This will be my last required post for my Digital Marketing class. I am glad that I was given the chance to create this blog and try my hand at writing. It was interesting to see how many of my friends were actually interested in reading about what I had to say. I was happy to see that I did gain some attention in the blog world and gained many followers that were not people who I knew.
So what did I learn?
The main take away I got from this class and experience is how important digital marketing is. It wasn’t like I wasn’t already aware of this but I didn’t know to what extent its importance held. Digital marketing has its moment when it is in your face and obvious, like paid search and banner ads.
You know it exists and you see that it exists. Most of these type of digital marketing can be annoying and people want it to go away. What I didn’t realize was the amount of marketing that is sneaky about being marketing. For example, lets talk about content marketing.
Most of the time there is content marketing people don’t even realize that is advertisement. They are just fun, engaging items that bring the user to your site and you don’t even realize what they are doing.
Digital Marketing and just marketing in general is all about being the puppet master. We use different strategies like, inbound marketing, social media, database marketing,etc… to persuade users to come to our site and buy our products. This has become a second nature to the users and they are so unaware how much everything has to do with marketing.
The skill that marketers need to have is knowing how to relate and draw in all the different people. Personalization is a key factor in drawing in all different types of users. Supplying different types of content on your blog or on your site allows for people to find something to their liking with your company. This is why it is extremely important for marketers to not only be creative but to also have technical skills. By having technical skills marketers will be able to help the users even more and they will be faster about it. Research will go quicker and decisions can be made by the marketers with confidence, instead of having to trust what the IT guy is saying. Going through code academy was a great experience in this class and I am happy that I’ve made the decision to learn more and more about coding.
I could go on and on about what I learned in this class but I suggest that you read my past posts to hear more about what I have to say about digital marketing.
At the beginning of this post I mentioned that it was interesting to see how many people of my friends would read my blog and how many new followers I was able to obtain. Well for the last day of my blog I did a bit of an experiment. I’ve been using Klout for a while now and I was interested in how many people were influenced by me to a point that they would do what I asked. For two days I asked people to help me out and read my blog. I never expected the results I would get but I got over 728 views in one day.
Throughout the quarter I had been pretty consistent with my blog. I gained more and more followers but would only get roughly 20 views per post. I would regularly post on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. I would just tell people they should read the blog but there was no real incentive for them to do what I asked. The fact that in one day I was able to get 728 views, granted only roughly 60 visitors, shows that I do influence a large group of people as long as there is something in it for them. In this case it was helping out a classmate and I promised I would stop giving them a hard time about reading my blog.
This could be used in digital marketing also. Brands want their customers to want to help them out, for example in co-creation. The dream is to ask your customers to do something, doesn’t matter what it is, and they will do it without a second thought. Granted me asking them to read my blog was very simple and easy but just think if I kept asking small favors from my followers and escalating the level of difficulty each time. If the user gets something out of the favor, whether it be physical or psychological, they will more likely want to help. I’m excited to keep writing this blog and see what I can make out of this.
For the end of this blog I would like to say that I learned a lot and I defiantly got a lot out of this class.
I became HootSuite Certified: 
I became Google Analytics Certified:
I also wrote 14,775 words with an overall view of 1,315.
Thank you for continuously reading and walking with me through this process.
Taylor Franks 