Tag Archives for " digital "

9 Digital Marketing Tips for the Holidays

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Super Saturday—the holiday season doesn’t lack shopping days. Add those to the traditional boost in consumer spending that occurs in the run-up to the holidays, and you have a recipe for a record sales quarter.

However, a bumper festive season doesn’t happen by accident. A comprehensive and thoughtfully crafted digital marketing strategy is necessary to make those sales rack up.

That’s why today, I will run through my top digital marketing tips for the holidays. By the end of this article, you’ll have an arsenal of strategies you can execute to make your physical or metaphorical cash register sing.

 

Why the Holidays Are the Best Time for Digital Marketing Success

Online shopping will be just as pivotal for consumers this festive season as last year. In 2020, online retail sales during the holiday period totaled $186 billion, and Cyber Monday was the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history. This year, the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday are projected to increase by 14 percent compared to 2020.

The sheer demand for online shopping makes the holiday period one of the best times to launch a new digital marketing strategy, but competition between brands also makes an effective strategy necessary.

It’s important to present a strong digital campaign given the potential propensity for consumers to seek out the kind of in-store events they missed out on in 2020. Research shows that while 70 percent of consumers report their shopping journey involves online touchpoints, only 14 percent of U.S. shoppers say they won’t shop in-store at all this season.

 

 

9 Digital Marketing Holiday Tips

OK, enough background information. Use these nine digital marketing holiday tips to guarantee a holly-jolly holiday season.

 

1. Start Early and Have a Plan

The best holiday digital marketing plans start months before the festive season. To put it another way: If you haven’t already started planning your strategy, start now.

By the time you’re reading this, most consumers will already have started shopping. It’s estimated that 31 percent of U.S. consumers will start their shopping in October or earlier, and 55 percent will start before Thanksgiving.

Whenever you start, making a plan is crucial. Try to wing it during the holiday season, and you’ll be outperformed by competitors who have had their campaigns set up and scheduled months in advance.

Planning your strategy doesn’t have to be complicated.

Start by outlining the goals you want to achieve and the tactics you plan on using. Next, list all the assets you need to design and the marketing funnels you need to build. Finally, create a realistic timeline backward from the day you want to launch.

Breaking your holiday digital marketing campaign up in this way will help show you exactly how much work needs to be done and how to make the best use of your time.

Most important of all, don’t freak out if you haven’t started planning yet. There’s still plenty of time to create a killer digital marketing plan. Focus on the shopping days that are still ahead of you and identify one or two effective strategies to put all of your efforts into.

 

2. Host a Contest

The holidays are a time for gift-giving, so what better way to get into the spirit of the season than by hosting a giveaway contest.

Not only is a contest a great way to give back to your consumers, but it’s also a fantastic way to drum up brand awareness, grow your social following, and build your email list. You can even use your contest to tease the holiday shopping deals and events you have coming up.

The great thing about hosting a contest online is that it’s quick, easy, and cheap to set up. You don’t even need to give away something extravagant to get people excited. A free product is all it takes to get your campaign going.

 

3. Use Paid Campaigns to Increase Awareness

While I’ll always believe SEO should have a prominent place in any marketing campaign, the time-sensitive nature of the holiday season makes PPC ads essential.

Run awareness-based campaigns on every major paid ad channel. I’d recommend Google, Facebook, and Instagram at a minimum, but feel free to advertise on any channel you think is appropriate for your audience.

Be thoughtful with your budget. Specifically, you’ll want to make sure you spread your budget across the entire holiday season. While it’s tempting to front-load your budget and catch shoppers as early as possible, consumers may not be ready to purchase at the start of November.

There are a couple of strategies you’ll need to implement to be sure of this.

First, account for higher costs the closer you get to Christmas. Since retailers know that consumers are much more likely to make purchases the later it gets in the season, CPCs become more expensive, too.

Second, get rid of any campaigns that aren’t performing by the end of November. That way, you can save your budget for campaigns that convert.

 

4. Use Promotions but Use Them Carefully

Promotions and discounts are something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are a great way to drive traffic and increase conversion rates. At the same time, they have the potential to devalue your brand—especially at a time when rampant consumerism is so closely linked to environmental damage.

In response, many brands have been distancing themselves from heavy discounts and Black Friday deals. Outdoor retail brand REI is closing its doors for the sixth year in a row and paying staff to take the day off and spend time with their family. Clothing brand Allbirds is raising prices on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, then donating the additional money to Mother Nature and matching it with their contribution.

You don’t have to go that far, but you should use offers and discounts with caution.

Rather than trying to compete on price when consumers are looking for as much value as possible, why not deliver value in another way? Free shipping, gifts, and other rewards are a great way to retain brand value while offering the discounts holiday shoppers are eager for.

Another way to make discounts more meaningful is to limit them to existing customers. With this strategy, there’s no risk of devaluing your brand in the eyes of new customers, while rewarding existing customers for being loyal. What’s more, it’s much cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one, and a generous promotion may be enough to stop them from shopping with competitors over the holiday.

 

5. Create Holiday Gift Sets

If you’re looking for a way to increase conversions and boost your average order value (AOV), try bundling your products into holiday gift sets and selling them at a discount. Product bundles are particularly popular in the run-up to Christmas when shoppers are searching for the perfect gift.

Bundling is particularly common with health and beauty products, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work in other sectors, too. For example, a yoga e-commerce store could bundle a yoga mat, block, carrier bag, and pair of leggings. A pet store could bundle dog food, a bed, and a collar. Whatever you sell, there’s almost certainly potential to bundle several products together.

Don’t just guess which products will work well together. Harness the power of data and dive into your inventory analytics to see which products have been most popular and which are most frequently purchased together.

Of course, you don’t have to only include your best sellers. Bundling is a great way to sell less popular products that may not do so well on their own.

 

6. Create Laser-Targeted Email Campaigns

Email marketing generates on average $36 for every $1 spent, making it the highest returning marketing channel. It’s a no-brainer to include email in your digital marketing strategy.

​​Unfortunately, nearly every other brand includes it in their strategy, too.

That’s right; it’s not just you who gets bombarded with offers during the holidays. From November onwards, everyone’s inboxes start overflowing with Black Friday deals, special offers, and holiday greetings.

Not sending emails isn’t an option. If you don’t catch your audience’s attention, your competitors will. Your job is to make your emails stand out in a sea of sales messages.

Your secret weapons? Segmentation and personalization.

That’s not to say your subject line and email copy aren’t. You’ll have to nail those, too. You’ll also want to make sure emails are optimized for mobile.

There’s only so much you can optimize, however. When you send your email shouldn’t be one of them. There’s no shortage of statistics telling you the best time to send an email. The trouble is your competitors are reading the same articles, too, so forget best practices for a moment and stagger emails as much as possible throughout the day.

 

7. Be Socially Responsible

Customers are prioritizing corporate social responsibility more than ever. More than three-quarters of them are motivated to purchase from companies that work to make the world better, according to research by AFLAC.

That means practicing social responsibility—whether that’s donating a portion of your profits to charity, creating environmentally-friendly products, or something else entirely—isn’t just the ethical thing to do. It makes business sense, too.

If you’re new to corporate social responsibility, start by supporting causes that align with your brand. For instance, it makes sense for a pet store to support a dog shelter, or a gardening brand to support an environmental nonprofit.

In both cases, customers will want to support the charity and may go out of their way to shop with your brand over a competitor. It’s also just nice to give back to something you care about. Tis the season for giving, after all.

Whatever causes you to support, remember to be genuine. Your customers aren’t fools, and they’ll quickly be able to tell the difference between a company that is committed to being responsible and one that is greenwashing.

 

8. Try New Platforms

Ever been tempted to run a campaign on TikTok or Instagram Live? Don’t wait for the New Year to make a change; try a new marketing channel this holiday season.

While it can be reassuring to stick to the channels you know, there’s no guarantee they’ll be as effective as they always have been. The move away from Facebook’s suite of apps towards newer platforms, in particular, is well documented.

Launching a campaign on a new platform may seem daunting, but if you treat it like an experiment, then it doesn’t matter if you fail. Better still, there’s every possibility you’ll hit it out of the park and uncover a profitable platform you can advertise on for years to come.

 

9. Make a Plan for Long-Term Success

My last holiday marketing tip doesn’t technically involve the holidays at all. It’s about how to squeeze as much return as possible from all the money you invest into holiday marketing throughout the rest of the year.

If your brand awareness ads are successful, you’re going to have a lot of people visiting your site. Hopefully, most of them will make a purchase. If they don’t, you’ll want to find ways of targeting them throughout the rest of the year to make sure that initial ad spend wasn’t wasted.

One of the best ways to do this without getting visitors to sign up for a mailing list is through retargeting ads.

With retargeting ads on Google and Facebook’s ad network, you only serve ads to people who have previously visited your site. This is an incredibly cost-effective ad strategy and one of the best ways to keep your brand top of mind well into the New Year.

 

Digital Marketing Holiday Tips: Frequently Asked Questions

 

Digital Marketing Holiday Tips Conclusion

The holiday season is rife with opportunity, and there’s no shortage of digital marketing strategies you can use to make 2021 your best season ever. It’s all about putting together a campaign that works for your brand.

Start by implementing one or two of the strategies I’ve listed above, then make sure you’re doing everything you can to improve your conversions. Finally, learn how you can keep your sales high after the holiday spike.

Which digital marketing tip are you going to use first?

Source: neilpatel.com

How to Use Transcription Services to Repurpose Your Content

 

Keeping your audience engaged with your content is a full-time job in itself. You must constantly evaluate your current content’s engagement metrics while also anticipating the needs of your growing audience.

With this in mind, new and updated content is crucial to any successful digital marketer’s strategy. How can you generate new content without spending more time than you have available? With transcription services.

In this guide, I’ll explain what transcription services are and what they can do for digital marketers. This will include a look at one particular use case—repurposing content—to give you an idea of just how valuable these services can be.

 

What Are Transcription Services?

Transcription services are business services that transcribe audio to text. The audio is most often pre-recorded and is then transferred to transcription professionals, who are trained in shorthand. They are able to quickly and accurately transcribe audio from many different sources.

You also have the option of AI-powered transcription tools, such as Otter and Rev. These services combine AI with trained professionals to deliver a top-notch experience.

From podcasts and videos to workshops and live speeches, a transcription service can help you to preserve your audio in text format. This can later be used for reference or, as I’ll outline below, as a way to repurpose your marketing content.

 

When are Transcription Services Used

Transcription services are most often used by physicians, scientists, researchers, and other technical professionals. Their spoken notes are transcribed into written notes and reports that can be used for reference or recordkeeping.

When you think of transcription, you may also think of court proceedings and police investigations. These, too, are used for recordkeeping (often public record) and as a way to make the proceedings accessible to all.

However, transcription can offer great benefits to digital marketers, too. One of the most effective ways to use transcription is to repurpose content and create high-value content in multiple formats.

 

5 Ways to Use Transcription Services to Repurpose Your Content

There are plenty of benefits transcription services can provide to digital marketers, and repurposing of content is just one. Here are five ways you can use transcription to expertly repurpose your content.

 

1. Turn a Video Into a Blog Post

Whether a new or established digital marketer, I can safely assume you never feel as if you’re hitting your weekly or monthly blog post targets. By transcribing your videos into blog posts, you can get that much closer to reaching your goal.

 

How many posts should you publish a week? According to HubSpot, the sweet spot can be anywhere from one post to five posts per week.

However, this will depend on the size of your website and what you hope to achieve. For a small website with a goal of maximizing organic traffic, for example, three to four new posts per week is recommended.

Another benefit of turning videos into blog posts is accessibility. While many digital media platforms offer closed captioning, they aren’t always the ideal way to digest content. By turning videos into blog posts, you can ensure all of your traffic has access to your content in multiple ways.

Of course, you should aim to bulk up these blog posts in ways that benefit the readers. These include using visuals (e.g., images, infographics, charts) and adding more in-depth examples.

The transcription should serve as a starting point to creating engaging, valuable blog posts.

 

2. Turn a Podcast Into a Video or Blog Post

You don’t need to forfeit multimedia content entirely! You can “upgrade” your podcast to a video using transcription services. Just add some visuals and you can now share to digital media platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.

The greatest benefit here is the ability to reach a wider audience. While there is certainly crossover between podcast listeners and video watchers, there are some people who stick strictly to one format.

By turning your podcast into a video (or vice versa), you open your content up to a whole new audience.

You have a few options here when it comes to adding visuals to your videos. The simplest is using one image (perhaps a solid background with your brand and website URL) throughout the entirety of the video.

This isn’t appealing, but it will enable you to add your content to sites like YouTube.

For more appealing visuals, you can also try stock photos, digital imagery, or even b-roll.

How can you ensure the visuals you use are appropriate and appealing to your audience? Search YouTube for similar content keywords to see what types of videos your target audience is currently engaging with.

This can ensure you are on the right track, while also giving you ideas on how to improve your content over the current offerings.

Or, you can turn your podcast into a blog post.

For example, Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi hosts a podcast, then turns the transcript into a detailed blog post. This allows users who don’t have time to listen to still access their content.

 

3. Create a List-Building PDF

Do you have a video or podcast episode that would make great list-building content? Then consider hiring a transcriptionist to turn that content into text.

List-building content, also known as lead magnets, is a great way to build your email subscription list. It is an offer of free content in exchange for an email address.

However, it is not as easy to attract people to your list-building content as it was before everyone had a website. Your content must be truly compelling and high-quality.

There are plenty of lead magnet formats to choose from, including:

• checklist
• cheat sheets
• e-books
• infographics
• case studies
• white papers

Using a unique angle, you can use the above formats to attract a targeted audience. With such an array of content types, it’s likely you have a video or podcast episode that can easily be transformed into one of the above.

 

4. Build a Resource for Social Media Content

There’s bound to be a Tweet-worthy quote or two from your latest podcast episode. Instead of replaying the episode and scrubbing through it, turn the episode into a transcript.

This will make it incredibly easy to find social media content to share.

Without the need to scour your audio, you can now spend that time creating attractive visuals using platforms like Canva or Adobe Spark.

These services allow you to create the ideal visuals for each social media platform, and they even include templates to get you started.

Do keep in mind the cost of transcription services may increase if your episode includes more than one person. This can take time and skill to navigate.

On the other hand, the added benefit of transcribing multi-guest content is that multiple speakers can add refreshing insight to your social media pages, especially if the guest has their own social profile to engage with your audience.

 

5. Create an E-Course

If you want to create a substantive course, then consider combining multiple videos or podcast episodes on a similar topic. The resulting e-course can then be offered as a lead magnet or even a paid course.

With platforms like Kajabi and Thinkific, you can host your online course with ease. How can you ensure the course you create is profitable?

The steps to creating a successful online course include:

• Choosing a fail-proof, high-demand topic.
• Creating compelling course objectives.
• Structuring your course modules effectively.
• Choosing a platform to host the course.
• Marketing your course strategically.

As a paid course, the content should be of exceptional quality and it should go in-depth. Transcriptions of your previous content will be helpful to create an outline, but you should really dig deep and build out the content as best you can.

Before you employ a transcriptionist, take special care to pick your best audio and video episodes for transcription. These will form the basis of your course, but they’ll of course need to be bulked up with further examples, imagery, and more.

 

Transcription Services Frequently Asked Questions

Transcription is invaluable to digital marketers, but perhaps you still have a few questions. Let’s go over them.

 

 

Repurposing Transcriptions for Content Conclusion

Your audience craves new and updated content on a regular basis. While this can seem a daunting task, audio transcription services can offer a solution.

With transcription, you can turn your audio content into text. This text can then be repurposed into other forms of content, including blog posts, social media content, and online courses.

Transcribed content can help you to satisfy the needs of your growing traffic numbers, while also providing accessible content so as to reach a wider audience.

Depending on the quality of the services you use, you may not even need to spend much time editing the transcription. This will save you immeasurable time while also expanding your reach as a digital marketer.

Which of the above content formats will you transform your audio content into?

Source: feedproxy.google.com

5 Coding Bootcamps to Help You Snag a Job In Digital Marketing

When you think of coding, your next thought probably isn’t digital marketing. It’s more likely to be UX design or software development.

Coding skills can be instrumental in digital marketing, and coding boot camps can help set you up for a successful career.

 

What Are Coding Bootcamps?

Coding boot camps are designed to give students the programming skills employers look for.

Generally, between 12 and 40 weeks long, these courses aim to get students into the tech field without spending years in undergraduate school.

With the internet and software playing such an essential part in our lives, more and more skilled programmers are needed to develop and maintain the tools we need to thrive.

For the past several years, many employers have said they’ve seen skills gaps in recent graduates—that is, students are often graduating with skills that are a bit out of date.

Coding boot camps have moved to fill that gap, designing intensive courses designed to get people ready for the current workforce in a short amount of time.

In true modern fashion, many of these courses are remote, but there are also options for in-person teaching.

 

How Much Do Coding Bootcamps Cost?

Coding boot camps are significantly cheaper than most undergraduate educations.

When you commit to a four-year university degree, you can expect to pay about $10,000 per year at a public school in your state—approximately $40,000 total. If you attend a private or out-of-state college, the cost rises exponentially.

Meanwhile, the average tuition for a coding boot camp is just under $14,000 for the entire program.

Boot camps may also allow you to pay your tuition over time, and some, like Flockjay, waive your tuition if you don’t land a well-paying job after completing the program.

 

How Can Coding Bootcamp Help You Get a Job in Digital Marketing?

When it comes to digital marketing, you don’t have to have incredible coding skills—but they can make a big difference.

The more knowledge you have about how the technology your brand runs on works, the better.

Think of it like the “required” and “preferred” skills sections on job postings.

Chances are, most applicants will have nearly all of the “required” skills, but having some of the more unique “preferred” skills could help you stand out.

If you have coding as one of your skills, a potential employer knows you should be able to speak the same language as the UX and development teams.

This could make things smoother for everyone, as it means at least one member of the marketing team understands what’s possible given budgets, deadlines, and other restrictions and can create marketing campaigns accordingly.

Additionally, if you’re working at a small business or start-up, it may need someone to wear multiple hats.

Regardless of your company’s size, your coding skills could help you as a marketer in various ways.

 

Interacting with Websites

It’s become much easier to build and run websites in recent years.

With platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, Wix, and SquareSpace, you don’t need coding skills to create a functional site.

But, if you’re reliant on the in-built tools of these platforms, you don’t have the same level of flexibility.

When something doesn’t work, you need external support to fix it, and any downtime is money lost.

We talk a lot in marketing about owning the medium (one of the main reasons you should have a website).

When you’ve got coding skills, it’s like you’ve got greater ownership of your assets.

 

Working With Data

Data is essential to digital marketing.

We’re constantly learning about our audience and tweaking our strategies to improve performance, which isn’t possible without understanding how to use data.

Coding and data science go hand in hand, and boot camp courses could teach you to detect patterns in large data sets using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

This way of thinking is extremely useful in digital marketing, and we already see a shift towards these technologies in the industry.

Working with data is a vital part of digital marketing, and coding skills, particularly those offered in a data science course, can be valuable.

 

Decisions About the Future

Digital marketing advances closely align with advances in technology.

If you’re not keeping up with the latest trends in marketing, you risk falling behind.

This is why businesses need innovators in their marketing departments.

When you have high-level coding skills, it not only makes you more adaptable but also means you could help shape the future of digital marketing by designing your own application and bringing new ideas to life.

Looking at the impact marketing software has on the industry, it’s clear we need people who can understand these applications on a deep level and get the most out of them.

 

Managing Projects

If you find yourself managing an extensive digital marketing project, you need to bring lots of people together.

Some of these folks will likely be developers.

A frequent challenge in these situations is that the marketing manager doesn’t know what the developers do, making both communication and hiring challenges.

How do you know you’ve got the right person for the job if you don’t know what coding or web development entail?

A coding boot camp can mean having informed, direct input on the project management and hiring processes, giving you greater control over what’s happening.

 

5 Coding Bootcamps for Digital Marketers

Online education has taken off in recent years, and there are lots of great programs that could help you find a job in digital marketing.

With more than six million Americans studying online, online learning of all stripes is becoming more accepted by employers than ever before.

Here are some examples of coding boot camps that could help you land a job or expand your skills in digital marketing.

 

Springboard

Springboard offers a variety of online courses in analytics, design, coding, and cybersecurity.

It Software Engineering Bootcamp says you’ll be able to “become a software engineer, guaranteed.”

This is an 800-hour program, so with 20 hours of study a week, it should take you around nine months to complete.

Springboard offers flexible ways of paying, starting at $8,500 if you pay upfront.

There are also options to pay monthly, defer payments (paying monthly once you land a software engineering job; if you don’t get a job in six months, you don’t pay), or obtain a low-interest loan.

While Springboard focuses on software engineering, these skills are transferable to digital marketing.

A big part of this program is the opportunity to work one on one with a mentor and a career coach to help guide you through your career path.

Springboard doesn’t offer success rates, but their similar Data Science Bootcamp resulted in 97% of their graduates finding jobs in their field within six months.

They also gained an average salary increase of $25,800.

 

Key Info

• The courses in analytics, design, coding, and cybersecurity
• $8,500 for software engineering course
• option to pay when you land a job (nothing to pay if you don’t find a job within six months)
• 800-hour program (nine months studying 20 hours a week)average salary increase for graduates of $25,800

 

Alchemy Code Lab

On average, graduates of the Alchemy Code Lab boot camp found a related job in just 11 weeks, with a median salary of $80,000.

Not bad for a 25-week program!

This full-time program is designed to get you ready for jobs in the real world.

Teaching you skills in modern programming languages and development methods,

Alchemy Code Lab takes six cohorts per year, with total program tuition costing $24,000.

Just as with Springboard, there are lots of different ways to pay.

Choose from self-funding, Income Share Agreement (don’t pay until you get a job), and financing through partner lenders.

There are also diversity-based tuition scholarships and GI Bill benefits available.

Alchemy Code Lab is based in Portland, but with a focus on the remote jobs of the future, it’s all accessible online.

With solid results and 87 percent of graduates going on to work in tech, it’s been a good investment for many people.

Key Info

• $24,000flexible payment options including income share agreement
• full-time study
• 25-week course

 

Flatiron School

In Career Karma’s 2020 awards, Flatiron School has named the best coding boot camp and best online boot camp.

The school claims to launch your career, and the stats back this up: 82% of grads land a job with an average starting salary of $69,000 a year.

Flatiron offers both in-person classes in New York City and an online program.

They offer programs specializing in software engineering, data science, cybersecurity analytics, and cybersecurity engineering, each of which teaches you skills that can help in digital marketing.

The online software engineering course offers three different ways to study: full-time, part-time, and self-paced, giving students great flexibility with how they learn.

The program costs $16,900 with options to pay upfront, in installments, or through a loan.

Courses begin every month, meaning you can quickly get started.

Key Info

• The courses in software engineering, data science, cybersecurity analytics, cybersecurity engineering
• $16,900 for software engineering course
• flexible payment options
• full-time study, part-time study, and self-paced learning options available
• 82% of grads land a job, the average starting salary of $69,000 per year

 

Thinkful

Thinkful is a platform that prides itself on allowing you to pay only when you land a job in your career.

It offers a range of tech-related subjects, including a specialist digital marketing boot camp.

Each option has a slightly different timeframe (the full-time digital marketing course allows you to graduate in just six weeks), with the software engineering course offered as both full-time and part-time programs.

The full-time option will require 50-60 hours a week and allow you to graduate in five months, with the part-time version requiring 25-30 hours a week over six months.

The courses vary in price, with the digital marketing one costing $7,500 while the software engineering boot camp is $16,000.

You also have lots of different payment options, some of which guarantee you don’t pay anything until you land a job.

Graduates have noted how Thinkful is focused on your career, which seems to translate into real-life results.

Eighty-seven percent of software engineering students were offered a job within 180-days of graduating, with 27% reporting an annual base salary between $70,000 and $90,000 and 50% reporting a yearly base salary between $50,000 and $70,000.

Key Info:

• courses in software engineering, data science, data analytics, UX/UI design, digital marketing, product management, technical project management
• $16,000 for software engineering course
• flexible payment options
• full-time and part-time options
• 87% of grads land jobs within 180-days

 

Flockjay

Flockjay isn’t strictly a coding boot camp, but it teaches similar ideas as a tech sale program.

It’s more focused on the sales aspect of technology, which could be a helpful combination in digital marketing.

This ten-week program costs $6,000 for most US residents ($7,650 for California) and aims to give you “future proof” skills that are in demand now.

Again, you have the option to pay zero tuition until you get a job paying at least $40,000, potentially making it an attractive investment for your career.

Flockjay provides instruction in the sales essentials and, importantly, has a strong emphasis on technology.

While it’s not quite coding, it could satisfy many students interested in tech and equip them with important skills in digital marketing.

Key Info:

• tech sales course$6,000flexible payment options10-week program
• average full-time job offer of $75,000 a year

 

Conclusion

Coding boot camps could be a great alternative to four-year college degrees for students interested in technology.

With payment options that allow you to pay nothing until you secure a job and courses that can be completed in less than a year, they’re a great way to propel yourself into the tech workforce.

As digital marketing is closely aligned with technology, these courses can also be an excellent way to snag a job in digital marketing.

These skills are in demand in so many industries, so the main point is that you’re opening all kinds of doors for yourself.

You may not go into a coding boot camp to become a digital marketer, but you may find digital marketing is a career you’re perfectly suited for.

Have you tried a coding boot camp?

Source: feedproxy.google.com

How to Pivot Digital Marketing

 

Digital marketing is like a pirouette. Those who get it right appear to twirl effortlessly, disrupting their market, dethroning incumbents, and becoming principals in their trade.

Megan Fairchild is a principal dancer with New York City Ballet who can pivot precisely on the point of her toe like a music box fairy.

To the layman, she makes it look effortless as she twirls delicately around on a pinpoint, flourishing her arms and hands.

But in fact, a pivot turn, or pirouette as ballet masters call them, is a series of steps so fluidly performed as to appear as a single, elegant motion.

Fairchild starts in the fourth position, making sure that she’s balanced and stable.

She bends her knees in a plié, pushes off, turns in an arabesque position, and finishes elegantly like a butterfly landing on a leaf.

Digital marketing is like a pirouette.

Those who get it right appear to twirl effortlessly, disrupting their market, dethroning incumbents, and becoming principals in their trade.

 

The Four Stages of a Digital Pivot

The four stages of a digital pivot are like the four steps of a pirouette.

But just as the young dancer who rushes onto stage eager to spin in her very first pair of toe shoes only to come tumbling down, most companies pull back the curtain on their website before it’s ready to convert visitors into prospects.

Just as the pivot turn is a series of individual steps performed in sequence, so is a digital pivot.

The steps build on each other.

A sequential approach to the digital pivot brings owned, shared, earned, and paid media together into something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The fastest way to generate returns is by putting these four steps together, in this order:

These are the four steps of the digital pivot.

Step 1 – The Set-Up: Owned Media

Whoever controls the layout, controls the payout.

If you don’t control the user experience, you can’t control the customer experience.

The proximity of your online content to the transactions you seek to make directly impacts the probability of conversion.

If you can’t experiment with the layout of the page, you can’t optimize for conversions.

And you can’t change the layout of the page on Amazon, Yelp, or Linkedin.

That’s why in a digital pivot, web pages precede social media posts.

Get the content on your own website right first.

But obviously, you can’t calibrate content without a website because that’s where you convert leads and drive revenue.

On your own website, you can insert forms to collect lead information or transact e-commerce.

You can’t do that on someone else’s website. At least not without sharing your profits.

 

Step 2 – Pushing Off: Shared or Social Media

When you have conversations on social networks with online influencers, you do so in front of their followers, which widens your reach.

The important thing to understand is that on social media, reach is a factor of engagement.

Unless people like, comment, and share what you have to say, no one sees it.

So pushing off is about figuring out where your customers are most active online and who they trust so you can find your axis.

The fastest way to build an online following is by winning the respect of the existing influencers in your space.

An engaged community of followers is social proof that others endorse what you have to say.

 

Step 3 – Spinning: Earned Media

The spin is the most glorious stage of the pivot.

It’s where you puff out your chest, raise up your arms, and earn the admiration of your customers and industry.

The harder the website is to get published on, the more glorious the admiration.

When you pitch an editor to publish a guest post on their website, you should include links to articles you’ve written on your own website.

If you can’t demonstrate your ability to articulate ideas and construct cogent arguments on your own website, why should they believe you can do so on a much larger stage?

Rather than regurgitate what everyone else is saying, the idea is to take a thought leadership position on timely, important ideas.

The news media and popular blogs exist to publish new ways of thinking.

So it’s always easier for thought leaders to earn media coverage.

The objective is to establish yourself as a thought leader, rather than a thought repeater.

The path from nano to mega influencer online illustrated in fig. 1.1 moves through each of the four media marketing channels in this order.

Owned media is the set-up, shared media is pushing off, earned media is the turn-on pointe, and paid media is the landing.

Of all four steps, earned media offers the greatest leverage.

But unless your owned and shared media is in place, the likelihood of success is slim.

 

Step 4 – The Landing: Paid Media

Now that your owned, shared, and earned media programs are operational, and you’re driving revenue organically, you’re ready to land into advertising.

You’ve figured out how to attract and convert customers online, and you’ve optimized the path to purchase.

Depending on your line of business, the last stage of a pivot is the landing.

By now, you’ve proven your ability to generate leads and commerce.

You know what percentage of visitors convert into leads, what percentage of leads become customers, and how much the average customer spends.

Now, as long as you can generate more revenue than it costs to acquire a customer, you’re ready to scale through advertising.

You forecast revenues by multiplying your conversion rate by your traffic counts.

If you know that half of all leads request a proposal, and a quarter of all proposals result in a sale, you can figure out how much traffic you need to hit your numbers.

Paid media is the last step of the digital pivot because you don’t want to drive traffic until you’re prepared to profit from it.

There is, however, one exception.

Dancers practice pirouettes without actually turning.

They just balance for two counts and rehearse coming down gently as a sort of exercise.

If you don’t have the time to build traffic organically, you can use paid media to accelerate the testing process.

Seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

I’m not going to lie to you.

It is.

But so is outbound sales, so in many ways, digital marketing is about reallocating resources from outbound to inbound.

Considering the trajectory of nearly all business these days, do you really have any choice?

Edited excerpt from The Digital Pivot: Secrets of Online Marketing by Eric Schwartzman, a Los Angeles-based digital marketing consultant.

 

The post How to Pivot Digital Marketing appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com