Digital marketing has become ubiquitous and combines traditional marketing with the online world. Its particularly difficult to define which is why I wanted to explore what exactly digital marketing is.
I actually came across a really interesting article which I particularly recommend, namely ‘What is Digital Marketing?’ over on HubSpot. It explores a number of topics, including what it actually is, what does a digital marketer do and does it work for all businesses. Rather than just regurgitating what I have already read – it is an excellent post in its own right which you should check out yourself – I thought I would explore the words they use in the article instead. More specifically, I created a word cloud over on WordClouds.com, a tool used to illustrate the words used in a text.
I copied the text into the tool which automatically ranks them depending on how often they appear in the text. The more a word appeared, the bigger it will be in the cloud. Naturally, I had to go through and delete all of the less interesting words like ‘most’ and ‘can’. After that, I produced the following word cloud which I thought was equally as interesting.
What I Found
Predictably, the words which came up most often were ‘marketing’, ‘online’, ‘social media’ and ‘website’. All of these are the fundamentals of what digital marketing is all about.
If you look at the mid-range words, you will notice ‘SEO’, ’email’, ‘traffic’ and ‘blog’ came up frequently too. I would like to consider these to be some of the basics of digital marketing and include some of the skills and knowledge every digital marketer should have.
Some other mid-sized words I found interesting include ‘company’ ‘customers’ and ‘results’. These are words you could associate with traditional marketing and highlight their importance all digital marketing efforts. Digital marketing is not just about using as many online platforms as possible. It’s about satisfying customer needs and meeting company goals and essentially ensuring good results.
Some of the smaller yet still important words I want to draw your attention to include ‘measure’, ‘tactics’, ‘user’ and ‘work’. I think these words were interesting because they perhaps aren’t what you would immediately think of. One key practice of digital marketing is measuring one’s results and analytics and adjusting your efforts to ensure the best possible results. Digital marketing is therefore very tactical and requires a lot of hard work. It is not all about tweeting once a day and sending a monthly newsletter via email.
Hopefully you have found this quite an interesting exercise. Wordclouds are really useful tools to find out the essence of a text. If you are a business owner, you could potentially use these tools to understand what your customers are saying about you. For example, you could copy and paste all of your reviews or tweets into a wordcloud to see what words come up most often. Perhaps your customers are saying exactly what you want them to or perhaps your message isn’t coming across at all.
I would love to know your thoughts about the findings so please comment them down below. I hope you have a great day and good luck with whatever it is you are working on today.
