A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing is ever changing. It moves quickly and to keep up, you need a strong foundation with the ability to think systematically and critically.
1. Be Laser 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 (1) the process of building personal connections at scale and (2) crafting customer value propositions that funnel back to ROI for your company.
2. Build Your Marketing Framework
Mediocre marketers think in terms of campaigns. Great marketers think in terms of growth frameworks. Learn how to position your marketing strategy into a sustainable, ROI-positive revenue engine for your brand.
Gone are the days of shallow branding. Leverage metrics to build a solid revenue stream. Get started with our Marketing Plan.
3. Develop Your Brand’s Story
When people spend money, they’re thinking with both their rational and emotional brains. The most effective marketing frameworks appeal to both.
Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools that your company can wield to build customer connections. This guide will walk you through the mechanics of cultivating your company’s story. Get started with our Brand Messaging Framework.
4. Traffic Acquisition Foundations
You can have the most amazing web storefront, blog, or product in the world, but if you’re not getting traffic, your business’s growth strategy will fall flat.
This post will walk you through some of the most common free and paid traffic acquisition frameworks for bringing visitors to your website.
5. Conversion Optimisation
Traffic acquisition is only half the marketing equation. You need to invest the time in building a strategy for driving sales.
Conversion optimization is the practice of (1) converting first-time visitors into customers and (2) converting first-time customers into repeat buyers.
6. Build Audience Connections with Content Marketing
Content marketing is more than just blogging. When executed correctly, content including articles, guides (like this one), webinars, videos, and even email signatures 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.
7. Find Customers with Paid Channel Advertising
Paid channel marketing is something you’ve probably come across in some form or another. Other names for this topic include Search Engine Marketing (SEM), digital advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.
Very often, marketers use these terms interchangeably to describe the same concept — traffic purchased through digital 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 be generating an ROI anyway.
8. Amplify 1:1 Connections with Email Marketing
Email marketing has a bad rap. Why? Because it’s often associated with spam. When executed correctly, email marketing can be incredibly powerful.
The trick is to prioritise the human-to-human connection above the sale. Balance automation with a personal touch.
9. Drive Incremental Sales Through Affiliate Marketing
It’s hard to believe that the Internet is now multiple decades old. Affiliate marketing has been around since the earliest days of digital marketing.
It’s a great solution for businesses that are risk-averse or don’t have the budget to spend on upfront marketing costs. Use affiliate marketing to build a new revenue stream for your ecommerce or B2B business.
10. Get Found with SEO
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 1 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.
11. Get the Word Out with PR
You’ve launched an amazing product or service. Now what? Now, you need to get the word out. When done well, good PR can be much more effective and less expensive than advertising.
Regardless of whether you want to hire a fancy agency or awesome consultant, make sure that you know what you’re doing and what types of ROI to expect. Relationships are the heart and soul of PR. This guide will teach you how to ignore the noise and focus on substantive, measurable results.
12. Launch Your Social Strategy
Your social media strategy is more than just an Instagram 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. This post will teach you how to make that judgment call. Get Starte with these SMART Social Media Strategy Goals.
13. A Quick Note on Mobile
Most businesses aren’t as of yet mobile friendly optimised, and that’s an issue. We operate in a cross-platform world. Smartphones and tablets are taking over.
If you’re not optimising your site for mobile visitors, you are likely losing money. Learn how to craft a data-driven mobile approach. Get started.
