A Student’s Answer to Digital Marketing
So what is digital marketing? Well, I’m sure many of you know what it is. You have probably read somewhere about it, somewhere objective, business focused and dull. So let me give my own take on this. A student’s perspective if you will.Digital marketing is anything on the web that an entity has placed to either gain exposure or request some sort of call to action. To gain exposure is simple. The more people see your name the better. Sort of like placing an ad on a billboard as humans drive by. But call to action? Yes. When someone places an item on the web requesting you to click it, watch it, cuddle it, they want you(yes, you!) to do so for the benefit of an extra sale or two. Click the ad, enter sweepstakes, receive spam to your email. Lovely.But digital marketing is more than that. Why are so many companies jumping on the social media bandwagon? Because they too would like to have 4000 friends to spew their empty thoughts on? Maybe, but mostly to connect with you, the consumer. Say you went on a cruise or are looking to do so. Royal Caribbean has a Facebook page (probably a twitter and every other social sewage as well) in which people are asking questions as well as reading feedback from others that have already been on the cruises. Everything is done to build a brand, if you don’t know what a brand is, it is the connection between the product and the consumer. And what better way to connect to your consumers than to constantly chat with them?The search engine has evolved. Back in the day the static webpage would be crawled, assessed for it’s content and relevancy and ranked for certain keywords. Now though, it has become much more complex and for the better. A bot cannot judge whether something is relevant based on just reading webcode, but people can(that is to judge whether is something is relevant. Many of us cannot read webcode). In turn the search engine crawls social camps and based on how much “buzz” there is regarding what you are doing, your page will be ranked accordingly.Lets say you write an article, like what I am doing right here. I want to gain traffic through the keyword “What is digital marketing.” The more people read it, the more people “like” it, the more people give it a +1 and the longer people stay on this page the higher my page rank will be. The higher my page rank will be the more traffic it will generate. It’s a snowball effect. So if you really care about something and would like others to care about it as well make sure to share on Facebook or Twitter or the Google social thing(its like Google buzz but now it has circles).To end this long winded and tiring explanation, “What is digital marketing?” Firstly, its very important and can generate quite a bit of revenue depending on what you are trying to do. Secondly, it’s ever evolving. Marketing on the web today is not the same as marketing on the web tomorrow or yesterday. Its a battlefield out there, between all the people trying to win us over, the consumers. It is also not that difficult to be successful on the web. I mean, I have had only a few classes on how to market on the web and I am sure that in the near future this page will rank high.And that’s it, the end. I have answered, in my own words, what is digital marketing.