Overview of Digital Marketing Tools
In addition to considering traditional marketing strategies, digital marketers must consider the different mediums through which they can reach customers. Whether a marketer is trying to grow a following organically, through paid marketing, or through a combination of both, digital marketers must pay careful attention to various visual and technical aspects of their content.
Digital marketing involves more than just social media. Digital marketers must consider search engine optimization (SEO), so that they can get their website seen by the right audience. They gather and analyze website data, so that they can make data-driven marketing decisions. They are also tasked with writing and designing effective email blasts that lead to conversions and sales. Finally, they must consider how their website looks and functions, as a poorly designed website can turn potential customers away in a matter of seconds.
Digital marketing is on the rise, particularly because of the ease with which we can reach our target markets.
- Almost 50% of Americans check their smartphones as soon as they wake up.
- Companies that create at least 16 posts per month triple their website traffic compared to companies that blog just once a month, or not at all.
- More than 75% of adults use Facebook every day.
Unlike traditional advertising, where we cannot choose exactly who walks past a print ad, we can laser-focus our marketing to the exact group that we want to reach, even if they have never heard of our business or product before.
With so many tools to learn, it can be overwhelming to get started with digital marketing. Our goal is to make the entire process straightforward and accessible.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial component of digital marketing. It involves identifying target keywords and using them strategically in your web content to rank ahead of your competitors on search engines. But SEO is more than just keyword stuffing; search engines are smarter than that.
SEO requires specialized attention to detail. On one hand, it’s necessary to ensure that certain keywords appear on your website, both in its content and in its meta data (the part of the page that is not seen by viewers, but is seen by search engines). On the other hand, it’s important for your content to be genuine. It’s should not be obvious that an article was published solely for SEO purposes. The content on your website should captivate your potential audience and encourage them to explore everything that your business has to offer.
We offer a 1-day course in SEO taught by a top digital marketing instructor, where we teach you the tools and skills necessary to improve your website’s ranking in search engines.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful but often underutilized tool that helps us analyze site performance and conversion rates. We can gather data regarding who visited our website, from where, how they found the website, which pages they visited, and how long they stayed. We can track how many visits lead to sales, enrollments, or other types of conversions.
Without access to this type of data, much of what we do would be guesswork. We would have to rely on data submitted voluntarily by site visitors (which would be limited in both scope and participation).
Google Analytics helps us make informed, data-driven decisions. When we see how visitors spend their time on our website, we learn which pages are attracting the most interest and yielding the most conversions. We can implement the right digital marketing strategies from here, saving time and money in the long run.
In our specialized 1-day course in Google Analytics, we’ll help you set up an account, gather relevant data, and analyze it with your business’ goals in mind. In our more advanced data science courses, we dive into Python and its libraries and frameworks to help you make the most of data analytics.
Search Engine Marketing
Sometimes, it’s necessary to sponsor search engine listings to boost them to the number one spot on Google, or other search engines. We can increase business leads and generate a high return on our investment with paid search options.
This is something worth considering when your target market is saturated, or when your chosen keywords aren’t helping you get to the first page of Google quickly enough.
Google Ads is one of the primary tools that digital marketers use to engage in paid marketing.
Google Ads uses an auction method when determining which ads to show to which viewers. Advertisers input the maximum amount that they are willing to pay for each click on their ad. When a search is executed, Google looks at the maximum amount the advertiser has offered to pay, plus the quality and relevance of the ad, and decides whether to display it. The advertiser might not always pay the maximum bid for each click, but that amount does play a major role in how often their ad is displayed.
With search engine marketing, you’ll often see an immediate boost in page views. But that’s not the end of your work. From there, you can use Google Analytics to determine what your visitors are doing once they land on your page, you can adjust your SEO if necessary, and you can add or revise content to improve the user experience and to get more conversions.
Get started creating campaigns and tracking conversions and ROI in our Google Ads classes in New York.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the most utilized forms of digital marketing, but it’s not always done well. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram have the potential to draw massive followings, but it’s crucial to post content that followers actually want to engage with. Repeated sales plugs often turn potential customers away, but engaging content related to your business or your industry draws them in.
The purpose of social media marketing is to build an online presence both organically and through paid campaigns.
It takes a lot of hard work to get social media marketing right. You will not see results overnight (absent a viral post -- but this cannot be planned for as we cannot make something go viral with the click of a button). Social media marketing involves building a following by posting the right content at the right times, and by interacting with your followers and viewers in a genuine way.
When done effectively, social media marketing leads to better brand awareness, decreased marketing costs, improved customer service, and, importantly, access to competitors’ information.
Companies that do not use social media often find that the only customers who view their products are the ones who are already familiar with it… but with social media, you can easily reach people who have never heard of your business, turning them into regular customers.
We’ll teach you the ins and outs of doing social media marketing properly. We offer a course in social media marketing taught by a leading instructor in digital marketing.
Email Marketing
In order to thrive in digital marketing, most people will suggest having an email list. Like social media followings, email lists do not bloom overnight! It takes time, effort, and worthwhile content to encourage users to sign up to receive your emails. However, having a mailing list is one of the best ways to engage with your followers and to convert them to paying customers.
There are a variety of services that you can use to develop an email list, but more important than the service you use is the content you provide. One major strategy to determine whether your subject line, content and layout are effective is to do A/B testing. A marketer will send two different emails to two small subsets of an entire mailing list and will analyze the data returned. How many people opened the emails? How many people clicked on the links inside?
This data can be used to determine which email worked the best and whether it should be revised before being sent to the entire list.
We offer HTML email courses that will help you design captivating email blasts that encourage readers to click through to your target page. We also teach email marketing strategies in our digital marketing certificate program. We cover A/B testing and a variety of other best practices that will help you convert subscribers into customers. We’ll work with you to get the content right; what you send out is just as important as what it looks like.
Web Design & UX Optimization
Like email marketing, where a plain-text email is unlikely to get you the conversions you want, a boring, plain-text website is unlikely to help your business thrive. Web design & user experience optimization is all about creating the ideal website experience to generate high conversion rates.
When a user lands on your page, they should know what they are looking at and where to go next. It only takes a few moments for a user to get frustrated and to leave the page if they can’t find what they’re looking for. Missed opportunities are common with poor web design and UX optimization.
The goal here is to design a page that accurately reflects your business, and that has the right information in the right places. Intrusive pop-ups, gigantic advertisements, and inaccessible menus are big turn-offs to users who are interested in your product.
Once a visitor lands on your page, you want them to stay there. We’ll help you get this right the first time.
Our web design classes in NYC will show you the essentials of webpage layouts, HTML, CSS & JavaScript. You'll walk away fully capable of designing and coding your own websites and optimizing it for conversions.
Get Started in Digital Marketing with Courses & Bootcamps
Learn these pivotal strategies to increase visitors and conversions in NYC's best digital marketing courses.
Master all these tools in our digital marketing certificate which includes courses in SEO, Digital Marketing (which includes email marketing), Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Social Media Marketing.