Digital Marketing Training

Digital marketers have long been trying to solve a rather obvious task: where did this customer come from? Once upon a time, it seemed like an obvious question. One clicked an ad on Google, visited a website, filled out a form, and finally became a customer. Someone else found a business on social media or via organic search results. Analytics tools helped track many of such actions and understand how it worked. However, this image gets harder and harder to keep. Search is changing, and people no longer use a predictable sequence of actions starting with a search query and ending up on a website. They can ask an AI service for some recommendations, read the answer without any clicks, look for a company separately, view their ratings, watch a video, and only after all of that visit the website. When this person becomes a lead or a customer, it will be quite hard to determine the source of the influence. Here is a new task for digital marketers: how do you measure the efficiency of marketing when the customer journey is unpredictable? Attribution Was Never as Simple as It Looked Digital marketing attribution can be described as a system to identify what marketing actions led to a conversion. Think of a customer who comes across a business via an Instagram ad. After a couple of days, the customer does some searches on Google. Two blogs later, the customer leaves the website, returns after a week via an organic search link, and submits an inquiry. Whose credit is it? Based on last-click attribution, it may go to the organic search since it was the last point of contact before the customer converted. The first-click attribution model will give the credit to Instagram. Multi-touch will attribute the credit to multiple points. All the above models could be correct since they just look at the customer journey from different perspectives. Now imagine adding AI to the customer journey. This will especially be critical for a digital marketing agency since more clients are interested in knowing the origin of their leads as well as how their customers find them. A Customer Can Be Influenced Without Clicking One of the main differences that AI-driven search introduces is that not all interactions lead to visiting the website. Imagine someone who wants to purchase accounting software. This person asks an AI search engine which platforms are appropriate for use by a small business. Several brands are recommended. But the person doesn’t click on any link, as he or she only researches the product. Two days later, this person searches for one of those brands on Google. This person reads various reviews, visits the website, compares prices, and finally asks for a demo. If you look at the report only, then the conversion looks like a result of branded organic search. But maybe the brand became known to the person due to an AI search? It cannot be said that AI made the person buy the product, but it might have influenced his or her decision in some way. The Number of Discovery Channels Is Growing  The use of artificial intelligence search is not a replacement for all of the current marketing channels. Instead, it is yet another addition to a growing list of choices that may present a potential customer with a brand name. This may happen via Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, review sites, industry publications, forums, emails, ad channels, or an AI-powered channel. There may be some overlap between the channels used. The buyer does not care about attribution models. They simply accumulate information until they feel ready to make a decision. But marketers do have to deal with the numbers. That is why the traditional question, “Which channel converted the buyer?” does not always give the complete picture. “What was the buyer’s journey before conversion?” would be a much more relevant one. Zero-Click Searches Make the Picture Even Less Clear A number of opinions have been expressed about zero-click searches, while AI search adds another aspect to the problem. A person can receive a relevant answer without going to the site. For the website owner, such a situation looks quite contradictory: a person found something helpful on his site but still has no visits registered by Google Analytics. However, it doesn’t mean that the site did not benefit from being recognized. Brand awareness can be formed without a direct visit. A person can remember a brand name, share it with a colleague, search later, or even purchase from the site later. AI Search Has Added Another Layer to the Customer Journey Classic searches followed a predictable flow of events. One had a query, typed it into a search engine, scanned the results, clicked on a website, and then continued researching on that page. AI-based search will turn it into a different story. For example, one could ask a search assistant a specific question and get an answer compiled from several sources. The customer might find out what needs to be found out based on the answer received and not have to click on any of the websites just yet. At some point, he or she may perform a search for one of the companies from the answer received previously. It would be another isolated search in analytics reports. And this is where attribution becomes complicated. The first AI-powered search could contribute to the awareness creation process, but the visit to the website could be attributed to a different traffic channel altogether. AI Citations Are Measurable, but They Don’t Tell the Whole Story There is definitely one part of AI-related traffic that can be measured more precisely. In some cases, AI searches return links to other websites, and people click on them. As OpenAI claims, for instance, publishers have the ability to get referral traffic from ChatGPT with utm_source=chatgpt.com used for referrals. It gives the marketer something to track. If a user visits the site via ChatGPT, it is possible to detect the

A bakery owner I know posted on Instagram every day for three months and received a few hundred likes, most of them from people in other countries who had no intention of visiting her shop. A plumber I know paid for an SEO package that guaranteed first-page rankings, only to end up ranking for phrases that no one was actually searching for. In both cases, they weren’t being careless; they were simply following advice that seemed sensible at the time. Most digital marketing myths are like this. They don’t make outrageous claims, and almost all of them contain a small element of truth, which is why they spread so easily. The real problem arises when a business spends its entire marketing budget in the wrong areas, sees numbers that never translate into inquiries or sales, and eventually concludes that online marketing simply doesn’t work for them. Digital marketing generally works when it is focused on the right audience, platforms, and goals. Below are some of the digital marketing myths I encounter most frequently, along with what is actually true and what businesses can do instead. Myth 1: Digital marketing is just social media  Social media forms part of online marketing, but for most businesses it makes up only a small portion. The remainder consists of search engine marketing, email marketing, paid advertisements, your website, customer reviews and your Google Business Profile, and it is generally these that cause a potential customer to choose you.  Consider the steps you would take if you were looking for an electrician on your own. You’d most likely enter a search term into Google, look at some of the reviews, go to the website and maybe send a message via WhatsApp. Instagram could have come up at some point, but it seldom results in a customer making a decision. Therefore, before spending any more time on posting, find out from your last ten customers how they discovered you; one or two of the answers will probably be repeated and that is the route on which you should concentrate first.  Myth 2: More followers means more customers  People feel as though they are making progress since they can see the figure going up. The problem is that a follower only informs you that someone has pressed a button once; the person might live in a different city, might be a bot, or may simply like your photos and have no interest in the things you sell. A furniture maker with 40,000 followers who enjoy the workshop videos could easily receive fewer enquiries than a competitor having 2,000 followers who are all homeowners within an hour’s drive.  Although a large audience does help build trust, it is by no means without value. It is not the same as demand, and it is one of the social media marketing myths that causes people to lose out. A good practice is to consider what takes place after someone follows you. For example, are people going on to the website, sending messages, or mentioning a post when they call? It is these small actions that tell you far more than the number of followers.  Myth 3: SEO gives quick results  SEO takes a long time because search engines have to locate your pages, determine what they are about and then decide if they should trust them. A newly established website that is competing with businesses which have been in operation for years may have to wait many months before seeing any real results. A great deal of the misinformation about SEO arises from this impatience, and some agencies are willing to take advantage of it by making promises that they cannot keep.  There’s a positive aspect to the slower approach: once you stop paying for ads, they immediately cease, whereas a well-created page that answers a common question can continue to generate inquiries for many years. If you’re just getting started, then start with the jobs that don’t require waiting—verify that your business details are correct everywhere, complete your Google Business Profile accurately, and ensure that each service has a page clearly stating what you do and the areas you cover. Also, if anyone promises you a certain ranking, leave them alone, since it’s only the search engines that make that decision.  Myth 4: Running Google Ads means sales will follow  There’s a real advantage in being shown to people who are searching for exactly the thing you provide, thanks to Google Ads; however, the service cannot make them decide to buy. For example, a dental clinic may pay for clicks on ’emergency dentist’ and direct all of them to its general homepage, where the phone number is located some way below the fold. Although people do click on the ads, no appointments follow, and the clinic concludes that the ads aren’t effective when in fact the problem lies with the page.  Create a separate page for each campaign, making the next step clear and obvious. Install tracking for calls and forms so that you can tell which advertisements result in actual inquiries rather than just bringing in visitors. Afterwards, periodically go through the search terms that are triggering your ads and block out the ones that are not relevant. Many accounts secretly squander a large part of their budget on searches that would never have led to a conversion. If tracking and campaign cleanup feels like too much to manage alone, working with a dedicated digital marketing agency can save both time and budget.  Myth 5: You need to be on every platform  The idea of being present on all platforms may seem thorough, but it usually ends up with six or so profiles that were last updated in the spring. Each platform has its own kind of audience and its own style, and getting even two of them right takes longer than most small teams realise. A profile that is abandoned can appear worse than one that doesn’t exist at all.  The platforms you use should be