What is Digital Marketing? [A Beginner’s Guide]

Introduction

Digital Marketing is a vast field. Back in the day, the most expensive marketing campaigns involved television ads and billboards. Now? They don’t matter anymore. The ‘mass market’ no longer sits around watching TV or the billboards. They’re surfing the Internet. Digital marketing is different from traditional marketing. Unlike TVs or billboards, you cannot wait your chance or decide on a right opportunity. To be digitally relevant and succeed on marketing online, you always need to be at the top of your game. But before you learn to be at the top of your game, You need to learn the various components of digital marketing and understand them. This blog focuses on them. Let’s get started!

The Importance of Digital Marketing

The enormous success of Google and Facebook is down to a simple reason. They grab more eyeballs than anything else on this planet. This simple thing makes them the ‘greatest billboard’ on the planet. The website duo has such an astronomical reach helps even the most niche businesses succeed by finding customers, even on the most remote corners of the planet. The Earth has truly become a global village.

The Future of Digital Marketing

The television and billboard industry have already started declining in urban centers. Their collapse is soon to follow, and the television industry is already migrating to the Internet with the amount of streaming services each company is creating. In midst of this, Google and Facebook continue to produce stellar numbers year after year and companies marketing themselves online report increasing sales day after day. This marks an increased shift to digital marketing, and it has taken precedence over offline marketing.

Making it Work

To understand the guide ahead, you need to understand the core of how digital marketing works. Most digital marketing courses can either get vague or too specific and fixate on just one aspect of digital marketing. This blog aims to throw light on all of it. While trying everything this blog talks about will work for you, its success depends on the core of all digital marketing: An Optimized Landing Page Everything you try will fail until a landing page is optimized. What is a landing page, you ask? A landing page is web page which serves as the entry point to a user and potential customer. It is the first page they see when they interact with your digital marketing creations. To learn how to create a good landing page, you can click here. To have a customer interact with your landing page, your digital marketing creations should engage them. Different channels of digital marketing will require different landing pages. To have a landing page of your own, you need to have a registered website. WordPress is an excellent service that lets you create your own website. Here is a course which will help you in creating a website with WordPress.

Components of Digital Marketing

What follows is a concise look at all the components that digital marketing encompasses. It is also structured in such a way that it acts as a step-by-step digital marketing strategy for your small business. Good Luck!

Google & Facebook Ads

We begin our digital marketing guide with Google & Facebook ads. To get initial attention & traction for your business, you need to advertise your business to the world. And for a small business looking to reach a wide audience, Google and Facebook ads are the safest and most surefire ways to generate sales leads. This form of advertising comes under the PPC advertising model.

Facebook

Facebook advertising is a highly competitive environment. In addition, Facebook has a potential userbase of nearly 1.4 billion people. Facebook advertising’s greatest challenge is often deciding on the audience you want to pursue. The goal of a Facebook advert is to get people either to your Facebook page or a landing page. Given below are a few rules to follow while making Facebook ads:
• Optimize your profile/landing page
• Blend in
• Don’t forget to advertise testimonials
• Regularly update your ad templates
• Boost posts on your Facebook
You can learn more about Facebook Advertising from this blog. To get sample templates for your Facebook ads, you can see as much as 50 Facebook ad templates here.

Google

Google ads is hands down the best way to market your business online. Google ads are also the most widespread with a reach of nearly 3 billion people. Google advertising is a vast subject and a blog alone cannot cover it. We have prepared a free course for marketing through Google Ads. You don’t need to sign up for this course! Just go straight ahead and learn. Google Ads are of three unique types. The video below gives you a simple explanation of all the types of ads you can find.
(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.) Before you go on to creating Google ads, you must understand the importance of keyword research. Finding your audience on Google is directly proportional to finding the right keywords. Finding success on Google Ads is a product of both SEO and Advertising. Learning how to research keywords and devise a successful advertising strategy. Our blog for Google ad templates is currently under creation. For the time being, you can check out a few google ad examples from this video.
(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.)

SEO

SEO is a word thrown around all the time. It is one of the most searched terms on the Internet. Everyone knows what SEO is. Why is it important? Because it is what you use to optimize your landing pages. It is what gives you traffic. It is what you use for content marketing. SEO marks the second step after you gain the initial traction. Advertising through Facebook and Google, while good, is not sustainable in the long term. It gets expensive real fast and has poor conversion rates. What gets you leads; sales and customers is a high amount of ‘organic’ or natural traffic. This is possible only through SEO. The initial need for your SEO team is to get your organization ranked on Google. To do that, you need to optimize your home page and create multiple landing pages. You can find various blogs on Appy Pie to help. For someone completely new to digital marketing, this blog will help you through the basics of SEO. Here’s a video too!(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.) SEO is so important that there is a mountain of information about it. This leads to inaccuracies and myths about how to use SEO. To avoid that, linked below is a video that dismisses common myths about SEO. Check it out!(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.)

Content

Marketing through content is done by combining SEO with content to create a surefire digital marketing strategy. Content Marketing is one of the most successful digital marketing strategies out there and is especially useful for organizations with a B2B model. Nearly 89% of all B2B organizations use content marketing and nearly 70% have a successful content marketing strategy. Content marketing, however, is relatively slow, and takes consistency, time and dedication to pay off. Content marketing is usually done through an official company blog. The way content marketing works is by generating organic traffic and raising the authority of your website/domain. Both things are loved by Google algorithms helping your blog rank higher online. This ranks your website higher too! A good portion of that organic traffic goes towards your website which then turns into sales leads. Another advantage of content marketing is that with time, it increases the number of pages or bulk your website has, which Google favors for rankings. Once your blog is up and running, you need to focus on optimizing your page for SEO. Here’s a video to help you do exactly that.(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.)

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is often considered a part of content marketing. However, its increasing importance and wide adoption make it another component within a complete digital marketing strategy. Social media marketing requires the same consistency and dedication as content marketing but the trade off being that it is still evolving and might fail for certain businesses. The best social media for social media marketing are given below (in order of popularity):

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Snapchat

Each specific social media has a course linked to it which you can use to get started. Social media marketing can also be done with the help of influencers. Influencer marketing is currently the rage. The following video explains how to find the right influencers for your organization and the three things to look for in an influencer.(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.) Small product-based businesses can benefit the most from the trend of influencer marketing. It is like direct advertising, but it reaches a vast potential audience. Here is a blog that you can read to understand why you should consider influencer marketing.

Affiliate & E-mail marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is using other blogs, professional influencers to promote your products. Affiliate marketing is done through outreach articles, press releases and product reviews. Affiliate marketing usually links back to one of your main landing pages and is a way to reach industry specific audience.

E-mail marketing

E-mail marketing is one of the oldest ways to market yourself digitally. It is often aimed at existing clients and customers. E-mail marketing is used to promote offers, coupons, new products or new services. It is a very late stage marketing tactic. The goal of both affiliate and email marketing is retention. Affiliate marketing connects you to more leads and also existing customers since it is aimed at specific controlled websites. It increases popularity and brand reputation. E-mail marketing promotes your business.

Why is Digital Marketing Important for Business Growth?

Marketing is the larger context within which sales activities can happen successfully. Poor marketing strategies for small business can affect sales adversely. Let us explain why.

• How Does Market Research Help You?
Market research is critical for your business to avoid such a situation. Suppose the product you want to introduce to the market is a toothpaste. The market may well have reached a saturation point with a wide variety of toothpastes on offer. It will be extremely difficult to find marketing strategies to convince your potential buyers to switch from their favorite brands. However, your market research may identify that young adults want bicolor or multicolor toothpaste, which is not readily available in the market. If you utilize this information, you can enter the market with a product for which the demand already exists. That is how important market research is.
• Profiling Your Customer Segment
Along with identifying an existing consumer need, the particular population segment you need to target also gets reflected in the market research findings. In the example cited above, it is young adults. However, that is too broad a characteristic. Further detailing is necessary. Careful analysis of your market research findings will inform you about additional demographic details of these young adults. The kind of families they belong to in terms of economic class and social position, urban or rural, the role they have in family decision-making about purchases, and so on. It is critical to capture these demographic details as that would influence the next steps in your marketing strategy.
• Determining your Target Market
The demographic profiling of your consumer segment will help you determine your target market. The kind of localities you should target, whether to sell online, or in brick and mortar stores, or both – all these variables are crucial in defining your target market.
• Positioning/Determining Your USP
The key element of your unique selling proposition is already clear from the findings of your market research. You will be offering bicolor or multicolor toothpaste for which there is a predictable demand. However, you need to strengthen it further. In this particular example, something to earn the favor of the parents/guardians of your potential clientele. They would most likely hold the purse strings! In case of other goods and services also, additional positioning is becoming increasingly important. Ethical business practices, commitment to reduce the carbon footprint in the production and delivery process, and similar declarations can easily become brand value determinants. You will be operating in a world of aware consumers.
• Promoting Your Brand
This next step in the marketing strategy depends fully on the previous three: your consumer segment, your target market, and the positioning of your brand. However, this is a critical component, not just for startups, but throughout a business lifecycle.
• Sales and Review
Sales is a step that merits a separate discussion on its own. Sales strategies would be in alignment with the overall marketing strategy, of course, but there would be differences as well. That’s primarily because sales strategies would be pushing your products, while in marketing you pull your customers. Ongoing review of customer satisfaction and addressing gaps as and when they arise is critical in marketing, and to grow your business. Nurturing your client base is the best way to retain them. Guaranteeing customer satisfaction is also indispensable to grow your customer base.

Conclusion

Businesses are going online. Digital marketing has become the main strategy for many businesses. It is going to continue to go. In this blog, you learned about the very basics of digital marketing and how they can help you. Going through the attached courses and blogs that have been linked will give you the complete picture on how to approach and use digital marketing to profit from your business. We wish you luck in this endeavor. We also recommend checking out Appy Pie’s Academy which also carries courses for other aspects of having a business and knowledge about the Internet.

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