Why I invest myself to learn digital marketing?
In 2018, the growth rate of the number of startups increased significantly in Indonesia. Many people talk about how to solve one particular problem with their own idea and make it into what they called ‘start-up’. In the United States, Blomberg shows its U.S. startups barometer that tells us the startup growth increased dramatically in 2018.
A brief story of my startup
I build my startup when I was in the last year of my bachelor's degree. It happens when I had a community service from my university to utilize our knowledge from the lecture bench and help society, especially in the rural areas. My project was about agriculture especially hydroponic. When I learned about this, I saw there was a potential of the hydroponic market in Indonesia and I did market research to estimate what kind of product that fits with the problem of the farmer. I did a prototype in the first year and found that my startup increased its existence and I thought that I need some strategies to get more customers. (I would like to talk more how is my journey in my startup)
According to me, prototyping time is the time how founders challenge themselves to be more patient whether their product needs more many versions, iteration and finally they can launch the best version of the product. My startup has passed its crisis time that our product was acceptable and satisfied by customers. The second year, we finally got stuck on how to expand our existence not only in one city (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) but we want to expand another city. I finally called my friend, friend when we were in Junior High School. He was Rahmad Kurniawan, the one who introduced me to Digital Marketing
We talk about digital marketing
Rahmad actually runs his business as a drop shipper to sell a product based on the demand of the market in Indonesia. I know he is the true person that I can ask about digital marketing. I told to him that “How can I reach more customers by expanding my products outside Yogyakarta?”, he answered me “learn digital marketing”.
According to Adam Barone (Investopedia), digital marketing is the use of the internet, social media, search engine, and other channels to reach more customers in terms of customer behave. Rahmad also told to me that reaching more customers depends on the interest, location, age, gender, and others. He suggests me to join a workshop of digital marketing for one week in Purbalingga, Indonesia.
I learn digital marketing in Kampung Marketer
Kampung Marketer, like the name, this company is located in a rural area and its services in marketing. I still remember the price that I spend when I joined the workshop was around Rp. 1 million include two times eating (breakfast and dinner) and lodging with an owner of the house (we were taught to blend with the villager).
In the program, I learn how to do research on market trends such as using google trends with our case (my case was hydroponic). After that, they told to us to search for more details such as ‘hidroponik rumahan’, ‘hidroponik organik’, ‘hidroponik sehat’, ‘kit hidroponik’, ‘nutrisi’ and others. There are 100 keywords that we have to collect in order to prepare our marketing and hope we can monetize the specific market. I thought it is a part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that we will inject those keywords into our website.
There are two major platforms to advertise our product such as Facebook ads and Google ads. In Kampung Marketer, we had been taught to use Facebook ads. In Facebook ads, there are several campaign objective and it has its own goal. For instance, awareness objective is advertising our product in order to get an awareness, conversion objective is advertising our product in order to convert our advertisement into the product that ready to be bought by the customer.
There are several metrics in Facebook ads that most digital marketers used such as:
- Reach, the number of people who saw your ads at least once
- Impression, the number of times your ads were on screen
- CTR (Link click-through rate), the percentage of times people saw your ad and performed a link click
- CPM (Cost per 1000 impression), the average cost per 1000 impression
- CPC (Cost per click), the average cost per click (all)
- Landing page view
- Add to cart
- Cost per Outbound Click
Here are the metrics that I always used to see the performance of my ads in terms of getting more conversions.
Result
I implemented my first digital marketing and advertisement in Facebook ads, I finally launched an offline workshop that can target 100 WhatsApp inquiries and 25 people registered for the workshop (in that time, the maximum quota were 20 participants). I compared to the other workshop with the same event which the company had done more than 10 times a workshop. we almost reached the 30 participants that other competitors usually got. In terms of the cost, I spent 12% of the total revenue, and in terms of the profit, I got 55,2% profit of the total revenue. I thank my friend that introduce me to digital marketing. Until today, I still use that knowledge to sell my products with high return and low cost of marketing.
Conclusion
Congratulations! You have learned the fundamentals of why you have to invest yourself in digital marketing. I hope that my story can motivate whoever wants to be a digital marketer to maximize sales and get more profit. Please feel free to give any comments or suggestions to improve my content. I will be happy to hear from you and update more qualified content consistently.
Next time, I would like to update how I maximize my digital marketing with the skills of data science. I like to connect with you and learn from you. You could connect me on LinkedIn. Follow me on Medium or sign up for my newsletter.
