This program focuses primarily on social media marketing, one form of digital marketing. But before we dive into social media marketing, let's take a broader look at what we mean when we talk about digital marketing. Simply put, digital marketing is marketing that uses digital technology or digital media. It has revolutionized marketing, because it's uniquely powerful. Let's watch this ad for Friskies cat food that aired on TV in the 1970s. The goal was to generate awareness and interest among cat owners for the Friskies brand. [MUSIC] >> The fun of Little Friskies is in its flavor, that's why cats love it. [MUSIC] >> Now imagine if Friskies approached you today, and asked you to help them generate awareness and interest in their line of organic cat food among cat owners. Would a TV ad still be the most obvious choice? Probably not. In our last lesson, we saw that people are spending an increasing amount of time online, so chances are you can get their attention there. However, that's not the only reason you should consider advertising online. Digital marketing is unique in that it allows you to specifically target your message to the people that may be interested, and it let's you measure the affect of your message. So let's take our Friskies example, advertising online would give Friskies targeting options they don't have on TV. If you advertise on TV, you can choose when your ad appears, during which show, but you don't have much information about who's watching. It's likely that many of the people that would see the ad on TV aren't interested in cat food and don't even own a cat. With online advertising, you can reach people who own a cat and are more likely to be interested in organic food. Another key feature of advertising online is that you can measure your ad's effectiveness on the behavior of the people who saw your ad. That's extremely important for marketers, as this kind of measurement capability helps to spend your marketing dollars more efficiently. You can measure what works, and adjust your campaign when you find there are options for improvement. A lot of what you learn in this course centers around these two key strengths of digital marketing: targeting who sees your message and the ability to measure the effectiveness of your messages. Digital marketing is a broad term, and its covers a wide range of marketing activities. You'll hear people divide them up in a few common categories related to different types of online activities. Let's take a closer look. This program is about social media marketing or marketing in social media channels, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. We'll cover how marketers can use social media to connect to people online. How you can build up and engage an audience, and we'll take a very close look at how advertising on social media works. Examples of social media marketing you may encounter include this Instagram account of Starbucks for instance, where they carefully curate posts for their followers, or this Facebook ad by Kellogg's. Another form of digital marketing is search engine optimization and search engine marketing, or SEO and SEM. Search engine marketers focus on making businesses and their products and services discoverable through search engines like Google. Search engine optimization focuses on increasing the chance that a website shows up as an organic search result when relevant keywords are typed into the search engine. Organic search results are the results a search engine returns without anyone paying to have the results come up. Search engine marketing or advertising, on the other hand, is focused on advertising associated with certain keywords. Let's look at this example for a search for non-stick pans. The results Google returns for this search exist of organic search results, as well as ads. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a series of actions that can help to make a website come up higher in these organic search results for a relevant search, in this case for non-stick pans. An SEM, or search engine marketing, focuses on the placement of ads for particular keywords. Another common form of digital marketing is display advertising. Display advertising refers to advertising with images or videos on websites or apps. It's a bit of a catchall term for many of the ads you see online, like this ad from Terra Outdoor on the CNN website, for instance, or these ads from HP and Zyrtec on Vogue.com. Then there's email marketing. Email is an important part of online activity and marketers use it to connect with current or prospective customers. Email marketing remains an important tool in marketers' toolbox. Here is an example from Williams-Sonoma. Content marketing is another form of digital marketing. It's a strategic marketing approach in which content is created and distributed with the goal to attract customers to a product or service, but without overtly advertising the product. Content marketers will often focus on informational or educational content to encourage interest in a product. Here's an example for REI, a video in which they explain how to change the chain on a bike. They're not promoting bikes or even bike parts in this video. The goal in content marketing is to help build awareness and engagement with the brand. So people will think more favorably of the brand in the future or will check out what else the brand has to offer on their website for instance. Social media marketing, search engine optimization and marketing, display advertising, email marketing and content marketing are the most common forms of digital marketing. Of course, you'll find examples that don't fall neatly in these categories and that are more of a blend of the different techniques. These different types of digital marketing often correspond with roles inside larger marketing teams or in agencies. Often a marketing team will include a search engine marketer, a social media marketer, an email marketer, and a content marketer. On top of that, you'll find other roles associated with different marketing goals, like brand marketers, who are focused on establishing and maintaining a brand and its image. And direct response marketers, who are focused on driving immediate action from their audience. All these roles work together, and while people will often specialize in one area, it's always good to know what the other parts of marketing focus on. As marketing projects or advertising campaigns typically cut across different categories. So a social media marketing campaign you develop for a particular product or service will often go hand in hand with a campaign in search and email marketing. Now it's time to look at social media marketing in a bit more depth in our next video.
