For the past two years, my main focus has been gaining knowledge in the digital marketing field. A majority of that knowledge I gained through my college education and internship, but mostly from making mistakes while in the field.
These are just four marketing lessons I’ve learned my first two years as a digital marketing coordinator:
Don’t Blind Fully Join Every Social Network
From the very first day of my internship as a marketing coordinator, the main task I was responsible for is managing social media accounts. The company I was interning for allowed me to start the social media strategy from the very beginning. I was responsible for deciding which social networks to join, as well as and what and how often to post content. I immediately opened a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ without thinking twice about it because they were the most popular networks. Once I started posting content, I found myself backtracking and asking myself if these networks were really in line with the target market of the company.
If I had done more research from the very beginning, I would have avoided spending all this time posting on networks and receiving no activity because my the target audience wasn’t present on that network.
SEO Involves a Lot More Than Just Keywords and Tags
When I think back on my education, SEO is one of topics I learned nothing about other than the definition. When it came time for me to maintain the website and blog posts, the only SEO I knew how to perform was through keywords and tags on WordPress. I had to research how link building, meta-tags, Google AdWords, and the Google algorithm affect the page rank and how to make them work in my favor.
Just Tracking Followers and Likes Doesn’t Prove Social Media ROI
Another valuable lesson I learned about social media through my internships, is that followers and likes don’t prove ROI. Every month I was responsible for writing a social media report detailing if our social media strategy was working and proving ROI. In my very first report, the only metrics I reported were engagement and increase in followers because those were the only metrics I knew. Once I learned how to track the website analytics and metrics, I learned how important it was to include reach, site traffic, conversions, and generated revenue in my reports.
Email Marketing Is Not Going Anywhere
As a social media junkie and Twitter addict, I easily found myself spending too much time posting on social media and giving it too much. Once I started my first entry level marketing position and was done with my internship, I became much more focused on providing and proving ROI to my client. My first month on the job, I found my marketing strategy was all wrong and needing more than just a tweak. I took a good amount of time to review and analyze what marketing avenues should take priority, and what metrics and analytics were most important to track. After researching ROI and coming across the image below, it was very clear what my focus should be. Email marketing provides the highest ROI for marketers, followed by affiliate and paid search. Social media provides only a fraction of the ROI that email marketing provides.
Email marketing is another skill and subject that I learned very little about throughout my college education and internship, which is why I didn’t know how much ROI it provided until just recently. Email marketing will continue to take center stage in my marketing efforts because it will continue to deliver the highest ROI for marketers. If your click-through, click-to-open, and conversion rates aren’t to your standards, it’s time to rethink your strategy.
Source: Spring Media Design
To Learn More about Email Marketing, Read My Previous Article: Four Elements That Will Make or Break Your Email Marketing [Infographic]
Marketing professional passionate about content marketing, social media, email marketing, and web design. When I’m not working with clients you can find me on social media posting about fashion, beauty, interior design, and digital marketing.
![Content Smorgasbord 2 - More Top Examples of ‘Snackable’ Content [Infographic]](https://visualcontenting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Content-Smorgasbord-2-More-Top-Examples-of-‘Snackable’-Content-Infographic.jpg)
[…] Four marketing lessons I’ve learned my first two years as a digital marketing coordinator […]