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What is marketing?

by | Oct 25, 2021 | 0 comments

What is marketing?

 Here you can find the definition on Wikipedia.

marketing definition

 

What does it mean?

Marketing is a tool to sell stuff. As a tool, you can use it good or wrong. The way you use it will make a difference for your business. So if you have a product or service, marketing will help you sell it. Marketing has all kinds of fields, but the main thing is that you should know what you are selling, and answer these questions:

Who will buy it and why? What is the reasonable price in exchange for it? What are the competitors do? Where will they buy it? Why will the customers repurchase it?

How can you reach your potential customers? Where can you ask them about your product? Was it profitable for you?

Digital marketing

Like many things, marketing has evolved and changed in the last 20 years, thanks to the digital online revolution. Of course, the basics do not change, but nowadays we can reach the potential customers many many ways not only on TV, radio or in newspapers.

We will discuss it later, but first, we answer the above questions, and you might have an idea…:)

So how will marketing help you?

Who will buy your product? Marketing research is about getting to know your customers. What age group is your average buyer belong to? Where do they live? Why do they need your product? Why is it better than others?

Woow wait! These are not answers but more questions to figure out.

Now you understand:). Marketing is, in my opinion, to have the right questions, understand all aspects of it, and then answer it. You might have more answers, and hopefully, you will test many different solutions before you find it out, so you will have a lot of experience along the road:).

We will discuss the potential answers to those questions focusing on small companies and digital solutions in the following posts. I plan to write posts about exact digital marketing strategies for restaurants, webshops, and many more. I also would like to give you some additional questions: what kind of data should a small company use and measure to optimize their digital marketing?

Credits:

Wikipedia 

Background photo created by jannoon028 – www.freepik.com

Using UTM parameters

by | May 2, 2020 | 0 comments

What is UTM?

UTM is a Google Analytics parameter that helps you label your website traffic from different sources. You can ask: “Isn’t Analytics already makes it possible to see?” The answer is yes, and no. Analytics better identify traffic when the links have UTM parameters. Without it, there is a good chance that the system doesn’t appropriately capture every visitor. Most of the time you will use it to segment ad traffic or organic traffic, e.g., a Facebook post, and you have five parameters for segmentation (source, medium, campaign, content, and term). Content and term are optional, and the other three are mandatory.

How does it look?

Here is an example; your URL is:
https://example.com and you want to send Facebook or email marketing traffic to it, so you should add UTMs to it like this:

https://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=2020_summer&utm_content=creative1&utm_term=fb

Maybe it looks a little bit confusing if you are not a techy person, but you will understand it in a minute. What’s more, you can download my UTM creator excel for free, where you can test it out and also can make many URLs easily with parameters in seconds.

So as you can see after the example URL, we add a question mark (if it already has a “?” then we mustn’t use it again. instead we use a “&” ), and then we add the UTM parameters one by one connecting them with “&” sign.

The five UTMs are:

utm_source=
utm_medium=
utm_campaign=
utm_content=
utm_term=

After the equal sign, you add the name of the traffic, or creative version, or campaign name.

So when a user clicks on your link and goes to your landing page Analytics will identify the UTMs, and you will see the same traffic names you added to the URL.
This is how it looks:

image

And here, you can download our UTM creator, or you can check Google’s original UTM builder here, but you can only use it for one link at a time. With our creator, you can generate more than 100 URLs, and copy and paste URLs, names, and so on.

Download UTM creator

Google_analytics_utm_creatorDownload

IMPORTANT: do not use special characters, only lower case English letters (it is case sensitive) and numbers. If you want to separate words then use a hyphen or underscore.

You should be very careful with URLs, and only use this UTM creator for your own risk! Any mistake, misspelling, or space could cause broken links! DataAndDigital.com is not liable for any harm, business loss caused by using this excel file.

 

Creating excel histogram

by | Apr 29, 2020 | 0 comments

When I started to learn data science, frequency distribution, and data visualization I have decided to create my own histogram visualization tool, so here it is:

Histogram creator_Excel for MacDownload

Disclaimer:

DataAndDigital.com is not liable for any harm, business loss caused by using this excel file. You should use it for your own risk.

First steps to create a website

by | Apr 13, 2020 | 0 comments

First steps

You need to figure out what you want the website to be about and book a good domain name.
Then you need to decide what system the site will run on, custom development or some kind of pre-installed, out-of-the-box solution.

What kind of websites are there?

There are a few types you can choose from.

  • unique site
  • “pre-programmed” site engine (WordPress, Wix, etc.)
  • webshops engines

First, you can have a unique site in terms of programming and design. You need to know coding, web development for this, or you have to find someone to make it for you. It could be static or editable. Most of the time, you need an editable website with a CMS (content management system), where you can edit text, images, create pages or posts.

To continue with “pre-programmed” sites. These solutions are top-rated because the system in the background is already programmed, and you only need to design it and upload your content. There are a lot of solutions; one of the most popular is WordPress what is originally was a blog engine, but you can use it in many ways: blog, website, webshop, etc. WordPress is free, but there are a lot of pre-designed themes you can buy and a lot of free versions too. Also, there are tons of free and paid plugins you need to run, optimize the site.

At this point, I have to say that a website is never free. There are complimentary parts of it (e.g., your time to create content and upload it is not for free either), but there are a lot of costs that can occur. At the end of this post, I will make a list of possible expenses.

In the case of WordPress, there are two ways to go.

  • pre-installed WordPress site (free and paid versions)
  • you buy web hosting service and domain on your own (or you ask somebody’s help) and install WordPress and do every setup too

Both ways will cost you money. Except for the free pre-installed version, but I guess in that case, you can not use your unique domain, so I will not recommend it.

In the first versions, you have to pay a monthly or yearly fee for WordPress. However, there are different pricing plans to choose from. Here you can check it.

It means a more negligible but ongoing cost until you cancel this subscription.  Then, you have support, and it will work. The other solution is to make everything on your own (or you can order it from a professional). You have to pay a higher one-time cost for a pro to create and install your site. There are also some fixed costs (domain, web hosting, plugins that you may have to pay yearly). This way is more flexible; you can even have a unique design that no one has. With the pre-installed version, you can choose from many templates to personalize more or less and look impressive enough.

Suppose you want to use your site for business purposes. In that case, I recommend going with the second solution and finding a company or someone who will create the website for you, because the monthly fee will be more after 1-2 years than the one-time cost you have to pay. But you have to order support from the company that has created it or does it yourself. Building, changing the content is your responsibility anyway, or you can outsource it too.

Ok, the third option I would like to tell you about is webshop engines. Logic is the same. You can have a unique webshop developed by someone. Or you can rent a shop from a webshop engine company like Shopify. Or you can use word press as a webshop too with Woocommerce module. It works as a WordPress site, but it might have some extra cost to create it and pay for additional plugins, e.g., if you have a paywall, etc.

They will charge you a few percentages of every sale you make (but you have to check the different offers). For example, the “free” Woocommerce shop is not accessible because, for the best payment solutions with plugins, you have to pay monthly fees for every sale you make. It gives you a little more flexibility than a webshop engine, but it will not necessarily be cheaper.

Or you create a unique webshop, but it is very-very expensive, only big companies do that.

Ok as I promised, here is the list of possible costs:

  • domain (yearly)
  • web hosting (yearly)
  • if you rent a site (monthly/annual)
  • If you order a site development, you have to pay a one-time development cost (maybe monthly support cost)
  • there are plugins to help in SEO, make your site faster, create automated backups, etc. (one time/ monthly/ yearly)
  • content creation is time, or you have to pay for someone (also, images are not accessible most of the time)
  • you might need a lawyer for privacy, cookie policies (one time)