I bet that there are still many people out there who don’t really understand about the term and job description of digital strategist, digital marketing, online/internet marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Management and the list goes on, or maybe there are some other similar terms ?

OK, don’t get confused by those different terms that sound similar but let’s focus on the common things that people on those fields do. I may talk about the tiny differences which are more specific of those fields in the next post.

The business world has been buzzing about digital and online marketing for couple of years now. Even though internet is still quite a young invention, already more than half of the word population use it. There should be no surprise that businesses want to unleash the boiling potential of so many connected and reachable business prospects and turn them into the loyal customers. Besides, going digital also allows for the constant communication with the customer, building a brand awareness and it is so much more cost effective than traditional marketing.

However, navigating your business into the digital realm might be quite a daunting task, as there exists many tools, websites, apps and know-hows that makes it almost impossible to choose from. Besides, many inexperienced business owners believe that online marketing is simply about posting on Facebook or Instagram and it is not a big of a deal. Well…if you think like that, you should think again as online marketing entails so much more than that, and there are many “behind the counter” tools that may work for you that you are not ever aware of. Especially if you are a digital rooky or you simply don’t have an expertise in the local market. But if you are still willing to tap into the market potential that awaits you online, it is the high time to contact the online marketer. To put it simply, online marketer is a professional who has the skills and the expertise to prepare and execute an online marketing strategy that would bring more leads into their clients’ businesses. Some may say that online marketer engages in either the “inbound” or the “outbound” marketing. Inbound marketing attracts customers through content creation and interactions that are relevant and helpful without being distracting. In the other hand, outbound marketing is a more tradition approach which aims at attracting customer through initiating conversation e.g. through advertising.

Regardless of approach that an online marketer pursues, there are some tools and technics that are widely used in digital marketing. Depending on individual strategy and company’s needs, one or a mixture of tools can be used in order to achieve optimal results and meets the company’s objectives.

The most common Job description of Online Marketer based on type of the field :

1. SEM – Search Engine Marketing or simply referred to as “search marketing” is an umbrella term that includes both SEO and various paid search methods such as PPC. In the broadest sense, search marketing uses both paid and unpaid methods to gain traffic and visibility from search engines such as google, thus directing the potential clients to the company’s website.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the process of gaining website traffic in a “organic”, “natural” and “free” way. The basic working principle of SEO is that search engine ranks the searched websites in a descending order based on what “it” thinks is the most relevant to the user. SEO includes various tools – both technical and creative, required to improve the ranking and drive traffic. Methods used by SEO may include the right word selection in a website’s content, making sure that the website is structure in an engine-friendly manner or how other sites link to your site on the web. SEO is called the “free” method, as in contrast to the paid methods, it is free of charge and the success of SEO depends on the skills of person who makes it.

The other part of search marketing – paid methods include different types of advertisements, depending on a way the buyer is charged for the ads. The most commonly used type of paid advertisement is PPC – Pay Per Click.

PPC – in the Pay Per Click model of search engine advertising, the advertiser is charged a fee each time one of their ads is clicked by the user. PPC allows the advertisers to bid for an ad placement when someone searchers for the keywords related to the business offering. Because Google is the most popular search engine, the GoogleAdWords are also one of the most popular available PPC on the internet. The success of the PPC campaign depends not only on the amount of money which is devoted to it (the budget may start from few dollars) but also on the keyword relevance, website quality and quality score (the score calculated by Google).

2. Social media marketing – form of marketing that employs various social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. to achieve number of marketing goals such as:

• Establishing conversations
• Increasing website traffic
• Establishing brand awareness and positive brand association
• Improving communication with clients

 

Social media marketing has become powerful tool for business and individuals as it allows for personalized communication and building close relationships online. Besides, literally billions of people use social media daily what makes it a tremendous business opportunity for reaching company’s target market and converting social media followers into the customers.

Marketers use different technics to establish online presence on social media, however, those two technics may be broadly divided into to: sharing the content such as blog posts, videos or photos and paid social media advertising. Of the most popular tool used by social media marketers are Facebook Ads as they are relatively inexpensive and have huge potential of reaching potential customer from closely 1.8 billion people connected on Facebook. Facebook Ads allows for very specific targeting as it allows marketer to tailor-made its ads by using all the demographic, geographic and personal information available through Facebook. The advertiser is then charged by the ad depending on the reach and engagement of users.

Furthermore, Facebook offers different kinds of ads, depending on the online strategy that marketer follows. For example, in order to increase traffic and lead to the company’s website is may use domain or page post link ads. If however, the strategic objective is to achieve more of user engagement, a page like or page photo like ads. Thus, the power of Facebook ads lies in their usability and adjustability to the specific need of company’s strategy and growth.

3. Content creation – content marketing is a prime example of “inbound marketing” where online marketer produces and distributes valuable, relevant and consistent content which adheres to the company’s online strategy. The main goal of content marketing is to attract and retain the desired market niche and, ultimately, convert that niche into profitable customer action.

The biggest difference between tradition advertising and content marketing is instead of trying to sell the services of products, marketers is focused on creating truly useful content to help its customer solve their problems and issues.

Possibly, there exist many types of content that can be created: blog posts, videos, eBooks, trends reports webinars, white papers and much more. However, each of the content usually falls into one of the four categories It can be educational, entertaining, persuading or converting.

Regardless of the type of content the marketer chooses to produce, it should be always seen as a part of bigger online marketing strategy as it connects to the other forms of online forms of marketing, for example:

• SEO: search engines rewards businesses that create valuable and consistent content with higher rankings.
• PPC: In order to rip the most benefits from pay per click ads, you need to have a content to back it up
• Social media marketing: content strategy usually comes before the SMS as firstly, you need to have a content to share

Another compelling reason to engage in a great content creation is the fact that many marketing specialists stress nowadays: namely, content marketing is the present and the future of online marketing. It is so because internet user want to access valuable information to them, instead of being constantly bombarded by advertising.

4. Public relations – digital PR, similarly to the tradition PR is a free method used for dissemination of information between the company and the public. Brands use online PR to increase their online presence through establishing relationships with key online influencers, content writers and online journalists to gain “press hits”, citation and high quality backlinks. There are many positive outcomes of online PR as it may increase the brand awareness, build trust and credibility as well as help the company to increase their conversion rates and ROI.

Online PR strategy, as is also the case with content marketing should be incorporated with an overall online marketing strategy. Successfully execute PR strategy will increase brand reach and visibility, it will have positive effect on search engine visibility via onsite SEO.

5. Creating Digital and Online Strategy that works – this means that as an online marketer, we need to analyze and compile all the the latest tools that can be used in the market. As the technology world will keep producing and innovating new type of technology for the business and marketing, we are forced to keep constantly learning all the time to follow up the latest trend and update of the tools, trends and the smart algorithm, features and policy that are constantly being updated for example by Google ( Google Panda ) and Facebook as two dominating online marketing tools.  so hence, we can’t stop learning and we’ll have to always learn something new keep ourselves updated with the latest tools and trends of the digital world.

 

I Love My Job

Let’s finish this with a positive note!

Doing and compiling a digital strategy and online marketing is hard work and can be frustrating at times, but it is also highly rewarding.

I never hardly submit my CV / Resume to many different companies, I have got many different Job offers from different companies, agencies and individuals. I once got a job offer without Job interview, without being asked to provide my college diploma, they didn’t even ask me if I have a degree or not. if I would have to send my CV / Resume to a company, it means that I am really interested in that particular company’s culture, mission and vision

I’m sitting writing this post from a coworking space next to the beach in Bali. I love to work hard and smart and get some inspiration by learning from different professionals that I meet along the way at any event and anywhere.

I love sharing my thoughts in this blog, I love learning something new, I love helping people and companies to reach their objective, I love educating people to understand this field in hope that they will value more on this kind of services,  I love making connections, I love working hard and smart, I love seeing new places and my traffic grow, I love making those first sales or commissions on a new site, I love the fact that I can (literally) make money in whenever I want in my flexible time.

I love internet marketing.

What would I be doing if I wasn’t an internet marketer…? maybe back in the time of 2012, if I would have gone to Australia to study while working, I would have been working at a restaurant or working at the farming field.

… I really don’t know :p