Learning Digital Marketing
I have been a Web Analyst for the last couple of years and to broaden my horizon, I decided to learn digital marketing in my free time. Around the same time, my wife and I had some business ideas we wanted to bootstrap, one of them being photo booth rental services. What better way to learn than to apply, right?
Man, did I bite off more than I could chew with this one.
Content
- Developing A Self-Hosted Site
- PPC Marketing
- CPM Marketing
- What's Next (SEO Marketing)
- Summary
Developing A Self-Hosted Site
The main focus was to learn as many facets of digital marketing as I can, but I also wanted to go into understanding the intricacies of self-hosting a CMS website. We purchased the domain pikstop.com from Namecheap, and then hosted the Wordpress.org site using a2.
Some proud moments from this stage of the project were creating email addresses within our domain (gene@pikstop.com, for example), integrating a CRM system (instant reservations, anyone?), and learning the administrative parts of forming a business (planning, licenses, insurance, LLC, DBA, tax filing, etc.)
PPC Marketing
I wanted to focus first on Google Search campaigns because I felt like it would be easy to convince potential customers to instantly reserve our service online, since they already know what it is. We got a couple of leads from this method but I think our market was too saturated and competing for clicks was hard with such a low budget campaign.
Some learning from this step include implementing Google Analytics and CRM events for tracking activity on the site.
CPM Marketing
After learning a bit more about the business side of this opportunity, I learned about the marketing funnel and how I’m really only hitting a small portion of the market i.e. the market that knows what the service is, and could potentially be missing out on those who don’t (which could be a larger population). Enter CPM through social media, specifically, Meta.
Really proud of being able to implement campaign goal tracking on this one. Also learned to properly categorize data feed by ad creative using custom URL parameters.
I was right! At the time of this writing, the campaign is still ongoing but we really got a lot of our marketing spend back (positive margin) in the form of bookings. I think this is where were going to focus in terms of paid advertising.
What’s Next
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is next.
I have very base level implementations on the site currently (keyword optimizations, blog posts, image taggings, metadescriptions, etc.) but the party entertainment industry is really competitive in our area. I think once we get a comprehensive strategy in place, we can really shine since having a self-hosted site really helps us move things around willy-nilly. For creating a strategy, we may need to phone a friend.
More to come on this but that’s another post.
Summary
Learning this was truly enjoyable. While this post doesn’t cover all the intricate details of this extensive project, I hope it conveys the main idea. I’m thrilled to have embarked on our own venture and grateful for the opportunity to leverage my 10+ years of career experience.
Again, more to come on this project since it’s a muli-year experiment. But I hope this gives you a taste of what I’ve been able to learn in a short span of time, in terms of digital marketing.