Felix - Digital Marketing

Module 5 is called the Ongoing Revolution. It focuses on the ethics of current privacy, data as well as terms of use policies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. The module also looked in depth at how the future of digital marketing will change and how we should facilitate the change. During my course, the module 5 speaker was a fantastic innovative entrepreneur who founded the lifestyle brand Zaggora.

The module 5 assignment was split in to three parts. The first part was to display an outline for an ethical debate on the policies of a major company. This debate was then shortened to just four people giving the viewpoints of four group motions during an Adobe Connect meeting. This was a fantastic meeting where the speakers of the group came up with some brilliant facts. For example one of the facts was that 82% of identity fraud cases in the UK occur online.

The second part of the assignment was called Digital Waves during which we had to create an infographic showing a digital technology that has been disruptive in recent years. Obviously the final part of the assignment was the peer review that is conducted after all of the group assignments.

Module 4 was all about data. The Module 4 of the Squared Online course looked at how to collect data, display and use the data to improve your marketing. And to be even more specific, it was about web data!

Module 4 goes in depth looking at Google Analytics reports, which is the prefered tool to analyse web data. It makes you interpret and understand the data to gain incites in to your audience.

The module 4 assignment was to download and understand the Squared Online Google Analytics data. I think it would have been interested to learn also about other tools that for example track the movement of the cursor. The group assignment made people interpret and gain incites about the ways that Squared Online could improve their website.

The third module of the Google Squared programme was very much about digital campaigns and how to use digital technologies to create an effective campaign. I want to discuss my three key insights I gained from the course.

    1. The Customer Journey

After you have identified the customer segment and your target audience, the customer journey is probably one of the most important frameworks to start your campaign. What is the journey of the customer? How many touchpoints or moments of truth can you use to help the customer through the sales funnel? It is probably useful to first create a customer persona, because the journey will certainly change depending on the type of customer.

  2. Combine customer journey with SEO/PPC

The most common way of displaying the customer journey is as the sales funnel. Even so this framework has some limitations, since customer don’t necessarily go through eve phase, it’s a good starting point to combine the journey of the customer with marketing activities. A very straightforward way is Search marketing, because advertiser can match the search terms with targeted Adwords and landing pages, thus creating a congruent experience for the customer on his journey.

3. Display advertising

Whoever thinks display advertising is just boring banner advertising, is certainly wrong. Today much more different formats are available to marketers, ranging from video pre-rolls and homepage takeover to advertorial. Great examples and best practice can be found on this website: http://www.richmediagallery.com/gallery

Company and businesses are global these days and so are their teams. Working together in a team that is spread around the global is no easy task. Indeed it’s quite the opposite, because most of our communication techniques we use in a face-to-face situation seem not to work in a skype or video conversation. The following paragraph contains the tree lessons I've learned from my online communication on the Google Squared programme so far.

1. 80% of conversation is nonverbal is a big Myth. Whoever created this myth did a great job, because hundreds of authors, conference speakers and communication teacher still refer to this “fact”, when they emphasize the importance of body language. Not only is this myth untrue in everyday communication, since we don’t get 80% of a message if we cover our ears and only watch the body language, but in a video or skype call, this is certainly not true. Thus words, pauses, pitch, etc. are more important if you want to communicate effectively.

2. Play a role? Since a team is usually more than the sum of each individual, it can be more effective for the overall performance of the team if everyone sticks to a role. This doesn’t mean that people should not change roles, but many unnecessary arguments and discussions could be avoided if people would understand that they don’t have to contribute all the time. Too many (of the same) cooks spoil the broth.

"We are creating technologies, then we are the technologies. It's not like your heart is like a pump, your heart is a pump. It's not your brain is like a computer, your brain is a computer until the next thing comes along" (In: The Net documentary, Lutz Dammbecks, 2003).

In 2003, when Brockman gave this interview, social networks were still in the early stage of development. Ten years later Brockman would probably add social network to his list. But what does this have to do with an online course on marketing?

The answer is a lot! The first lesson I learned from our teachers on the programme is that we should immerge ourselves with the digital world. We should blog, share, tweet, like and comment, to become active members in the global online community. In this regard the first lessons have been helpful by introducing the tools we will be using over the next few months, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogging, Youtube to name a few. In line with these rather general first lessons, Mike Berry introduced the concept of a "T-shaped" marketing experts. This concept was new to me, but I think it fits well with the rapid changing internet world. Marketers need to become generalist rather than experts in one field, because who knows whether a particular technologies will still be around in 5 years? Jonah Berger made a similar point in a talk at Google with MySpace - the social platform that died when Facebook came along.