the results its users find while searching. What’s more, Google now looks beyond search. Much more emphasis is now being placed upon the users engagement factor. Things such as bounce rate, load speeds, and goal completions, can both positively or negatively impact on where your site ranks, more so then how you got them there in the first place.

Whilst pre Panda and Penguin updates focused on driving the click, these days the emphasis is more about post-click activity. The bottom line really, is if the user wins, we all win.  So much more effort needs to be placed on what happens after the click.

The conclusion

While this is rapidly becoming the new reality, it is still important to consider both sides when approaching your SEO rollout. While the new focus is around optimising the browsing experience for the user, increasing overall engagement, and retaining the user for a longer period of time, the old practices still apply to some extent. To put it simply, while it is becoming increasingly more important to keep your user engaged once he or she has found your site, you still need to get them there in the first place.

Rather than the traditional eCards that get emailed out these days,  we thought we could do something a lot more fun,  interactive, and who knows, maybe even have it go viral (hope, hope).

So we have created a humorous and festive video against the backdrop of Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas” acted out, sung, and produced by the entire team at Talooma.

So take a look, and enjoy. Oh yes, and have yourselves a very Merry Christmas, and enjoy this time with your loved ones.

The Talooma Team

The new design will allow companies to highlight important posts through the new Featured Update option, which promotes posts to the top of their updates stream.  The featured update function is a better and easier way for companies to highlight, new products and services being offered. It will also highlight any important company news and job opportunities and will aid with driving word of mouth.

The new pages will simplify how users explore companies that interest them. It will also keep them in the loop with any hot topics and any news from their respective industries.

Check out the new pages here

Spread your word in a more effective manner…

LinkedIn has always been a network for professionals and company pages have primarily been used to introduce your company and start spreading company messages.  The new LinkedIn Company pages will allow companies to do this in a more effective way.  Companies can now showcase new products and services and catch the ever elusive prospective customer’s eye more effectively.

Catching Up With Social Media…

Facebook was the first social network to adopt a highly visual layout with their timelines. In the ever changing world of Social Networking, LinkedIn has had to adapt to stay current and not be left behind.  On average companies don’t spend as much time optimising and maintaining their LinkedIn profiles as they do on other networks. It is important to remember that LinkedIn is still a public entity that clients and employees will view before they make a decision about your business.

LinkedIn may not be the leader in Social Networking but when they make changes such as the redesigned company pages it is worth taking the time to update your company profile, stay relevant, and present your company in the best way possible.

In the traditional process of getting ready for your work day, everything seems to takes longer, and is way more challenging in winter. Whether it be the relentless release of the electric blanket, the folding back of the covers, the placing of bare feet onto cold tiles, or that first exposure of skin to the less than satisfactory air temperature. All these factors vastly increased in winter, and are largely an increased hindrance to the effective welcoming of a successful business day.

That said, once you are on the go, with those items a distant memory, provided you have dressed accordingly for the weather, your day continues just like any other.

So here’s the real question:

In Summer, when we are preparing for our day, do we ever pause, and give a thought back to when the conditions were a lot less favorable, or do we proceed quicker, in the nature of habit, oblivious, until the next time when winter comes around?

Mobile sites or mobi sites, are websites designed especially for your mobile device. The challenge for web developers and designers is to make the experience of browsing on your device simple and hassle free. However, many digital marketing agencies offer mobile website designservices that can achieve that.

The use of internet on portable units is fast becoming the norm. The shift to mobile sites is a result of a modern society’s needs for having internet access on the go – whenever and wherever they so wish. As a business, you want your customers and potential customers to have full access to your products and services specs. at all times. This is exactly what a mobi or mobile site will do for you. However what are the benefits of a mobi site for the actual user? The benefits are plentiful…

Improved User Experience

Mobile sites are specifically designed for handheld devices with easy navigation, less text, big buttons etc.

Faster Download Speed

Mobile sites are specifically designed for mobile standards and optimal download speed, which means less waiting and more browsing.

Engagement and Context

A mobile site allows you to immediately engage users with mobile-specific features such as click-to-call, mapping functions etc.

Portability and Connectivity

A mobile site can be accessed anywhere, any time. This level of constant connectivity provides an unprecedented opportunity to connect with you customers in new ways, wherever they may be.

Integration with Offline Media

Mobile devices are unique in their ability to immediately bridge the gap between online and offline media through the use of QR codes. QR codes can be displayed in magazines or pamphlets and then, when scanned with a smartphone, translated into electronic messaging such as awebsite URL, an email address or SMS message.

Don’t miss out on exposing your business, organisation or brand to a world of online users who, these days, browse the internet on their handheld devices.

Source: frugaldad.com

What are some of these things?

There are a few but here we will discuss how SEO copywriting as a style of writing achieves those results. SEO copywriting is unique from other forms of writing such as magazine writing or a newspaper writing. SEO writing focuses on specific “key words or phrases” that make your website or specific web page on your site emerge on the first page of a search list – which is essentially where you want to be. However this is only possible provided the writer has adhered to specific SEO protocol which includes:

• Finding the correct search term or phrase for your product or service (there are a few online tools which online Copywriters use for this)
• Using the search term or phrase only a certain amount of times without over using or misusing it
• Avoiding very long words (words with multiple syllables)
• Not writing very long sentences
• Having an appropriate and appealing topic if writing an online article
• SEO copywriting must still be readable and persuasive like any other style of writing

Styles of SEO writing

Online writers write articles, press releases and “optimise” existing web content. The copywriter must keep in mind all the above mentioned SEO “rules” when writing articles. Press releases are similar but cover more than just one topic. Optimising web content is simply increasing the use of a specific key term or phrase on a particular page of a website with the hope of making that page rank higher during a search.

Writing for magazines, news papers, pamphlets or even bill boards, the Copywriter writes easy to read, enjoyable and compelling copy with the aim of persuading you into taking a certain action. Whilst SEO copywriting is steered in the same direction, the online Copywriter has a goal of making a company’s website or specific web page on the site rank highly in a search.

The foremost goal of SEO copywriting is to produce succinct, effectively persuasive text for a well-written web page and to make it rank highly during a search.

Marketing Success.

The Johannesburg weather is beginning to heat up in a serious way. The mercury has touched on just shy of 30 degrees a few times already and the brunt of summer is no where near us. The relentless heat coupled with a lot of traffic on the M1 South heading towards Johannesburg central meant that we were in need of something to quench our thirst and bring some much needed relief from the heat.

While making our way along the highway we cannot help but be bombarded by the cleverly designed and well placed KFC Krusher street pole advertising. Every few hundred meters the mundane “fade into the background” and traditional street pole advertising (which gets filed by our minds eye as irrelevant) is replaced by the larger than life replica Krusher cup, grabbing our attention and screaming at us to take notice!

The repetition of the Krushers coupled with additional more traditional billboard advertising on the highway made it virtually impossible for us to think of anything other than making our way immediately to KFC!

Execution fail!

KFC did everything right. Or should we say that the Ad Agency who does KFC’s advertising did everything right! They used a busy, public space to grasp our attention in everyway imaginable. In fact, a KFC Krusher was all that was on our minds long after we had even passed the clever, alternative advertising. 10 points there!

When we finally arrived at a KFC (on William Nicol) some distance from the M1 south where we had been hypnotised by this Krusher advertising, we waited in line patiently, adding to the suspense of that very moment we would have the Krusher firmly in our grip. Alas, it was not meant to be. Upon ordering our long awaited KFC Krushers, our ears were met with the very words we dreaded, “Our Krusher machine is broken.”

Not only did these 5 words make us want to cancel the rest of the order and buy lunch from the competitor down the road, but we were also very disappointed because it seemed as though KFC had grabbed an advertising opportunity by the horns, (unlike other brands in South Africa) and finally used some creativity in a campaign.

Maybe someone should have checked that KFC’s Krusher machines were all working properly before they created such a hype around one of their products. All in all, a complete brand disappointment and a slack effort on KFC’s side.

What to do?

When embarking on a marketing campaign, ensure that you include in the planning of your campaign to check the following boxes :

1. tell your organisation about the promotion
2. check that you can handle increased demand for when your marketing actually works
3. have a plan in place for if things go wrong with your delivery

I caught up with Ceri James, the founder and Marketing and Sales Director of Talooma Digital Marketing Agency. Talooma has been in the digital marketing space for over 12 years and continues to set benchmarks.

Talooma Digital Marketing Agency by user8601966

The secret to Talooma’s success lies in its leadership and the quality of its staff. “Team dynamic, passion, a common purpose and unlimited potential to learn” this is what Ceri had to add to the ingredients of his company’s success.

With mobile internet devices like Smart Phones and Tablets becoming more and more affordable and therefore accessible to most people, the internet has become available to almost everybody these days. As a result of this, Digital Marketing Companies are becoming more and more relevant as most companies realise the huge potential for a great return on investing in online marketing. The future only has bigger and more exciting things to offer for the online space and digital marketing as a whole.

Talooma has grown tremendously as a digital marketing company over the last 12 years but the journey does not end there, in fact this is what Ceri had to say, “in the next two to three years we are certainly going to be a lot stronger in the hospitality industry…our aim is to hopefully be listed as one of the top 500 companies to work for”

The Talooma story is certainly a testimony that hard work and dedication pays off but for Ceri the sky is the limit and there’s still a long way to climb.