The Power of Technical Marketing, SEO, and Data Scraping over SMM

As the world becomes more globally accessible, businesses have a new challenge: how to successfully market and advertise in this new frontier with the new tools available? Should you use technical marketing, SEO software, web scraping tools, or social media? Let's break down each marketing technique's pros and cons, how reliable each one is, and which you should invest more time and money on.

What is Technical Marketing and How It Works

Technical marketing is marketing that focuses on the specifications of a product. Technical marketing is the use of advanced product information to appeal to customers who already have a basic knowledge about the product. Although precise, it does not typically contain jargon or inside information.

How Does It Work?

A company running a technical marketing campaign needs to understand the audience's needs and address that with a good solution. When running a technical marketing campaign, businesses often involve focus groups. These sessions collect information on what matters to the consumer when making a purchasing decision. The marketing campaign will then showcase these details to capture audience attention and stand out from the competition. 

Why Is It Powerful?

Ultimately, a successful marketing campaign leads to a volume of sales, so it is important to win over a sale opportunity. When it comes down to the time of purchase, the specifications of a product highly influences the final decision. With successful technical marketing, your product will stand out from the competition. 

Another reason to invest in technical marketing is that it targets motivated consumers. This means the audience is already interested in the product and is looking for the final push to make a purchase. Spending more time and effort in perfecting technical marketing can ensure you capture the highly motivated customer rather than spending money reeling in potentially interested audiences.

Pros

• Addresses the concerns of the target consumer
• Detailed descriptions sell the product
• Address potential upsells

Cons

• Multi-step 
• Could be expensive

What is SEO and How It Works

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO software increases the quantity and quality of traffic to a specific website through organic search engine results. SEO makes sure there is better visibility for a company's content so that consumers are more likely to see their content, click on it, and become customers.

The better the traffic quality, the more traffic you will receive and achieve better and more organic results and customers. 

How Does It Work?

Google responds to search queries with search engine results pages (SERPs) created by a Google crawler. The crawler gathers information from all the content it can find under that search query on the internet and builds an index with the data. The index is then put into an algorithm that tries to match the given data with the requested query.

So, what is SEO in digital marketing? SEO helps make sure your content is at the top of the search query by having correct title tags and meta descriptions and proper use of internal links within the article. Having the key search word in the first few paragraphs help as well.

For example, say you want to determine whether or not your cat's runny nose is something to worry about. Type in "cat runny nose," and the crawler will go out into the internet and pull multiple articles that could fit that query. Posts that have more hits for the requested search word will be at the very top, as they are most likely what you were looking for.

On page 20, you will find a random page that talks about humans having runny noses and mentions a cat at the bottom of the search.

When it comes to SEO, understanding your keywords and using them to your full advantage is, forgive the pun, key to being successful with SEO software. Using a good seed keyword is the first starting step. If that seed is not there or is not good, the keyword will not take root in the SEO garden and leave a good harvest of clicks.

To see how your keyword stacks up to other content on the world wide web, click here.

Your content should be the last click that the consumer clicks on. It should be the best result for the keyword and should be all the content that the user is looking for. The user should not click away from your content to find information on this content that you did not provide.

What is Data Scraping and How It Works

Data scraping, also known as web scraping, imports information from a website into a spreadsheet. Data scraping is an efficient way to get data from the web and analyze it for marketing campaigns. But are all forms of data scraping legal? 

How Does It Work?

Using a data scraping tool, you can program bots to do the monotonous tasks for you. The tool will collect data from the website you've selected and import the data into a readable spreadsheet or API. You can then use the data for your business. 

Examples of data scraping include research for more web content, pricing for sites like Expedia and Carfax, finding sale leads, sending product data from eBay to another online vendor like Etsy. Some people also use data scraping to email harvest, but this has dubious legal claims and ethics issues. Despite this, there are several ethical data scraping tools available. If you would like to take a look at building your own web scraping tool in Python, this tutorial should prove a handy resource.  

How Is It Powerful?

Once a website such as Twitter and one of its hashtags is scraped and input into a sheet, marketers can see which users they may want to target for a campaign. Such solutions of digital marketing may be very useful and effective. Essentially, it can be a database for contacts.

Data scraping can also be a sped-up alternative to market research. With this data, you can make better-informed decisions for your marketing campaigns, and cater to your target audience better.

To download a Chrome plug-in data scraper, click here.

Pros

• Allow ownership of data
• Can be referred to after content is removed or updated
• Automatic database
• Expedites market research

Cons

• It can be complicated to set up
• Some methods bring legal and ethical issues up

What is Social Media Marketing and How It Works

Social media marketing is using social media as a principal place to advertise. Many companies have recently taken this route; however, this method has more drawbacks than evident.

Social media has been called a new frontier for companies with marketing. While it is a handy tool from a PR and customer service perspective, it should not be a business-only form of advertising and content creation.

While technical marketing lends to social media a little bit as a platform for a technical marketing campaign to advertise, social media marketing is more in competition with affordable SEO services.

How to Do Social Media Marketing

Similar to SEO software, social media sites have their own algorithm and target audience that you will need to cater to.

Facebook and Instagram

Facebook prioritizes posts from groups and clickable photos, and their target audience being mostly the older millennials to baby boomers. Facebook does allow for bought ads to target consumers who have specific interests marked on their account, and Facebook ad videos often go viral on other platforms. However, virality cannot usually be predicted and replicated.

Instagram targets photos that are frequently interacted with, and their target audience are older millennials to gen z. Instagram recently added a shop tab to set up a direct shop link to their products via their posts. Like Facebook, Instagram ads often go viral on other platforms, but virality cannot be predicted and replicated reliably.

Twitter and Tik Tok

We have the two social media platforms that are not only an advertiser's gold mine but are also a hard place to gain traction: Twitter and Tik Tok. Twitter's target audience is mostly a combination of both Facebook and Instagram target audiences, but they prioritize trending content.

Twitter has also promoted posts, but those ads are built from the advertiser's page, unlike the other platforms. And Twitter allows users to block ads and the owners of the ad pages, meaning your product may be reaching your target audience, but there is a good chance your target audience will block your account, thus blocking any chance of you gaining traction from that post.

On the other hand, Tik Tok primarily caters to cuspers (those between millennials and gen-z) and gen-z. And as they are a video platform, all the content must be in video form. Tik Tok also changes its algorithm regularly, so once marketers and content creators feel they know how to manipulate it, marketers can no longer use it that way.

Youtube 

Youtube doesn't have a target audience. Each creator within Youtube has a target audience. Advertisers can target their ads based on interests similar to Facebook. Youtube ad algorithm is supplemented by Google's ads system and collects info on their users, as to have a Youtube account, you must already have a Gmail account.

Of course, advertisers can always give sponsorships to content creators on social media platforms to promote their products. However, these products' exact numbers and success are not as well known as conventional media as many influencers are under NDAs.

But some content creators, such as Philip DeFranco on Youtube, create a minimum of one video every day between Monday and Friday and have a sponsor on each video every day. Each video also has a minimum reach of 1 million views a day.

Here's MrBeast explaining how the Youtube algorithm works and what your content should look like. 

Why It Is NOT as Powerful?

Do you see the problem with social media marketing based on the previous section? We just looked at how all five algorithms work. Each one is different and is not easy to manipulate. If you were to advertise on each platform, you would need to put in more time and money to create a successful campaign for each platform.

Additionally, if you are putting content only on the platform, some social media platforms claim the use of your content in their terms of service. If a social media platform goes under, like Myspace, or deemed dead, like Tumblr, you would lose out on the money and time invested into that platform. It is much more stable to put the content in a place you can control and monitor.

On top of that, social media posts are not prioritized with SEO. So if you only market on social media platforms, your product will not be given priority when consumers go to Google to search for it. 

Pros

• Suitable for immediate customer service
• Immediate connection with consumers
• Free to set up an account

Cons

• Each platform has its algorithm
• Some platforms keep the algorithm a secret and are hard to manipulate
• Expensive to maintain
• Hard to go viral and gain attention; without attention, you don't appear unlike SEO
• Could go under, rendering all the money and time put into it moot

Final thoughts

Overall, it is not time or cost-efficient to invest only in social media marketing for your business. You need to learn multiple algorithms, but it has no guarantee of discoverability for smaller, unknown brands.

Learning technical marketing, SEO software manipulation, and data scraping is much more cost-efficient in the long run as it is guaranteed to show up in Google searches, and the results can compound upon themselves. In contrast, social media posts have no such guarantee.