“Online marketing is just uploading content to Facebook, boost the post with some money and make some impression,” said a newly met friend who heard I was working as a digital marketer.
It is more often than not that digital marketing being seen as ineffective or simple-to-do. But neither can justify the amount of work and experience that is required to excel in digital marketing.
Experience? You might question. You heard it right. Despite seemingly a young industry with relatively less expertise to leverage when compared to traditional marketing campaigns or other industries, experience in the digital marketing landscape is immense. And, in fact, the knowledge in the space is growing at an unprecedented rate thanks to the constantly changing online environment and rapid data transfer.
Zenith found 30% of the marketing budget in the world was spent on digital marketing, with social media accounting for 13% and paid search at 17%. It might sound that 80% of the expenditure was spent on traditional marketing. However, with Facebook events and online presence being a huge part of the brand image online, great digital marketing often brings exceptional results.
Take Google Ads as an example, we are so used to search for something we need on search engines and select the top results. While Google Ads, and search engine marketing in general, places your website to the top of all search results, every USD$1 of investment on average returns USD$2. Though dependent on the industry and other factors, it has been one of the most effective uses of marketing budget which could partly explain the lower share of digital marketing cost.
Coming back to experience, being able to attain the 200% cost-to-marketing-investment ratio is not as simple as going onto Google Ads on your own, click some button and see sales fly through the roof. The artificial intelligence of Google is so smart that it will not give your advertisement a chance if the website that it links to suck. That means, even if you pay USD$200 to Google whenever someone clicks your website, you might still lose to someone paying only USD$1 because their associated factors and the resulting quality score are better.
This has made digital marketing so hard to master. Yet, because of the seemingly “simple” view on digital marketing by the general public, many decided to be a part of it. This includes business owners and self-employed marketers.
As experience is much required in the digital marketing landscape now, when compared to years ago, those who lack such often failed to yield the results that they are hoping for. Eventually, they will summarize digital marketing as “ineffective” or “useless”.
So, are those earning big money through digital marketing a fraud? If they are, I would most probably be fleeing somewhere rather than spending my time to type this article, character by character.
It is just because of the sheer expertise required to master digital marketing that those guys are able to earn a good sum of cash. Although it is commonly said that “jack of all trades, master of none”, digital marketers often have to excel in a few “trades” in order to become a leader in the industry, making great digital marketers, like Neil Patel, even more scarce.
Digital marketing companies often need various aids to perform their tasks. Therefore, it is not uncommon that these companies, like WeBOOST, are able to work on multiple information technology aspects, including SEO, social media marketing, website development and more.
