...and Last but not least

You've made it.

You've finished the game.

Now you have to think and reflect. It's the last thing.

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Feelings

What makes this simulator fun and such a good learning experience for me was the challenge of continually improving in each round. I mean that's how you know you get better and when you don't do well, you have to do better next round. That's how I felt at the end of each round when I receive my results. There is a scoreboard which shows my rank, which was also another reason to why I liked the competitive aspect of this simulator.

In this simulator, I was competing against my classmates. So it was good to know that I was better than some or most of them when viewing the scoreboard. Which also drove my willingness to do better and be above others in each round. But, I do understand that it may not be the reality of how SEM works. When I do real ad campaigns and email campaigns in the future, I would have to make every penny of the budget worth spending. Also, make sure the landing pages are all done smoothly and well, even with the help of Google Ads.

Learnings

Here are the key things which I've learnt about SEM, SEO and email marketings.

Keywords - They play such an important role when it comes to SEO because consumers will have words typed when researching for products. So what a company is trying to sell must have those keywords in their description to match the consumers wants and needs. Keywords found in the description have to be attractive, if not consumers would not bother to click as it does not resonate or builds interest in them. I also think that a marketer will always have an essential set of keywords that he/she knows consumers will be searching for and for my case it was "cameras", "DSLR", "sales", "cheap" and "best".

Hence, it is so vital that one's SEO strategy starts by finding the correct keywords that will ultimately drive conversions for the business. 

"Think about what the user is going to type” – Matt Cutts

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AIDA Model - A marketer must know this model well before making the landing page and ad campaign. From my experience, when making the ad campaign, the marketer should not only focus on conversions because that is a small portion of the funnel.

Instead, they should have ads in all 3 other stages of the model. This is to ensure that they are reaching out to all consumers no matter which stage of the decision-making process they are at. It is much more effective to find people who are only aware of the product and convert them after, rather than targeting those who are already in the mindset to buy. This is because of the number of people who want to convert are more than the people who are simply aware. Thus, it would not be a funnel, haha lol.

“Mediocre marketers think in terms of campaigns. Great marketers think in terms of growth frameworks. “ – Neil Patel

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Last Words

Today, Digital Marketing is used everywhere and is seen in our daily lives whenever we are surfing the internet. Only after this simulation, I understand how I am recommended the different websites and I see the perspective of actual digital marketers. SEO, SEM and Email Marketing are very interesting areas of digital marketing which I've learned and are the foundation of it. Thus, my journey for Mimic Pro has come to an end. Hopefully, I can use what I've learned and applied it in the years to come...lol. Thanks for reading, human.

“We have the technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.” – Pierre Omidyar