The why, the what and the how of Digital Marketing – Way Back Wednesday 007

Martin Henley0:32

Hello there my name is Martin Henley, my business is The Effective Marketing Company,I am a lecturer with the Digital Marketing Institute and I was absolutely delighted when Leoron in the UK asked me to take part in their Christmas content splurge. They told me we’re planning a 12 Days of Christmas and we would like you to take care of day number three. So of course, I was delighted. Three is the magic number, three is the perfect number. I can prove this, I can demonstrate this to you. Three is the smallest number we need to create a pattern, the perfect combination of brevity and rhythm. It’s a principle captured neatly in the Latin phrase, Omni Trium, perfectum, perfectum term. Everything that comes in threes is perfect, or every set of three is complete. Why is the number three magical you ask? The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, the triangle guy, postulated that the meaning behind numbers was deeply significant, deeply significant. In their eyes, the number three was considered as the perfect number, the number of harmony, wisdom and understanding. So when we write jokes, or when we write copy, or when we write headlines, we know about the power of three.

Martin Henley1:54

When we answer the question, why is the number three magical, it has the power of three in it, it’s because of the harmony, the wisdom and the understanding. Three is the perfect number, three is the perfect number. We have the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In French, we have the menage a trois, 100%, more engaging for everybody involved than the menage a deux, not quite as messy as the men are a quatre and nothing like the logistics involved with a menage a cinc.

Martin Henley2:36

In digital marketing, we have three tools at the very cornerstones of digital marketing that expres perfectly, what digital marketing is, why we do digital marketing, and how we should do digital marketing. So of course, I was delighted to take care of day number three in the 12 days of Christmas. You might be asking me Now why am I talking about this on the second day of a 10 Day countdown to Christmas? The answer is because everything changed, but last, I’ll ask you, where is the beauty in number two’s? Where is the perfection in number twos? Where is the justice in number two’s? What am I going to talk about if there are only two?

Martin Henley3:25

It’s an issue. Anyway, what I’ve decided to do is I’ve decided to talk to you about these three tools at the very cornerstone of digital marketing on the second day of this 10 Day countdown to Christmas. You might be asking yourself now, what is marketing? Quite simply marketing is the investment that businesses make of time, energy and money in finding winning and keeping customers profitably and they need people to help them do that for them. You might ask me what is digital marketing? Well very simply, digital marketing is using digital channels to find, win, and keep customers profitably and businesses definitely need people to do that for them.

Martin Henley4:08

So the question then becomes why do we do digital marketing? Well, you might argue that the entire market is online. That’s true. You might argue that digital marketing is incredibly cost effective. That’s also true. You might tell me that digital marketing is incredibly accessible. That’s also true. You can do this in a bus station on your mobile phone. But that’s not why we do digital marketing. The reason that we do digital marketing is for the transparency, and it’s the transparency that takes the risk out of marketing. So if you are going to invest your time, your energy and your money in finding winning and keeping customers the more secure you can be in that outcome, the more successful you are likely to be, the less likely you are to fail. That’s why the three tools that I’m talking to you today are really important, really do form the cornerstone of digital marketing. Now these three tools come from Christmas from Google and there is something rather Christmassy, I think about Google, there is something rather Father Christmasy about Google.

Martin Henley5:22

Google knows if you’ve been good nose if you’ve been bad, and Google probably knows what you are getting for Christmas. So here we go, the three tools, the first tool that I want to share with you, or rather, let’s go back to the beginning, if you want to be an effective marketer, if you want to be effective at finding winning and keeping customers for your business, you are going to need to get better, and better, and better at understanding your market.

Martin Henley5:50

What you might be interested to know in the first instance, is what it is that people are searching for, you will want to know when it is that people are searching, so you know when to make your marketing investments, you might want to know who is searching, and as much as you possibly can about your market. Essentially, I’m going to demonstrate for you now how these three tools will achieve that for you.

Martin Henley6:17

The first tool that we are looking at today is the keyword planner. This tool lives inside Google Ads, but you don’t need to worry, we’re not going to spend any money advertising with Google at this point, we are literally interested to know what it is that people are searching for. So if we come to this tool, and we look to discover new keywords, we might be interested to market a digital marketing course, because that is one of the things that we are marketing. So we simply put in the words digital marketing course, we ask then to get results and Google will come back and will tell us exactly the phrases that people are searching for that are relevant to digital marketing courses. So they are telling us that every month there is between 1,000 and 10,000 people each month, searching for a digital marketing course. Of course there are who wouldn’t want a career in digital marketing, who wouldn’t want a certification in digital marketing, and who wouldn’t want a network of digital marketing friends. So what Google will also give us is another 1,246 keyword phrases that they think are relevant to the search digital marketing course, it includes Google digital marketing course, social media marketing course, digital marketing Google, digital marketing course online, digital marketing certificate.

Martin Henley7:51

So if I am interested to market a digital marketing course, I don’t have to be scratching my head, wondering what it is that people are looking for, because Google will tell me precisely what it is that people are looking for.

Martin Henley8:05

Okay, so now we know, what it is that people are searching for. Now, it might be interesting to know, when are they conducting those searches. What we do now is we go to the second Google tool at the cornerstone of digital marketing, which is Google Trends. What we will do is add a search term, so we are interested in digital marketing course. And we add that, and it will tell us when people are searching. Now, interestingly, this is telling us from the beginning of time essentially, when Google started tracking these things, which was by way back in 2004. So What’s interesting, as you will see, is that people only got interested in digital marketing around 2014 to 2015. It really is as young as that. We might be interested in when people have been searching for this in the last 12 months and we won’t be surprised to see that most of these searches are happening over the Christmas period. So on the 27th of December, people eat their Turkey on Christmas Day, they eat more Turkey on Boxing Day, on the 27th of the month they get up and they are interested in a digital marketing career. You will see that people are pretty much interested in digital marketing courses throughout the year of course they are.

Martin Henley9:30

We might be interested to know when they were searching in the last three months. Or we might be interested to know when they were searching in the past 30 days, or we might be interested to know when they were searching in the last week, we might be interested to know when they searched in the last day. So what this tells us is exactly what it is that people are looking for and exactly when they are looking for for it, which will tell us something about when we should be looking to place our marketing investments. The other thing that this tool will tell us is where the searches are happening. So you won’t be surprised to see that these searches are happening across the UK, but more in Scotland, interestingly, England, second Wales, third, Northern Ireland in fourth place. Related topics are Google digital marketing courses, bachelor’s degrees, Google technology companies, and business topics.

Martin Henley10:32

So we have covered now two of these tools and we already have a really good sense of what people are searching for, when they are searching, and where they are when they are searching. Now the third tool that I want to share with you is Google Analytics. So once you have this in place, once you have your website up and running and working, then literally, Google will reward you with more information. What you will get to know now is not exactly who has been on your website, but you will get a sense of the demographics, and the interests of people who have been on your website. So if we come to the Google Analytics tool, it looks something like this. And we will see it will give us demographic information. If we are interested in the age demographic of the visitors to our website, we might be interested in the gender demographic, we might be interested in what these people are interested in. So overview,in this instance, people are interested in Home and Garden, Do It Yourself, lifestyles and hobbies, banking and finance, shoppers, luxury shoppers are the categories that they are interested in.

Martin Henley11:43

They might be interested in market segments like home and gardens, autos, and vehicles and they might be interested in other categories like business and industrial, art and entertainments. Now, this will inform as you go forward with your digital marketing, you’re targeting who it is that you want to reach. So when you start thinking about advertising with Google, you will have a very strong sense of the demographic of the people that you are targeting, and what those people are interested in. t doesn’t stop there because they will also tell us about their geography, where they are in the country, which languages they’re speaking, their behaviour in terms of how often they come to our website, it will tell us about their technology. It will tell us the about the browsers that they are using and the networks that they are using, it will tell us about them mobile, it will tell us about the devices.

Martin Henley12:39

So when I tell you that we do digital marketing, for the transparency, I’m not even joking, this takes the risk out of your your marketing investments, this makes it so that you, on the way in, can have a lot of confidence that you are doing the right things. This is a cycle and if the mission, which it is, is to know more, and more, and more about your market, every time you go through this cycle, you will learn more, and more, and more. Your marketing will become more, and more, and more efficient and effective and you will be more and more successful.

Martin Henley13:17

This is why we do digital marketing. So I will leave it there. I would love to see you on a Digital Marketing Institute digital marketing course at some point in the next year. I will wish you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year. I will suggest that maybe it will be a prosperous new year if you manage to get yourself some digital marketing skills, a digital marketing certificate and some digital marketing network, that might help you enormously. I will leave it there and I will wish you a very merry Googlemas, Christmas, Christmas.

Martin Henley

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