The Wild West is over in internet marketing. While in the 1990s and 1900s it was an untamed, emerging market, it is now stable and controlled by the largest players. However, the world of the Internet is so large that for many entrepreneurs it seems complicated. That's why I wrote a complete guide for anyone who would like to develop their business and take it into the future. At the beginning, it describes the entire context of e-marketing, relying heavily on its history. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, because then you will understand most of the cause and effect sequences and it will allow you to draw correct conclusions. However, if you want to go straight to today's situation, at the bottom of the article there is a section "How do Facebook and Google advertise?" In short: 🔹 Internet marketing has access to data and opportunities that were once impossible to achieve by any organization. 🔹 The market has been taken over and shaped by the largest companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple. Their history and current size allow us to understand the mechanisms of operation of advertising on the Internet and draw correct conclusions.
🔹 Currently, the systems of the largest players complement each other, strengthen each other and cover the marketing needs of most companies.
The most important thing is what the Internet has changed in marketing.
The Internet has introduced something that was once unprofitable: presenting completely personalized content based on the analysis of each user's behavior individually. Once upon a time, to learn about anyone's behavior, you needed a team of people. Today, it is enough for a customer to have an account on any social media portal or e-mail. Information that was previously unavailable to organizations such as governments, Pepsi, the KGB or the CIA is now within the reach of literally everyone. How it was advertised in the past, how it is advertised today. Traditional product advertising usually involved plastering the city with posters, purchasing advertising on television or radio, and scattering leaflets in promising locations. Compared to today's possibilities, it was a blind move. Even when ads were placed in a visible place and with good airtime, viewers could be focused on other things and not notice them. Most importantly, it was impossible to check who would see these materials, how they would react to them, or what they would do after seeing them. The evaluation of the effectiveness of individual ads was impossible to calculate. There were no tools to select those initially interested from all recipients and lead them to make a purchase. Why is it so important? The most important rule of marketing says: Hardly anyone will buy anything after seeing one ad. Customers are convinced to buy in stages.
The Internet solved this problem. Today, sequences of highly personalized advertisements are shown to precisely selected customers on screens that they look at with full involvement and with which they spend most of their time. Additionally, these ads are displayed to people who are interested in a given topic and their behavior promises a purchase. Google and Facebook algorithms examine every interaction with advertising, optimize their presentations and provide advertisers with a powerful database. With each campaign you receive a precise report of costs and profits calculated down to the penny. This enables you to act in accordance with sales funnels, which is the most effective way to lead customers straight to purchase. Such advertising campaigns will prepare customers to make a purchase, and at the right moment they will be presented with an offer they cannot refuse.
A short history of the Internet. What for? Because "whoever doesn't know history is always a child." Cicero.
The history of online marketing was shaped by events that were milestones and established the rules of the game. The entire industry had to adapt to them and find solutions that are still used today. Below you will find the most important ones with an explanation of their consequences and impact on the modern world.
Changing the way we communicate. 1971. The first e-mail.
This year Ray Tomlinson sent the first ever email. No one ever won with convenience, so it was a sign of the death of traditional mail. Can you imagine today dealing with clients through traditional letters, for which you have to wait not a few seconds, but a few days? Currently, traditional mail is mainly used to receive official letters. But this will soon end, because most countries in the world are implementing digitization programs - including Poland, using... Ministry of Digitization. More and more issues are being resolved profile and trusted signature.
How does this relate to marketing? First, email marketing was created. Instead of sending your customers advertisements to their mailbox, today you send them to your e-mail box. The average user checks their email 15 times a day, and even if they don't, they get a notification with every new message. No traditional mailbox can beat this. Apart from e-mail marketing, something else has changed.
Never in history has any institution in the world been able to analyze and draw conclusions from the content of letters the way Google does. Based on what people write to each other, algorithms can tailor ads more than ever before. You think it doesn't matter much? On October 26, 2018, Google announced on Twitter that the number of active Gmail users exceeded one and a half billion. That's one fifth of humanity. Forty times more than the population of Poland. The most interesting thing is that these data are from two years ago, and the trend was already very upward. Nowadays there are even more of them.
A new way to search for information and products. 1990. The first search engine - Archie. 1998. Google.com is created
Although Archie was only used to search FTP files, it is considered the first Internet search engine. The idea of search engines has not changed since then and is perfectly defined by Google's motto - “organizing the world's information resources so that they become universally available and useful to everyone.
Google's mission is to give users information that best responds to their searches. On the other hand, it helps marketers find out what potential customers are looking for. Using Google, companies search for customers, and customers search for companies. Finding and purchasing a product from the other side of the world has never been easier. Having a website that is easy to find and its content is written to meet the needs of customers often means being or not being good for a company.
Today Google's capabilities and importance are difficult to comprehend. It is a company that influences the social, economic and ideological life of all humanity. Do you think these are too big words? Check out the data below: -Google accounts for 95.65% of searches on mobile devices. Currently, 45.15% of the world's population has smartphones, or approximately 3,500,000,000 people. -Searching for local businesses using mobile devices increased by 250% from 2017 to 2019. -Google accounts for 87.35% of searches on desktop and laptop computers, of which there are approximately 2,000,000,000. -Google handles 80,731 searches per second, which is 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 searches per year. -Google's average annual growth is 10-15%. -On average, one dollar spent on advertising on Google returns eight times its return. -Thanks to Google, in 2018, companies in the USA alone earned $335,000,000,000, or PLN 1,239,500,000,000. -63% of users click on paid advertising on Google. For comparison - on Amazon it is 15%, on YouTube 9%, on Bing 6%. -Google Chrome is currently used by 61% of all internet users.
It is difficult to imagine today a company that wants to develop in the future and does not care about its position and image on the Internet.
Technology that replaces almost everything. 1991. First website.
He created the first website in history Tim Berners-Lee for CERN. It was purely informative and described... what the Internet is. This website is still available under this link. Few people could have expected then what a revolution it would be.
Currently, approximately 2,000,000,000 websites have been created, of which approximately 4,000,000 are active. Websites have enormous potential and are taking over the roles of typical media. Netflix and YouTube provide the need to watch TV, Facebook to communicate and news, Amazon and eBay to buy, Spotify to listen to music, e-book portals, and soon portals like Google Stadia will take over the computer games market. Traditional newspapers are going out of business one by one or moving online.
The whole world is moving to the Internet. And not slowly, it only took a few years. If you don't want to be left behind, it's worth creating a good website as soon as possible. A well-written website for your company should become the basis for building your image and presenting your offer. Currently, there are many technologies, the most popular of which are Python, WIX, Wordpress. Remember, however, that creating an effective website is a difficult art. Read how to do it in this article. A new way to shop.
1971/72. The first network transaction. 1994. Amazon.com is founded 1995. eBay.com is founded 1999. Allegro.pl is established 1999. PayPal is created. In 1971 or '72, the first product in history was sold over a computer network. Using the internal network ARPANET students Stanford University i Massachusetts Institute of Technology they arranged the sale of marijuana. It was a very creative use of the network, but it was dictated by the client's needs. It was also too convenient not to accept. Online stores have many advantages over typical stores, including: Low costs.
-The warehouse can be located anywhere in the country, which minimizes the costs of production and storage of goods.
Easy and accurate advertising. -There are 944 cities in Poland. All you need to do is find 10 customers in each city and you already have almost 10,000 of them. Appropriate advertising on the Internet will allow you to find them and not waste your budget on uninterested people.
Easily scalable offer. -Amazon started by selling books, and currently it offers about 12,000,000 of its products - but together with user offers, it is over 350,000,000. After only 23 years of existence, Amazon took 4th place in the ranking of the largest commercial enterprises in the world with a revenue of USD 118,573,000,000, or PLN 438,720,100,000 - Allegro, established in 1999, currently has 90,000,000 offers in its catalog, and in In 2017, 30,000,000 products were sold via Allegro.pl. Already then, 20,000,000 Poles had accounts on it, and over 300,000 people visit this portal every day.
-eBay was established in 1995, and today there are 2,000,000,000 transactions on it every day. -Jack Ma founded Alibaba in his apartment in 1999, and is now the richest man in China.
The growth of online sales is constant and is taking over the traditional market segment by segment, which is visible in the chart below.
Why did I add PayPal to the history of e-commerce? Because it popularized convenient online payments. According to the report “How we buy online", almost half of consumers give up a purchase if there is no convenient form of payment. Without PayPal, the e-commerce market would not grow so quickly. Remember this when building your website.
2004. The rise of Facebook. The world's largest social network. 2,600,000,000 users and it keeps growing. Despite the competition that appears every now and then, Facebook has become part of our civilization and is unbeatable. It has the largest database of not only personal data, but more importantly - user behavior. The algorithms know when we enter new relationship and when we are going to get a divorce. They also know what, when and why we buy. Most users forget about Mark Zuckerberg's business model. Facebook is not a social media platform. It is the world's largest advertising platform and makes 98.5% of its money from it.
The video below comes from Mark Zuckerberg's hearing by US senators, and as you can see, even they don't understand it.
Facebook's advertising system is getting better every day as it understands users better. This makes it effective. Entrepreneurs know this and that is why each year they spend more and more on advertising on this website. 2007. iPhone premiere. Despite being the first smartphone was created in 1992, only the premiere iPhone promoted this type of devices. Currently at SEO audits Typically 50-60% of visits come from mobile devices. Therefore, a website that is not optimized in this respect immediately turns customers away from the company.
How do Facebook and Google advertise?
The biggest players in internet marketing are Facebook and Google. Both companies built their power on the sale of advertising space. Their systems are effective and, best of all, they complement each other. For many companies, their proper use covers all advertising needs. Facebook. Facebook works by learning about user behavior and then showing them ads at the right time and place. Algorithms examine every user activity: uploaded photos, Messenger messages, articles read and even... conversations taking place within range of the phone's microphone.
Based on this, it optimizes the group of ad recipients, the manner and moment of their display. The result is that guiding customers to purchase has never been easier. An important element of the system is Pixel, a program that examines behavior on the company's website and informs the Facebook advertising system about it. Example: Your company sells shoes. When a potential customer searches for wellingtons on the Internet, they will see the type of shoes from your offer that match their interests. Do you have Avengers wellies? An Avengers fan will see them. If they also visit your store and browse it, Pixel will transfer this information to the Facebook advertising system and trigger the next string of ads - adjusted depending on the customer's behavior.
Many times, posts on a fanpage are just the tip of the ice so that the profile doesn't look sad. Well-prepared advertising campaigns on Facebook are the real goal of running a company profile on this website. Facebook bought Instagram and connected its advertising system, thanks to which ads appear on both sites.
You will learn the mechanism of creating advertising campaigns at bottom of this page. Google.
The main advertising tools on Google are: -SEO, i.e. Search Engine Optimization. In Polish it means Website Optimization for the Browser or Website Positioning. It involves creating websites in such a way that the search engine evaluates them well and displays them as often as possible to users. You may be surprised, but more than one audit of a website that cost tens of thousands of zlotys shows that... about 10 people visit it every month. This does absolutely nothing for the company. SEO efforts turn this into thousands of users without paying Google a penny. -SEM, i.e. Search Engine Marketing. In Polish it means Search Engine Ads. After entering the phrase in Google, the search results will appear at the very top of the page with the note Advertising. This is already a form of paid advertising, but you will only pay for it when someone visits your website. -Google Display Network, i.e. the Google Ad Network. Many websites make their space available to Google, thanks to which they display advertisements tailored to the user. You know that feeling that advertisements for a certain product are chasing you around the Internet? This is it. The displayed materials depend on the user's previous behavior, what he was looking for and what websites he visited. This can lead to bizarre situations, such as advertising ham on a website about vegetarianism or pizza on a website about diets.
How to combine Google and Facebook well to promote your company?
-Create a well-built and SEO-ready website connected to Facebook Pixel. The website must be ready for mobile devices, have easy payment systems, not overwhelm the user and guide him through the offer without any problems. Content should be written in accordance with the art of SEO and updated based on trend analysis. Thanks to this, many customers will find you for free when searching for information on the Internet. After finding your page and viewing it, Facebook Pixel will receive information on which it will base its advertising campaign. -Buy SEM advertising in the Google search engine. This will allow you to be at the very top of the search engine, where you will attract the most customers. Only a small number of users check further search results in Google. You will only pay for advertising on Google when someone visits your website. This way, you will find a group of customers interested in your offer, who will start seeing your advertising campaign on Google and Facebook.
-Prepare attractive advertising materials. Video is much more engaging than photos and is currently the strongest advertising material on the Internet. The materials should be prepared for sales funnels and consistent with current trends.
-Run a Facebook advertising campaign. The campaign should lead the customer along sales funnels and be analyzed, verified and improved on an ongoing basis. You never know which material will have the best reception and direct your campaigns further.
-Create a campaign on the Google Display Network. This will cause customers to see ads outside of Facebook as well.
-Analyze and improve until you succeed. The data obtained from these sources will allow you to create even better ads in the future and make better business decisions.
