Kelsey Bremner: All About Digital Marketing

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Going Mobile - Day 2

I’ve often wondered if I were to create an app how I would get it out there. Sure, if any idea is good enough it’s bound to take off, right? But say an ice cream shop pops up around the corner selling the best ice cream in the world. People won’t be lining up at the door right away. First, there must be a few brave customers who meander in and decide to give it a try. Then, they can run and tell all their friends that it is, in fact, THE best ice cream in the world, and boom, you’ve got your line. Impagermobile.com offers “16 Innovative Marketing Strategies” to help confront this very problem: fostering your hypothetical ice cream store’s – your app’s – “discoverability.” Like a lot of marketing advice, the strategies revolve around one core principal: networking. From building email lists and connecting to news sites to exercising every one of your social media outlets – twitter, facebook, etc. – it’s all about using every resource possible to get your message out there. With the internet, we are becoming increasingly more interconnected making it such an exciting time for marketing. We are now able to share that favorite ice cream flavor not only with our friends, but with their friends, and their friends’ friends… you get the picture. Knowing how to get that app off the runway will make or break your app’s accessibility, and ultimately, it’s successfulness.

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Going Mobile

It seems as if everyone—from preteens to great grandmothers—is completely dependent on their mobile device. It’s the last thing you check before you go to bed and the first thing you reach for when you wake up. In today’s society, we have growing obsession with our mobile phones. With this current and growing obsession, a new category of consumer has emerged: a mobile consumer.

In the article The mobile consumer: Remapping the pathway to purchase by John Lim, he emphasized how the mobile consumer has the ability to be submerged in both the physical world and the digital world. Consumers are using mobile to interact with your brand through Web, social, email and apps more frequently than their PCs, tablets, MacBook’s, etc. The importance of ensuring all these touch points work correctly when accessed through a mobile device is vital and should be considered when marketing your brand. From a personal standpoint, I cannot reiterate enough about the frustrations I experience when accessing a site that is not mobilized.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the consumer’s experience. If they aren’t happy with their experience, they might choose to look elsewhere in the future. 

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Coding: Today's Second Language

There once was a time where people dedicated their time to learn foreign languages, by attending night classes or buying special textbooks and software to teach themselves. Now the urgency to learn Spanish or French is being replaced by HTML, CSS, Java, and Python.

The nature of the computer forces solutions to be expressed precisely in a language the computer can interpret. Meaning computer scientists or other "techys" need to understand how languages work and exactly what each part of the language mean. Because natural languages are too ambiguous with a lot of versatility, following the steps correctly requires knowing lots of unstated assumptions. To program computers, we need tools that allows us to describe processes precisely and brief for better comprehension. 

According to the Coding Textbook by David Evans, there are two reasons why everyone should study computing:

1. "Nearly all of the most exciting and important technologies, arts, and sciences of today and tomorrow are driven by computing."

2. "Understanding computing illuminates deep insights and questions into the nature of our minds, our culture, and our universe."

The founder of Codecademy believes learning how to program is the best job security you have, and knowledge of code id the best way to improve the economy and the planet.

It's important to realize that programming isn’t only for programmers, as intimidating as it might be. In today's world where technology is growing rapidly around us and controlling many aspects of our life, it's a valuable skill that can be acquired with time, practice, and persistence. 

Programming will become more important everyday and like learning a foreign language, it's never too late to learn.

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To be honest, I was dreading the fact that I would have to try and code for 2 or more hours because my last experience with coding was a complete disaster (freshman year computer science class... not fun). However when using Codecademy, those 2 hours didn't seem too bad and I found myself actually enjoying it! I finished most of the HTML under the Web Fundamentals sections and I'm curious to see how CSS will pan out. I plan on continuing on, and learning some Javascript too, as I've always have had a curiosity with interactive web content.  

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Social Media: From a Problem to a Solution

Social media can create great value for your business…if executed properly. It seems like a simple task--creating a Facebook page, interacting via twitter, connecting with people via LinkedIn--but it's much more than that. Because social marketing is a new territory for many marketers and companies, many businesses face problems when implementing their social media efforts driving little to no value for them.

Majority of interactive marketers mention "engagement" as their main objective for social media. How do you measure if you are meeting the goals of your social engagement? Too much or too little engagement can hurt your objective and make it harder to convert customers into loyal purchasers. We must place the highest value on consistent monitoring and responding. Social media should be a two way street. 

It's also important to ask yourself if your business is investing enough to make social media effective. Not just talking about investing a large enough budget, an appropriate staff and the investment in technology, but also time.

Timing is everything. With approximately 100,000 tweets per minute, the likelihood of blinking and missing something is very common. Not only is it important that you respond to your social base, but it's also important to respond promptly. This gives you the opportunity to connect with your followers to create that customer loyalty businesses are continuously seeking. 

Social media is a direct link to your customers. Customers are magnetic to their computers, laptops, tablets and mobile devices looking for product information when deciding to make an educated purchase. That is exactly where we want them. Having your social presence visible in the online word is an all-access pass to your brand, and social media is that link to building a relationship with your customers. Updating product information, asking questions, sharing news and offering promotions via social media can create great value for your brand.

The commentary article, How Social Media Will Make You Fall in Love with Brands by Leyl Master Black, posed an interesting point. She talked about how brands can become your friends, and as creepy as that sounds, it's true. When brands and companies respond to your posts it makes you feel connected to them in a genuine way. They want to know who you are and what kind of things you care about. Yes, it does seem a bit intimate and almost invasive, but it can serve you benefits as well. 

I love following my favorite brands through Twitter and Facebook and using those social media outlets as a tool to gain information about the company and to be updated with current promotional deals. Just yesterday one of my favorite sunglasses brand, Blublockers, advertised a spring special on their Facebook page that ultimately lead me to a purchase. If it wasn't connected to that brand via social media, I wouldn't have made that purchase, and wouldn't be stylin' in the sun! 

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I always knew my searches were being tracked, but I had no idea the magnitude of the situation. Yes cookies make your searching more efficient and also provides benefits for businesses, but are you being tracked too much? It feels very invasive knowing some companies are collecting data even without your permission. Scary...

In this video Gary Kovacs, the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, unveils an ad-on called Collusion that makes it able for you to track who is tracking you. 

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Content Marketing: Attention Converting to Customers

Content marketing is “any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers.”

It creates and shares valuable content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you. It’s considered the new branding. A brand is a promise; it’s an expectation of an experience.

But how do we inspire people to generate content that attracts attention and keeps your audience interested? Start by understanding your customers: Who are they? What do they like and dislike? What are their passions? You won’t be able to create content that speaks to them and drives them to take action unless you have answered those questions. If content isn't worthy enough to link to, bookmark, retweet, and email friends about, it’s probably not good enough content. That’s where the social aspect of content marketing comes into play. Sharing content has become one important aspect of social media status. It provides networked word-of-mouth publicity, which is a very powerful tool in marketing and gaining exposure. 

In short, knowing your audience and grabbing their attention by publishing content relevant to their liking, will most likely create that customer relationship you’re looking for. 

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SEO is Not Dead

Search Engine Optimization is one of the many topics I'm excited about learning and becoming familiar with this quarter in Digital Marketing. SEOmoz is a very useful resource when trying to wrap your mind around all aspects of SEO and answered many of my questions I had about the subject prior to reading it. At first, I thought SEO was mostly about using Keywords to get your content higher ranked and popular; but it's way, way more than that. A key takeaway I found was the idea to "build for users, not search engines." Meaning, obtain what your target market is looking for and use their language to create an easy experience for your user. 

Another important note to consider is that SEO is constantly changing, and that's not going to change. Tactics used five years ago will not suffice and won't provide the same results anymore. The idea that some people are calling SEO a dead-end road seems a bit ridiculous to me. Websites are invariably competing for attention and higher rankings in search engines and those who know how to properly optimize their content will receive the benefits of increased traffic and visibility. That's a pretty simple defense to the argument of whether SEO is a dying cause, but I believe it to be true. SEO is not dead...for now that is. 

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"Content Doesn’t Win. Optimized Content Wins"

Li Evans, search marketing guru

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Welcome!

Hey everybody. My name is Kelsey, a senior at Western Washington University, studying Marketing with a minor in Psychology. I'm passionate about how people think, specifically consumers and their buying behavior, and love the connection between concepts I've learned in the marketing industry paired with similar content in my Psychology courses.  After I graduate this coming June, I plan on moving down to the Seattle area to pursue careers in brand development or advertising. Another option I'm exploring is to move to Austin, Texas and begin a whole new adventure over there and see where it leads me. But of course with being young and free, I want to keep my options open and take advantage of every opportunity I face. 

The Economist: Another Game of Thrones

This article was extremely intriguing, as most battles in competition are. I was surprised to see how little recognition Microsoft received in the article because I just assumed that they would be frontrunner in the playing field. Each of the big for companies--Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon-- started off with different goals and ideas of where their companies lies, but as time goes by and competition grows, those ideas and product lines are starting to blur and overlap. At one point in time, I felt the need to use each of those companies and their products seperately for different tasks. Now I find myself only needing the use of one product to do all the things I need to get done. I would get on my MacBook and search using Google for products that would ultimately lead me to Amazon. Identifying with the article, now I immediately go to Amazon, bypassing the need to search on Google, to find products I'm looking for. 

I also found it interesting how intense the battle is for Apple and Amazon when referring to the e-Book industry. Stating in the article, Amazon acquired approximately two-thirds of all digital-book downloads in America in 2011, with Apple only accounted 5%. This doesn't surprise me at all. Amazon primarily started off as a place to buy books online whereas that wasn't Apple's first objective. For me, I simply use my Kindle app on my Apple MacBook to do my e-book reading, finding no need to use Apple's digital book downloading service. A cool article I recently read states that Amazon acquired a social reading service called Goodreads, that gives Amazon an even more competitive advantage over Apple, which has no social components to their products at all.