Digital Marketing for Beginners. How to Get Started?
Have you ever felt overwhelmed while listening to the marketing experts about Facebook ads?
If you are researching “digital marketing for beginners”, chances are, you might be new to digital marketing, or you haven’t started marketing your business on the internet.
Either way, it’s imperative to pay attention to the methods that can be used to grow your business in today’s environment.
We’re not worried whether you’re a B2B company or a B2C company; what concerns us today is that you may not be utilizing the most underpriced platform of marketing, which is the internet.
So, the purpose of discussing digital marketing is that someone needs to take the responsibility of educating the brands, startups, and organizations on reaching out to the new audiences through the internet.
Ever wondered why you should start using digital marketing when you can get a TV commercial during the Super bowl or place an ad in a famous print magazine?
Let us spill the beans.
Almost half of the U.S. digital ad spending in 2015 was on the mobile platform. It supports the fact that the attention of the consumer is shifting from the “old media” to the “new media.”
We’re here to discuss how you can win in today’s digital marketing age where technology, social media, and the internet are the new pillars of modern-day communication.
What’s Digital Marketing, anyway?
Digital marketing is a way of creating an online brand representation through various tools across multiple platforms.
The core purpose of digital marketing is starting up the conversation and beginning the engagement process between the brands and the audience.
However, some brands opt digital marketing for brand positioning, but others prefer to do it for lead generation.
In other words, a digital marketing campaign is designed to send the brand’s message across.
It comes down to the way of looking at the marketing possibilities that we have now.
Why Should You Start Doing Digital Marketing?
It’s something you might ask at some point if you have stumbled upon the videos or articles related to digital marketing lately.
There are three fundamental reasons why a business should consider doing digital marketing:
1. Brand Positioning
It refers to the process of creating an image of the brand in the prospective customers’ mind. We have been using this strategy for many decades.
The companies have been using radio ads, billboards, magazine ads, and TV commercials for a very long time to do the same thing.
They bombard us with their adverts and try to create an image of their brands in our minds.
It does work when we go shopping and grab the same product that we watched on TV or in a magazine.
Today, brands are running ads on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram to snatch our attention and trying to showcase what they’re selling.
In other words, digital marketing has become a vital tool in today’s marketing arsenal.
2. Audience Engagement
Audience engagement is another reason why brands need to focus on digital marketing.
Audience engagement is something that breaks the ice and brings the prospect and brand closer.
Have you ever seen a sponsored video on Facebook and liked the page afterward?
If yes, then the brand has successfully done the brand positioning and audience engagement.
It’s not like that a prospect sees your ad and instantly buys the product.
Brands know, which is why they take the time to build trust with the audience, and thus the engagement begins.
Gary Vaynerchuk explained in a video that Twitter isn’t just about sharing your content, but instead, it’s about engaging with people.
He went on to share that he invested so much time in replying to the conversations in 2007-08, and therefore, he was able to amass a huge following on the platform.
3. Customer Acquisition
One of the main reasons a lot of brands pay attention to digital marketing is that it helps them gain new customers.
Not only does it bridge the gap between the brands and new audiences, but it also plays a role in converting the prospects into paying customers.
A 4-Step Process to Get Started with Digital Marketing
Step #1: Build Your Persona
Before you get your hands on the tools and strategies that you’re going to learn in this article, I’d recommend building your persona.
What I mean by building your persona is that you must define who you need to reach out and communicate through the digital marketing process.
To build your persona, you have to classify the ideal customers to make them stand out from the crowd.
For instance, you might not want to show your makeup products Facebook ads to the male audience, because by and large, they won’t be interested in buying those products.
To make it easier, you can start off by analyzing the following key indicators:
- Demographics
- Behaviors
- Likes and Dislikes
- Goals
- Motivations
- Patterns
The purpose is rather simple; if you want to target the audience and reach out to the ideal prospects, you’ll need to cut through the mist and see the clear picture.
And, that’s what building the persona does.
Step #2: Create Content
People get caught up in the cliché things when it comes to digital marketing.
It’s mind-boggling to see what people think digital marketing is; they have perhaps wrapped the idea of digital marketing into PPC and CPM advertising models.
In reality, digital marketing encompasses lots of things such as putting out content, reaching out to the audience, and gaining attention on the internet.
We’re about to explore content creation that will educate you on how the process of content creation paves the way for digital marketing success.
Now, we’ll dig deeper to understand the opportunities digital marketing has to offer.
Some of the essential tools of the digital marketing arsenal are:
- Content: Content is a valuable piece of information in any form such as text, audio, video, or visual that delivers a helpful message across.
In other words, it could be articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, and pictures that could be used to deliver value to the audience.
The best part of the content is that it gives you leverage, which you’ll learn in the next point.
- Online Advertising: Isn’t it fascinating that the majority of people who comes across the buzzword “digital marketing” think that it is just about online advertising?
The reality is that online advertising is an important pillar of digital marketing.
Moreover, various online advertising platforms could be used such as Facebook ads, Twitter ads, or Google Adwords to advertise online.
The upside of the content creation is that it allows you to leverage your content to advertise on social media and win the attention of the audience.
- Search Engine Optimization: Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important phenomenon in online marketing.
So content creation does add two cents in the online marketing of the brands or individuals who put out content on the internet whether it’s articles, videos, or images.
SEO is the answer if you want your content to perform better on the platforms.
The point is that once you have content in your hand, you could use it in marketing in different ways, which is why I can’t imagine digital marketing without creating content.
The whole idea of creating content is that it will help you attract, engage, and convert the prospects into customers.
Step #3: Develop a Strategy
At step three, you have to have a plan to gear up your digital marketing campaign.
When you’ve created content hands down, it doesn’t mean that you’re all set here; there are two important elements of the digital marketing strategy that you need to check off at this point:
- Selecting Social Media Networks: Social media networks are compulsory to the digital marketing process. One can’t establish a digital marketing strategy without exerting the power of social media.
So just be sure that your prospective audience hangs out on the platform you’re choosing along the way.
- Choosing Online Advertising Platforms: Online advertising was a little different before the advent of social media.
However, it’s a different ball game now.
There is a Facebook ad, which is undoubtedly a favorite option for the majority of digital marketers, but brands continue to use Google Adwords for ads in search and YouTube.
Let’s not forget the advertisers choose to pay where the attention of the end-consumer goes.
Twitter, Instagram, StumbleUpon, Quora, LinkedIn, and Snapchat are also major players in the online advertising game.
These two elements help us determine a better strategy that incorporates the right selection of social media and online advertising platforms.
Step #4: Analyze the Outcome
A digital marketing campaign is incomplete without the insights and results analysis.
Pay close attention to the statistics, and see what’s happening with your digital marketing campaign.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that one must keep an eye on the lead generation, email sign-ups, social media followers, and content sharing.
Don’t get carried away so much by the ROI.
In fact, experimentation is the answer to that problem. You must experiment, and see what works for you.
The interesting part is that you don’t need excel sheets or special software to analyze the outcome of your digital marketing efforts – the numbers would speak the truth.
If you’re running a Facebook ad, see the number of impressions, click-through rate, and the number of people reached, or if you’re publishing content, see the number of shares and comments, or if you’re publishing images on Instagram, take a look at the likes and comments.
The analysis part, however, shouldn’t be scary at all.
The engagement on social media, email inquiries and quote requests would ultimately reveal everything.
If nothing seems to work out, then you better hire a professional team of digital marketing experts because you might not want to waste your thousands of dollars on the experiments.
CanzMarketing, for example, is one of the leading digital marketing agencies in San Diego, California.
We genuinely believe in deeply analyzing the campaign results as an essential digital marketing metric.
If you’re juggling with Facebook ads and haven’t been able to pull this off yet, then we might be the team you should be calling right now.
Conclusion
We didn’t want to astonish you with a whole heap of technicalities of digital marketing, but instead, the idea was to share the concept of digital marketing.
If your marketing staff just runs Google Adwords, and they think that they’re doing digital marketing the right way, then ask them that why so many SAAS-based companies are putting tons of content on their blogs as well as social media?
We think that it’s time that you embrace that fact that digital marketing is way more than just an online advertising campaign.
Do you have any digital marketing tips for beginners you would like to share?
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Thanks so much for including me – I’m eager to learn more. Some great people on this list. Hopefully we can see the upcoming changes of digital marketing.
I’m loving this website lots of useful information. There is always something to learn about digital marketing.