Marketing Nuggets

115: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing Sprinkled With My Insider Nuggets: Part 1: PPC, SEO & Programmatic

• Emma Windsor • Season 5 • Episode 29

Share episode

One my secret weapons to being a Head of Marketing is having a core understanding of all (well most!) marketing channels. And with Digital Marketing taking up the large majority of so many marketing plans nowadays AND with my tipping it to be one of the most important areas to focus on to level up in 2024, I thought I should dedicate a couple of episodes to it.

In this part one of two episodes on Digital Marketing, I start off with a couple of definitions that you should know and then go into the definitions for PPC, SEO and Programmatic. But of course, not just the definitions on this podcast, I'm sharing a story or two, my top tips and what helped me the most to level up my career.


Speaker 1:

Are you driven, ambitious and love all things marketing? Then this is your backstage pass to level up. I'm Emma, your marketing mentor and biggest cheerleader. With over 10 years experience, I'm spilling all my secrets to max out your marketing game. Expect authentic conversations as I dive into actionable strategies, behind the scenes stories and hard-won lessons to give you the confidence and tools to boss your marketing career. Whether you're a recent graduate or a marketing director, this podcast is for you and the whole marketing community. You'll walk away feeling inspired and equipped to become the marketing lead you want to be. So pour yourself a cup of coffee, grab a notebook and let's level up together to do an episode on.

Speaker 1:

And then I looked back at the episode that I did and said like these are the four core areas where I would be focusing right now, and one of those areas was digital marketing. And I suddenly thought you know, digital marketing has been something that has been fundamental to me and I think that as I started to learn more about digital marketing, it then really helped unstick me and uncover lots of areas of marketing and different channels, and then it kind of opened up possibilities of what I could add to my marketing plans, my campaign plans and strategies. So I thought we would do a fundamentals of digital marketing podcast today, with a twist, of course, because I'm going to give you the definitions that you can find anywhere on the internet, but I'm also just going to give you my take, my advice, my stories and what I would do if I was you right now and you wanted to know about these, and also to let you know that you are not alone in not knowing some of these definitions or what the flipping heck they are. I'm also going to start with some other definitions as well that go kind of hand in hand with digital marketing. Now I'm going to see how long this episode is. It might be split into two halves half of it this week and half of it next week. We're just going to see how much I yapper, basically. So let's get straight into it, as always with All Marketing Nuggets podcast. So let's start with the digital marketing definition. That's a great place to start.

Speaker 1:

Digital marketing is actually any form of online marketing, and there are over 2.7 billion online shoppers, so we all know that we don't just use offline marketing tactics. But because digital marketing therefore covers so many different channels and tactics, what do I think do you need to know. So the amount of knowledge that you need for every single channel definitely varies on your ambitions, your role, your expertise and, I guess, which industry you're in now, but it's always just good to know, because you might change industries. I would say, though, at least knowing the basics in every digital marketing channel is so helpful. It's for me, it was imperative that I know them, because when I'm building my marketing strategies, I then, if I don't know a tactic or how it works, or even just like top level, even if I'm not doing the channel myself, how do I know what to do with it, how much to spend on it, what the ROI could be and how it intertwines with other channels? So that's why it's so important just to at least understand top level, and it helps me to pick and choose which ones go in.

Speaker 1:

So in this episode, we're going to go through PPC, seo, programmatic. I also have those four definitions that go hand in hand, so we're going to start with those now. So the first one that you might hear is CRO, which is your conversion rate optimization. Now, this is essentially what happens on your site looking at user activity and behavioral data, and you essentially test to improve the conversion rate of your site. So the conversion rate could be anything from people filling in contact forms it could be them purchasing. It depends on if you're a service-based or product-based business. But you obviously want a high conversion rate, and so optimizing your conversion rate is done based off the data that you can get. One of the really great tools for that seeing what's going on on your site is Hotjar. It goes kind of hand in hand with UX analysis, which is also looking at user behavior on the site and driving like better performance Now that one is could just be better performance of your entire site. It isn't necessarily linked with that final action of conversion rate, but if your UX experience is up, then, generally speaking, hopefully your conversion rate is going to go up as well.

Speaker 1:

Now we are talking about tactics today in channels, but one thing that flows at every stage within all of the tactics and channels is your content marketing. So this is essentially what the actual content, what the thing is that your audience are looking at at every different stage of your journey. These vary vastly depending on what the channel is, so that could be anything from a little clip on social, it could be a whole podcast, it could be a blog, so it really really varies depending on what that is. So what the flipping heck is PPC? Let's get into the first one. So PPC stands for pay per click. It is a mode of digital advertising obviously, because that's why we're here and it essentially is when the advertiser pays a fee every single time their ad is clicked on. Essentially, you're paying for targeted visits to your website.

Speaker 1:

Now, a misconception about PPC is that it's just Google search ads. It's actually not. It can be made up of texts, images, videos or a combination, and they don't just appear on search engines. It's also websites, social media platforms and more. So people including me, usually call PPC their Google ads because it is the majority of my PPC. However, I am technically wrong. It's not the entirety of your PPC. So PPC is much wider than what people like me call it. So that is something to know Definitely. But, having said that, google ads is the single most popular PPC advertising system in the world. Google Ads platform enables businesses to create ads that appear on Google search engine and other Google properties. Did you know that one of Google Ads properties is actually YouTube? Google owns YouTube, and so when you see an ad that was created on YouTube. It was actually done within the Google Ads platform. Created on YouTube, it was actually done within the Google Ads platform.

Speaker 1:

Now, how often your PPC ads appear depend on a whole bunch of things, including what keywords you're targeting and how much budget that you've got, but also as well, your quality score. Quality score is essentially your SEO and your PPC match together, and it determines what you rank, how you rank and how much you rank for. There's two main areas that I think are fundamental to your PPC strategy, and that is your keywords chosen and also your landing page quality. Do not forget that your landing page needs to be chef's kiss so that it converts more people and also has a better quality score in general. If I was you because this can be very overwhelming I would start learning search-based ads. If you want to do this yourself, search-based ads on Google is definitely the place to start Understanding the basics. How to do a search text-based ads is all you might need to do. It has been one of the most successful channels for me throughout the years, and sometimes I seriously just been from search alone. Don't worry about more complicated ones like display video performance max there for a later date. At the very least go on google, do a couple of courses and just understand how it works, how the back end of Google ads works, because that is going to help you so much, I promise.

Speaker 1:

I told you I wasn't just going to tell you the definition of PPC, because you can find that anywhere. I wanted to tell you a bit of my background with PPC. So the first job that I had where they had PPC, I had no idea what PPC was, didn't know what PPC stood for, didn't know anything about it and you think I would, as I had two degrees but didn't know anything about it. I genuinely thought the guy that was doing it was magic. Everything he said sounded mysterious and crazy and exciting and he was using all of his acronyms. I had no idea what they meant and I felt like that for so long, like we'd sit in meetings and I'd be like no idea what you're on about. But I was like I'm in my little email marketing niche. It's fine, I don't need to know anything about PPC. You do if you want to get to the next level.

Speaker 1:

So it wasn't until my next role where I actually even started to look at this and think you got to learn about this, emma, and the reason why I thought I actually actually learned about it was because there was nobody to doing PPC and I needed to think of local tactics to get ticket sales, and so I thought PPC would be a good place to start and there was no one else to do it. So I set about learning. I took a couple of Google classes, google courses. They were free I'm not sure if they still are, but they were free at the time and I took them news and basics. I only focused on search ads so that I didn't get overwhelmed. I focused on local targeting keywords, so literally like using the city that I was targeting, using the type of sport. It was like being very, very specific and just kind of dipping my toe in the water. When you go into the, the back end of google ads, it is is overwhelming. So just starting with search ads is my biggest piece of advice. Then from there you can learn and grow. Don't be confused that Google has lots of different areas in there. It has display video lots of new ones as well. So, seriously, do not get stressed about that Bite size. This way is the most important.

Speaker 1:

Now I put my new skills into action at that role and it became a viable sales channel. Was it the best of basics? Yes. Did anybody know that? No. Was it successful? Yes. Did I know everything?

Speaker 1:

No, the next role that I went to, somebody was already doing PPC, which meant that I didn't have to learn any more about it. And I was like but I just kind of learned a little bit more about the theory of the other ones, because as I'm doing budgets, tactics and putting in channels, I needed to know really about what was going on in those areas, what was good and what was bad. Also, then, as you become more senior and people are reporting to you, you need to know what amount of click through rate they're telling you what impressions are saying what the ROI is, is it any good? And if you don't understand the channel, how can you know if it's any good or not? So that is a big, big piece of advice. So now it's been a key part of our marketing strategy ever since I can see the value in it.

Speaker 1:

I think that sometimes it's difficult to see the value in a channel if you don't understand it, because you might have bias over other channels that you do understand. I have someone running this for me now, but if I didn't understand it, I wouldn't. I'd feel out of control and like again, not knowing the metrics that they're telling me. It's just it's pointless of them reporting to me and telling me about it if I don't understand it. So that has also been a reason why I've wanted to know about PPC. It's one of the most successful channels and that is because I solely believe it is a search intent channel. So people come to Google for two main reasons One, because they want to buy something, or one because they want to know something, and so they have a more direct intent of an action than if you just catch them on social media. Getting people to convert on social media is so much harder because you're interrupting them in their scrolling, enjoying their content. So having it on a platform where Google, where they've got that intent, is honestly going to be so much more rewarding and so much more helpful. Which leads me on nicely to SEO, seo, search engine optimization. Now I'm going to be covering this really briefly because I have some awesome episodes on SEO and that is because I had an incredible guest, phoebe. Phoebe has her own podcast which is flying. I'm so proud of her, called beginners seo podcast, but if you go back and listen to episode 75 of marketing nuggets, which is seo nuggets we all need to know from an expert, and episode 76 seo bite-sized definitions and advice to level up your marketing, she gives us all kinds of beautiful nuggets to help us with our seo.

Speaker 1:

Se SEO is a set of processes aimed at improving a website's visibility in search engines like Google, with the aim of getting more organic traffic. A good time to tell you about organic traffic. So organic traffic is different to any other traffic, obviously. So direct traffic is people that come directly to your website. They type in your website name in the URL, so they already know you. Paid traffic is obviously people that come through PPC. Organic traffic is people that have found you in Google but they didn't click on your ad. So if you have a PPC ad out but they came this way, they didn't click through your PPC ad. Organic traffic is gold dust. In fact, according to SEMrush, the top three organic results in Google get more than 50% of all clicks. So this could be genuinely a channel that could be life changing for your business if we get your organic SEO right, which is why Phoebe is so good at telling us all to be better with our SEO.

Speaker 1:

Now, what does SEO involve? So typically it involves keyword research, content creation and optimization. So your content creation is everything around the whole site your landing page, your blogs, everything. Technical optimization. Lots goes into this, such as site speed and link building, and this is internal and external. Lots goes into this, such as site speed and link building, and this is internal and external. Internal is where you link between different pages, and external is sometimes called digital PR, where basically you want to get linked to your website off of different websites that have a really high authority domain. Basically, they're really great websites and you want to be linked on them because then it makes your website seem even better, so so it kind of brings your website up. The correlation is very simple the higher you rank, the more people that will visit your page, and so that is why SEO is sometimes the best kept secret in marketing.

Speaker 1:

Generally, your SEO strategy should be focused on optimizing your content to get ranked as high as possible on search engines, preferably page one, and the goal is to boost that organic traffic to find your so most search engine results that you will ever see and I absolutely hate this abbreviation, but SERPs is sometimes used, so literally like the the initials SERP search engine results page. So if you see SERPs and it is used sometimes in digital marketing that's what it means. So your SERPs, your search engine results pages, are made up of two results. One is your paid results you've got to pay to be there, that is, through the ppc, pay-per-click advertising, and they're going to be at the top and the bottom generally. And your organic results, where you basically have to earn the right to be there with your rankings through your seo. So actually, if you get more organic traffic, it is actually more rewarding in a way, because that means your seo strategy has smashed it and you haven't just, uh, used ads and they do work well together, even though they are very distant disciplines.

Speaker 1:

Having both a great ppc strategy and the seo strategy can actually powerhouse more than them working like separately. You want to work them together. Google looks at all of these things together because it wants the, the user, to have the best experience, so don't look at them as kind of separate. You want them both to be really great. And a top tip is to not just think of seo like a search engine like google or bing. It's important to remember that people are using social networks. They've always used youtube, like this, and pinterest to be seo search engine places, but now tiktok seo is really taking off this year, and that is where people are looking to social media to find information. So it's really important to make sure that your social team or if you're running the social, that you are keeping that in mind as well, that people might be searching for things, so that you're writing the right comments, right hashtags, the right anything that you need, so that they can then find it through that route.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so my experience with seo so you can learn to do this yourself, but it is definitely the long play. My experience with this is, if you're thinking of creating a website or you have a website, it is definitely worth learning the basics, things like your URLs, your breadcrumbs, site speed, keywords, landing pages and linking. All of those things you can learn yourself, and actually you know your content better than other people, and so actually sometimes it's better that you do it yourself. Otherwise you're kind of explaining things twice, which can be really annoying. But seo takes time, effort and consistency, but it is worth it, but it takes more time than you think. So if you have more time and less money, diy it. And vice versa, if you have lots of money but no time, you need some kind of seo to happen for that longer term play. Think of you in three to five years if you start your SEO strategy now.

Speaker 1:

Seo will also help you a lot in meetings. So if you know what SEO is, then when you have different kinds of meetings, it could be about planning a campaign, a landing page. It could be a whole different branch of the website. It could be that somebody has this really great idea. If you don't know the fundamentals of seo, how can you give your feedback without knowing what that impact might be on seo? Now it might be that you don't know the ins and outs and you don't need to know, like what a full seo professional would know.

Speaker 1:

But you need to know that if you are adding bunches of new pages to your website, what are the breadcrumbs? Aka Aka? What is like your URL going to say so that's like your forward slashes. So it's going to be like, say, forward slash services, forward slash X, forward slash like that's your breadcrumbs. So you need to just know little things like that which becomes really helpful. So over the years, I started not knowing anything about SEO and then I found that, as I was getting more senior and people will be asking me about SEO, I'd be like I need to know that so that then I can say so it's really helpful, learn the basics. I recommend, if you want to know how to do it yourself, go and listen to Phoebe's podcast Beginner's SEO Podcast. Honestly, it is so good, so really go and listen to that one. But, yeah, definitely want to invest the time in, so let's do programmatic, and then we're going to cut for next week's episode.

Speaker 1:

So programmatic. So programmatic is technically a ppc. It is the process of automating the buying and selling of ad inventory in real time through an automated bidding system. It enables brands or agencies to purchase ad impressions on publisher sites or apps within milliseconds through a sophisticated ecosystem. So, as I said, it's technically a PPC because you're paying for the clicks and this could be places like retailer websites. So like Tesco, you'll see these. The Economist, you'll see them. Lots of different, like online sites, but it's essentially those ads that you see, the banner ads. Typically, you will have control over your audience, your bidding strategy, your budget, creative assets and placements. Audience does rely a lot on your first and third party cookies and so, with that going away, I'm hesitant to know how accurate it is.

Speaker 1:

My experience with programmatic was five to ten years ago. It was one of the channels that when I was listening to digital marketing professionals, they would kind of talk about this channel like it was like the ace in their pack. They'd be like, oh, this is really great, you should do programmatic. And I'd be like what's programmatic? I don't know what programmatic is. And then I realized, oh, it's just, it's just the ads that just appear everywhere banner ads. They can appear in lots of different places, from out of home to online to streaming, to tv videos and voice. So they cover a whole lots of breadth of things. So if you're confused, you're not alone. They cover so many things. It's basically just ads popping up all over the place and you can do this at a massive, massive scale if you really have big budgets or big campaigns or big areas that you want to cover.

Speaker 1:

So the benefits of this is generally that it is large-scale audience release. It's efficient for low-cost awareness, but really focus on making sure that, if you are doing this, that the awareness that you want is where your target audience is because what I've also found with this is the like cap to get in is always quite high. So even though the amount of people that you reach is many more people, but, like I remember starting at like £10,000 for this channel. So there is usually like a cap and it varies between publishers, but generally they want you to kind of hit at least a what's the word? A floor or a ceiling, a floor to even get into this. So that is something to bear in mind.

Speaker 1:

Some other facts are that you get the real-time data and analytics and, again, as I said, you can use first and third party data. So first party isn't going anywhere. So that could be something that could be really helpful, but third party is out of here, so do not rely on that. And it is a good opportunity for cross-device campaign strategy. So if you've got a big campaign going somewhere and you want to put more awareness into it, this is something that could work really well. A good example of this is if you've got a big campaign in a specific geographical region for a specific amount of time, you might want to consider this channel, which is where I've used it before.

Speaker 1:

Did they make a big impact on my campaign. Maybe I found it really difficult to say whether they did or not. They are good for awareness. They are good for getting the amount of impressions for your campaign up. They really really boost that number. But I've always found that I was always disappointed with the click through rate because really they're not there for people to click through on, because if you can imagine where people are seeing these, they are very interrupting and usually they might be reading like an article or something and so you are interrupting them literally. So they're okay for awareness but, um, with the crackdown on cookies, it wouldn't really be a channel that I recommend for a long term.

Speaker 1:

To be honest, it's nice sprinkling in occasionally if you have a specific reason. Uh, if you have a specific place that you really want to have your banner ads on, that makes sense, that might be for it. But I wouldn't just do it as just a general channel to add, with no rhyme or reason. I would definitely just stick to PPC and SEO if I was choosing out of these three ones. I think it's good to know what they are. I think it's good to know how they work. So then you have the understanding, because I also find that if you are having outside agency help to help you run campaigns, programmatic is one that they usually try and get people to do because it has that higher threshold of money intake and it can get you a bunch of awareness views. So it does look good on paper, but just be aware that it might you might be disappointed with the return on investment that you get off of. It would be my advice on that. So I've spoken for plenty long enough today.

Speaker 1:

Next week's episode we're going to carry on. We're going to do affiliate marketing, email marketing, and then maybe I'll do one other digital marketing channel as well so that we can round it off, so that there's three on each episode. So you'll have to come back next week to find out what that third one is. I hope this episode inspired you to go and learn some basics. Go on some course websites. Go on LinkedIn. Go on because LinkedIn doesn't just have LinkedIn courses HubSpot, google I find the Google courses a little bit dry, but they are very good, so try and stick with them.

Speaker 1:

My advice is don't just sit down and try and do one course for four hours. Try and bite, size it into your day a little bit more, even do 20-30 minutes a day, really dedicate the time to this. I think that over COVID, I really dedicated a lot of time for it, but sometimes it's difficult to do it. So just say, just tell yourself you're going to do 20 minutes, learn something new, because the learning that I've done has then helped me in situations where you wouldn't think it was going to help you. So, honestly, I think this is my secret weapon to being a head of marketing is understanding all of the channels, because then, when you're asked about them, you know when you're putting together your strategies whether it's a campaign or a four year strategy you understand how they work together, what they might do, what your ROI might be, how much they cost, how much time they take, which is also a very good understanding to have, so that you know how much your team members have to do. So you know how much time that you might have to put into things.

Speaker 1:

So I hope this inspired you to go and learn something new this week within digital marketing. It's not going, it's only growing. It's only changing. You only have to look at all of the changes with AI to know that. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. It was so lovely to be back and chatting to you all this Tuesday, and I will talk to you next week. Bye for now. Thank you so much for listening to my marketing nuggets podcast. I've been your host, emma, and I will catch you next time. Bye for now.