Digital Marketing | Digital Strategy | This Digital World

Insights for Search - Digital Marketing Terms

Google's Insights for Search tool (beta) provides a simple way of looking at trending search terms.  Today I looked at digital marketing related search terms.  This data is worldwide searches since 2004.

Internet Marketing

 

Interesting decline from what was a hot keyword search from the early 2000's. 'Web marketing' shows exactly the same trend.

Online Marketing

 

Fairly flat for 'online marketing' - no distinctive change over time.

Digital Marketing

'Digital Marketing' shows a marked increase, possibly because 'digital' represents more than just online, so as mobile has grown, so has this term.

Affiliate Marketing

Finally I looked at 'affiliate marketing' and as you can see, it shows significant growth.  Interesting, since affiliate marketing has been around since the early internet days.  It shows just how important affiliate marketing is as part of an overall digital marketing mix and how valid affiliate marketing still is in today's digital world.

As a side note, anything with 'digital media' in it has seen a significant drop off over time.

Facebook Fan Growth for RealPlayer

This is an article I wrote for the RealNetworks intranet this week - highlighting the growth to 100,000 plus Facebook fans:

We hit a new milestone this week with our RealPlayer social media efforts – over 100,000 Facebook fans!

The graph below shows the growth in fans/likes since we launched the RealPlayer Facebook page in November 2009.  The spike that you see in March 2010 coincides with us encouraging users to become a fan on Facebook after they had installed the RealPlayer.

 
 

Facebook has been an important tool in our customer communication strategy over the past 12 months. Earlier this year, we moved some our customer support team to active Facebook duty  and encouraged our RealPlayer users to post questions, issues or general rants about the product on the RealPlayer page. 

With 24/7 monitoring, we are able to respond quickly to posts and point users to the appropriate help sections on our website.  It has done wonders for our transparency as a business, since everyone can see how well we are dealing with customer comments, both good and bad.

We also use the Facebook page to poll fans about new feature ideas and gauge their feedback on existing features.  Our Facebook fans even got a taste of the new RealPlayer via a special download link two days before we released the product to the public.

You can see from the graph below that the fan base is more heavily male, in line with our overall RealPlayer user base and is much younger than our traditional RealPlayer user.  This is important as we continue to extend our user base to younger audiences that have never previously needed or wanted to download RealPlayer.

 

Growing our Facebook users will continue to be a focus as we develop deeper relationships with our customers and engage them across many different platforms.  If you like RealPlayer but haven’t yet ‘liked’ our RealPlayer Facebook page, then please visit the page and join the 100,000+ strong community already there.

Facebook is just part of a larger social media presence that includes our RealNetworks blog, our YouTube channel and Twitter presence.

Daily Deals - know what you're getting into

A new marketing category is born - daily deals.  Sites like Groupon, Living Social, Tippr and others have sprung up across the world, offering consumers amazing discounted deals.  In Seattle alone there are more than 6 companies competing for their share of the coupon stampede (Foodie Offers does a good job of aggregating the restaurant only deals which makes my life easier).

So, it's good for consumers because they get access to a wide range of discounted offers. But is it good for the businesses involved?

I went to Flying Fish in Seattle the other night to take advantage of a restaurant deal there.  The place was packed out, we waited half an hour longer than our allotted booking time to get a table and the service was average.  They just couldn't cope with the influx of new business.  What is that going to do to their reputation and will all those people that jumped on the discounted meal really come back.

If your business is approached by a daily deals salesperson, make sure you know your margins so your 'free marketing' doesn't hurt your business or your reputation.

Related links: Groupon and why it matters to your business