Celebrating Digital Marketers Around the World

As online traffic builds up on the internet highway at unprecedented rates, I’d like to take a moment to thank and celebrate all the digital marketers - creative designers, web and mobile app developers, creative technology specialists, search engine marketers, social media marketers, content writers and inbound marketers - helping move the traffic (myself included) along.  Without them, I am convinced that the online space would be in unimaginable chaos:  many of us will not know how to get to where we need to go.

Here’s how all of this makes sense in my mind.  First, a few visual references:

• Website traffic - Internet traffic is the online presence of anyone who connects to the internet/world wide web. 
• Search engines - Search engines are the highways on the internet, the major ones being Google, Yahoo & Bing.
• Digital real estate - Websites and social media platforms are the destinations where all traffic eventually goes.
• Digital ads - Every digital ad functions like a sign on the internet highway that points us to a destination we may want to go to, much like the highway signages on the sides of the road that announce the existence of gas stations, restaurants and nearby hotels.   
• Ranked pages and landing pages - every search result and landing page that ads click through to are exit points from internet highways (search engines).  They lead traffic to different destinations.

Many of us begin our online journeys by driving down the internet highway of Google, Yahoo and Bing, looking to find a specific or even a general destination.  We search for these places using keywords - the best possible way we can describe a destination.

We then click on search engine results and ads until we finally land on the digital real estate we’re looking for.  Some ads actually follow us around - it’s hard not to click check them out!

Unless we live most of our lives on the internet, a destination is a point where we leave the internet and go back to our face-to-face, physically tangible world, most of the time bringing along the information or experience we have found online.

All this may seem like no big deal but there is a Digital Marketer to thank at every point of the journey!

Digital marketers - especially digital marketing strategists - are like transportation planners who invest time in understanding everyone’s needs to go places and develop strategies that allow for all that travel to happen as safely, as quickly, as fairly and as cost-effectively as possible.

They map out buyer journeys and lead the effort in making these journeys fun and rewarding.  Digital marketing specialists such as Search Engine (SEO) marketers and Social Media marketers are subject matter experts in the digital marketing world, lending their expertise like digital tour guides and pointing traffic even more precisely to their destinations of choice.  

Creative designers and creative technologists do most of the heavy lifting in the digital world.  The architecture, design and build the highways and the signages and develop beautiful, functional, interesting and interactive digital real estate.

When going online is so much a part of our lives, it’s easy to take all the work that goes into it for granted and overlook the contribution of Digital Marketers.

But Digital Marketers Create.For.The.World.  They are an invisible force and their creation touches many other worlds.  We use the information we find online to build in our face-to-face world, receive guidance as we discover spiritual worlds, and get ideas for exploring the universe.  Especially during times when our ability to physically travel is limited, our ability to “travel” online efficiently - connect with each other, engage each other and collaborate with each other is priceless.

Great Digital Marketers shape our online experiences so our online journeys become effortless and almost intuitive. 

So if you are a Digital Marketer, CHEERS to YOU!