Preparing the Field

The Shortage of Professionals:

Digital marketing gives organizations the ability to direct communications to targeted audiences and measure their impact. 

Careers in the field of digital marketing and advertising are relatively new, they didn’t exist until 1990, when the way companies sold products and services started to change. Now more than ever, digital marketing professionals are an essential part of companies. However, the speed at which people are becoming specialized in these fields hasn’t kept pace with the speed at which jobs are opening up in this industry. 

One of every two marketing jobs listed on LinkedIn relates to digital spaces or digital media. What’s more, the ability to manage paid advertising on social media is the most in-demand digital skill. According to platform data, demand for paid advertising specialists has doubled.

Laying the Groundwork

To get started developing your digital advertising campaigns, there are some basic tools you will need as part of your foundation.

We’re going to take a look at 4 crucial elements of digital marketing. But first, let’s clarify a few things: Who is the brand? We say, “who” because thinking of brands as people is a useful thought experiment — thinking about what they like, how they talk, who their friends are, what they look like, and what place they occupy in society. It’s also important to think about why they occupy that space, or rather, what is the value they are contributing and what is the gap that they’ve come to fill. What do they accomplish? 

Let’s get started!

Audience:

The audience is the group of people to which companies’ communication and marketing efforts are directed, to capture their interest and get them to carry out a specific action. 

Later on in the course, we’ll go more in-depth into how to identify the relevant audience.

Budget:

To impact your audience in the right way, first, you need to define your objectives — what it is that you want your campaign to achieve, to create an appropriate budget to be invested in its development. 

Budgets must consider all the resources required to develop a successful campaign; marketing professionals, execution and development of design pieces for content, as well as the budget set aside for the platforms on which the campaign will run.  

Each platform uses a different system of charging for advertising and has a different system in place for pricing. Some platforms charge per click or per-impression, but most offer multiple pricing options that can be selected depending on the company’s objective. We will also go deeper into this later on in the course. 

These are points to take into consideration to create a more precise and accurate budget.

Content: 

The third consideration when it comes to developing a campaign is the content. Content is based on the message you want to communicate, so you will have to ask yourself: What do you want to convey? Why? What are you trying to make happen with this? And, of course, how? 

Landing Page: 

Lastly, it’s important to think about your intended customer journey, and what you want your customers to do in relation to your brand and campaign objectives.

Ads that appear in different placements within a social media platform should redirect users to a website or profile from which they can complete said actions (for example, making a purchase). 

While no company is compelled to have a website, it is recommended to have one, since it allows you to have greater access to user behaviors and information, and apply these insights. Your landing page is a direct encounter between the brand and the customer, so it must be a place where the customer feels comfortable, can navigate with ease, and be guided toward the action you want them to take in a 100% intuitive and seamless way. This is why it’s so important to think about design, aesthetics, and, most importantly, functionality — how you will display products and services in a way that’s accessible, easy to navigate, and allows for the practical execution of actions.