Digital marketing is scary for many people. It involves computers, and many people cannot grasp the digital world. They hear about social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which makes no sense. The problem is that there is a gap between the reality of what happens on social networks and the understanding people have already built up with a lifetime of knowledge. That gap is caused entirely by computers and their thousands of ones, zeros, and digital bits and bytes.
Computers can be frightening, but they only allow people to do what humanity has done for centuries. Microsoft Office lets people type a letter and add up a row of figures. Sure, it lets people delete mistakes and insert fancy graphics, but people have been writing letters for centuries. A computer is simply a tool; once people realize this, they can far more easily understand the mystery of digital marketing.
A tool that can be hard to understand is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC.) All SEO is making sure people can find you. Google’s search engine is like a newspaper, “Top Ten Restaurants in the City.” When someone searches for a restaurant, Google searches their databases and finds evidence. So many people are talking about a certain restaurant (how many people are linking to the site,). The restaurant’s façade looks good (the website is properly set up and maintained), and there have been no health and safety violations attributed to the restaurant (no bad practices have been found by the website.) Google measures the digital “buzz” around a restaurant, much like a newspaper would report on it. The only difference is that Google’s computers did the measuring, not the newspaper’s reviewer. This is scary to many, but Google is quite good at what they do. With PPC Advertising, you’re paying Google to show your ad, much like a newspaper would print it. The difference is that you pay a newspaper for however many thousand copies it distributes, while you pay Google for however many people click on your ad.
Digital marketing is simply doing what people have done with computers for hundreds of years. The new part is the computer, a tool like any other that mostly makes our life easier but sometimes harder. And it makes life harder if we don’t know how to use it. Things like social networks and video sites like YouTube are digital examples of what people have been doing since the dawn of time: talking to each other, entertaining each other, and making connections. You may certainly need to hire someone who understands the computer side of things, but you can easily understand the overall picture. Digital marketing is about appealing to the same people you’ve been dealing with forever, just this time with a different tool.
