Calvin Crane Digital Marketer

Marketing is not hard like swimming is not hard.

Marketing is hard like swimming the channel is hard (lots of water, lots of noise/competition).

What does My Digital Marketing cover?

Content Marketing (Pull)
SEM SEO Organic Search Marketing
Lead Generation (Push/Pull)
Social Media Marketing (Overlaps PPC [Push/Pull])

Unsurprisingly these are the main areas of my expertise. There are others I do but do not do as much such as email marketing, which is included perhaps in Content Marketing. It is a good channel and I do understand how it works and when it’s right I do it.

Content Marketing has been covered [here]. But to mention quickly that it is blogging and vlogging. Content Marketing leverages search engines and free social media for traction and traffic. It is front heavy investment that pays dividends over time like Search Engine Marketing. In fact your whole website is involved with this if you are doing it right. Content Marketing can use high traffic platforms such as YouTube however, which is the main distinction.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Appearing in the search engines like Bing and Google is very important. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation skills are required. Search engines are the most commonplace people go to for answers, inspiration or services and more. So you need to be visible when the time comes that someone needs you. Timing is the important thing here when people need a Plumber it is usually due to urgency. They may go look in the kitchen draw for the flyer that landed a year ago or ask for referrals too but being a part of this mix is very smart. Unfortunately people do tend to think being on Facebook with a Page covers them enough. Facebook could be seen as a search engine eventually to add to the mix by the time you read this. Search engines when advertised upon are providing good results and value to marketers. We can track very well the activity and effectiveness of Ads. I have a lot of experience of PPC and use it also within shopping and lead generation.

Lead Generation is perhaps the hardest form of marketing (at least technically). There are lots of moving parts to get right and you develop the skills and intuition to get good quality leads. It is very necessary to know the niche. Lead Generation involves obtaining traffic (more often targeted but not always) that is further filtered and refined by a process. Those processes are often closely guarded company secrets and I won’t share mine either. I am happy to share the overall process here as is because the devil is in the detail. The refined traffic often opts in their email or telephone number during the process and that is then further qualified by a call or sold as a lead at that stage. Lead generation makes financial sense only when you have a larger cost item or service of at least $300. If you have an item below that then basic PPC is more likely to work.

Social Media Marketing is complex in its nature. It is both paid and free too. Expect to pay to get decent results quickly. To do free social media marketing you need to post good quality content carefully and consistently. Check the platform the niche and go from there. Indeed this is Content Marketing.
Paid social media marketing is very powerful because for the first time we are able to target interests at least on Facebook YouTube and Pinterest for sure. We are also able to target based on locale and many other criteria. We need to pay to ensure that our Ad (Advertisement) is seen. All too often regular social media posts are simply never seen due to the amount of them the platforms decide via algorithms what to put in your ~~face~~ feed. Understanding how to create a good social media Ad takes intuition skill and learning. Testing forms a part of the cycle for all kinds of PPC advertising. But if you just throw up some text and an image it will most likely fail or cost more than it should to be effective. I have created many videos as Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing some of which are here.

What does My Digital Marketing cover?

See also