The digital age: From social media to geo-positioning, digital marketing has become commonplace - and continues to grow

Digital devices are everywhere and people are using them constantly -- so much so, that digital marketing has become commonplace.

"There's so much digital that is going on in the world of advertising and promotion," says Dr. John Cherry, a professor at Southeast Missouri University, who teaches advertising, marketing, promotions and public relations. "Everybody is being buffeted by this technology."

Most companies have websites, but increasingly, they also are launching Facebook pages and using other social media marketing tools to gain public attention.

"Every internship that comes through this office -- just about every internship -- they are wanting students to come in and establish a social media presence for them," Cherry says. "These clients want to have a presence in the social space, and it's not just on Facebook. It's Twitter and Pinterest, a lot of these other places."

Businesspeople turn to the university in search of interns to handle a part of their operation they are not necessarily familiar with, such as social media.

Bob Clubbs poses for a photo with the Coad Chevrolet WeatherMobile on Tuesday, April 14, 2015 in Jackson, Missouri. (Fred Lynch)

"Your average business owners, they are not web savvy like our students are," Cherry says. "They did not grow up on a screen."

With more and more people using mobile devices, such as phones, tablets and notebooks, it's important to take that into consideration when developing a company website.

"The way the world is going right now, websites need to be formatted such that they will fit on a small screen, like a phone, because mobile is really taking over," Cherry says. "If your company has a website, that's all well and good. But if it can't be reformatted to fit on a mobile screen, that's not good."

From a business perspective, the whole point of setting up a Facebook page for a company or corporation is to tempt the viewer to want to know more.

"Ultimately, the goal of it all is to drive the people who look at the page to the website," says Darren Burgfeld, a project manager at Element 74, a local web design company.

Bob Clubbs poses for a photo with the Coad Chevrolet WeatherMobile on Tuesday, April 14, 2015 in Jackson, Missouri. (Fred Lynch)

Although the Southeast Missouri State University curriculum doesn't include courses on Facebook or other forms of social media, it does offer a digital marketing course, taught by Sandy Sen, an assistant professor.

When it comes to business, it all boils down to the bottom line.

"One of the things, which people don't think about, is it's very easy to make a Facebook page; even a 5-year-old can do it," Sen says. "But to make it more active, to get people to like your status or to comment to your opinion, doesn't mean anything unless you can actually generate revenue or make them do something."

While it's easy to get people's attention by posting a charming picture of a puppy, panda or other cutesy image, the real test is being able to garner attention with the written word.

"The challenge is to write a very intelligent, readable status with a complete sentence to make people comment or engage with the status," Sen says.

To use Facebook effectively for marketing, content is key and needs to be on point.

"What we try to do is create an entity through social media that is giving people a reason to look at that page," says Burgfeld, whose company also handles social media management for some of its clients. One client, a brewery, has had success by posting a "Beer of the Week."

To assess whether the marketing is effective, it's essential to be able to understand how to interpret the data by using analytics provided by services such as Google and Facebook, which have features available to allow users study the web traffic numbers.

"Companies need to analyze the back end of the social media," Sen says. "In other words, use the data to improve the online presence."

In some instances, a Facebook page can generate revenue.

Bob Clubbs, a speech and theater teacher at Jackson High School, began making weather posts on his personal Facebook page, and got so much response that he started a separate page, "Weather with Bob Clubbs," which has turned into a moneymaker.

Through it, Clubbs has assumed the moniker "The Social Mediarologist," and has more than 13,000 Facebook followers.

Busch Pet Products contacted him to sponsor the page when he posted pictures of his rescue dog, "Violet the Weather Dog." Coad Chevrolet and Lawless Harley-Davidson of Scott City also sponsor Clubbs' Facebook page.

One of the newest trends is marketing through geo-positioning, which allows companies to trace a consumer's physical location through GPS on a phone, tablet or other digital device.

"If a marketing research company knows I'm at Starbucks, they will send me a three-question survey that fits neatly on my phone," Cherry says. "It's kind of an exciting trend in marketing research, because it asks people about their perceptions at the exact time they are happening, as opposed to asking them to remember what their experience was sometime after it occurred."

Although the technology changes constantly, understanding it takes a bit longer.

"It's a science," Sen says. "You cannot learn how to do it in one day."