Orji-Oko Uzor- Introduction
- What are the basics of digital marketing?
- How can I teach myself digital marketing?
- What skills do I need for digital marketing?
- What are the 5 D’s of digital marketing?
- Can digital marketing make you rich?
Introduction
Let’s Talk About Digital Marketing For Dummies.
What is it all about?
Well, a good digital marketing for dummies article will not be complete without a proper list of the main methods. And they are called the marketing channels. When you utilize them, more customers will be brought to your business:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Email marketing
- Affiliate marketing
Each of these marketing channels when dived into deeply, may be difficult to personally master more than one. We advised you learn a bit of each of them and then choose one that you will be a specialist.
Before now, you must have heard of digital, online, internet marketing. Now you’re reading this, I believe your intention is to read and learn. And that’s cool by us, because every day we keep learning.
The sad news is, digital marketing is deeply complex and the good news is, digital marketing doesn’t have to be confusing.
The mistake people make is to spend their entire lives mastering just one aspect of digital marketing. And its always changing, but you can still learn it without your head spinning if you know exactly where to start and stay focused.
Let’s begin with a simple definition: Digital marketing, also known as online marketing or internet marketing. It’s any activity that is carried out with the intention to bring more of your ideal customer to your business using the internet.
Essentially, whether you simply get someone’s attention or ask them to buy from you it’s digital marketing. If it’s done over the internet.
What are the basics of digital marketing?
Before you make up your mind to invest your time and resources in strategizing. It is very important that you understand the basics of digital marketing regarding the various channels. An effective marketing strategy may include a variety of components like:
- Website design
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Content marketing
- Social media advertising
- Pay-Per-Click advertising
- Social media management
Engaging with each component in the right way will certainly grow your brand’s presence online in a powerful way.
Website design
You must know that your website is the face of your business that visitors see online. Its structure, color, design, and even writing (content) impact the way your customers perceives your brand.
This is the reason why your site need to reflect your brand style and personality in addition to the general theme of your business.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
By now you must have designed your website. Also you must have optimized it for mobile phone users as well. Making sure that there’s responsiveness with the design.
Next thing to do is to target your ideal customers. And that’s what search engine optimization does. Research has shown that 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making big purchases.
When your ideal customer is looking for a product or service online, there is high tendency they will like to Google it first. So, to be able to be found among millions of search engine results, your website need to be optimized for the search engines.
Let’s consider what optimizing your website means. Search engine optimization is the process whereby you improve the visibility of your website on organic (unpaid) search engine result pages (SERPs).
SEO makes it very easy for your website to appear within the top results any time someone enters your targeted keyword(s) in the search bar.
Social media advertising
Social media advertising is a kind of advertising that uses social media platforms to promote and sell products or services. If you really need to know and master the basics of digital marketing, to start with social media marketing is a good idea.
One of the advantages of advertising on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. is that you decide your target audience.
Social media management
Social media management gives you the opportunity to manage all your sociial profiles (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) together on a single platform.
Additionally, it equally helps you handle both your inbound and outbound online interactions in a better way.
In simplest terms, it shows how you engage in conversations that happens across different platforms – blogs, social networks (like Facebook), and even public and private online communities.
Email marketing
Don’t bother to ask, just know that it still works. Statistics of email marketing shows that 82% of B2B and B2C businesses use email marketing today.
Why?
Because for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 on an average, and over 34% of people on this earth use email.
This is the very reason email marketing has become a lot more competitive nowadays. It is one of the most powerful channels.
The key here is to make your emails stand out, which very easy to say than to do it. Before you think of creating an email campaign, first understand the psychology of your potential customers.
Pay per click advertising
PPC is a kind of advertising used to bring visitors to your website using search ads, which you only pay for when someone clicks on it.
Content marketing
One of the basics of digital marketing that has been the talk of the town is content marketing.
Content marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on creating and sharing valuable and relevant content on a consistent basis to entice and retain a clearly-defined audience. And eventually, to drive customers to take a profitable action.
How can I teach myself digital marketing?
Well, it depends. Yes and no. Yes, you can definitely teach yourself digital marketing. But no. Why? Because theory and practical are not the same. Here’s something that will help you a little.
If you go online and search; “Can I learn digital marketing online?”
The quick answer on Google is yes. There are many sites that sells their courses. But you should understand that no matter how many courses you take. Getting hands-on practical will always be a different experience. Here at Urbizboost we advice you take one or two courses, then jump into your career.
How can I teach myself digital marketing?
Let’s consider the following platforms that you can use and teach yourself digital marketing.
YouTube
There are a lot content on YouTube. A lot of people make use of YouTube to teach themselves digital marketing with the content on the platform. This means, is a platform you shouldn’t ignore.
Acadium
Acadium is great to get started and improve your skills because everything is there. It’s totally complete, no need to search. For beginners like you, Acadium has an introduction to marketing course that explain everything about business, marketing basics and branding techniques. The good about everything is completely free.
Google Academy for Ads
Google has been a big player and influencer in the digital marketing world. Now it has its own training program and not just in digital marketing.
Go online and check out their courses and know more about the world of digital marketing from the basics to the harder stuff. The best thing about this program is that many digital marketing campaigns are run on Google, meaning learning from Google itself is an amazing opportunity.
Coursera
The cool thing about Coursera is that it offers different kinds of content, from MBAs to specializations. They have courses covering all levels and ages, in all languages.
What skills do I need for digital marketing?
Ability to analyze data and draw insights
Digital marketing growth has created endless amounts of data. Now, digital marketers have moee access to how campaigns performs and the behavior of customers To have meaning of this huge amount of data, digital marketers need to understand data analytics.
Digital marketing for dummies, explains that data analytics go beyond web analytics and website performance. Tomorrow’s digital marketers need to be well-versed on how data shapes and drives the customer experience across different platforms.
You will need to know different tools including Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads Managers, and different ad exchanges.
Digital marketing analysts work with structured data and unstructured data. Structured data, equally known as quantitative data, includes facts and numbers that software collect and order. Unstructured data, equally called qualitative data, includes subjective options about your brand which include survey responses, blog comments, or social media comments.
Organization and project management skills
To run multiple digital campaigns will get complex quickly. Building an omnichannel marketing plan that include different technologies and various measurements will lead to many moving parts to coordinate. Digital marketing for dummies explain that you need to equally have the skills of a project manager. This will bring together disparate departments to move marketing ideas from concept to completion.
Project management skills include the following; leading and directing internal and external departments to manage projects and deliverables.
Knowledge and application of automation
Marketing automation showcases, automates, and optimizes marketing efforts. It will allow your business to target customers with marketing and sales messages using workflows. Digital marketing efforts might be customized on the fly to send various messages to various prospects at various points in the customer buying journey.
This marketing automation has allowed more precise messaging and it’s adopted by almost every marketing department.
Implementing automations will help your team create a better experience for the customer. Tomorrow’s digital marketers should be able to understand the tools available to automate, including strategy and content needed.
Voice search SEO
Voice search does more than just return links to your website. It seeks to provide snippets of information that will answer query directly. In the world of voice-search, it’s not about keywords and backlinks. But your content need to be created in a way that search engines will see it as high quality answers.
UX skills and an understanding of the customer experience
Nowadays marketing is no longer just to get the customer to buy. Now it includes the experiences that will continue after the sales. This includes onboarding, communications, and even upsells. With this continued effort to keep and upsell your current customers. Digital marketers need to understand the full customer experience and provide thoughts around the best UX and CX.
Advanced social media knowledge
For most companies, social media is a powerful way to boost your website traffic and ultimately sales. With more than 69% of adults on Facebook, clearly your target customer is spending time on social platforms.
Tomorrow’s digital marketers must go beyond just to post occasionally on social. Rather, they must understand paid advertising on social, social chatbots. How to be able to build engaging communities on social media.
Digital marketers must research where their audiences are, and what kind of creative will mostly appeal to them. You need to create content in different forms like images and videos and be able to reduce the creative into different sizes to fit the various social feeds. Finally, digital marketers must rely on strong analytic abilities to ensure the social ads that delivers a strong return on investment.
What are the 5 D’s of digital marketing?
According to Statista, more than 85% of the U.S. population has accessed the internet so far in 2020. And this number projected to keep increasing steadily globally and nationally.
What does this really mean for your business?
This actually means that it’s high time you understand the impact of investing in digital marketing may have on your business.
Well traditional marketing has really served us good but it’s time that as owners of business start to understand what digital marketing is all about. Digital marketing will vastly improve your customers’ experience and will equally support the whole customer transaction from pre-sale to post-sale.
Let’s talk about digital marketing basics i.e. the 5 D’s of digital marketing.
The 5 D’s of Digital Marketing
Digital devices: What devices do your customers experience your brand on. The question is, do they interact with your website or mobile app on a smartphone, tablet, desktop computer, TVs, gaming device, or somewhere else
Second, digital platforms: Which platforms do your customers experience your brand o. Now, do they interact with your website or mobile app through social media platforms. They include Facebook or Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, or some where else.
Digital media: This third has to do with paid online communication with your customers. Will you spend advertising dollars on video ads, an email management platform, social media ads, search engine marketing (paid search), or on something else?
Fourth, is digital data: Here, the data is collected from your audience profiles. How do your customers interact with your business or what are they drawn to most?
Digital Technology: It’s the technology associated with your business interactions. What tools will you use to reach our customers better, digitally. Such as kiosks, mobile apps, and email campaigns via a marketing automation platform?
From all indications, there many things to digest here. Probably you’re left wondering where to begin. This article “digital marketing for dummies” will certainly be of help. We at Urbizboost have the necessary tools, resources, and manpower to take care of your business needs. And show you exactly where you might be missing opportunities and more reach.
Can digital marketing make you rich?
Well, gone are the ways of traditional jobs where you go to the office and work yourself out to make money and produce results. With the internet becoming part of our lives, the working environment has really changed. Nowadays, one may relax in their homes and find work that pays as much as an office job would easily. While there are various ways to make money online, currently, the best way to earn money online is through digital marketing. There are various ways to make money by doing an online course in digital marketing.
Can digital marketing really make you rich?
The answer is a resounding yes.
Content marketing
Content marketing is all about creating content that will advertise the product and publish it for free online. This content will act as information for the customer and bridge the gap between the customer and your business. It is majorly used for SEO purposes. Meaning if you have a good skill in writing, then this is one of how you can make money through digital marketing.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
As the name suggests, the major target of doing SEO for a website is to increase the visibility of that site in search engines. Its visibility of your site depends on the keywords and key phrases used in the content of your website. These keywords are some of the most common and important words. Using this advantage, your site will stay on top of results even when google analytics change itself from time to time.
Social media marketing
This is a very popular platform when it comes to connecting people all over the world. Social media marketing is just nothing but advertising your company and your products through social media platforms. You this by creating exciting content and posting it on the platform to be able to reach out to potential customers. With it, discussion will be created, the product equally will become popular.
Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing has been here in the past as well, the demand for it has increased with the development of technology like QR codes and mobile apps. Today it’s very difficult to find people without a mobile, and this act as a big advantage when it comes to mobile marketing.
Email marketing
Another way to make money through digital marketing is by email marketing. Email marketing is nothing but where your company sends your potential customers about the various products and services they offer, to convey the information. So, if you master this skill, you will make a fortune from it.