My Digital Marketing journey – Day 2

| Day Two

“Consistency and discipline births successful outcomes” -Robin S. Baker

Welcome to Day two of my Digital Marketing journey. I woke up buzzing with energy and I couldn’t wait to start learning. Other than the fact that I am learning Digital Marketing majorly to learn how to run my small business online, I was starting to think about the career opportunities available to Digital Marketers. So, let’s get started on what I learned today.

Social Media Platforms

Before this course, I only used social media platforms to connect with family and friends, make new friends, engaging with content, and apart from the occasional ads that pop up on my feeds or stories the business aspect was foreign to me.

Today I learned about the different social media platforms, who uses them, how they work, and how marketers can use the various platforms. I learned how different social media platforms can be used for different businesses and the ways you can advertise on them.

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp are all social media platforms owned by META. Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform and it focuses on bringing the world closer. Apart from building an online presence, showcasing goods and services, and connecting with customers. Businesses can also use Facebook to create ads and manage consolidated campaigns with Ads Manager. Facebook also has a fair share of men and women that use the within the age of 25–34 years, it is also quite popular among older demographics.

While Instagram is a visual platform, businesses can build organic followers, connect with customers, set up a shop, partner with creators, and also promote their posts and stories. WhatsApp offers a more direct way for businesses to use the platform. Businesses can use WhatsApp Business, an app that gives businesses tools to automate, sort, and quickly respond to messages from customers. Various social media platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, WeChat, and YouTube all have various ways in which businesses can use their tools for advertising and connecting with customers.

Apart from the obvious social media platforms in existence today, some platforms focus on specific niches. A great example of these types of platforms is Medium. Here I am at 2:30 am(WAT), a no-name writer using this platform to write about my journey. Readership has grown to 120 million readers. And writers can partake in a partner program where they get paid when readers read their posts. There are several other platforms; GitHub is an interactive space where its 50,000,000 developers share their work, can help each other build code, and collaborate on each other’s projects. Next is Goodreads, a social media platform for readers where they can connect over the books they’ve read. There are so many of these platforms and businesses can use them to target specific audiences for advertising and connecting with customers.

Setting Marketing Goals.

I learned the importance of setting marketing goals. It is important to set marketing goals and a way to measure whether the goal was successful. It helps you to communicate what you want to achieve to other people on the team, and it helps you decide on the metrics, you’ll need to assess success.

Writing personal goals is similar to writing business goals. it helps to make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, in other words, SMART. For example, my goal for my business is to get a 25% increase in sales before the end of the first quarter of the year. Let us break down the goal using the acronym. The goal is specific as it describes what I want to achieve in clear terms, it is measurable because I can track the number of sales, the goal is achievable as we believe we are confident that we can increase sales, it is relevant because making revenue is one of the core goals for the brand, and it is time-bound because I have six months to meet it.

Key Performance Indicators.

Key Performance Indicators are measurable values that can help you track your progress toward your goal. They are usually quantitative, meaning they can be measured. KPIs are directional, they go up or down. And they have a direct relationship to your goal. They will help you focus on those metrics that matter when you are evaluating, whether you achieved your goals or not. In the SMART goal above the KPI would be tracking the number of sales.

After my coursework for today, I wrote out SMART goals for my business and their key performance indicators. I also decided on the social media platforms I could use for my business based on my target audience. It’s the end of Day two and I am delighted that I decided to take this course.