A term heard throughout the apprenticeship of a digital marketer. A measure of how well an online business or brand is doing in its social media efforts. Engagements are shares, likes, comments and any other interactions. Historically, engagement has been a common measure of social media success.
How is it calculated?
Total engagements / Total followers X 100
Tips for better Social Media Engagement
Know your audience – Research into who it is you want to target and find out their interests, what platforms they use and at what times. There is so much you can learn from researching the target audience!
Create interactive content – The more engaging the better! how many times have you gotten sucked into random BuzzFeed quizzes? Interactive content is great because it can create emotions of curiosity, excitement and fun.
Use a social media management tool – Tools such as Hootsuite or Meta business Suite not only allow marketers to plan and schedule content best to fit their audience but also provide analytical features. This means you can track how well campaigns and posts are doing for future success!
Know the difference between Reactive and Proactive Marketing – Marketing campaigns that are proactive require specific preparation before release, while marketing campaigns that are reactive respond spontaneously to current events. Use both accordingly!
Respond quickly to queries – Customer service is key. You want the customer to feel valued always respond in a professional, timely and friendly manor. Keep inline with bet industry practice and your business or brand social media policy.
Somecontent ideas for boosting social media engagement:
It’s essential that people have the right knowledge, skills and confidence when getting started in apprenticeships. With digital marketing apprenticeships being a specific and unique profession to get into, I thought I’d share my top 3 tips into getting started and ensuring a good and solid foundation for success.
Realise it for yourself
You’ll find that you are probably involved in one aspect of digital marketing every single day. Whether that’s typing in your favourite products on a popular search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) to scrolling through social media or watching your favourite youtubers and coming across paid ads as an result, it’s needless to say that digital marketing is around us everywhere.
Seeing and appreciating Digital Marketing in this way will only help to raise your interest, awareness, but also develop your knowledge concerning the industry. As most young people have the opportunity using these aspects everyday, I’d suggest utilising them through the lense of a digital marketer. As you use these tools it would be good to raise a few points like:
Why does a search engine suggest keywords when finding a product on Google?
Why are the ads on social media telling me to ‘swipe up for more’ and what does swiping up do?
Why are companies constantly emailing me with incentives like ‘10% vouchers’?
There is always a reason behind these things and when going into Digital Marketing as an apprentice it definitely stands out and makes an impression on you that you can’t forget.
Get Familiar with Digital Marketing Tools
It’s important to familiarise yourself with tools that are needed for digital marketing. This way you’ll be able to track webpages and marketing campaigns and have a good understanding of how they perform.
KPIs and metrics such as form fills, page views, bounce rate, click through rate, open rate, organic reach and many more can all be measured on platforms such as:
One way in which I was able to get a great start in my Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship was through short and free courses that I searched for on Google.
There was a variety of courses that I completed prior to starting and during my apprenticeship. Doing these courses really established a foundation of knowledge that I was able to develop. The courses that I covered answered some questions that I had such as:
What does SEO stand for and what does it mean?
What tools do you use to measure paid campaigns?
How do I track the performance and data of a webpage?
How does Google Analytics work?
How do I know that emails are effective?
I recommend the following resources that provided all the latest updates, information and education needed for a great start in Digital Marketing:
In conclusion it’s important to integrate all of these tips, tricks and methods when getting into the field of Digital Marketing for any young person. Having these standards in place will definitely give any young person seeking an apprenticeship a great advantage in the field.
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With data becoming the foundation of marketing campaigns and strategies, it is no surprise that data has become a fundamental part of daily routines and digital marketing courses. Throughout the level 3 digital marketing apprenticeship, students will need to understand various data tools to qualify as competent in the technical Data skill.
Although I was cheeky here to add two data tools in one, these tools are commonly used as the basis of pulling data for campaigns and strategies. If you need to prove an idea or decide on the success of a marketing tactic, using one of these data tools will be the best place to start.
Data gives team’s the relevant information needed to understand where traffic is coming from. Traffic channel data is necessary when confirming the success of a marketing tactic. Furthermore, this data can give you and your team an idea of what traffic channels need optimizing immediately. If a traffic channel is not driving a large volume of traffic or the conversion rate is significantly low, it is an indication to digital marketers that the channel needs improvements; this could be through optimizing a current campaign that is not succeeding or creating a new campaign. Often, this can be a great way to propose a strategy to senior team members.
The best element of these data tools, in my opinion, is being able to compare data points from different time ranges. This can give an indication on the performance of a traffic channel, product or page through determining whether key metrics such as traffic, conversion, bounce rate and revenue have increased or decreased over time. This trend can suggest whether a campaign is performing better or worse and lead to discussions on why this may be and how to improve this.
Personally, Excel is a favourite tool for pulling data insights! With reporting tools such as Adobe Analytics, Excel can provide detailed visualizations that can be easily shared with the team. If you have a passion for data in your digital marketing apprenticeship, I recommend studying this tool and leveraging the basic formulas to provide your team with regular performance updates. Moreover, use conditional formatting! I use it to colour code positive and negative data points. This is clearer for the team and myself to see an overview of our performance.
Furthermore, you can easily share data and insights. Use Microsoft Cloud to work within the same documents as colleagues to collaborate together.
Analysing web pages has never been simpler. ContentSquare gives a whole new meaning to using data in digital marketing. With the Chrome extension giving digital marketers the ability to analyse heat maps on live web pages, this is a tool you don’t want to miss in your apprenticeship.
Optimizing your site for SEO? Testing new content on different pages? This tool will allow you to compare visitor engagement on pages over time. You will be able to see whether the changes you have made have had a positive effect on customer engagement. Likewise, it is important to monitor any negative impacts.
Understand the engagement of your audience with this tool. Then, take key insights back to your team to explain why certain pages are performing better or worse than others. Use these insights to inform next steps in content and SEO planning.
A range of data tools is important to find insights that align with different marketing goals. As a digital marketing apprentice, you will need to understand Search Engine Optimization. This will determine a site’s organic search performance. If a page has a low ranking on the search engine results page (SERP), it will have low visibility to the target audience.
Interested in learning what pages on your site are performing well and which need optimizing? Google Search Console has many features that can provide these insights. Personally, my favourite feature is the average page ranking for a given URL. This data can give marketing team’s reasons behind Organic Search performance. It can give marketer’s the incentive to run a SEO strategy. Then, you can understand whether the strategy is working through continuing to monitor how the page rankings change through the trend graph.
Data Tools are important for marketers to build campaigns that are valuable to the goals of the business.
Another SEO tool, Google Trends is a useful data tool to find the volume of searches for certain keywords. When conducting keyword research, it is important to find keywords that are both high enough in volume to reach a significant audience, but also with low enough competition so competitor brands don’t take all the top ranks.
Furthermore, this tool can be interesting to look into branded keywords, especially if your company is trying to understand whether they are more engaged with their audience than a competitor. This tool allows you to see the volume of searches for your company’s branded keywords compared to that of a competitor.
Data Tools – Conclusion
These tools are useful for their own reasons. However, the level 3 digital marketing apprenticeship standard focuses not only on being able to pull and read data, but you must also be able to provide recommendations and insights to others. Take note of where I have mentioned sharing data to recommend marketing campaigns based on data trends.
If you are interested in learning more about key digital marketing tools, check out our article on keyword research tips for SEO.
Are you an individual or small team starting out in the digital marketing world? Or are you an online expert interested in topping up knowledge or refreshing your experience? Or somewhere in between? Hopefully, this will spark ideas for all readers as we go through some of the best Digital Marketing practices.
Keep Up to Date
With as fast paced as the world is nowadays, it can be a struggle to keep up with relevant trends or the ever-changing wants and needs of customers. Therefore, it is important to stay with it! Achieving this can be done in very simple ways. Like: signing up for newsletters, staying active on social media sites like LinkedIn, and subscribe to mailing lists of companies with similar aims and objectives. Not only then do you keep up with your competitors, you can notice changes in the market, discover new technologies and see software developments as they are introduced. All which will benefit progression for your organisation however big or small.
Similarly, as mentioned before you can keep up with trends and changes in the industry. All while keeping up with other people/organisations, using LinkedIn. As you can see here on the #DigitalMarketing feed.
Know Your Audience
The most important step to being a digital marketing ‘pro’ is to understand who your target audience really is. What it is they truly want from either your products or services. Sometimes company lose sight of who they are working for, the customer. But there are many ways to ensure that you are always customer-orientated and therefore keeping the aim in sight. The below being examples of how to keep up to date with your audience:
Look at your competitors, often – Evaluate their brand, their marketing strategies and what they are offering to the public that you are not. How are the customers reacting to these differing products and services or marketing methods.
Monitor your social media engagements – watch their reactions, hear their feedback, and learn from what they say or show you. Analyse the data shown in the form of likes, shares, follows, comments etc. More often than not social media platforms offer a metrics page (e.g. Facebook Insights). Which makes engagement analysis easier and faster to collate.
If you wish to analyse in greater depth. You can compare social media results, website views, and leads in a analytics tool like Google Analytics or Adverity.
Ask them – Using surveys to ask your customers directly what they want in a generally affordable way. Allows you to use a question format which is an easy way to collect information from your audience. Once created it can be submitted to your social media followers and email subscribers. We recommend using a tool such as Survey Monkey.
Some other plugins you might find useful for collecting customer opinions might be:
It is extremely important for a company to always be consistent in both branding themes and the brand personality. Consistency is one of the most important and easily overlooked factors in any company, especially digital marketing-based organisations. Often being completely online based it is harder to put forward a cohesive and complete brand identity together. It promotes a professional appearance and earns respect and trust from your customers. See below the top 3 points to remember in Digital Marketing.
“Consistency is the true foundation of trust. Either keep your promises or do not make them”
Roy T. Bennett
Dependable Brand Personality – Always keep the same tone and personality for your brand across all channels. On both digital platforms and when using offline marketing methods. In order to achieve this, all staff should be receiving training on how to respond and post for the company. This ensures they post the same way with the same style of language to continue an overall ‘personality’.
Unvarying Aesthetic Theme – The synonymous layouts across all channels and platforms. Along with the corresponding logo, colour schemes, fonts, symbols, style of imagery and illustrations etc.
Reliable Quality – Having a constant standard of quality of products and/or services at all times is crucial. This creates a trustworthy, safe and respected brand for yourself. While also further complimenting the brand identity created in both point 1) and 2) above. So when mistakes are made handle them with impeccable service and professionalism.
TOP TIP! Use shared cloud storage services for general imagery, logos, downloaded font folders, colour charts/samples. This is beneficial so all staff can access the materials. An example of software’s you could use would be Dropboxor Google Docs.
Personalise!
Keep content for customers and contact with them, personalised. There are many ways of doing this and the simplest ones can help you drastically. When customers do not feel important to a company, they get bored. Ways of doing this can include mail merges in newsletters or email sends. Very simple to do but just feels as if the reader is being directly spoken to. Even using mail merge tags for email address or postcode, further personalising the content to them or their local area.
Similarly, in email or social media campaign content, it could be beneficial to target customers geographically with location-based content (e.g. City of Leeds aimed events or deals for a particular County). More on this would be, Geo-Location based targeting.
Which is identifying your site visitor’s location in order to connect with them. An example of how companies can use this their advantage, would be in online clothing/department stores websites. By tracking a user’s Geo-location they can tell if a user has visited the site before – if not? They can use this opportunity to showcase special discounts or offer for ‘first time shoppers’.
Another method for commerce sites selling products is to identify items in a customer’s basket and recommend complimenting products. Showing personalised and individualistic results heightens the possibility of a last minute ‘add to basket’ and boosting the sales total.
Focus on the Long Term Goals
Don’t be short sighted.
Remembering the big picture, always. Getting wrapped up in setting quick, short term goals to boost engagement and sales is easily done. But this is not always as beneficial as we’d first hope. While this can work effectively and may generate a momentary spike. It does not mean it’ll work effectively in the long run and is not certain to maintain that customer base.
There are ways to keep up with your long term goals and track success towards these goals. The site Perdoo.com who helps you set and track goals. Another one you can use to closely track your goals and your progression in immense detail is Google Analytics.
Conclusion
No one can be perfect at digital marketing however we hope this will helps you to improve yourself or your company, if only by a little.
Thanks for Reading!
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