Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide
Yes, there is a full semester, accredited course by the same title, in every Marketing Degree Program. This is not that. Or maybe, consider this more like a Chapter 0 of that course. A brief look at the core principles of Digital Marketing. Before we start, let’s quickly explain what digital marketing is, you know, for the time-traveling medieval people’s sake.
What is Digital Marketing?
It’s a form of promoting and selling products and services using digital mediums such as websites, social media, search engines, apps, and emails.
There are essentially four core principles that make any digital marketing campaign successful.
Content Marketing
Here, the idea is to create relevant and regular content to attract, retain, and convert user action. It doesn’t mean blogging. Although blogging is a part of it, there are other aspects that take precedence.
For instance, a website. 92% of consumers look at a company’s website when choosing a service or a product. If you have a user-centered website, created with a UX design, filled with relevant content that is placed at the right places, you’re already halfway there.
What are the right places, you ask? If you look at the marketing funnel here, each step requires a specific kind of content to have the maximum benefit. For example, blog posts and newsletters help the user be aware of what you’re selling, whereas, case studies and testimonials would only be needed in the decision stage. Knowing when and where to put out what is a key strategy in content marketing.
Paid Advertising
93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. So, that’s where you start. This is commonly referred to as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising or Search Engine Marketing. These are the Ad Banners and Texts you see on Google Search Pages. Similar ads are also visible all around the internet. Any website you go, any page you’re in, there’s bound to be advertisements there. And they all follow the same cycle as shown here.
The success of such ad campaigns depends on creating a cohesive series of ads that share the same theme, using the targeted keywords, placing to ads at the relevant places and platform, and performing regular analytics.
Organic Advertising (Search Engine Optimization)
While a paid campaign can provide immediate results, an organic campaign helps drive traffic in the long run.
Typical steps of an SEO campaign involve utilizing relevant keywords for the titles and meta descriptions that show up at the search engine results. Then, look at your competitions to find out what works and what doesn’t. Then comes the optimization part. This involves rather large strategies, and we’ll mention a few of those here. –
- Submit an up-to-date sitemap
- Create content with targeted keywords
- Link building
An ideal SEO campaign will integrate all aspects of your marketing, from customer research to content creation to value optimization.
Social Media
Seven out of ten customers expect a business to have a well-maintained social media presence. But “going social” is not as easy as it looks. A successful social media marketing strategy involves these five steps.
- Monitor and join in on conversations that relate to you, your brand, your competitors, and your industry in general.
- Respond quickly to questions, comments, or inquiries, as soon as possible, and we’re talking seconds and minutes. You wait a day, they’re gone looking answers somewhere else.
- Brand your authority on subjects with credible voices. This increases audience engagement.
- Start creating original content, not especially about your brand, but about things surrounding that. This way, you’ll start connecting with other authorities of the industry, and your content will be shared and talked about by other people.
- Finally comes the selling part. Since you’ve built authority in your space and established a strong network, now if you put up offers, people are more likely to pick it up.
So, there you go. These are the main areas of digital marketing that you need to conquer to succeed. Of course, there are several other forms of digital marketing as well, such as email marketing, affiliate marketing, mobile advertising, etc. But these are the major ones.
Although, if you own a business and want to start a digital marketing campaign, you might need more info than what you read here, and that’s what we, here at Alter Ego, do. For more insights on who we are and what we do, visit our website and keep coming back!
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