Why did I sign up?

I took a digital marketing subject back at uni. The subject was sort of an introduction to digital marketing and how to go viral. While it was an interesting topic, I wasn’t able to ✨connect✨ with the prof’s teaching style and therefore couldn’t get a really good understanding of the subject (I know, my best luxury purchase in 2021- lol).

And then I thought, maybe I can just learn it on my own. Google is the largest search engine, so probably the best place to learn from. So maybe I should just learn from one of their courses in Digital Garage, and after doing some research— I found this Google Digital Garage – Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

The reason why I think this course is worth my time and energy is because it’s free, filled with practical tips & resources, and the course is easy to follow. Honestly, I think it’s much better than what I learnt at uni. I think it serves as a good foundation for online marketing, or perhaps if you’d like to start a marketing agency from zero. I think it’s like a Digital Marketing 101, but with just enough details that it’s not intimidating.

I finished this course in roughly a week with a 9-5 job. I managed to put some time for this when I was on my way to/back from work and during lunch break (also perhaps maybe a little bit during work hour 🥸).

Below are some snippets of what I learnt:

1. Keyword Research and Planning

The first step to plan on what you’re going to write is by doing Keyword Research & Planning. For example, with the help of Google Keyword Planner (here’s how to find the Keyword Planner: Google Support), we can search for relevant keyword with high traffic and low competition.

High traffic keywords mean that these words are searched by a lot of people, whereas low competition means that these keywords are not used by companies/websites that much. So ideally we’d like to use keywords that are widely searched by people, but they’re not used by a lot of websites.

💡Tips:

🔅 Don’t use keywords that are too specific / too long, this can result in low traffic.

🔅 Use tools such as Answer the Public or Google Trend to start observing what people are wondering on a topic you’re interested in. To give you an idea, this is some questions related to searches of Lavender Tea in Indonesia from Answer The Public:

2. SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation—where we optimise our webpage/content so that search engines can find it and rank it high on the first page. This is an organic method, meaning that we can do it without paying for ads. Choosing the relevant keywords, creating meta description & proper title, and achieving backlinks are some ways to practice good SEO. Interestingly, likes/follow on social media don’t really matter when it comes to ranking high on search engines.

3. SEM

SEM is short for Search Engine Marketing. It is somewhat similar to SEO, aiming to place your post at the top of search engine. However, these ones from SEM would be located above SEO search result. Contrary to SEO, you need to 💰pay💰 for this by placing bid for keywords, hence why some people call this as “paid search”. You’ll be charged whenever people click your ad (💅 fancy word for this is: PPC / pay-per-click).

As you know already, some keywords are more popular (high in traffic) than the others—these ones are therefore a little bit pricier. But then again, search engines are still going to show results that are relevant to users (i.e. what people are actually looking for). So that’s why researching keywords that would be relevant to your target audience is still recommended, as it will determine the performance of the auction.

There’s more!

There’s definitely more to learn from the course, such as digital marketing analytics, social media marketing, content creation, etc. I’ll share it on another post to avoid this one getting too lengthy.

I’m definitely not a digital marketing expert (yet!), let’s just say I’m a ✨digital marketing enthusiast✨ so I’m documenting my learning here. Hopefully this could also serve as a good intro for anyone who’s interested to dive deeper into the topic.

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