Beginner’s Guide To Digital Marketing

Digital marketing moves at the speed of light, unreachable yet most effective. To keep up, you need a strong foundation with the judgment to think critically, act independently, and be relentlessly creative. Here’s a guide — to empower you with the mental building blocks to stay ahead in an aggressive industry. There are plenty of guides to marketing. From textbooks to online video tutorials, you can really take your pick. But, we felt that there was something missing — a guide that really starts at the beginning to equip already-intelligent professionals with a healthy balance of strategic and tactical advice. Beginner’s Guide to digital Marketing closes that gap. Not only this, but digital marketing allows you to build a vital online marketing strategy that helps you to draw the attention of target audience from various channels to generate organic traffic.

Still, before you decide that digital marketing is right for you, you need to understand what digital marketing is, including what sets it apart and how can you get along with digital marketing. In order to answer these questions, we’ve put together this guide to dive deeper into what digital marketing is all about.

What is Digital Marketing?

It’s easy to get bogged down thinking that digital skills are only important for tech-specific jobs like web development or web design. But the truth is, in today’s workplace, digital skills are job skills—a fact that’s highlighted by the increase in careers related to digital marketing.

Digital marketing includes all the strategies applied online to market products and services, whether you’re targeting potential audiences via computer, iPad, social media or app. In case, if you follow brands or influencers on Instagram, you’re experiencing digital marketing daily—and likely every time you open the respective feed. Same goes when you take a deep dive into Google search results to find anything from a new dinner spot to where to find online courses and more. This guide is going to help you with what a beginner should look into while opting for digital or online marketing.

7 comprehensive steps a beginner must know –

1. Stay focused on your customers

Your customers, prospects, and partners are the lifeblood of your business. You need to build your marketing strategy around them. Step 1 of marketing is understanding what your customers want, which can be challenging when you’re dealing with such a diverse audience. This guide will walk you through firstly the process of building personal connections at scale and secondly crafting customer value propositions that funnel back to ROI for your company.

2. Build your own marketing framework and work along

Stepped framework of an actionable marketing strategy where your ultimate goal as a marketer or business owner is to get prospects, customers and the public to engage with you and to develop a profitable relationship over time. Start with defining your marketing goals, identifying your audience or the audience you need to target, creating the exclusive offers, develop your creative (which includes branding, produce benefit, media platform, call to action, response channels and more, then move forward to choosing your channel whether owned media, third party media or social media and ultimately get along to test your marketing and check on success metrics. Such stepped marketing framework will help you as the core element.

3. Develop your brand’s story

Brand stories are not marketing materials. They are not ads, and they are not sales pitches. Brand stories should be told with the brand persona and the writer’s personality at center stage. Boring stories won’t attract and retain readers, but stories brimming with personality can. a story is the framework for a business’s life. The story shouldn’t create a trap but serve as a catalyst. Some brands get so caught up in their story, that they neglect the value of their present activation. Although you can honor your brand’s heritage, you should still live in the present. The great thing about a story is that it lives on. Real stories keep on telling, keep on going, and keep on connecting with people. Keep your story alive by continuing to impress your customers and give them the best experience possible. Your story will build the foundation of trust, but only a customer’s personal experience will cement that trust into something that lasts. We are much better storytellers than we are logician.

4. Build audience connection with content marketing

Content marketing is more than just blogging. When executed correctly, content including articles, guides, webinars, and videos can be powerful growth drivers for your business. Focus on building trust and producing amazing quality. And most of all make sure that you’re capturing the right metrics. Create content to generate ROI. Measure the right results. Today, outbound marketing strategies (or anything that interrupts your audience members) aren’t as effective at resonating with and converting audience members as they once were. Your content needs to reach your audience in a way that feels natural or inbound. A common way of doing this is by creating a narrative for your content — or telling a story. In doing so, your content will feel more authentic, engaging, and tailored to your audience. In order to start with, determine which type of content works best for your business and audience, and develop a content marketing strategy to begin boosting your bottom line today.

5. Find customers with paid marketing

Paid marketing is something you’ve probably come across in some form or another. Other names for the same include Search Engine Marketing (SEM), online advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Very often, marketers use these terms interchangeably to describe the same concept — traffic purchased through online ads. Marketers frequently shy away from this technique because it costs money. This perspective will put you at a significant disadvantage. It’s not uncommon for companies to run PPC campaigns with uncapped budgets. Why? Because you should know how to generate ROI.

6. Get found through SEO

You might have decided to bite the bullet and embrace search engine optimization (SEO), the strategy digital marketers around the world use to help businesses get found online. But in a field fraught with disagreement and ever-shifting rules, where do you even start? And is it really worth all the effort? To be honest, search engines are a powerful channel for connecting with new audiences. Companies like Google and Bing look to connect their customers with the best user experience possible. Step one of a strong SEO strategy is to make sure that your website content and products are the best that they can be. Step 2 is to communicate that user experience information to search engines so that you rank in the right place. SEO is competitive and has a reputation of being a black art.

7. Introduce your social strategy

Your social media strategy is more than just a Facebook profile or Twitter feed. When executed correctly, social media is a powerful customer engagement engine and web traffic driver. It’s easy to get sucked into the hype and create profiles on every single social site. This is the wrong approach. What you should do instead is to focus on a few key channels where your brand is most likely to reach key customers and prospects. In order to work around social strategy follow some simple steps to get along –

• Set meaningful social marketing goals.
• Research your target audience.
• Establish your most important metrics.
• Analyze your competition.
• Create and curate engaging content.
• Make timeliness a top priority.
• Assess your results and optimize.