I have been doing marketing for quite a while but I have never really mastered the essence of marketing because this dimension is just so huge and immersed, and that’s why working in Marketing field has been always one of the magical things that I can devote all my passion into, it is not just about to bring sales, lie to your customers lol [a dedicated marketer will not need to lie], or even spend sh*t tons of money fo your current company.
It’s more about creating an idea and apply to your customers, bridging between both your company and clients and last but the least, to offer a solution to your customers, this is the way how I define marketing.
For many startup companies, implementing a full packed marketing team might be quite dangerous because the lack of direction and capitals, any wrong decision that you make in the earlier stage might greatly impact to the business, and that is why I create this blog – the blog to educate, learn and share among the guys who are small but willing to aim big in the future.
So what type of marketing activities that I should do if I start from zero? I often received this question from the clients. In general, depending on what kind of products you are offering to customers I would say. If you are selling a product, then I would recommend you start building up your SEO fundamentals and if you are in the fashion industry, then obviously focus on Facebook / Instagram will definitely become your right approach.
Overall, no matter what type of business you are aiming with, I highly recommend you to do the following:
1) Learn Google ads (AKA Google adword)
2) Learn the simple Google analytic technique, you can get full resource from Google
3) Learn the basic site architecture of your site.
The idea for suggesting you focus on Google is pretty simple because the majority of your audiences will be there, even you had a business on Amazon, customers will still use the search engine to search for the product and loop into Amazon, and this Google battleground is much more competitive than you think if you don’t have the skill to conquer the territories where you are fighting your life for, then the chance for you to succeed might be small, failing strategies usually starting with when you are too overconfident to your environment/competitors, the answer is not, business is just like the weather in Canada, you might be able to predict the direction, however, the true facts sometimes even the top technology cannot have an accurate prediction.
The most 6 common marketing channels that most companies are listed in the following and each has its goal and purpose:
- Organic traffic
- Direct Traffic
- CPC / PPC
- Referral
- Social
- Display
Organic traffic
An easy way to explain what organic traffic is- It’s in the opposite as paid traffic, which basically means clients usually use the search engine to find the keywords on the search engine and choose the non-paid search result and this is where the SEO kicking in because an URL must be very high ranking in order to stay on SERP (search engine result pages) this is another black hole which I will spend more much content on this later on.
Direct traffic
This is much easier to explain, the direct traffic refers to the URL that customers already know your business, it could be either type your URL to enter or use the browser bookmark, I will just simply refer this traffic to your current existing customers.
CPC / PPC
This is the most costing part that makes the marketing personnel headache because this basically means the paid traffic, the term CPC / PPC stand for (cost per click) & (Pay per click), which is usually the top searching results that you see with the “ad” tag on it when each customer clicked the link or acquired actions, the company will have to pay, and this is usually the biggest ads spending and the quick traffic channels that a company should definitely master on the earlier stage.
Referral traffic
As the title mentioned, referral traffics are the traffic comes from another web site, such as from local discussion forum or blog…etc
Social
Social traffics came from all social media platforms such as Facebook / Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, generally the contents from here are highly viral and related to timeline events such as trendy news, topics or event.
Display
This traffic refers to banner or flash from your site or 3rd party ads..etc, usually, the standard size is 728 x90 leaderboards, 250 x250 square, 120x 600 skysraper..etc
BONUS MATERIAL: Email traffic
Strictly saying email traffic should be referral because it usually involves link leverage from other domains, however, since Email traffic is extremely important to a company especially for current existing customer engagement, which I probably write another blog about this in detail.
Hopefully, you will find this article useful and if you don’t, feel free to comment or SHARE this content on your socials if you find it useful! I will try my best to benefit the community by providing more and more info in regard to marketing.
For the next content, I will cover the fundamental Google analytic tips and tricks that you will need, stay tuned.