Digital Marketing Demystified: The Ultimate Guide to Success

1. Welcome to the Class : Welcome to Digital Marketing. Why? I'm so thrilled to have you here with me today. If we have not yet met before, It's such a pleasure to meet you. My name is Megan. I'm a digital marketing strategist with over ten years of experience. I am so excited to be teaching you digital marketing today in terms of what you can expect from this course, a key learning outcomes are for you to be able to understand exactly what is actually meant by the term digital marketing, as well as the basic concepts within this career path. And the very many, but a jog and the D gets thrown around. In addition to that, you're going to understand the difference between the different digital marketing platforms, as well as how they all fit together. And understand the role of a digital marketing strategist. That would be someone like me in a marketing agency or a marketing company, or a marketing team who's really putting together the key components of a digital marketing strategy, executing upon those elements and then reporting back to the business and in terms of what impacted so marketing is having on their specific KPIs. All of my classes are about removing the overwhelms, so we'll definitely do that as well. And instead, feel inspired to do digital better together. In terms of my background, I worked in the digital marketing agency space for a very long time, but I've also done two brands dense as a digital marketing manager, I'm very thrilled to be sharing with you guys exactly what I've learned from all of those roles combined. I've also been teaching social media marketing for the last three years or so, although I've never created a digital marketing course, social media strategy is of course, a subset of digital marketing. But I'm really excited to give you guys the full picture, the holistic bird's eye view. With this course, I am now working as a freelancer and a solopreneur. And I have a YouTube channel dedicated to helping people do digital better. So that's really what I'm all about. Tips, tricks, hacks, quick tutorials, you name it, please be sure to subscribe to me over there if you do want to stay in touch, the easiest way to get a hold of me is either leave me a comment on this course or leave me a comment to my latest video and I will always come back to you. You just need to make tell us on YouTube or you can scan the QR code that's on the screen so that we can get connected and stay connected in this wonderful realm of digital marketing strategy. 2. Your Project: Today's project is really just trying to understand where you're currently at with digital marketing and where we can get you to with this class. I really just want you to write down and articulate your current understanding of digital marketing before you get going with the class. And then come full circle and write a couple of paragraphs in terms of your new found understanding of digital marketing. I'm sure it's going to take you from 0 to hero because honestly, I just love explaining this topic. And I've also coached many other strategists with simple methodologies which are really going to help you to better understand this wonderful world of online. Next up I'd love for you should write down the five key benefits or digital marketing as you understand them at the end of this class. So really you're just going to end up with probably a one page of A4, which is really going to encompass how far you've come with this topic, which although seems overwhelming, once explained, really comes into its own, as well as the importance of that. Why is it important that companies are looking more and more into the online realm for answers? And How can digital marketing strategists like myself or you at the end of this class really offer them some of those solutions. 3. What is Digital Marketing?: Digital marketing is a vast and complex field, but I'm gonna be breaking it down in the simplest of terms so that you can understand it that much better. Let's first talk about the basics of digital marketing. So the boring definition is the digital marketing refers to any marketing efforts accusers, either electronic devices on the Internet. And it's a way for businesses to connect with the target audience, increase brand awareness, promote their products and services online and so forth. But unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is highly measurable, which means that businesses can track they ROI, return on investment, and adjust campaigns accordingly. And throughout digital marketing includes a wide range of components such as search engine optimization or SEO, search engine marketing, SCM, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and much more. Whilst each component serves a slightly different purpose together they create a cohesive digital marketing ecosystem. But there's going to be what is going to help businesses to achieve their goals. In today's digital age, digital marketing has become that much more important than ever before. Consumers are spending a significant amount of time online, whether it's browsing social media, searching for information or of course, making online purchases. Digital marketing allows businesses to reach that target audience exactly where they're spending their time, creating more opportunities for both engagement and conversions. And as technology continues to evolve, digital marketing is going to continue to adapt and change that we can expect to see more advancements in artificial intelligence, ai, virtual and augmented reality and voice search. And the future of digital marketing is super exciting because the businesses that are staying ahead of that curve are the ones that'll have their competitive edge. Digital marketing is of course, an essential part of any businesses marketing strategy. As a result, it's a cool way to reach a wider audience, increased brand awareness and drive conversions online in a fully measurable way. Whether you're a small business owner or a marketing professional, understanding the basics of digital marketing is going to be critical in helping you stand apart in today's digital age. 4. What does a Digital Marketing Manager do?: In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you exactly what a digital marketing manager is, what they do and my top tips for becoming one, Let's start out with asking, what is a digital marketing manager? Well, in theory, they are the person in a company who is accountable for developing, implementing, and managing digital marketing campaigns and always on platforms, what does the digital marketing manager do? The typical responsibilities of the position include building, planning, and implementing the overall digital marketing strategy. Staying up to date with the latest technology and best practices. Managing all of the digital marketing towels with the support of either an in-house team or members of an agency. And this includes overseeing all of the social media accounts of that company. So this can include things like content creation, influencer marketing, community management, which is when you actually just monitoring and responding to inbound social media queries and sentiment analysis, which is when you use fancy tick to monitor what is being said about your business across social media. You are also responsible for measuring return on investment or I, as well as KPIs, or key performance indicators. And managing things like SEO, search engine optimization, and Google Analytics, which will dictate what the quality and quantity of traffic to your website it's like you're also responsible for mobile marketing, whether that be SMS or WhatsApp and e-mail marketing. And you're also responsible for preparing and managing digital marketing budgets. And crucially, this is going to include all of your digital media span. So I think Google search, google Display, often called GDN, paid social media and mole few. I have been a Digital Marketing Manager for two different brands. And although the roles were quite different, I would say that this explanation is pretty much all encompassing with a few minor nuances for the retail brand that I worked for. I also had physical infrastructure within my portfolio. So think WiFi, digital wayfinding, outdoor digital signage and so forth. So the term digital wasn't referring purely to the online space, but to some hardware elements too. Due to the large nature of the company, it was a more corporate environment, so they had a heavier reliance on agencies in order to get the work done. So this would mean that the role included a lot of agency into action meetings and internal alignment. There was also a big focus on gift vouchers, digital bartering. So despite it being a physical property primarily, there was more and more thought being given to e-commerce type eat considerations for the property brand. On the other hand, I operated more as a digital project manager. I reported into a Head of Digital instead of into a head of marketing as I was doing and the previous role. And I worked a lot on mentally emailers and bi-annual catalogs to market luxury her I worked closely with a head of social, so I didn't have any real social media responsibility either. I would say that one of the biggest determining factors in the nature of the digital marketing role is going to be that team structure. So if you are interfering for roll like this, there would be five questions in hindsight that I would ask. First of all, who else works across the digital portfolio? Secondly, how many agencies to use and what is the scope or ramus of the work? Number three, who is responsible for social media? Number four, what are the primary digital marketing channels for the business? And five, what are the skills that your ideal candidate possesses? I've put all of these in the description box below. If you are interviewing for a role soon, but best of luck, and I hope they have pros and cons of being a digital marketing manager. I would say that my top three pros were number one, no two days are ever the same. I loved getting to stay on top of trends and best practice that could huge amounts of data and still get to satisfy my creativity. It is an incredibly rewarding job if you're willing to work hard and you have a super curious mind, all the skills which you hone in this position are hugely valuable. So data analysis, e.g. is incredibly sought after an well-paid. You'd have plenty exposure to this. Think Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, and any CRM or customer relationship management tools you may use, as well as understanding newsletter stats like open rates or click-through rates and so much more. If you do enjoy this particular focus, I would also suggest looking at roles which are paid media focus, as they rely on a thorough understanding of data in order to excel. As such, data heavy digital marketing roles are typically very well-paid. Other incredible exposure that I received was the world of project management. So it isn't a single company which doesn't need some form of project management. Even if you decide the digital isn't the one, you will have plenty to fall back on. Next pro is that age is nothing but a number. So despite being in my late '20s when occupying these positions, I still felt like I had a lot to bring to the table in terms of specialist knowledge. To put it into perspective, I've been working in digital marketing since 2011. So despite being relatively young, I still have a lot of experience in the field. And I have a huge passion for talking about it, which I hope always shows cons of the job. Of course, there are always comes. First of all, there is a lot a stakeholder buy-in and bigger corporate companies and trying to consistently explain and re-explain and justify the value of digital marketing can be super ideas. It's sometimes felt like my passion for all things like WhatsApp. But TikTok, trends and the latest productivity tool wasn't necessarily shared with the team. This would probably be quite different in a startup environment. But if you are in an environment that is anything close to corporate, be prepared to be super resilient and relentless? Number two, they can be a lot of pressure and stress. Yes, of course, you're not saving lives, but you are typically dealing with one huge amounts of money to legally binding contracts with agencies. Three, tight timelines for newsletter databases which are millions strong, and number five, personally identifiable data, the list goes on. So if you are looking for a straightforward job which doesn't have complexity and change, it's unlikely you would enjoy this position and last seat, your relationships with the team members and agencies will make or break use. So whether they're good or bad, that's really going to be your experience. 5. Benefits of Digital Marketing: Let's talk about why digital marketing is so important. So digital marketing helps you to reach a larger audience than you could otherwise through traditional methods. And talk at the prospects who are most likely to buy your product or service. So the best way to expand it as think of maybe a billboard for argument's sake. This is something which you have very little control over. Who's walking past that bull board. And you're not sure how many people saw the billboard, how many people then actually went and bought your products? And digital marketing is really the antithesis of that. So it's actually saying, I want this very specific subset of an audience which is clearly defined by x, y, and z parameters. And I'm going to target them on the platforms where I know that they are. Then measure every single point in which they have engaged with those various platforms and to what effect that had on my bottom line. So it's a lot more cost-effective, which allows us to actually do that and be a lot more laser-focused, in addition to being a lot more laser-focused in terms of the target parameters, it's also more cost-effective. So if you can consider how much something like a TV commercial would take for a company to produce versus sitting down and shooting a TikTok and then paying to promote that. That's a really a massive discrepancy between the above the line channel, which is TV radio, more traditional means compared to digital, which is a lot more loci, low cost and often far more high impact. A lot of arguments as to why a company would go the digital route as opposed to the traditional route. And of course, that key components of measurement. In addition to that, I really want to bring your attention to the other various benefits of digital marketing, which of course links back to your project assignments. So please do pay attention on this slide, particularly in terms of a few major benefits of digital marketing, you can focus your efforts to be only on the prospects who are most likely to purchase your product or service. So the best example here would be something like Google search. If someone has already typing something into Google search, it's very indicative that they are what we call a warm lead and marketing. So they are already actively seeking out your product or service. So they are already actively seeking out your product and service, which means they are very much more likely to convert when you serve them ads. And a very easy way to check out for that particular product or service specifically, when it comes to e-commerce. Number two, as I mentioned, it's more cost-effective than many of the outbound marketing platforms because of the lower cost of production as well as distribution. With Facebook or Instagram ads, for example, you can spend as little as $100 and see great returns on that $100, whereas that wouldn't go anywhere. In the traditional marketing wrong. Numbers three is the digital marketing really does even the playing field within the industry and allow you to compete with bigger brands. So we see oftentimes the startups will be hiring for people like growth marketers and that kind of thing, which are really trying to hack the progress of a particular business in the digital marketing sense. And just because they budgets are smaller, oftentimes it'll mean that they will use more aggressive online targets in order to reach their KPIs. So gone are the days where the bigger your budget, the better. So gone are the days really are the bigger the budget, the bigger the market share. Although there's still a correlation, of course, in digital marketing, there are many companies which have small marketing budgets, who have employed the best of the best and are therefore we're getting great bang for their buck on digital and it often, and oftentimes actually outperforming bigger competitors. Number four is, of course, a digital marketing is measurable, like I mentioned in the beginning, it is so specific from the very beginning to the very end. So you're targeting a very profiled person, monitoring how many times they've seen it, impressions, how many times they've clicked on something using a KPI, like a click-through rates. And then once they have gotten to your website, are they converting, how long are they staying on that page? Are they bouncing off the website? All of these are KPIs that we're able to get within digital marketing. We will of course, touched on this when we speak about web marketing concepts. But a big part of what a digital strategist will do is look at the data which is presented using all of these different platforms back ends to unpack, as I said, efficacy of, for example, Google search boosters, Google despair. What are the two bringing to the party in terms of the ultimate KPI of that brand. And therefore, that is something that you're then going to bring into that iterative process and establish a month after month, which are the ways in which you should be putting the most of your effort. If you're familiar with the 8020 rule, of course, this says that 80 per cent of your results typically come from 20% of your effort. So what does that 20% of effort that we should really be honing in on growing and what can we leave out or mitigate? Number five is that it's much easier to adapt a digital marketing strategies. So think about how long a production process something is like producing a magazine. If for example, something changes at the last minute, like let's say you need to turn the telephone number or a URL or something in the ad copy needs to be amended. You have minced meat when it comes to traditional forms of marketing, it's not easy to pivot or change. Whereas with digital marketing, if you had an issue with an ad or something wasn't performing, you'd simply log into the backend of that specific platform and fix it. So it really is quite an empowering field to be in. Digital marketing can also improve your conversion rates and the quality of leads given the granularity of the data. A bit better able to understand the leads that came from this platform are converting a whole lot better. Therefore, we need more of the specific kind of leads. Whereas with traditional marketing that would be hotter. And you can also engage your audience at every single stage with digital marketing. So it's a lot more high frequency. So if you think about something like Instagram stories or even Twitter fleets, we're able to engage our customers very many times and give them very many opportunities to engage with us on multiple different platforms before ultimately they choose to convert. Whereas as I said with the TV example, maybe they only had the opportunity to watch one TV commercial because that is all the company had budgeted for. The unwritten benefit number eight, which is not in the slide deck, but as something that's also quite close to my heart, is that age ain't nothing but a number in the digital marketing realm. So oftentimes you'll see top talent with digital marketing is very young because we are the generation that have grown up with digital marketing. So if you are a young person coughing onto a career in digital marketing is a really fulfilling one because oftentimes, people who are further in their career don't want to take five steps back and go through this process of learning a whole new form of marketing. So definitely also bear in mind that it can be a magnificent way to actually set yourself apart from some of your older competitors with your digital marketing understanding. 6. Owned / Earned / Paid: Let's talk about digital marketing channels. So the tunnel palettes, as I like to call it on, digital marketing, is very broad. So you can be using any number of these platforms, or you could just be using one or two. Most of the time, I love to express this as a spider diagram when I'm trying to understand a particular clients digital marketing ecosystem. In the middle, I simply put the word digital. And around that I'll put all the platforms that are currently being used by a particular brand. Sometimes I will put things in gray where I think they don't currently have a platform, but there is scope for them to expand to that. Oftentimes with my strategies, I will express where there's opportunity is using a spider diagram. But really here we need to look at the fact that in addition to every single individual social media platform that a brand could be on, they also have the opportunity to explore what impact their website, just having, how they CRM efforts or customer relationship marketing efforts are impacting their bottom line, as well as things like email marketing and paid digital media. So as I mentioned, is of course both are paid and organic side of all of the social media platforms. But then from a pure-play paid perspective, we also have opportunities to look at things like Google search or Google display, which is banner advertising, which we'll see on third party sites. So really they are quite a lot of options. In addition to this, not all websites are made equal. So when we consider just the pure proliferation of how many different web technologies they are out there. It really helps to appreciate what it is that a digital marketing strategist is doing. So you could have bought your website on Wix or Squarespace, which are both easy drag-and-drop builders. Or you could have a lot of developers involved because maybe the tech stack, as we call it as a bit more complicated using something like Wordpress or a company is e-commerce focused and therefore their ecosystem lives on Shopify. Then over and above, this is always a measurement layer which typically includes things like Google Analytics and Google Data Studio, which are tools looking at monitoring the efficacy of these platforms, as well as tools like PageSpeed Insights, which we'll discuss later in this class, which are going to help you to optimize the performance of your website and therefore help you with your search engine optimization. In addition to the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, clubhouse. There's also, of course, the third party tools which analysts and strategists are using in order to make sure the content goes out as it should at a time when the most of the audiences online, which of course is another thing they would get from one of their data points. And then typically going to be using some sort of scheduling software or community management tool like a HootSuite as Sprout Social or later.com thing. When we talk about a mailer and verbal perspective, there are a bunch of different competitor email tools which a client may be using, which include things like MailChimp, mail or light and sharp spring, and any mobile tools that they may be using over and above that, like let's say WhatsApp for business or the wife's app marketing API. Really, there's a lot to contend with as a strategist and as a business to make sure that your digital marketing efforts are performing as they should. In terms of our media mix, like I mentioned, the key distinction that you will definitely need to understand and be aware of in the digital marketing space is the difference between the organic content as well as paid content. Organic content, just to recap, would be any unpaid posts, tweets which Ghana attention through the content itself. So it might go viral because it actually has some kind of inherent interests that people are interested in finding something more out about that company or about that particular topic. Whereas paid content, you're really paying for those eyeballs. Sometimes the content is not very engaging. If you think of something like a YouTube pre-roll ad, typically it's not very exciting, but because the brand is putting a lot of budget behind that, it's still being able to get the message across. With social media. Specifically, it's often referred to as a pay-to-play environment. Because whilst the perception may be that if you had a 100 thousand fans and you posted a particular piece of content, that a 100 thousand people would see it. We know, of course, thanks to the algorithm, that is not the case. Even if the content is good, we're having to augment that with paid support, which is going to help ensure that our message gets out there. So social can be both organic and paid depending on whether that post is promoted or nights with is some kind of money running behind it. Whereas something like Google search ads or Google display ads would always fall within the paired realm because you can't run them unless you have a credit card attached to the back end of that platform. A slightly different way of discerning between the platforms is this notion of Earned, paid and earned. This often comes up in the digital marketing ROM. So in order to make sense of how the platforms really fit together, people often use this classification as well. So in addition to just distinguishing between paid and organic, sometimes people will distinguish between Earned paid and earned. So paid would be the same as paid in our previous example, but earned on, earned as really the difference here would be more stuff like PR and stuff that people are saying about you. Whereas owned media is something that is within your control, like your web properties, your website or mobile site, your blog, or your e-mail marketing. So if you want to use the second distinction or second grouping, you can consider the fact that paid media includes any kind of media coverage that has been paid for. The key benefits of paid media is that it's an immediate impact. So if you have a campaign going live on the 1st of June, guess what? You're paid media is going to start the first of June, if not before, with the teaser campaign. It's also going to help support your search engine optimization efforts because you are going to help drive people to a particular website and unpack the insights from that. It's also going to help with branding and trust. Whereas owned media is things within your control, like websites and STO. The benefits is of course you have that control, but there's not necessarily that immediate impact. So it can take a very long time for a blog post to get picked up by or search algorithms. And the Istio impact is a little bit slower. So this would be your website, your microsite or blog, as well as email marketing. Then there's earned media which you have very little control over. Its media exposure that comes without payment and is often referred to as p. So this is media exposure in, through media outreach can include things like customer reviews, content shares on social media interactions. So the benefits, of course are it's free, it's trusted by readers because it's word of mouth. And it's also a nice way to get your brand and the mix, but it's not something that you necessarily have the most amount of control over. So whilst they all have their pros and cons, they really do need to be working together to make sure that you have a well-rounded presence online. 7. Digital Marketing Strategy : Next up, let's talk about digital marketing strategy. So the necessity of a strategist is definitely as a result of the proliferation of online platforms. So if we consider from a digital experiences perspective that we have content marketing, search engine optimization, paid media, social media, e-mail marketing, multi-channel analytics, as well as both always on campaigns and then the integrated planning component. We have always on marketing initiatives, as well as marketing initiatives which have start and end dates. And it means that marketers have to facilitate positive customer experiences across a very large quantity of platforms in order to communicate effectively at scale by virtue of the number of platforms as well as the data that's actually being created by these platforms. So if for example, we take John Wanamaker is famous quote about advertising. He paused in 1922 to give you an indication of his generation. Heats said Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half. He of course, did not exist in the digital marketing era. Where here we have too much data. We're really inundated with data sources from things like our websites, our CRM data, purchase data, social data, any kind of smart TV data, third-party data like you can get from bureau's as well as mobile data. So really it's more about making sense of these data points and creating meaningful insights as a result of them. So this has created major shifts in marketing where we used to have quite an uninformed buyer. We now have a very informed buyer who's probably watched a YouTube video comparison about that exact topic. They may have done research across multiple price comparison websites. And therefore, they really know what is what when it comes to purchasing your product or service. In addition to that, from a marketing standpoint where marketing used to be outbound, mass vary and personalized and probably be quite disjointed. It now has to be inbound, attracting people into the fold with a focus and personalized approach. Integrating our customer experience across channels and devices with mobile at the core, because we know that this is where a lot of our customers are spending the majority of their time. From a channel perspective, it used to be majority offline. Now it's majority online with a handful of offline platform still being important from an operational standpoint of accompany, where it was more manual with more siloed departments and more siloed data. Now, there's this need to automate, enable, and connect all of our data sources to have a single view of the truth. From a measurement perspective. This was activity-based, whereas now it's continuous. From an organizational perspective. Again, we're moving from a siloed approach to an integrated approach. So the platforms and different departments really need to work with one another using things like APIs to really aggregate the various platforms that are being used in order to have a clear view on the bigger picture. From a skills perspective, advertising was just to create a career path, whereas now it can be an analytic space in addition to that creativity that's required. And from a cultural perspective where it used to be rigid and top-down. Guess what? Because digital marketing is such an important skill, now we find teams that are a lot more flexible and collaborative and agile, with oftentimes younger members of the team being responsible for digital marketing. These changes have forced businesses to radically adapt so where they were minimally limited or had no experience in digital technologies, then now getting to a place of transformation. So that's where the term digital transformation, of course, it's coming from. It's this continuous action on focusing on your customer and focusing on the digitization of the world. And a digital marketing strategist or digital marketing consultant is going to help you to really navigate all the steps in that journey. So this has really made digital marketing strategy more important than ever before. So we're needing to look at the various initiatives that we could potentially undertake. And then we're going to assess them from the standpoint of impact as well as effort. Impacts are things that affect our bottom line. Help us achieve our key objectives and hopefully support our long term vision. And the effect is really going to show us what is our perceived ease of implementation of that specific project. What is the time-frame record for that project, and what kind of resources in the way of people are investments do we need to make? And oftentimes this will result in some sort of matrix like you can see on the right-hand side, which is going to ascertain whether something is maybe high effort and low impact, you're going to forget about it. Whereas if something is low effort and high impact, that is an absolute no-brainer of something you should be doing. Not only in the digital marketing space, but probably in the marketing space as well. Let's consider for a moment, what is the old school definition of strategy? It doesn't need to be digital strategy. Strategy as a discipline. So strategy is something that generally involves setting those goals as well as your priorities and determining the actions that are going to be needed to be undertaken in order to meet those goals. How are we mobilizing our resources to execute on those actions? And therefore, the strategy is going to be the articulation of that. So it's really saying, what are we setting out to do and what are the ways in which we are going to be doing that. So that is where terms like strategic planning and strategic thinking come in. It's all about a team of specialists looking at the data on hand. And matching it up with the resources within a business in order to drive a particular business action. I love this quote by IG best suit, which says without strategy content is dressed staff and the world has enough staff. So we don't want to be creating content for content sake. Just like we don't want to be doing email marketing. For email marketing sake, it really applies to any of the aspects of digital marketing. We want to make sure that whatever we are undertaking is for a particular purpose and is really serving our business interests. So then let's think about what a digital strategy is. The definition of a digital strategy is that we're establishing that overall direction. But from a purely digital standpoint, key to the strategy is a definition for some kind of digital vision. So that would be acting as our North Star. And the business can then follow that. This is going to provide you with some sort of purpose to align your organization as well as any of the marketing or tech teams. And it's fundamental to that ambition of your business. So really if you can think about business objectives sitting at the very top, marketing objectives sitting beneath that, and digital marketing sitting beneath that. Really what we're looking to do is work our way back up in terms of width of platforms that fall within our control as digital marketers, how can we then support our marketing objectives which sit above us, and the business objectives which sit above those are digital strategy is going to be the articulation of the channels, the assets, the platforms, and the tools in order to achieve these objectives and deliver the results. And of course, what are the resources that we require in order to do that by way of birth, budgets and human capital. Whether or not your strategy is from a marketing standpoint, there's always some kind of diagnosis that gets done by a strategist or a consultant. So oftentimes we'll use things like swat analysis or audits in order to understand what I like to call the lay of the land. So what is it that a business is doing well at and where can it improve? They would then start to put together guiding policies for dealing with this specific challenge. So what are the ways that we can mitigate this issue? What are some of the ways that we can actually amplify the things that we are really doing well. And then setting a band, a set of targeted actions that are going to be necessary in order to accomplish a policy. And that's really what a strategist and a strategy is doing when I teach digital marketing strategy. On the other hand, what I like to always boil it down to is an approach which really isn't affordable and simple way for anyone to conduct a digital marketing strategy, which is a four-step process, auditing what are businesses currently doing, developing a strategy for them, executing it and all the tools involved in actually making it happen and then measure an execute. So it kind of speaks a bit more to that four-step iterative process. So really that is what I always teach and coach in my classes. Because unless you wanting to go that more corporate route, that's typically something that you would find yourself doing as a digital marketing strategist. And this is how I articulate it. So an audit would be assessing your digital marketing presence and comparison to that of your competitors as well as your industry. And identifying those gaps as well as some kind of health school. So being able to evaluate yourself a bit more objectively. Then we get to the development phase, which is where we set our goals and select our most appropriate digital marketing platforms in order to achieve our goals. We then look at what we need to execute. So how do we develop a plan and how do we implement this? And then what does that measurement framework look like? So another big role of a digital marketing strategist will be outlining the KPIs within a KPI framework or a KPI framework, depending on whether you're referring to key performance indicators or key performance areas. But these are really ways in which a business can articulate what does success look like and how do we help to get them. 8. How to conduct a SWOT Analysis: In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you guys how to conduct a swat analysis for a business as a digital marketing strategist, this is a tool that I use the super often in order to understand a particular business prior to conducting maybe a digital marketing or social media ordered for them. It allows me to get to grips with a lay of the land when I'm onboarding a new client, especially however, I use it more broadly than that. It's actually a lot more far-reaching, of course, than just using it for digital marketing. But I'm hoping that by sharing my process in this video, I can help others hold up a microscope to evade business or maybe that of a client's for the purposes of app leveling, improving, and enhancing businesses. If you are new to my channel, welcome, my name is makes an every week or at least take tutorials helping you do digital bands. So first off, what is the swat analysis actually stand for? Sweat, simply stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The purpose of a swat analysis is really to create an understanding where you are at today so that you can build a better future for your business. The simplest way to complete a swat analysis is to hop into a room with a whiteboard and brainstorm. This can be with your planning team, with your executive team, you can pick, but you really want to do this as a group to fill-in your sweat. If you'd like to take it to the next level, you can actually layer data into your swat analysis thereafter, this would likely include things like key performance indicators or KPIs, or maybe just your current performance over the last quarter, the last year, maybe last two or three years, whatever it's going to make the most sense for you and your business. If like me, you're operating in a digital marketing space, you will have absolutely no shortage of data. So think Google Analytics, Facebook, Instagram insights, e-mail, newsletter data and so on. Other sources of data could be employee or staff interviews, customer research, and so forth. It is best to do a swat analysis, bullet point style, with the end goal of really creating a one-pager which is going to help you to drive business forward. You might also want to display it in your office or maybe on your Intranet, on a wiki. Maybe you use Notion. So you want it to become kind of like a living breathing tool which is going to help your business moving forward. My preference is to conduct while using Google Slides, which is of course collaborative. Then I love using the slides go website for templates. So chances are you can really find all the business infographics and icons you might be needed if you're wanting to present your swat analysis before we start filling in the quadrants, it's helpful to remember that strengths and weaknesses are rarely things which are within your control. So you have a direct impact on these factors. Whereas the external quadrants can only be influenced but not directly impacted. So let's jump into strengths. Strengths are really those internal positive attributes of your company. Where useful questions you may want to ask yourself would be things like which business processes, products, or services are really working for us. What acids do we have in our Teams? Is it maybe knowledge, Education, Network skills, or reputation? What are the physical assets that we have, such as customers, equipment, technology, cash or patterns which are intrinsically valuable. And maybe what are some of those competitive advantages that we have within the industry? The next step we want to be looking at weaknesses. And weaknesses are of course, the negative factors which are going to detract from our strings. So these are things we need to improve on in order to be more competitive within the marketplace. And questions that we're gonna be asking ourselves here would be things like, what are the business processes that we need to improve upon? Or they may be tangible assets that our company needs. So e.g. could that be capital equipment and so forth? Are there gaps in our team, perhaps from an HR perspective, and it's our location ideal for our success. So to summarize in these two quadrants, you're going to be asking what you're doing really well and what you identify as things that need work. Your biggest attractors, in other words, Next on our agenda are the opportunities. Opportunities are external factors in your business environments that are likely to contribute to future success. So some of my favorite questions to ask here would include things like, is our market growing and other trends which are encouraging people to potentially buy more of what we're selling or their upcoming events that our company might be able to take advantage of in order to grow our business or the upcoming changes to things like regulations that are going to positively impact our company. And if our business is up and running, what are our customers actually think of as next time, let's chat through threats. It's traits are those external factors that we have no control over. But we probably want to consider putting in place contingency plans in order to deal with them should they occur? The questions here that we're likely to be asking ourselves would be things like, how easily can potential competitors actually enter into our marketplace? Future developments in technology really impact how we do business and is consumer behavior going to negatively impact our business in the future? Are they potentially market trends which are likely to become? This section is all about considering trends impacting the market a bit more broadly and your industry a little bit more holistically. So you want to help support your business in areas like innovation, agility, and relevance. It'd be mindful of the fact here though, the weaknesses can sometimes seem like they are opportunities. So you do want to just be clear on what is within your control and what is not within your control before you assign that quadrant or this swat analysis is a super useful planning tool. The main criticism, this tool is that the points are each rarely reflected with equal priority, which means that the sweat is not accounting for the inevitable differences in weightings in a way around this is actually getting our participants to add a star or maybe a dot next to the three strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that they deemed to be the most important. Or ideally, you'd want to deduce this from the data regardless though, I think it's a fantastic tool for us to implement within our businesses as it gives us a sound bed, simple methodology with which to unpack our business considerations in a super constructive manner. 9. Components of a Digital Marketing Strategy : So let's talk about the key components of a digital marketing strategy. So regardless of the approach that you take, they will always be objectives and a goal-setting exercise. You will have to have a articulation of your target market or a persona which represents that. Thirdly, you would need your channel palate. So those would be you actually choosing which of the social media and digital marketing platforms you're opting to go for. The fourth one would be some sort of engagement blueprints or a summary of what your proposed activities, as well as a KPI framework which is articulating what success will look like if that strategy is a great roaring. Success, as well as the budgets and the timelines which needs to be taken into consideration. When it comes to objectives and goals settings. Of course, whenever we talk about objectives, we like to consider smart objectives which are specific, measurable, action, orientated, realistic, and timed. So we do want to make sure that whatever we're sitting about to do, we're not going to set ourselves up for failure. We then want to look at our target market and persona's and make sure that we've defined a target audience that really articulates who it is that recreating that content full beard, organic or paid. And better understand how to create content that caters to our wants and needs, as well as ways in which to increase engagement as well as conversations. The easiest way to do that is through a persona. And the persona, of course, does require research on the brand's perspective. So you can use Facebook's Insights, Instagram insights, any of the backend analytics platforms on the social media tools to understand who is it that actually already likes our page? And how do we attract more of that sort of person to our audience? It can also be informal questions asked to customers in surveys, like, how did you hear about us? What do you think of us? And so much more, as well as an online poll, maybe you using LinkedIn or Twitter as Paul functionality. I would suggest revisiting any of your previous marketing research that you may have done in the past and asking yourself if it's still holds true. And you're welcome to use my template when a kid comes to creating. And you're welcome to use my template when it comes to creating your persona because I liked the way that this one is laid out. It really covers what this person's interests are, what their device preferences, or the digital touch points, as well as some of their firmly held beliefs about this particular category. In addition to this, you can think about the five key things which typically make up a persona, which are their interests, demographics, thoughts, needs, and desires. Once you've created your customer persona, you may want to take them through this journey mapping exercise. So here you can see this company is persona was called jumping Jamie, and Jamie needs to switch her current mobile plan. She wants a plan that can save her money without having to sacrifice usage limits in terms of expectations, she wants care online information, the ability to compare the plans as well as friendly and helpful customer support. And the persona is walked through a number of different aspects in this purchase journey to unpack what are some of those key opportunities? And then what are the metrics that are going to help to determine what that success looks like. So it can be very helpful to map your customers against a specific set of actions to see where it is that you could actually help support them in that journey as a brand or as a business. Other thing that we do need to bear in mind when we're thinking about things like customer persona's as well as journey mapping is people are predictably irrational. So there's definitely a lot of components to psychology, as well as digital marketing where people are acting in strange ways. So we need to consider what are some of the things that are driving customers to make particular purchases. There are two kinds of indicators which can often be helpful to consider. Extrinsic motivators are things like limited time specials and discounts. If a customer is motivated by a perceived cost-saving and the urgency to act before the offer is revoked. Of course, they're more likely to take a particular action if they believe that there's a scarcity in this specific industry and their availability is limited of a product. Of course, again, going to take action. Loyalty programs which offer extrinsic rewards like coupons, exclusive access or free gifts in order to help people to make that conversion or purchase. As well as ancillary benefits like free parking at your favorite shopping center if you spend over a particular amount at a specific store, or free content with downloads and exchange for your contact details, often called a trip wire or a lead magnet. There's a whole host of different psychological ways in which digital marketers and marketers are helping to get customers to make a particular decision. Even though, as I said, we're quite irrational beings. They may be intrinsic factors, which they may also be intrinsic factors which are, They may also be intrinsic factors which is going to decide whether or not we do something. So it could be love, not just romantic love, but of course the level of an activity or a specific outcome, enjoyment, fun, self-expression, achievement or competence, as well as maybe some negative intrinsic motivators like fear, embarrassment, inertia are very powerful drivers that rely on our negative emotions to digital marketing is not purely a case of doing what is rational and what is logical, but also playing into some of these traditional, but also playing into some of these age old market t, but also playing into some of these age old marketing techniques which are really moving you towards a particular point. And so when you do that journey mapping exercise, you might uncover that they are strange things that people are doing as a result of maybe one of these psychological phenomenon. And maybe that is something that you can sit it playing into in order to help your business really excel from a digital marketing standpoint. 10. Google my Business Listing: Before you go ahead and set up your website, there is one thing that you should absolutely investigate and see if you can do for your business. And then instead of a Google, My Business listing, often also referred to as a Google business profile. This is really important because it's really going to help you in the search engine results page when you go ahead and create that website. Or in the interim, it could be something that she set up to just make sure that is that place holder in terms of what your business is all about. So if, for example, you go to google.com forward slash business, you'll see that on the overview page. It's giving you the fact that you're able to engage with customers on Google for free creates a great business profile which looks like this one on the right hand side, little sprouts. And there's some things that then people take for granted, like the fact that you can actually create offers on Google, My Business, which is lovely, of course you can call the business, get directions to the business, have a message be sent as well as set-up your website URL, given ways for the customer to actually reach you. And you do get some basic analytics in terms of how many people are looking at your profile. So here, for example, you can see what were the views of little sprout? What are the searches and harder activity relate? And so that's really going to give you a good idea in the same way that Google Analytics is going to show you how your web traffic is doing. And maybe something like Facebook Insights. It's going to show you how your Facebook pages doing. Similarly, this of course, is going to give you some insight. Then the other thing you can of course, do is go into the FAQs and see what exactly is a business profile. Here. It's really expanding the fact that it's going to be a place for you to list your address, your phone number, your business, website hours, and match more. If, for example, you are looking for a digital marketing agency and Cape Town, you will notice that in addition to the web listing appearing on the left-hand side there, prominent set of real estate displaying on the right-hand side, which is going to be pictures. It's gonna be that MapLocation as well as reviews. Definitely what I would suggest when you go ahead and set up your Google, My Business listing for the first time is good friends and family to review in order to get that five-star rating. And then it really is learning a lot of legitimacy to this business. It's going to link up all the profiles which are appearing on that left-hand side, as well as showing what people also search for. So it's definitely a key piece of real estate that you need regardless of whether or not you have a website or not. So in order to do this and sick when App you something and assign into Google My Business. And here for example, you will see some that I have set up. So let's go to this one, Neumann architecture and design. So this is what the back end looks like. It's going to give you the opportunity to create a post out a photo, or creates an ad. Posts. You'll see, I don't think I have created any for this client, but instead I have gone ahead and done the brilliant basics, which is filling in the information about the client. So I've filled in the opening hours, as well as the phone number, the website address. I've given, the Instagram profile and so much more. And then in terms of those insights like we mentioned, you'll see that you're going to get some rudimentary kind of graphs just to show you exactly how you are ranking, how you're searching, who's searching for you. And of course, that's going to be invaluable as a small business owner. And then again, you want those reviews to be as positive as possible in order to help you seem as legitimate as can be messages. We currently have this turned off, but you can put it on and actually see that you can request a quote through this as well, as well as any photos. Definitely, I would suggest getting some high res photos going on. So for example, here I've uploaded the full logo as well as some pictures of the beautiful architecture that this company undertakes. That is, the picture of the business from outside. So people know what I'm looking for if I'm actually coming for a meeting. So all just very helpful staff as well as the Street View. You will see that of course, Google, My Business is something that I would strongly suggest as a small business entity, something that you sit up again, it appears very prominently on the right-hand side and it is going to help you with your search engine efforts when you are looking at your website. So I hope that this has helped to encourage you to get going with your Google, My Business profile. 11. Important Web Concepts: Let's talk about web concepts next. So the web is really something that is often oversimplified, but often one of the most complicated things in digital marketing strategist will contend with. So at face value, of course, a website is a very simple thing to understand and appreciate. So it's just a set of related webpages located under a single domain name, which is typically produced by personal organization. They are about 1.8 billion websites online. And there's eight main types of these. So it's homepages, magazine websites, e-commerce websites, blogs, portfolio websites, landing pages, social media websites, as well as directory websites. But of course, there's a whole lot more nuance to this in order for us to get the visibility that we need on our website in addition to the paid media efforts that we're going to be undertaking, we would need to make sure that we are optimized for search engines, or search engine optimized, which is where ACOs comes in. Simple terms. It's really the process of improving your site and its visibility in a way that it's going to rank well in search results. So oftentimes we'll see syrup being referred to SERP search engine results page. So what are some of the tactics that we can employ on our website to make sure that something like Google or Bing can easily read what is contained within our site. And therefore ensure that it is served when someone is Googling that particular search term. The better the visibility you have in your search engine results page, the better your results are likely to be from both a current customer and prospective customer standpoint. Really, businesses are investing huge amounts of money to make sure that there is SEO efforts are taken care of. So SEO is seen as a bit of a dark art because it's something that becomes quite technical quite quickly. But some of the key concepts which you may just want to jot down. The fact that you're making things accessible by a search engine. So something like an image, it's not necessarily the case that the search engine knows what that image is about. So therefore, there'll be things like Meta tags or image tags which helped define what is actually in that image. And same with something like a video. A search engine may not necessarily know the contents of that video, so you need to give it a title, you'd need to describe it. You'd need to give it some sort of Meta tags around what is the content contained in that video and that kind of thing. The other thing that you do need to give credence to from an SEO or search engine optimization perspective is the hierarchy of information. So you might hear people talking about H1 tags, H2 tags. These are simply different kinds of heading tags which are indicating to the search engine that this is a key part of what this article is about. So things like the length of the article, the keyword density, definitely factors which are going to play a role in terms of how well your website ranks. Seo efforts are really garnering a lot of attention from brands. On the other side, if you do not have a search engine optimized website, what will typically happen is you'll have to compensate with paid media efforts. Because Google, for example, can see that your website has a slow loading speed. It is not mobile optimized, and there may be several user experience issues. You're going to have to pay double, triple, or four times the amount that someone with a high-speed website that is very optimized for the latest Google algorithm because really they're giving implicit signs to Google that this is quality content, whereas you may be on not. And therefore you're going to have to pay in order to motivate the search engine to show your results at all. Something which also comes up often in the web concept space is that of responsive design. Responsive designs simply means that designs dynamically change depending on what device they are being rendered. So if for example, you look on a big screen like maybe you've got a big, beautiful Mac and it's a desktop. And then next thing you are looking on your iPhone and it's a totally different aspect ratio on a very small screen, a responsive design is one which is able to really comfortably adapt depending on which device it is being rendered. And that is something that search engines do take into account in terms of knowing that the majority of traffic is typically coming from a mobile device. And therefore, if you haven't considered the mobile experience, it's unlikely that you'd have a good search engine optimisation ranking in addition to the face value upfront thing that we see when we hit a particular URL. There's also what is called a content management system or CMS. This is a commonly referred to as the back end of a website. Websites are in fact not superficial. There are a lot of internal processes that they use. A cannot see. The backend of your website is where you can update software published blogs in your CMS or content management system as well as uploading new products. So if you look on the right-hand side of the screen, you'll see what the backend of WordPress looks like. It's something which is enabling you to access the plugins, the appearance of that particular site, what media has been uploaded to a web, blog posts. And what products as a tool that is a little bit confusing in the web space is wysiwyg stands for what you see is what you get. And it's often used when referring to website building platforms like for example, Wix or maybe Squarespace. So wysiwyg website builder is a program that's allowing you to visually edit your site in an environment that is identical to the live website. So what you see as the developer, even though there's no Coca-Cola involved, is what the consumer or user gets. So that's basically saying what you're seeing is the editor and what the end user is seeing is pretty much the exact same thing. You're just seeing maybe a toolkit over and above that. Whereas for example, a developer would be typing in code which looks nothing like what actually gets input on that other side. So these sorts of wysiwyg boulders are really helpful because they avoid users having to hand code websites. And therefore it's become a lot more mainstream to maintain your own website, something else which is used a lot in the web space as the word cash. So cash is really a reserved storage location that collects temporary data to help website to load faster. So whether it's a computer, laptop, or phone, web browser, or app, you'll find some variety of a cache. And the cache is what's making it easier to retrieve data. So you may see if you're on Google Chrome and you hit Control H control history, you will have the opportunity to not only clear your cookies, but clear your cache. If you are implementing web changes, you may notice that even though your developers saying he's published the change, you may be viewing a cached version of the site, IEEE, something that your browser has previously stored in its previous iteration or version. So therefore, it's really important that if you work in the digital marketing space to know how to clear your cache and make sure you are in fact seeing the latest version of a website. Another definition you need to be familiar with is that of a domain name or an IP address. And a domain name is of course, a unique name used to identify the location of a website or through a web server. When you access a website through a web browser like Google Chrome, the domain name is translated to an IP or Internet Protocol address, which looks like that number on the screen, which represents the server on which the website is hosted. This translation is done numerically performed using a domain name server, often referred to as a, d and S. So you can see things do start to get a little bit more complicated as we go down this more development style root. There's also your URL, Uniform Resource Locator. And that's the file address of a resource on the Internet. And a URL can represent a webpage and image and video, a style sheet and very much more. You can see on the right-hand side, all of the components which comprise a URL. There's a protocol like HTTPS. There is a sub domain, a domain as well as an article permalink. All of this is divided by what's known as slack. So again, it does get technical quite quickly, but for the purposes of this class, you just need to be aware of some of these basics. And when we test about a web browser, where of course chatting about how are we viewing that particular webpage is that on Safari, Chrome, firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer. This is another way you could be caught out with web changes. For example, you may be viewing a website on an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer. The developer would therefore say to you, Well that's not something that we've actually developed for. And so you'll see developmental really catering to the latest versions of browsers. The other thing that comes hand in hand with websites is the measurement and the attribution of attribution is a way in which we can actually tell where a particular result is coming from. So you might have heard of the term last click attribution. This is when you're attributing that success, like for example, a conversion to the last thing that someone clicked on. So they may have come from Facebook and then come on board your particular dress on your e-commerce site. And therefore the attribution goes to Facebook. Although we've come to learn that oftentimes it's not that last check that was actually the deciding factor, but the combination of the clicks before it. So pixels and tags become very important because these are what's going to help us to understand where a user has come from before they take a particular action. A web browser, often referred to just as a browser. So they are a lot of different kinds of pixels, ul tags pixels can refer to a Facebook pixel that for example, is allowing Facebook to know that you've been to a particular checkout page and therefore trying to remark it to you. And a tag is typically referring to Google Tag Manager software. So this is a tag which has been given to a customer because they have performed a particular action. This also works in conjunction with events or Event Tracking, which is also done using Google Analytics. Another piece of terminology which may trip you up in the web space is that of a fabric. So if favicon is that very small icon which appears on the top of your browser, which allows you to see what websites you have left open. Sometimes like me, you might have hundreds of tabs lift open. And so therefore that favicon is going to help you to know exactly what website that is referring to. It's normally a small version of your logo. And that's also something that a digital marketer would need to provide to the web developer to ensure that the user experience is spot on. Something else that a strategist is often responsible for is creating a sitemap. Again, this is very important from an information hierarchy standpoint to understand what are the different sections or slugs of my website, as well as the subsections which sits beneath that. Definitely, it's something that you would have to do if you went further in the digital strategy space. As well as an understanding of all the different web platforms that are available to us when it comes time to creating or maybe recreating a website. Wordpress is probably the most popular website when can create where 40 per cent of the wave is actually bolt on this platform. Bloggers, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies, or use WordPress. The wysiwyg boulders, which we've learned all about, like Wix and Squarespace have grown tremendously in popularity because of course they don't require you to have any coding experience and are definitely great ways in which a marketing team can maintain its own CMS. And then there's also some more left field platforms like ghost, which is free and open source, which allows people to also create their own websites. So there's no shortage of different platforms that you can use as a digital marketer depending on the needs, states of that website, as well as your persona's and probably your journey mapping, which is going to help you to decide what are some of the priorities from a website experience perspective, another thing which people often take for granted in the web space is the Google. My Business actually allows you to create your own simple websites. So whilst this would not be a solution for bigger businesses, if you simply want to holding page, did you know that you could actually just create a one or two-page that show it's a regimented, It's templates ID, but it's certainly it's better than nothing if at the moment you currently only have a social media presence, the website builder here is really going to prompt you to create your very first post on Google My Business, get customer reviews and display a gallery. And even if you don't choose Google My Business as your website builder, because you probably have more sophisticated needs, you would still want to include it because of course, the Google, My Business listing is the first thing. It's going to appear on the right-hand side. When someone in Google's your brand. In terms of the project steps that a digital marketing strategist and a digital marketing team would undertake when it comes to a website built project, they are, of course quite a lot. They would have to choose a domain name, registered the domain sign up with web hosting, set up their website using one of those platforms customized like web design and structure, which of course, initially would just be a best guess and would need to be optimized over time. You would then need to add important pages, important content, add your online store if you want to set up your navigational menu, do cross-browser testing to make sure it's working on all the browsers, unless of course it's outdated ones. You've implemented with Google Analytics and auditing, understand better what the traffic is doing once it hits those sites. And then you'd start to work on your SEO or search engine optimization efforts. So there really is quite a lot that goes into this. 12. Introduction to Wix: So let's pause for a second and chat about Wix. So although many people have their own preferences, my preference is typically just creating a Wix. If it's a small business, I find that the drag-and-drop technology is fantastic. I use what's known as the Wix editor. This is simply going to allow you to drag on elements and widgets onto your website and then publish that and have that be a basic overview of your business if you're interested in my website is built on Wix, so definitely do check that out. You'll see, although it is nothing crazy, It definitely does give you a good understanding of what the platform can do. There's also a more basic or pared down version called the ADI, which is an artificial intelligence platform which will create a website for a year, which would result in a very similar outcome as that Google My Business folder. So something quite rudimentary. Or you can go the other way, which is valid by Wix, which is basically you need to develop all over again. So this is a one-of-a-kind result that does need development expertise. So it really takes all three of those boxes. It also offers you an extensive library of free website templates, which you can then make your own through customization. You can pick how many pages you want, whether you want a blog section, whether you want to e-commerce section, and very much more so. Definitely if you're starting from scratch, I would say Wix is quite a good one to learn on. Also, if you don't mind a strip of branding while you're not on a premium plan, you can leave it like that for an undefined period of time until such point as you wanting to upgrade connected to a domain and remove that wicks branding with Wix and with any website, you'd need to set a goal in terms of what you're hoping to achieve, what the site is it an online store to sell your products? Is that they restaurant website for online orders and everything in-between those two. But crucially, regardless of which platform you use, you do need to make sure that your website is mobile optimized. And the way in which you do that on Wix, for example, is it actually creates a replica of your site, but just in a vertical portrait format, which you then tweak over time and just make sure that it renders as beautifully as your desktop version. This is of course, something that needs to be done before you publish your site because you want to make sure that that mobile experience is just spot on. 13. Basic Website Overview: One of the absolute best ways that I can express to you guys the difference between the front end of a website and the back end of a website is to show you the difference between what my website looks like to the end-user versus what I see through the CMS or content management system. If you hit to my site, makes how this.com, you will see this is exactly what a user would see. It's got my hashtag, hashtag do digital better with a bit of intro copies. So mine is, I help you thrive on social media and beyond removing that overwhelmed with easy-to-follow tutorials and courses, join me and thousands of other creators and get a one month free trial over on Skillshare. That is a big call to action button in a very prominent color, which of course is absolutely no coincidence. Join me over on Skillshare, is going to mean that people then convert. E becomes students of mine as well as me earning referral income thanks to them joining using my link. Similarly, there is a big call to action button in the top right-hand corner called tag. My courses will take my classes. So when you scroll, you'll notice that of course, navigation actually stays at the top, which means that that CTA or call to action button is always present. And you can see that this hero banner or hero image sits above the fold. This is one of the principles of web design where you want everything to sit in such a way that you don't necessarily need to scroll in order to get an overview of what this business is selling you. And oftentimes, when I do conduct a website audit, that will be a key piece of feedback to the client That's commissioned. It is, there's too much scrolling. And you can imagine that if that is the case on desktop, what that experience would be like for someone on a mobile. So what we see, and this is of course dependent on which country you're coming from. Mobile traffic typically accounts for between 60, 70% of the total web traffic going to a website. So mobile optimization is definitely something that we're going to speak to you in a bit more length as it is such an important topic when it comes to web design. So if you scroll up, you'll see that I'm promoting a very recent course launch. Take my own use social media, of course, social media strategy. And there you can see it's going to load a YouTube video which showcases exactly what that course is about. Then I have a call to action about joining my mailing list. And this is of course important to me because it means that I can communicate with people on an ongoing basis. This is a big opportunity that many websites overload. So consider that you actually have a very short time, the truly like a click of your fingers in order to get someone to buy what you're selling when it comes to a website. Whereas with email marketing, it's definitely that longer hand approach. We are able to nurture a lead over time. And so it's very important that you do have some kind of way in which to stay at communicating with this person because the chances are they're not going to convert on that very first trial, then I want to give away free B's. So I say NAB, my free resources download my e-book, as well as promoting the rest of my digital marketing courses. So I really want my website to showcase the full suite of offerings without being overwhelming, which is why you'll see I have the overview. Then I have my latest course and only then do I have the catalog of all courses beneath that. Then I say, I'm on YouTube because I know that's another way that I can keep in touch with people is just simply by virtue of them subscribing. And then because I'm a one-person business, I feel like testimonials are especially important because really what people say about me is going to, is really going to help clients workout whether they want to work with me and students if they want to take my classes. So these are really nice widgets which are created by Wix. So they're very easy to customize. And all that it means is when you hover over them, actually going to showcase exactly what that person said. And then here you can see join my internet fam, 4,200 subscribers and counting, again, reminding people to subscribe to my channel. And then a have a question form at the very button, which allows people to either e-mail me directly or fill in a very basic form. And then of course, my social media icons over there, so very straightforward as a homepage. You can then click on any one of my courses like let's say for example, social media marketing. And you'll see that you get taken to a dedicated page with a dedicated URL. This is important to note because something like a pop-up actually doesn't have a URL, wears a dedicated page, does. And this is particularly pertinent when you're running paid media promotion. You don't want someone to go to your landing page each time because you know that there's gonna be a sequence of clicks that they'll have to undertake. You're trying to minimize those clicks as much as possible. So you'd actually direct them to the specific offer page that you're wanting them to convert on which matches up with that ad copy in the ad creative. Here you can see I've included some copy which is going to help me from a search engine optimization perspective, which is indicates just how important social media marketing isn't the world. And then the fact that my social media went ON clause is. Designed for anyone curious, then there's quite a clear call out in terms of the learning outcome. There is a screenshot that I've taken from Skillshare. And then again the link join me over on Skillshare, as well as covering which platforms are in that class and the difficulty level. Again, a bit more copy is required from a search engine optimization perspective. Psi then break down all of the modules on that course. I have a course trailer. I expressed the ways in which the student is going to learn by way of video content, presentation, walkthroughs and much more. How many students are in that course, as well as student testimonials which are specific to that class. So these are a bit more straightforward and that they're not doing that flip for the previous ones did. But I really want it to be straight into the points so people could just have a once-over and decide, yes, I want to enroll now, there's multiple call-to-action buttons as you scroll down the page, as well as of course, that ever-present button in the top right-hand corner, take my classes, bonus resources again, trying to convince people of the value of the class, as well as then that YouTube link. Then that's the case, of course for all of my courses. If you then go to Services, you can read a little bit about me and creating my experience and what services I'm currently offering as a freelancer, as well as my qualifications. Then again, because I'm a one-person business, there are a lot of pictures of me so people can really feel like they know me before they engage. And then in terms of the gear, I've listed all of the gear that I have. My Canon, my Canon lens, my video Mike, as well as my halo light on my Manfrotto tripod. There's also FAQs that you can go and have a look at. And then again, just that free e-book, which is going to make it really easy for people to stay in touch with me, get to know me by filling in the email address and receiving a lead magnet or a trip wire, as it's often called. In the form of this e-book. I'd say that this is a pretty generous gift in terms of someone just coming onto your side. Normally it would just be like a one or two-page lead magnet, but I have not yet had the time to create that kind of a lower tier freebies. So at the moment I'm just giving the full e-book. So you can see it's a very straightforward website and I think it looks nice. It's on-brand in the sense that I have, of course, replicated all of my corporate identity across. I've used my logo. The one thing that you will notice referenced in the web design spaces. Instead of talking about Pantone, you'll notice we talk about hex codes and it's basically an alphanumeric number that's going to reference the color. So if you're struggling to get this across, what you're gonna do when you're building the site is simply go to what's called a hex code pick up. And here we go, image color picker.com. This is what I typically use if you have something that you've previously created or maybe a designer's previously created for you. You can simply upload a picture of maybe a social media graphic or whatever it may be, and then click on the exact part of the image like here, I'm just going to click on this color blue. And it's going to spit out a hex code that looks like that. And you can contrast that, for example, certain RGB code. So that's really how you're going to transfer that across and all the other elements I will showcase with you in the very next segment, which is going to be sharing what it looks like from a CMS or back in perspective. 14. Wix CMS on Desktop: Alright, so when you login to Wix, you'll notice that you can actually access any of the sites that you've created. So I have created hundreds of sites on Wix. You can see them all listed here and whether or not they premium. So what you can do with Wix is actually create your site for free. You will see that there is a strip of branding that remains up until the point that you actually upgrade, as well as the fact that you are not able to connect to a custom domain until such a time as you have upgraded. So do check out the pricing. I think it's quite reasonable considering that you're not having to pay a developer each month because it's something that you can maintain. But of course this is something you'll have to work out yourself. I have noted that it is cheaper than Squarespace, which is a common alternative. For that purpose, I feel like I am getting value for money from Wix. So let's go into this particular site, which is the hollow side. Simply we're going to click on Edit side over here. This is what's actually going to take us into that wysiwyg CMS. What you see is what you get CMS Content Management System. So instead of a developer maintaining this, I'm going to be maintaining this from the perspective that I'm able to upload, I'm able to drag and drop, and I'm able to use things called a widget. So that means that by no means does any of the functionality it needs to be created from scratch. It means that I can literally drag and drop stuff that has already been created by the Whigs community and by their developers. And then implement that in such a way that it makes sense for my brand. You will see that you can click on any of the elements. So for example, if I click on the header, it gives me the option to change header design. So if I click on that, for example, it's going to allow me to see that this is the head of that I currently have. But if I wanted to, I could make a transparent, I could change the color. And I can do a little bit more if I click on Customize design. So I could change the full color as well as the capacity. I can change the border, change how the corners look, and I can also add a drop shadow if I would like. If I then click on the horizontal menu. So the navbar, you'll see I can manage the menu. And this is a pretty important step because it's going to dictate which of the pages are shown on which I'm not sure. So for example, here you can see that I've created a backup of my homepage. And the reason why I've done this is sometimes you'll implement changes and they don't **** how you were imagining. So obviously it's a low risk way of doing that. So what I would have done in this instance is simply click the three dots. I would've said duplicates. And then I would have come to the right-hand side here and actually said either show or hide, I've hidden it. If I hadn't have hidden it, it would appear in my nav menu. So it's not something that we want and we of course wanted to rank in the search engines result page. Either hiding will take care of that. Then you can see that I'm able to control the hierarchy. So the fact that causes houses a bunch of different courses underneath that, which is what's creating the dropdown in that Nav Menu services. Again, that's what's creating that dropped on the free book you'll notice doesn't have any dropdowns, so that just goes to that page. So something we can chat a little bit more about in this search engine space is if you go here, you can actually access the issue of basics and just make sure that instead of when you duplicate a page, so for example, you're trying not to start from scratch each time. It'll often duplicate the URL as well. So if I duplicated my homepage, it would be called home too. But by this stage, I may have adapted it to be my services page. So it's definitely a good idea to check at each point in the journey what is resulting from an SEO perspective as well as from a length perspective. And you'll also notice that you have the opportunity to upgrade or update your title tag, as well as the pages major description, which again is important from a surgery optimization perspective. So those are the kind of key things that you're doing. From the nav side of things, you're gonna be using the menu on the left-hand side to navigate between pages. Because if I click on Services or courses, for example, it's just going to select the entire menu and not click through to that actual page. So that is really handy in terms of getting around. And then you'll see if I double-click on anything, it is completely editable. If I've noticed that I've made a mistake, it's something that I can quickly and easily maintain. And things like training, of course, is very important to keep up to date. So for example, I had to change Facebook blueprint training to metal blueprint training and that sort of thing. And it is really easy in terms of how I've got these different colors, strokes. So they literally called strips. And you'll see you can maintain the background differently. If I wanted to add one n, I would simply click the plus lag where I'm wanting it to appear. And then it's gonna give me a bunch of different options in terms of their templates. So let's say for example, we wanted to add this. It's going to pop it exactly where you've told it to. And then you can double-click on that hero image and say, for example, change column background. What I do love about wigs as well is that it is integrated with a stock photography service. So there's a lot of photography that you don't actually have to Sauce off of an splash. And pixels. But if you do do that, then I would just suggest before you actually go about uploading, it is makes sure that that image is compressed. Because what's going to happen is if you put a whole lot of big, higher-risk stock photography pictures on your side. It's going to slow down that side speed, which is going to have a negative impact on your search optimization. So in that instance, let's say we didn't like the pictures that were being spat out to us by Wix. So we wanted something that was maybe mobile marketing related. We'd simply go to mobile marketing. And of course we're looking for landscape images typically with a website. So maybe this is kind of a fun one, so we're going to download it then. Then we're just going to check if it's a JPEG or a PNG. And the reason why it's important is that the website that you're going to use is going to be determined on that. So if it's a J peg, you're going to type in and compress J peg. And the first search result that's going to come up as compressed JPEG.com. If it were to be a PNG, you type in compressed PNG. That, and you'll see that the URL, but it's going to come up as compress PNG.com. Of course, in this instance we're looking for a jpeg bad. Surely the site looks exactly the same. You can then drag and drop the images across. And you'll see that it's going to compress that image for you. And then it's gonna make it 59% smaller, which is a huge when you're going to read download it. You'll notice from the filename It's just got a minute after it, which indicates that you've minimized the size of the file. So if we then click back into Wix, we could say change column background. We could say image. And instead of selecting one of these backgrounds done here, we would then go ahead and say Upload Media, drag-and-drop them men version of that file. And you'll see it of kids and my gallery. So I can simply click that, say change background and it's going to appear there. And then similarly on this hand, on the right-hand side, you can simply go and maybe change column background color. And then you'll notice obviously some of my brand colors that I've already used, I'm going to crop up. Otherwise you can say add, pop your hex code in there and Bob's your uncle. If on the other hand, you decide that you do not want to section about Mobile, I can say honestly, I have the stroke selected. I'm going to hit Backspace, hit backspace one more time. And then I just drag and drop the stroke back up. And then I'm going to select on the top right-hand corner, publish. If I select Publish, what's going to happen is those changes are going to be taken live. And then you can see, I can then view side which is going to open a new tab, which is going to allow me to make sure that the changes are correct. So in addition to that menu item that you saw on the left-hand side, you'll notice that there's an even skinnier menu that appears that just simply has icons on it. So if you click menu and pages, it's going to pull out the same as what gets pulled up when you click that drop-down. If you click this little a with drop icon, you're able to set the theme for your site. And that means obviously if you set up your brand colors, It's a bit easier to apply that across the board, including what you want the page back on to be in. If you want page transitions which I have not set up. Then also to note as Wix has an app market of where some of the apps are free and some of them are paid for. So you can add some of these fun integrations as you need it. And of course, search whether there is in fact an integration for that. To be honest, I don't think that I'm currently using very many apps, if any at all. I find that most of the native functionality covers the needs of my sight. If you then click the little picture icon, you can see that immediate gallery gets pulled up of all the reasons stuff that you've implemented. Then if you have a blog on your site, you'll see that there's also something that allows you to manage your blog through the blog manager, the blog pages like elements and learn more. So the reason why it's giving me this option, as I did previously, have a blog, but it's currently hidden. So even though you don't see a blog outwardly on my side currently it's one of those unpublished items. But for the sake of this video, of course, I'm sure there's many people that are wanting to have blogs, so let's just hop into the blog manager. And even though mine is not live, of course I can just show you exactly what that it looks like. If you've worked with anything like a WordPress or maybe a Squarespace, it works in the exact same way. When it comes to the blog functionality, it's really easy to load a blog post, writes a blog post and comment any pictures or videos. So honestly this is one of the simplest parts about Wix. So here you'll see all the published articles that I previously had. And then you can go into Edit. And it's simply going to spit out exactly what that blog post looks like. Here's all the copy images, the videos and so forth. And again, very important you want to be checking out what is being put in the SEO section so that this is actually going to define what your URL is looked like and much more. The other things you can implement is if you want to have categories, you can set up some kind of filtering system. If you would like to have tags. You can also tag it for the purposes of ACO. And then if you want to monetize, there's also a way in which you can set up members of access, which is going to allow any people who are members to actually access the blog. So that is the blog side of things. The other thing that I had previously added, and this is of course what my blog used to look like when it was published there you can see the groupings between the fact that at 1 I had a free social blood, then I was changing and around. It's not currently in its perfect fashion, which is why it's unpublished. But certainly am going to rework this and then republish it. And you can completely change the way that this looks as well. So if for example, you just simply go to Settings, you'll see that there's a whole host of different ways in which this primary page can be displayed. So for example, display. You'll see it's showing a whole lot of information about that particular blog post, which you can toggle on or off. Then you can see just how many different options they are in terms of what it could look like. So for example, if I wanted that kind of more grayed out approach of I once had an editorial approach that really is quite overwhelming. I can have a one column approach. Alternatively, I can do a full post approach, which again is going to actually display the full post one beneath each other, which is probably going to create a credit bit of scrolling. So maybe not that one. But you get the idea. That's really how the blog section works. Then previously I did also have a booking functionality and bolts which is again not currently live chloride. So next let's talk about the ascend business tools. Email marketing, your SEO tools, coupons if you're wanting to run any kind of special promotions, social posts, a video maker, as well as marketing integrations. To be honest, the one that I use the most is simply called email marketing. And this is of course that integration between that form that was asking users for their e-mail address and then creating a workflow where it's it's ensuring that everyone who signs up to that is going to be receiving that e-book or ride in the e-mail marketing section. And what you're gonna be able to do is actually create workflows or automated workflows. So for example, if you want to do the ebook thing like I'm doing, you can set up a workflow that allows the system to deploy an email once someone enters they email, as well as if you're wanting to do mentally sands, of course, this is the same dashboard that you would use. And so that's going to replace something like Mailchimp or any kind of e-mail service provider that you're currently using. You can consolidate them all within Wix. If you want a more up-to-date tutorial in terms of this side of weeks, please do let me know, but hopefully that gave you a nice overview in terms of what is possible with the software. The next thing we're just going to quickly run through as how the mobile optimization works on the platform. 15. Wix Mobile Optimizations: Alright, so in terms of home mobile optimization works, you'll notice that there are two icons in the top left-hand side. And if you click switch to mobile, it's really going to do a little bit of shape-shifting where it changes all of the elements that you've created and make some mobile version of that. So important to note here, you cannot add something on the mobile version that is not in the desktop version. However, you can remove stuff that is on the desktop version that you don't want it on the mobile version. The reason why that is super-helpful is sometimes you have big schematics. Like for example, I have a client that has a big roadmap with like eight steps showing their workflow. I don't want that to display on mobile because it's not a good user experience. So that whole section just gets hidden when you viewed from a mobile phone. This is to mitigate a lot of scrolling and rarely people and really get people to the crux of the matter. So you'll notice when you very first click this button, it has a lot of tweaking that you do have to do because the Whigs does its best to try and to try and take something from a horizontal slash landscape format and put it into that portrait format. But of course, there are things that are just not going to work. So definitely before you publish your site and advertise the URL, this is gonna be something that you pay a lot of attention to. So you'll see that there's new functionality within the mobile section which allows you to, That's how that hamburger menu looks. You can switch up how the button appears. If you want the button to appear with any of the elements, you'll notice there's somebody that I hide icon. Sometimes you'll notice that the font is too big, the font is too small. So that's of course what you're going to do there. But you'll notice that you cannot add any elements. So I think that this is doing a pretty good job in terms of representing what my site looks like. But there may be tiny issues like for example, here you can see there's a little pink strip that's appearing. Simply pull that up. And then there's also a prompt which allows you to delete space because sometimes it creates blocks of space that is not necessarily needed. Here. For example, the baton is maybe looking at a little bit cramped so we can simply just drag that open. I've hidden the pictures that pertain to each of these causes because it was creating quite a cluttered environments. And then you can see, of course everything is appearing one beneath each other instead of next to each other, we want to create some space there. And then again with simply going to click Publish. Once you've done this, of course, be sure to test it on your actual mobile phone. And the same way that you're testing on your actual computer screen because they are definitely things that are going to shift and change. That's really the mobile optimization journey. I would say don't rush yourself in this phase. So what I've noticed with client projects, if I'm building a client, a project in Wix, I will definitely allow at least one day extra in terms of my whole timeline just to make sure that mobile is working as it should. Because honestly, this can be a bit of a sticking point. And as we mentioned, of course, a lot of our traffic is coming from mobile, so definitely something that cannot be ignored. Once you are happy, hypothetically, you would of course, upgrade your membership to a premium version of Wix, which is then going to remove that strip of branding as well as allowing you to connect to a custom domain, which is very straightforward. You can either purchase a domain through weeks or I use GoDaddy for purchasing any of my domains. And then just simply going to do that linking process which GoDaddy or Wix have detailed in excruciating detail on either of the blogs. So that's something that's quite straightforward. And then it'll give a, it'll give you a prompt around how much time it needs. Normally it's about 12 hours in order to go live and be linked to that domain. And hey, presto, you are ready to go live on the Internet. 16. Introduction to Google Analytics: Next up, let's chat about Google Analytics. Google Analytics has recently undergone quite a big change from Universal Analytics to GAL4. So GFR is the new standard for Google Analytics. And really how this came about was in the olden days, or a couple of years ago, there was a separate way of tracking app information, App traffic versus web traffic. And so GFR is a way in which these two things are combined, as well as taking on board or learnings from this previous way in which web traffic was being measured. So it has a whole different data structure. It has different data points. It's reporting interface looks different on their resources are slightly different as well. You definitely want to be learning about J4 as opposed to Universal Analytics. So be sure if you're ever reading up on it that you make sure you're looking at the most up-to-date version, as well as making sure that the tracking code, which is live on your current website is that of GAL4 and not Universal Analytics. When you sign into Google Analytics, the moment you'll see that there's actually a message which lets you know that they are sunset and Universal Analytics, which of course is that reminder that you have just swapped over. But if you're new to Google Analytics and you can simply learn on the newer version. And that's going to obviously stay view from two different learning curves. There are loads of resources you can add skill with A4. There's absolutely no shortage of that. But if you were familiar with Universal Analytics, I'd say probably the biggest change is hard the data parameters are handled. So with GAL4, everything is handled as an event. And the reporting is really going to look a whole lot different. So you do want to allow yourself some time to familiarize with the newer version of Google Analytics. If however, you just want to understand the benefits of Google Analytics, it's really about getting a deeper understanding of your customer and what they're doing on your website. So it's giving you the free tools you need to analyze your data for your business in one place. Although there is a premium version of Google Analytics, the majority of people are just using the free version. It's going to help you to understand both your site and your app users in order to evaluate the performance of your marketing content products and more. And analytics is both to work with a full suite of Google advertising and publish a product. So there's that seamless integration. So something that also often comes up in Google Analytics, that's the notion of tracking link. So trackable links, often referred to as UTM links. Utm stands for urgent tracking module and it's a way in which Google can actually attribute a number of different strings onto your URL. It's going to allow you to see where that traffic came from. So oftentimes you'll click on a social media ad, just like how long a bad URL actually ends up being. It'll say something like source equals Facebook, campaign equals spring summer edition. Bloody blah. That's all for the purposes of Google Analytics so that the person who's logging in on the other side can actually see, okay, at 10% of the traffic this month came from that particular campaign. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to necessarily work out which platforms in which campaigns were performing well versus those that didn't. 17. What is Content Marketing?: Content marketing is a marketing strategy which involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, ultimately to drive profitable customer action. In simpler terms, it's about creating useful and informative content to engage with potential customers and build those relationships over time with them. The goal of content marketing is to provide value to the audience by creates and content that meets both their needs and interests. This can include blog posts, videos, podcasts, e-books, infographics, and social media posts. The key here is to create content that's informative, educational, and engaging, rather than simply being promotional. One of the main benefits of content marketing is that it can help to build brand awareness and credibility by consistently providing valuable content. Businesses can therefore establish themselves as the thought leaders in their particular industry and therefore gain the trust of the audience. This typically leads to increase brand loyalty as well as hopefully customer retention. Another benefit of content marketing is that it can help to drive traffic to a website. So by creating content that is optimized for search engines, businesses can improve their websites search engine rankings. This can lead to increase website traffic, which of course can translate into more leads as well as more sales. It's also great for lead generation by creating content that addresses the needs and the pinpoints of your potential customers. Businesses are likely to attract highly qualified leads that are more likely to convert into customers. Additionally, by providing valuable content throughout the customer journey, because it says CAD typically then nurture those leads and build relationships and ultimately convert them into sales. So in order for content marketing to be successful, it's really important to have a well-defined content strategy so that you're not creating content for contents sake, because it involves identifying the target audience and the standing there pains creating a content plan and then of course, measuring the results of the content marketing efforts. If I consistently analyzing an optimizing that content strategy, that's what's going to be, what's going to ensure that you're providing that value to the audience and achieving your own marketing goals. 18. Your New BFF: Canva: As a digital marketer, you are going to be constantly creating graphics and visuals for your social media, your blog, and your website so it can fit is one of the best tools that you can use to help to create eye-catching designs quickly and easily. In this lesson, we're going to be discussing how digital marketers can use Canva in order to create the engaging content that they need. What exactly is Canva, It's a web-based graphic design tool, but also has a downloadable app which allows you to create a wide range of designs, including social media graphics, posters, flyers for graphics and more. And I use it on both my computer and my phone. It offers a broad range of templates, images, and design elements so that you never starting from scratch and you can create high-quality designs in minutes and it's free to use. It does also offer a paid version with additional features and tools. I use the paid one because I liked the deep itching functionality, but most people are just using the free version. So why would you need it? Well, first of all, you're going to need to create social media graphics because social media is of course, one of your most crucial platforms and digital marketing. And so creating graphics for it is essential in order for you to stand out. So Canva has a wide range of social media templates that are optimized for the different platforms, such as Facebook, instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And these can be everything from those cover images to the posts themselves. So you're going to be able to use these templates which are designed and the correct dimensions critically and adapting quickly and easily to your corporate identity or CI. Next up is creating visual content for your blog and for your website. So this of course, is going to be hopefully where the majority of traffic is going. And so in order to engage those audiences and improve your user experience, I would suggest looking at the range of blood graphics, featured images, blog banners as well as post headers. And you can use Canva to create your website banners. So if you have like a hero banner scroll through as you land, It's perfect for that and any other website graphics to another key way of using it is through infographics, which are a great way to communicate more complex information in a visually appealing way. Often we defer to text, but images can say so much. And these design elements and templates make it so easy to create stories that are both informative as well as visually appealing. So I would suggest using Canva to create those charts, graphics, and any other visual elements which you might want to include a cross with digital marketing assets. Then fourthly, from a presentation perspective, presentations are of course, an essential part of digital marketing because you'll need them for things like pitches. So they're gonna be able to help you to create engaging and visually appealing presentations. And kava has a wide range of presentation templates that you can use to create professional-looking slides in minutes. You can also use Canva to create custom graphics and images to include in your presentation. So you could use that in conjunction with something like keynotes and PowerPoint two, and finally, creating marketing collateral. So Canvas can be used to create a wide range of marketing collateral, whether those are flyers, brochures, business cards, and much more? Yes, even though you may be a digital marketer, you still wanna do a little bit of below the line or traditional marketing to promote herself, even if that's just business cards or the QR code on it, to being able to create stuff that's visually appealing and on-brand is amazing. In confusion, Canva is going to be your best friend or BFF as you become a digital marketer and you foray into this exciting world because you need those visually appealing designs and you never want to be starting from scratch. Embrace Canvas, help you save that time, improve the quality of designs, and enhance the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing. I'm by no means a designer, but let me tell you, I do get by with Canva. 19. Content Marketing, Social Media & Paid Media : Next up, let's talk about social media and paid media. Content marketing is really the broad strokes theme that we chat about, where social media is just one component of this. So there's other things that we need to think about within content marketing, including video marketing and much more. Content marketing is really approaching how we create and distribute that valuable, relevant and consistent content to our audience, which we hope are clearly defined using probably a target persona and a customer journey that's going to help us to drive profitable customer action. So content marketing is all about writing the blogs, creating the vlogs, making the educational videos, making the listicle articles, which are really going to help to drive traffic to a particular place in order to get a particular result from that customer. Social media, although it is a big way in which we do that, it is only one way in which content marketing is actually working. So social media, of course, referring specifically to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, clubhouse, and many others. If you are interested in social media marketing, please do check out my other classes. There's a lot about how to decide which platforms to use, the benefits, the subtleties, the new answers, and much, much more. But for the purposes of this class, I really just want to express that content marketing is a bigger discipline and just social marketing. And really the two are working hand in hand. So make sure that you're meeting those organic marketing efforts. Then of course, we have our paid media component, which is going to help us AP level on social. So boosting of the engagement or the awareness depending on what the KPI of that particular adders, as well as all the other components of paid advertising like Google Search and Google display, which is being set up within Google's AdWords Interface or Google's advertising platform. So rarely there's quite a lot that goes on from a content and paid media marketing. But all of these are traffic drivers which are ultimately going to take people to that website that we've created where hopefully they're undertaking some kind of conversion. 20. What is Responsive Design?: What exactly is responsive design? It's an approach to web design that aims to create websites that adapt to the size and the capability of the device that they're being viewed on. In today's digital age, of course, people are using a whole bunch of different operating systems devices, as well as screen sizes plus they of course, accessing from desktop, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. So responsive design is what's going to ensure that a website is optimized for all of these devices. And you're going to be providing the optimal user experience regardless of what the consumer is accessing it. On. The main benefits of responsive design is of course, an enhanced user experience. A website that's not optimized for mobile can be difficult to navigate. I'm sure we've all seen websites where the text is too small, you can barely read it. The buttons are too small. So with big firms are struggling to click on it. And so by using responsive design, websites are optimized for this and ensures that they are easy to navigate with a readable size text. The buttons are of course, easy to click and just in general, you're able to navigate very easily around. Another key benefit of responsive design is improved search engine optimization or SEO. In 2015 at Google announced that it would be using mobile friendliness has a key ranking signal, search results. And this means that websites which aren't optimized for mobile or simply unlikely to rank. So you'll easily be tied to your competitors simply by having a mobile optimized site, by using responsive design, websites can ensure that they are mobile-friendly and therefore more likely to rank in ACR peas or search engine results pages. Responsive design also makes it easier for businesses to manage their websites. In the past, believe it or not, businesses could sometimes need to actually create separate websites which they then had to maintain independently. That meant managing two totally separate code bases and just became difficult for people to cope with. Whereas with responsive design it's the self-same entity, but it's optimized for all devices, which means that it's easier to manage content as well as updates. Another advantage of responsive design is that it future proofs websites that as new devices are released, of course, the responsive design is going to be what's ensuring that those websites continued to be optimized for the newer devices without the need of a complete redesign. So it's almost like gardening in a way you're kind of like pruning the head so that you don't have to go out and buy a whole new tree. So hopefully you'd save money in the long term using responsive design because you're not there needing to create all new websites as new devices come out. Overall, responsive design is a critical component of modern web design. It improves user experience. It is beneficial for your SEO and it is critical for website management. It also future proofs those websites. By using responsive design, businesses can ensure that websites are optimized across all devices, providing an optimal user experience, as well as improving their online presence. 21. What is Mobile Marketing?: Section we're going to be exploring the wild world of mobile marketing with more people using their mobile devices than ever before. And those mobile devices becoming so super powerful, mobile marketing has become an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. We're going to be covering everything you need to know about mobile marketing, from SMS and MMS marketing to mobile app marketing, instant messaging marketing, mobile advertising, and responsive design. Let's get started. Sms and MMS marketing involves sending promotional messages to customers via text or multimedia message. Text messaging campaigns are typically used for promotions and offers. Whilst multimedia messaging campaigns can include things like videos, images, and audio, the compliance and regulations are of course, essential when it comes to SMS and MMS marketing to ensure the customers have actually opted in to receive communication and to avoid potential legal issues, let's chat about mobile app marketing. Mobile app marketing involves promoting and advertising mobile apps. The potential users on both the iOS or Play Store app store optimization or ASO, is crucial to ensure that your app becomes discoverable in those app stores. In-app advertising and promotions can help to drive these sorts of downloads and engagement. Well, push notifications and in-app messages can help to keep those users both informed and engaged. Mobile advertising includes various forms of advertising specifically designed for use on mobile devices. So that could include mobile web advertising, in-app advertising, and mobile video advertising. And each form of mobile advertising has its benefits and can be used to reach specific target audiences. Responsive design is essential in mobile marketing to ensure that websites and digital contents are of course, optimized for different devices and screen sizes. Responsive web design and shows what websites or mobile friendly and easy to navigate on mobile devices. And mobile first design focuses on designing websites for mobile devices First, before adapting them for desktops. Cross device compatibility ensures that digital content is accessible and functional across different devices and platforms. With the rise of instant messaging, apps like let's say, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WhatsApp for business, you often see that businesses now instead of using SMS and MMS marketing are actually transferring across these more direct platforms. So I speak a lot about WhatsApp and WhatsApp for business because I'm based in South Africa and it's probably one of its key markets to be honest, even WhatsApp does taste things in South Africa as well as in India and Brazil as developing markets because we're really mobile-first countries. And so it becomes even more exciting in these sorts of areas because it means that with some of the first people to see cool features and functionalities. So I can go into a lot of detail around WhatsApp. But for the purpose of this course, what I will say is there's a whole host of functionality that people don't even realize that can be leveraged for business use. What's up or business is a standalone app would stand slightly apart from WhatsApp. And it has some really cool key functionalities, which includes the ability to create a product catalog with up to 500 products or services, well as auto messaging responses, which means that even if you're not on your phone all the time, it can feel to consumers like you are. So mobile marketing has really become a huge portion of digital marketing strategy just by virtue of the nature of people using their phones all the time, the proliferation of those devices. So therefore, things like responsive design have inherently become that much more exciting and critical rarely, because that is where people are hanging out. By leveraging these components, businesses are going to be able to reach a wider audience and the most intimate touch point, literally in people's pockets, in their handbags and so forth. And in doing so, they ultimately going to drive conversions and awareness and engagement. So all critical factors. 22. Mobile Marketing: Next up, let's talk about mobile marketing. So the definition of mobile marketing is of course, multi-channel digital marketing that is specifically aimed at people's mobile phones as well as their tablet devices. So think about back in the day, it's a mess. Was of course, the biggest marketing, lots of Buck is semester's lots of bulk. Mos says that we use to receive. Since then it's kind of changed. So in many regions we've pivoted to using things like USSD specifically to check out airtime balance or those sorts of things. As well as WhatsApp marketing, which has really come into its own in the last five years or so, we were able to use a lot more of WhatsApps rich media functionality like voice notes, videos, images, you name it. It's really a burgeoning discipline within digital marketing, which is really just having that firm focused on mobile. So for example, there's a lot of campaigns that would benefit from a purely mobile marketing approach. Or for some brands, depending on the markets in which they operate, they would have a whole separate mobile marketing strategy like let's say for example, pixie or Coca-Cola. They often would run those competitions where there's a unique code underneath the underlying or on the can, which you then estimates in to get entered into a prize pool. There's a lot of nuance and complexity just within the mobile marketing landscape, which really is its own beast. So that would be considering the fact like Islamist, unless you've included a Bitly or trackable link within your estimates, there's very limited reporting options. So being mindful of those sorts of things, other considerations would be the fact that he uses D will time out after 20 seconds. So those sorts of experiences need to be designed in a way that there's no drop-off. With WhatsApp marketing. You need to have an understanding of the API and how that works because it again falls within matters universe in terms of what can and can't do on WhatsApp, including which industries may or may not live in that space. As well as how we driving people to these mobile experiences, like for example, with WhatsApp, were able to actually run Facebook ads. Which link here to a WhatsApp experienced. So you can definitely see that my own marketing as exciting as it is rarely a whole other juicy piece of information which you're welcome to. Let me know if you want to chat more about in a different course. 23. Email Marketing: Next up, let's talk about e-mail marketing. Email marketing is of course, the emails that we get an inbox hopefully from up to the analysts that we are a part of. They are very strict privacy laws depending on which country you find yourself in. For example, Europe and UK, of course, I, gavin by GDPR, which clearly specifies exactly how someone needs to opt into your e-mail list in order for you to be a compliant company with big regulatory fines which then become associated if you are not actually playing your part. But the good news is most of the ESPs or e-mail service providers like Mailchimp of the world make it easy to ensure that all of those updates are being handled very responsibly. What I love about email marketing is it's one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching our target audience. Many online business owners will actually say they turnover is exactly related to how lives that list actually is. Because it's again, one of those ways in which we can get our frequency f and ensure that we can communicate offers to people. Timing has to be in an immediate way that is very personalized. So these platforms offer as a fabulous personalization options which can pull from a CRM database. For example, knowing what your firstName is, maybe knowing what plan you're on. If, for example, Netflix is trying to up-sell, cross-sell, you might send you an e-mail saying that they knew that you watched a particular series. Would you like to watch this series? Would you like to upgrade your plan and very many more things. So it's definitely a beautiful burgeoning topic that you probably do want to spend some time on. And the best way in which I suggest getting started with email marketing is reading the blogs associated to these major ESPs. So Mailchimp has beautiful resources on their website which allow you to understand the basics of email marketing. In stark contrast to something like SMS marketing, which has very limited data points in order to understand how something performed with the e-mail marketing, there's so many different components which are going to impact the success of your campaign. So things like what your subject lines should be, whether or not you should be using emojis. If there's a word that you've used in your subject line that's maybe triggered the spam filter of that person's email. If you have used too many exclamation marks, you would be amazed at what really impacts the deliverability of an e-mail campaign, as well as then monitoring how many people are opting out per E-Mail sin to understand whether or not they're getting value from your particular mailer. There's also a whole host of design considerations when it comes to digital marketing. Like for example, if you've used a triple column layout and someone's may be opening that on their mobile phone. You can see how they wouldn't have the best digital marketing experience. So email marketing is also a very exciting concepts to discuss in terms of how valuable we can truly make it and how we can help to drive our bottom line. Especially because we're able to have multiple quota actions as someone scrolls down the mailers. So definitely do check out male chimps resources if you're interested in learning more about email marketing. 24. Batch like a Boss: It's no secret that social media marketing can be time-consuming, especially if you're managing multiple accounts or platforms. And so one key way in order to streamline your social media marketing efforts is batching. Batching tasks. You're effectively grouping everything that is similar and completing them at the same time. So if you are a culprit of kind of like magpies syndrome where you just looking at shiny objects and then doing them throughout the day a week bashing can be a really good discipline to get into. In this lesson, we're going to be discussing the importance of batching tasks when it comes to social media marketing. So the first key benefit is saving time. The reason it's going to save you time is because you actually spend quite a lot of time context switching or switching between different tasks. And so totally eliminates that. And instead of writing a social media post and then checking your email and then responding to a comment and then maybe writing another post or blog posts. You're going to be able to write all of your posts at once when you're in the mood and have that mindset or cap on. And then you're going to move on to responding to your comments and emails. This is going to help you save time and hopefully be a little bit more efficient. So that brings us to our next point around efficiency. So why does it improve your efficiencies while you're focusing on one task at a time, which believe it or not, is what the human brain is meant to do. The switching between different tasks can be challenging. I'm sure you guys know just how long it takes to get into that flow state. And so by constantly disrupting that, it can be a little bit challenging, batching tasks is going to allow you to focus on one task completed and then move on to the next task. And this is going to increase your efficiency and hopefully reduce those distractions. And if that doesn't work, put your phone in flight mode while you're doing this. The next point is reducing stress. So social media is notoriously overwhelming as a profession, there's just so much noise coming at you. You need to know your logins for the different platforms, the new answers to all the different platforms. So batching your task is going to reduce the stress required for that task by breaking things down into more manageable chunks. This is gonna be what allows you to focus on one task at a time and just get rid of that overwhelm. Even your overall workload will seem simpler and more straight forward with this approach, it also improve its consistency, which is absolute gold when it comes to social media, by ensuring that you're regularly posting on your social media accounts, you're going to be able to hold yourself accountable that much better because you know, e.g. and Amanda, you write on a Tuesday, you edit on a Wednesday, you form or however you choose to structure your days of the week. But this is going to be exactly what's going to help build trust with that audience and lead to that increased engagement as they kind of know what to expect from you, also believe it or not, enhances creativity. So batching tasks can help to enhance your creativity by allowing you to focus at unadulterated attention on one thing without the distractions. So by bashing your tasks, you can set aside the time to brainstorm your ideas, create the content, and then schedule the posts. And so you're really giving 110 per cent hopefully to each step in that process rather than just feeling overwhelmed. And it's kind of giving ten per cent everything to wrap up batching tasks is really quite essential when it comes to social media marketing. And if you have been battling, maybe this is one of the ways in which you might be going wrong. It's going to help you to save time, increase your efficiency, reduce your stress, and improve consistency all while enhancing your creativity. Streamline your social media marketing once and for all by using this tactic and let me know how it works because I'm hoping that it works for you as well as hardware with me. 25. Must Have Digital Toolkit: Finally, let's talk about our digital marketing toolkit. What I ever leave you without a toolkit of resources? Never, ever. There are so many cool resources which I can suggest to you if your interest has been piqued as a result of this course, please do check out the Freee marketing textbook, which is available from grid and yellow, which coincidentally is a South African company that has a global footprint in terms of their free educational resources. So you can download this Essential Guide to marketing and digital world, which really unpacks every concept that you may be interested in learning about in the digital marketing space. There's also free metal blueprint training, which I also do always push, which is going to allow you to learn more about measures suite of products which includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And then Google has both Google digital skills in South Africa. They have digital skills for Africa as well as Google digital garage. So if you just type in Google certifications, you'll see all the resources that come up and how these models will typically work as well as to all of the resources are free. You do pay probably about a 100 years dollars for the accreditation, depending on which course you're interested in doing. That is a beautiful one, which is called the fundamentals of digital marketing, which takes you 40 hours, covers 26 modules and is completely free and less as I say, you want to do that certification. Some of them will make you pay extra, in this case, the recognized certification as a part of it. But for many, you'd actually have to pay an additional fee there. And the kinds of courses that this covers is seizing the digital opportunity. Exploring how your websites can work, building a strong online strategy, managing time effectively creating a long-term social media plan and exporting and expanding your business internationally. So all very topical concept, if you're putting together a digital marketing strategy for a client, the key way in which I create my PowerPoints is using a tool called slides go, which is what these slides are created for. And I use Google Slides to create them. But the other thing that I always need a stock photography, I like to use pixels and Spanish and nappy to Greg, great quality stock photography for both my presentations as well as my social media rollout. And then from a design tool kit perspective, Canva is my everything. I use it for all of the marketing material that I need to roll out for my clients. The alternatives here would be published by buffer or Adobe Spark. The other things that I like to use in my design toolkit would be Creative Hub, which is a Facebook tool which allows you to see how Facebook and Instagram placement is going to look. As well as add parlor, which is a third party version of that, which allows you to create mock-ups for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. Then in terms of our social media toolkit, of course, as I mentioned, they do have loads more courses which get into a lot of detail about this. But the basic ones you need to be aware of is Facebook scheduler, which is going to allow you to schedule any Facebook content across both Facebook and Instagram. Hootsuite, which is a third party version of this or later, which is the version that I use in order to schedule all my social media content once I've nailed that digital strategy. So from an SDR toolkit perspective, the tool I cannot live with art is called PageSpeed Insights, which is going to help you to understand your page loading speed and some of the things which are blocking that, which are really going to help you from an SEO or search engine optimization standpoint, as well as SEO Site checkup, which is also a fantastically handy tool which actually gives you a score on high what SEO is doing. And we rank works in a very similar way, which gives you a score unpacking. What are some of the ways in which you can improve your website in order to ultimately improve your digital marketing. 26. Acronyms You Need to Know: Because digital marketing is always changing, of course, there are always a lot of terminologies coming out as thick and fast. This video is going to be around understanding key concepts and acronyms which are crucial to succeeding in the digital marketing industry. I'm going to be sharing eight key ones that'll come up time and time again. But they are definitely many more which you'll find in the resources. Search engine optimization is number one, and SEO refers to the practice of improving quality and the quantity of your traffic to your website from search engines, and that includes Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It involves optimizing the website's content as well as its structure, as well as building links from other websites to indicate that it's high-quality traffic that you're sending to your website and making it broadly appealing for those search engines. Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is a digital marketing model in which an advertiser is paying every time a user clicks on one of the ads. This can be done through search advertising, such as Google ads, or through social media advertising platforms, say Facebook ads or social ads in general, social media marketing is often referred to as SMM. And SMM is the practice of using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok in order to promote a brand product or service. And this can include organic social media posts as well as paid social media advertising. To number four is conversion rate optimization or CRO. So CRO refers to the process of improving the conversion rate of a particular website or landing page. I know people whose whole job so as CRO, So they'll effectively work for a travel brand and enhance the click-through rate over time to make sure that people have taking a desired action as a user on the page that could be making a purchase or filling out a form. Number five is KPI or Key Performance Indicators or KPIs, or metrics which are used to measure the performance of a digital marketing campaign. Common KPIs include website traffic, conversion rates, click-through rates, those sorts of things, and anything that points to social media engagement, to a six a search engine results pages or ERPs, that is, CLP is the page displayed by a search engine in response to a user's search query. And it includes a list of search results as well as paid advertising placements, as well as other features. This can include knowledge graphs, and featured snippets. Number seven is a call to action or CTA. And the CTA is a marketing term that refers to a prompt on a website or any other digital platform that encourages a user to take a specific action. This can include making a purchase, filling out a form, or maybe subscribing to a newsletter. And number eight, user experience or UX. Ux refers to the overall experience that a user has when interacting with a website or other digital platforms. This can include factors like site's speed, ease of navigation, as well as the overall design and layout of the site. Sometimes you'll also use UI used interchangeably. That's actually incorrect. You, I refers more to how the interface looks and feels, whereas UX, It's more about the holistic experience. I hope this video helped to demystify some of the jargon and that you won't feel lost in any marketing meetings from here on out. 27. Digital Marketing Trends in 2023: The digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving and then staying ahead of the curve is critical for businesses to remain competitive. In this section, let's discuss a few key trends in 2023. The first one is artificial intelligence or AI. It's absolutely revolutionizing the digital marketing landscape and it's set to continue those. Yeah, I powered chatbots and virtual assistants are already being used in customer service. And we can expect to see more businesses leveraging AI for personalization, content creation, and predictive analytics. Chat GPT and GPT four has really taken off in a way that no one could have quiet, really understood prior to that, the next trend is video marketing. So it's really not slowing down anytime soon. And so businesses really should be placing a big focus on creating engaging video content that resonates with your target audience. Things like live video streaming, 360 degree videos and personalized videos are just some of the ways that businesses can differentiate themselves in neat video marketing space. The third one is a voice search optimization. So as more people are using voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Home, minimizing full voice search is becoming more and more important because it says it should therefore focus on creating conversational content that answers common voice search queries and optimizing their websites for these voice searches. Finally, influencer marketing. Influencer marketing has been around for quite some time, but it's safe to become even more popular. This dn by crit influencers with a smaller but highly engaged following are becoming more popular and businesses are really focusing on building longer-term relationships, typically with smaller influencers who actually align super well with their niche and their brand values. Privacy and data protection is also one that goes without saying that as privacy concerns continued to rise, businesses are taking data protection incredibly seriously. Businesses should focus on the most transparent data practices they can add complying with privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA. In conclusion, the digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving and so businesses really do need to keep up with the latest trends in order to remain competitive, we can expect to see things like AI, video marketing, voice search optimization, influencer marketing and privacy and data protection. Be top of mind as some of the trends this yet and by leveraging them, Hopefully businesses can stay on top of things, creates engaging, personalized, an ethical digital marketing that resonates with the target audience. 28. The Evolution of Digital Marketing: Let's take a look at the evolution of digital marketing over the past ten years. With the advent of social media, the rise of mobile devices and the explosive growth of economies. Digital marketing has undergone a significant transformation of lakes. Let's dive in and explore the key milestones in the last decade of digital marketing. First off, let's consider social media and content marketing. So about ten years ago, social media was starting to gain a little bit of traction. But it wasn't until 2012 that Facebook actually hit that 1 billion active user mark. This milestone led to a whole new era of social media marketing, where brands, we're starting to create content. Specifically for social media platforms. The focus shifted to creating the most engaging content that will hopefully go viral and ultimately attract more followers. Consider trend number to the mobile revolution. In 2014, a mobile overprotective start with the primary way in which people access the Internet globally. Those shifts led to the rise of mobile phase design and mobile responsive websites and brands had to optimize their digital content for mobile devices, including websites, e-mails, and adds. The rise of mobile also lead to the development of mobile apps and mobile specific ad campaigns. Personalization and AI. The past few years has seen a massive focus on personalization. And of course, Hello Chad, CBT, with the help of AI, brands are not able to collect and analyze data on customer behavior, preferences, interests, and therefore able to deliver far more personalized marketing messages. And this trend has led to the rise of chatbots, personalized email campaigns and product recommendations based on private purchases. And finally, e-commerce and influence the marketing. E-commerce has experienced massive growth with the rise of online marketplaces like Amazon, Alibaba, and of course, the global pandemic expediting all of this, more people are shopping online than ever before. This trend has really helped to explode the growth of influencer marketing ways, social media influences, promote brand's products or services to their own followers. So different lighting has really come a long way over the past decade, from social media and content marketing to the rise of mobile and the industry is seeing significant changes. As we move into the future, we can expect digital marketing to continue to evolve and adapt to new technologies and consumer behaviors. And that my friends is what makes it so very exciting. 29. How to Make Money as a Digital Marketing Freelancer: In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you guys how I make money as a freelance digital marketer. When I quit my corporate job just over a year ago, I was absolutely petrified about how to make a consistent income that was congruent or greater than my corporate salary. And over the past year, I've really proven to myself that it's totally possible. And in this video, I'm hoping to share some of those ways in which you can do the same if you're new here. Welcome, my name is megs and every week or at least take tutorials helping you do digital beds. So let's start off with a little bit of background in terms where I was coming from. So I started in the digital marketing industry about ten years ago, I joined a digital marketing agency as a project management in turn, and ended up finding a real passion for strategy. So I then transitioned into a strategic role and then later ended up becoming the head of strategy for that company. I then changed to a much bigger agency because I really wanted big agency experience. And I was there for about two years. I've been returned back to the smaller agency and was heading up the strategy and innovation department. Then, then I really started to get this nagging urged to work brand side. So having only ever worked on agency side, I was really curious to understand what was it like being the big scary wolf for the big clients on the other side. And so I then left to join a big corporate where I was for about two years over the COVID period. And then after that, launched into this wacky and wonderful world of freelancing. You can imagine coming from a very corporate position and having a steady and stable income. I was very apprehensive in terms of how I was going to make it work. So initially my intention was to run an e-learning business full time, but I ended up pivoting and just marketing myself behind my name makes Hollis. I set up a website and I no longer was behind a brand. I really wanted to be all about kind of a personal branding exercise where I could pull on friends and colleagues that I had previously worked with, just saying I've gone freelance and these are the services that I'm offering. But I was obviously quite hesitant to do so, mainly from a financial standpoint. I knew that I could earn money passively online because I'd been teaching on Skillshare and on YouTube from 2020 and the instance of Skillshare and I think about 20:19 on YouTube. But it certainly wasn't enough income to sustain me full-time and it certainly didn't come close to my corporate salary. Then I really had to put my thinking cap on in terms of how I was going to structure this and make it work. So what I ended up doing, which has been such a godsend, is I started partnering with digital agencies that well, really offering the services that I want it to be offering. I found that it was really easy to be given an agency email address and operate under the guise of other agencies offering the services that they were offering. This was really helpful because it was giving me access to far bigger clients than those that I would be able to land by myself. And I was fulfilling really important roles. So fulfilling social media manager roles for big organizations and really getting to understand a lot of different processes. So obviously I had worked in that realm previously coming from the corpus. But because they had a specific set of ways of working, it was really helpful to me. So then started working with agencies and then their respective clients. So this gave me a lot better feel for all the different project management tools out there, e.g. like previously, I'd only ever worked on trailer and notion. I then got a really good understanding of Asana. I've also worked extensively now on teams as well on Slack. So I just got a lot broader exposure in terms of different ways of working which I found super, super helpful. And then obviously, because you are agency side again, you get the opportunity to work across multiple brands instead of picking just one or two, I was working primarily behind a couple of agencies that I've previously worked with or friends that I knew and acting on behalf of them. So whether that be presenting strategy, offering social media marketing services, and it wasn't necessarily about them having to one to work with me specifically, but rather the fact that they needed a social media manager and especially post COVID, there's been a lot more demand for those sorts of skills. In addition to that, I was also teaching online. So this was a really handy way to actually think to myself as a freelancer. One of my chief concerns is the fact that I'm not able to scale my time because there's only 40 h in a week, e.g. the ability to earn as obviously cap then at that 40 h. So once you've come up with your hourly rate, you realize that there's no opportunity for you to actually pay yourself a raise or an increase or even a 13th check at the end of the year. Then I really started to burn and more into my Skillshare teaching as well as into my YouTube. I was producing a YouTube video once a week for the last I don't know how long. And then from a school perspective, I was trying to come up with a Skillshare class once every three months. I've shared very openly, particularly around my Skillshare earnings, which you can definitely check out those videos and the description box. But to bring you up to speed, I'm essentially earning about 12,000 round on a good month from Skillshare. And I'll put the dollar amount on the screen. And then from YouTube, I'll typically in about 1,000 random month. So that then would be over and above my full-time rates operating as a freelancer than what I started to do was actually prospect for clients for myself because I found myself enjoying particular industry is based on the agencies that I was working with. I really started to develop an understanding of the kinds of brands that excite me. So in my instance, e.g. I absolutely love working on tourism brands. I love working on wellness and beauty brands. And I love working with wine and those sorts of lifestyle product brands. So I would really suggest if you are marketing yourself as a freelancer to find those kinds of niches. Because if you just advertise social media services, it's really not saying that my Saran, who you are passionate about and who you are looking to serve. I've found that the more specific I am in terms of the offering that I want to offer, the more people are actually attracted in terms of working with me. That's really been my journey in terms of how I've been framing my services and high than Ansel those. So the majority of the work, I would say is in the realm of social media strategy, but I'm a digital strategist. I'm able to offer far broader services than just social media. It's just kind of being as a result of COVID, That's the biggest demand at this point in time. But certainly I am also able to offer some other digital marketing services. I have put social media as the focus in terms of how I present myself on things like LinkedIn and put myself out there online. And then I'm like, by the way, I also actually offer a lot of other skills, e.g. email marketing, CRM, and the other components that do not pretend to social media. So that would really be a tip in terms of trying to be specific about both the industry as well as the specific service that you offer. One of the things that I do notice a lot with social media is if e.g. you say social media services, people cannot osmosis and there certainly are not psychic Around whether it is that it's the copywriting within the social media, whether it's the design within social media. If social media management, which typically pertains to community management and actually monitoring comments and queries. And then also the paid media side of things. So if you market yourself as a social media expert, people will of course, assume that you have an all encompassing knowledge of social media. For many people, what I've noticed is actually what they're trying to say is that they are experts in content or the organic way in which the brand shows up. I would suggest, again, going back to the drawing board and actually distilling exactly what skills you do have, then having the certifications to back it up. So e.g. Facebook blueprint actually have a community management certification that you can sit if that's a service that you want to offer. And then similarly from a paid media perspective is an absolute plethora of free and paid for courses from a paid media perspective. So before you start putting herself out there as an all encompassing social media markets, are you very well aware of the fact that there's very many different facets to the service. So in addition to the social media strategy and content creation that I offer, as well as the more broad digital marketing services. I actually studied journalism, which means that I'm a very passionate writer. I'm also a very quick to qualify the fact that content creation and my mind is not necessarily all just pretty pictures. It's also about being able to write compelling and hard hitting call to action type content. So that is another servers. So you can see I'm being very specific in terms of what it is that I'm offering and in which Nietzsche's I'm doing. So you can tell by how I'm explaining it that my income streams are actually very, very, There's the passive income that I'm making as a result of teaching online via it on Skillshare or on YouTube. Then there's the retainer work that I will do for agencies. And then there's direct client work that I will have found myself in terms of high price myself. I've also noticed that pricing is kind of a double-edged sword when it comes to digital marketing services because they will almost always be someone willing to do it cheaper. So with the proliferation of platforms like Fiverr, There's a lot of not great social media marketing and digital marketing that can be performed. So of course, these platforms will say, we are so great for outsourcing, leave it with us. But the reality is there's no ownership or accountability when you enlist those sorts of services. So I'm the first one to use Fiverr for every particular job with a very particular timeframe. But in almost all instances, I would prefer to work with a freelancer who I can potentially go get a coffee with or have a Zoom with. So I do prefer to have a little bit more of that one-on-one connection. There is nothing stopping you when you first get started enlisting of self on services like Fiverr and Upwork. But bear in mind that that is the nature of the relationships that typically very transactional. So maybe once you've gotten your confidence level app with those sorts of services, you can then build client relationships which are maybe a bit more local. You also need to consider that what social media people do expect that high-quality pictures can be produced. So maybe you've got a partnership with a photographer who you can work with or you e.g. have a background in photography or videography. And more and more people are expecting you to be able to produce things like reals. So I absolutely loved making real is for my clients. And I use in shot to do this. I've actually made a video all about exactly how I go about this. But you can see that again, you would need to be very specific because people are expecting a whole lot of different things when it comes to social media marketing services, one of the ways that you can land a lot of clients is by joining Facebook groups. So finding local Facebook groups of people with small businesses or potentially other freelancers and doing trade exchanges or offering freebies or promotions. That was definitely how I got my start when it came to online teaching because I would always offer free beta versions of my courses that I was busy launching, which was a great way to build up my audience. And as a result of that, I still have a Mailchimp lists which I can use when I want to run promotions and so forth. Because your personal brand starts to become increasingly important, you do have to start thinking of yourself as the business. And therefore things like LinkedIn and email lists will become increasingly important when it comes to marketing yourself online. The other thing that I've found to be seriously helpful is because I'm teaching online. I do create things like freebies and cheat sheets, as well as trends presentations. And so if anyone's a Gary V. H fan in the house, you will notice that one of his books was called jab, jab hook. And it was all about the fact that you need to job and give a lot of free value before you're actually able to hook and get someone to sign up with you. I think even though you're in that mindset when you're first getting out that every single second of your time needs to be spent on profit bearing output. It's actually a sad reality that if you spend some time putting together something like an e-book or a cheat sheet or some sort of lead magnet. It's actually going to serve you better in the long run because people are going to appreciate that you're a thought leader in the field. Youtube, in addition to bringing the revenue, has also helped to position me as a thought leader in the digital marketing and social media sphere. So I'm very grateful to that because of course, when I do cold outreach to people via e-mail or on the Facebook groups like I've mentioned then of course I can include a link to my YouTube channel, which of course shows that I do teach digital marketing. So one would assume I would be able and competent to take over digital marketing for a particular brand. So in terms of earnings, Incredibly enough, I think they were only about one or two months and the years span that I actually made considerably less than what I would have done where I working at a corporate. On the whole, I would say I earn 20 to 30% more actually freelancing, which may sound like a lot, but also consider that you will have more expenses. So e.g. things like having upgraded equipment, all of that is obviously going to fall on you. If you need a new computer, if you need a new microphone and video camera, and so on and so forth, particularly in your first year of business, I discovered that I was using a lot of money on both hardware costs as well as software costs. And now I've reached a middle ground. So definitely when you are factoring in your rates, be sure to account for those sorts of expenses. So everything from Internet to the fact that there's no one to help you when things go wrong. But I really hope that I can encourage other people to seek the path less traveled when it comes to digital marketing, I'm now in the position where I can work remotely, which means that I'm able to soon travel to Australia to work remotely for a month and really start to emulate that more digital nomad lifestyle. For me, it's really not about going into Qt coffee shops and eating a psi evils. It's more about the fact that I feel I'm gonna get a lot more out of my life if I'm not bound to one particular bus or one particular job that I may or may not be very passionate about. And so, although initially it does feel overwhelming to have these very many different kinds of responsibilities and income sources. It also means that you are obviously a whole lot less reliant on a particular client or particular project. And so over time, you can obviously weed out the industries that you're less passionate about, the clients that you may be doing gel as well with and hopefully end up with your dream job. So those are all the ways that I make money as an online digital marketer. If you do have any questions around how I got the confidence to go on this journey. I'm obviously very open to making further videos. This is more just the practical considerations and the services that you can consider offering. I can't wait to see you guys in the next videos. So if we can keep on doing digital basis. 30. BONUS: Why I love my Job (Part 1) : In today's video, we're going to be discussing why do digital marketing strategist is what they do and why I love my profession so **** much. I have been trying to perfect my explanation of what it is that I do to my parents for probably the last ten years. I think I finally have it down pat. If you potentially are interested in becoming a digital marketing strategist or learning more about the profession, then this is the video for you. So what does the term digital marketing strategist mean? Well, particularly post-COVID, with more and more things moving onto the online space and into an online ecosystem, there needs to be a person and organizations who can really make sense of not only the individual platforms, but the relationships between those platforms. So e.g. a. Digital marketing strategist would be looking at a company's website. So both the structuring of the website, the kinds of content that it houses, as well as its performance. There would be looking at social media marketing, content marketing, how the brands presenting online. And then finally, things like paid media. Whether that the Google Display Network or Google search. That is really crucial in terms of understanding if someone's searching for your product or service, what is going to show up? Are you really going to be putting your best foot forward? Are you leveraging what you have in your favor and are you trying to actively minimize month on month ways in which you are maybe not excelling as a brand or company. That's what's kept me busy for the last ten years, mom and dad Israeli working with agencies in order to Ansel services, to clients which are going to help them to do digital data, which you guys know is the tagline for this channel. In addition to that, there would be in-house resources on the brand side. So if e.g. I've worked at two different companies as the digital marketing manager. And they have a similar set of responsibilities as a digital marketing strategist. Again, they're really looking to leverage the different ecosystem components to the best of their ability so that their best serve the business objectives, the marketing objectives, and therefore tick the boxes when it comes to the digital marketing objectives. When you hear terms like growth hacking, typically it's quite a similar thing. It's all about looking at what are we trying to achieve here and what are the most suitable digital marketing platforms? Of course, with any role, it will depend greatly on the company that you are working for in terms of what your day to day responsibilities would be? In my experience when I was working for a smaller digital marketing agency as a digital marketing strategist and later the head of strategy. A big portion of my role was actually new business development because strategy is typically one of the first steps in a process, particularly on an agency workflow side. It'll come into strategy first. So we would be the first point of contact, particularly with a new customer, to understand what is their business requirements. So what are some of the things that they're hoping to achieve? Where are the weaknesses? Or there may be competitors coming into the market with a more compelling digital offering. And there would be looking to enlist that digital marketing agency. In that instance, it was really about meeting with the client, understanding what it is that they were trying to achieve and where they really felt that they were falling short. So in a nutshell, it's a How can I help you conversation? It's been a fantastic listener and being able to distill probably quite a few different challenges or problems from a company standpoint. Really isolate them around particular objectives. What you then do is match those two key performance indicators, or key performance areas as they're sometimes called. And actually hold yourselves accountable as an agency and say, based off of the information that you've told us and based off of the objectives you are trying to achieve, this is an action plan. In order for that action plan to really hold any way, it needs to look at what success may look like to that business. So that at the end of your contracted agreement, you would be able to turn around to your client and say, we have just shot the lights out. And this is why with digital marketing is that there is nothing subjective about it. It's actually quite beautiful in the sense that although it is a new and developing and burgeoning industry, there is a lot of literature that's recently come about from all the big institutions. So you'll notice that you can get certified by Google. You can do the metal blueprint courses. And there's a lot of information around best practice. So most of the time you're able to just reference statistics around how many people actually use that particular platform in the country that you are operating from. There's a whole bunch of different resources that you can consult for this. So most of the time people are referencing the HootSuite digital report, which comes out annually. And that really forms the bedrock of most digital strategies within that, because you have access now to this particular company's website or social media platforms, you'll then be able to dig deeper into each of those analytic states. So it's really about consulting all your different sources, most of which, as I say, are pretty objective. And then adding a little sprinkle of fairy dust. So this is the part where your creativity really comes to play. You can look at the data as much as you like. I like to call it analysis paralysis. But at the end of the day, you really need to draw conclusions in terms of what is the best way forward for my client based on the information that we have on hand. And that is really why I'm so passionate about being a strategist. It's really like being partially a psychologist but for brands. And then partially this artist because you're able to look at the data, make sense of it, and then put forward your best foot in terms of recommendations. The other thing that I really like about it is you get to understand different industries and different sectors. So what I mean by that is when you work on the brand side, so e.g. as a digital marketing manager, you will become very, very affair with that particular industry or niche. On the other hand, if you work for an agency and what I like about it, although be where the shiny object syndrome is that you do get a lot of exposure to different business models and different industries. You can go down many rabbit holes with each of your clients to actually understand what it is that's unique about the industry. And what are some of the ways that you can leverage digital marketing strategies in order to help them. If we want to think about being a digital marketing strategist and a larger agency. The key ways in which it would differ from being in a smaller agency would be that there's probably going to be a pitch team and a bigger agency environment. There's a lot more leadership and hierarchy. So typically, those initial conversations might be held by the MD or the business director or something like that. Whereas you would be brought on board as kind of like a not so silent sidekick where you would maybe receive a brief that's beautifully typed out, hopefully not unchaste, which is a very common agency tool that is used in order to get your briefs. Then you would go about your business of doing that research, doing your competitor analysis, you'll often undertake what is known as a swat analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats. And if you're part of a bigger agency, they will also be proprietary models that you will use. And these are really fun. I must say my time at a big agency and Cape Town was baseband really understanding what are the methodologies around strategy, but make no mistake about it. Strategy is not just about problems. There is a lot of opportunities. So one of my favorite tasks being a digital marketing strategist, would be compiling trends, presentations Around what are some of the key changes that are happening to social media platforms? Google Analytics, which has just recently changed from Universal Analytics to GA for heaven help all of us. And many other fundamental changes that are changing the way that we view the world and enter into the metaphase. I think there's also that large degree of making sense of a scary and changing world and putting your clients at ease that in fact, you have been staying on top of the research, staying on top of what your competitors are doing. And really carve a distinct and define strategy for that particular brand that you're working on. 31. BONUS: Why I love my Job (Part 2) : One of the key distinctions between the inclined side versus being agency side is that because you have an agency helping you, hopefully, it will mean that you actually have to get really good at that bird's eye view. So although you may not be the person compiling the research, you may not be the person compiling the report. No longer would you be expected to e.g. dig through your Google Analytics for a very particular answer. Most of the time you would be working on Google Data Studio on a dashboard that your agency has created for you. That being said, you need to be very fastidious in terms of who you choose to work with, how you choose to run those agreements. What I like to call operational fitness. So that means that you really need to be on top of things like status meetings, agendas, getting your briefs into your agencies, and staying super organized. So one of my favorite parts of being the client was all the exposure that I had to productivity tools like Trello, e.g. I also love Notion. I've made some other videos about that. So it's really all about staying on top of what needs to happen and make sure that the key stakeholders in each scenario, on each brief, I kept up-to-date, informed and ultimately will be happy with the result. You are going to be the one asking for the KPI framework and asking what success looks like. You will also be accountable on behalf of your agencies. Typically, you will put out what's known as an RFI or an RFP for a particular service or skill set of services. So let's say e.g. you're wanting to launch an app as a company, you would then put out an RFI or an RFP, get a bunch of agencies to actually create pictures. You would be part of that pitch process which can be long and can be quite grueling. You'd pick the agency that you're actually wanting to work with and then they would then be held accountable for that set of deliverables. If I could describe a day in the life of a digital marketing strategist, honestly expect the unexpected. That would be my advice. So it'll depend particularly on time of year, whether or not your client is wrapping up the fiscal, those sorts of things are really going to impact you as a strategist. The other thing is going to impact you as the time of the month and I'm not talking about your menstrual cycle. I'm talking about reporting. So a big part of your job will be ensuring that Google Analytics reports are sent to your client. Or if you are the client, received and circulated and making sure that everyone understands particularly the action points that should arise from that particular report. Other things that you might be doing as a digital marketing strategist and kid things like social media sentiment reporting. In South Africa, typically, brands will use things like brands are or meltwater to understand social media sentiment. Other than that, you would also be looking at social media reporting. So the growth of your various platforms as well as your paid media reporting to lids. Think if it's not the first week of the month, what would you have typical deliverables be? So they would either be taking the brief and co-creating that with a client or as I said, in the bigger agency environment, receiving the brief, you within typically go into a research phase. So a lot of the time actually, I'm spent crouched over my desk in that research phase, looking through the data for my clients. So that would be looking at historical information, looking at places in which they're underperforming, which is typically surfaced by an audit. So accountants are not the only ones who do audits. Digital marketing strategists do them for breakfast. As digital marketing strategist is going to be looking at, if you can imagine a spider diagram with your digital written in the middle, you'd have a website, social media, paid media, email marketing, programmatic media, and so forth. So you'd have to go through each of those nodes, I know spider diagram and assess of what is happening with each of them. At the same time, you would also be looking at your biggest competitors. And in addition to that, you'll also be looking at who are the people doing it. We maybe want to look at Airbnb. We maybe, we probably want to look at Apple. We probably are going to look at some automotive examples. So some are wildcards, put it like that. You need to have looked at a bunch of different ways in which different industries have been using that particular platform. So e.g. on Instagram, we want to look at the client's Instagram and say, Mr. Client, is there a reason why you're not using reels in 2022? It's a great way to grow organically. And by the way, Instagram is a super cluttered environment. Unfortunately, in feed posts are not going to cut it anymore. So you can really see where I'm going with this before I get too silly. That is really the kinds of research that you're going to be undertaking. You would then compile that into a deck. It's called a deck for God knows what reason. It's just a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. This is going to really provide us synopsis of all of your findings. In this research phase, you would then have what's known as a tissue session. I'm not sure why it's called this because You shouldn't be crying. Although I'm sure I probably have. This is time for you to flesh out what you've found. Flesh out where the opportunities are with the client before, ideally, you present one big strategy because often what will happen is if you don't have this tissue session, you will go on a tangent in the opposite direction of your client. Whereas the tissue section gives you the opportunity to present, maybe like our hypothesis would be the right terminology to say to them, this is where my research is pointing. I'm gonna keep on going. If you're happy with that. What also helps is that then you're not wasting a creative or creative team's time in terms of creating collateral or pictures and copy that, look in a certain way. And meanwhile, the client would have disagreed with you had you just presented your hypothesis. So it's more about giving a stab at the direction and checking that your client is okay with that. If your client is happy, you keep on tracking. So you would then use all of that information to put together a rollout plan, rolls of platforms, sometimes called a channel palette. It will really dictate how you're going to be leveraging each different platform or Avenue. You'd also associate those beautiful KPIs budgets as well as who is responsible for what and what are your ways of working? Lot that goes on in this price is if your client then sees it lives its signs it off. At that point, it goes into the creative team of the agency. So if you can think of a round circle, which strategy is the starting point, it then will typically go into a creative process. So the creatives will look at all of the insights that are being unsurfaced by this strategist, which is yourself. And then say, Okay, this is the chase list which I'm going to produce. I'm realizing how much we're jogging is a chase list is really just a list of what collateral they need to create. Collateral is because sometimes it's words and sometimes it's images. And sometimes it's like PID Cosgrove. Really, it can be anything that then gets signed off by the client. Hopefully, it'll go into execution which will typically require front-end development, back-end development, and QA, quality assurance. And then results hopefully in a beautiful digital product. But the job of the strategist just a lot over because now you will have probably a new platform to look after. If e.g. your client has now started TikTok, or if you have now launched a new app on your website, because lo and behold, you can't just build it and they will come with these digital assets. You then need to actually unpack what is the launch strategy of this new product we've created and optimize, and really just iterate on what you've done. So that is another reason why I love digital marketing strategy is with a print campaign because there's a lead time. You're going to create it, launch it, and hope for the best if your billboard sex, you know what, the printing fee is behind you. So there's not a whole lot you can do with digital. There is no such thing as the 11th hour. There is the 12th hour, there is the 13th. Our base believe your client will be changing it up until then. Your client might potentially notice after you've gone live, like the color green and therefore something needs to change on the website. You're gonna be working consistently with your client, with your account management team to really finish that and make sure that over time, whatever you've created has longevity and it's delivering on the results you've been hoping for. I didn't mention, of course, that there would be a project manager involved at every step of this journey. But hopefully you guys got that, that there's someone moving it through those various steps of the cycle. That in a nutshell, is what a digital marketing strategist is. Certainly different company to company. But the baseline expectation is that you are a brilliant generalist in a variety of different digital marketing medians. They are, of course, instances where people will specialize. So oftentimes you will hear people talking about an SEO specialist or content marketing specialist or a social media specialist. And that's simply someone that's taken the ecosystem and cherry pick their favorite platforms and gone into those specifics, my reasoning for sticking it out as a general digital marketing strategist As I really do enjoy the variety and that is the same reason why I freelance. I love being able to work across different business models and understanding different agency and client models too. If you're not really a fan of a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty, then I'm going to say that digital marketing strategy might be a tough nut to crack. Just because there are a lot of days when you have a very unpredictable workload, There's unpredictable expectations upon you. And as I say, it will depend on whether or not your agency is busy pitching, whether you have reporting on the go and so forth. So there are some requirements which are very much monthly and can be anticipated. There's nothing like an 11:00 P.M. slack from your colleague. But that really is the nature of digital and I think it's part of the reason why we love to hate. It's one of those things that cannot be stopped. Say, particularly in the social media space, it really does challenge you. People will say to me, How do I become a digital marketing strategist? And I honestly want to say like, I have no idea. I'm not sure what that most direct path is, and I'm also not convinced that the most direct path is necessarily a good thing in terms of what I actually did. I studied journalism and I specialized in photojournalism, which at the time I was really wondering what I was gonna do with this profession. But lo and behold here I am trying to work out things like, what lenses should I be using for my YouTube channel. My other major was German and who knows, who knows what my ideas were. At 17 when I first went to what I was actually going to do with this smorgasbord of qualifications. But I then got it together. I did my postcard and marketing. And probably six months into my marketing postcard, I had an epiphany that social media and digital marketing, we're really where it was that I had no time for anything above the line. I really wanted this fast-paced Korea and digital marketing strategy was the best way in order for me to go about that. And to be honest, I've never looked back. 32. Thank You: That is a massive thank you from me. Thank you so much for joining me for digital marketing when I, when I would love for you to write down your current understanding of digital marketing and how many facets are really encapsulated by this big, beautiful, beefy topic and how it shifted during the course of this class. As well as those benefits, of course, of digital marketing, which include things like just how measurable it is, It's cost-efficiency. The fact that you don't have to necessarily have 20 years of advertising experience to understand it, but rather be really a fair with tools like Google Analytics for which we now know is the new universal way of tracking online. I really hope this course was valuable to me, please do let me know in the comments section below, if you have any questions, I always love and appreciate a review if you want to get in touch alternatively, check me out on YouTube and I can't wait to see you for my next class so we can keep on doing digital better.