Digital Marketing Strategy summary

As a digital marketer, it’s impossible to avoid the field known as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. As soon as you develop any kind of online presence, from a website to a social media page, SEO begins to matter – a lot.

The aim of SEO is actually pretty simple: to secure a prominent position for your website among search results. It’s the digital equivalent of securing a location with constant, heavy foot traffic: being prominent is desirable because greater visibility can often lead to greater sales.

So, we’ve looked at how to choose your keywords. But that’s not all there is to search engine optimization these days – far from it.

Yet in the early days of the internet, SEO was pretty straightforward. Back then, it was easy to boost your place in Google’s results: creating hidden content stuffed with repetitions of your keyword could earn you a top spot if you were determined enough.

SEO isn’t the only way to increase the traffic your website gets from search engines like Google. There’s an easier way to increase your prominence – but this one costs money. It’s called paid search, and it’s pretty self-explanatory.

When you Google “hotels in Havana” and see a few ads at the top of the results page, you know that the companies in question are making use of paid search. In short, they’re paying Google to advertise their websites when relevant keywords are entered.

Back in 2014, Facebook faced a global backlash after it emerged that it had subjected unwitting users to a secret psychological experiment: it had subtly manipulated user news feeds, curating the content they saw in an effort to change their moods.

When Facebook reviewed those same users’ own posts, it found that the experiment had been a success – exposing people to curated content could indeed influence their emotional states. But, in marketing and reputational terms, the experiment was a dismal failure: the Guardian, the British newspaper, published a poll showing that 84 percent of respondents had lost trust in the social network as a result of its experiment.

Content is a word you often come across in the field of digital marketing. And yet despite its significance, it’s a word that seems to refer to just about anything. Blog posts, videos, reports, podcasts, and so on – all of these fall under the very broad heading content.

So, what exactly is content then? In short, it’s media designed to engage the attention of potential customers. It generally tends to be less on-the-nose than traditional advertising and tries to attract the attention of customers in a softer, more engaging, and less direct way.