E-Marketing Guide For Beginners

• Introduction
• How do I do e-marketing?
• What is the use of e-marketing?
• The problems or challenges of e-marketing
• What are the main e-marketing activities?
• Strategies of e-marketing

Introduction

E-marketing guide for beginners is the most comprehensive and extensive introduction to e-marketing that you can find anywhere.

The question now; Why this guide?

E-marketing is moving at the speed of light. To be able to keep up, you need a very strong foundation with a good judgment to think critically. Act independently, and be creative. That’s the reason we wrote this guide. To empower you with the mental creating blocks to be a step ahead in an aggressive industry. Mind you, there are many guides to e-marketing. Ranging from textbooks to video tutorials, you will really take your pick. But, we at Urbizboost felt that there is something missing. A guide that will really starts at the beginning to equip already intelligent experts with a balance of strategic and tactical advice. E-marketing guide for beginners will certainly close that gap.

This guide is for an audience of first time e-marketers, experienced entrepreneurs and
e-marketing managers who are in need of resources to train their direct reports. Most importantly, we want you to walk away from this guide feeling confident about your e-marketing knowledge.

This guide is written for you to read word to word. Every new guide builds upon the previous one. A core idea that we need to reinforce is that e-marketing should be looked at holistically. However, to read this guide from beginning to end will help you connect the moving parts of e-marketing to your big picture goal, which is ROI.

How do I do e-marketing?

Be laser focused on your customers

Your prospects, customers, and partners are the very lifeblood of your business. You really need to build your marketing efforts around them. Step 1 of e-marketing is to understand what your customers need, which will be very challenging when you deal with a diverse audience. This guide is here to walk you through the process to build personal connections at scale. Craft customer value propositions that will funnel back to ROI for your business.

Build your e-marketing framework

Average e-marketers always think in terms of campaigns. Great e-marketers think in terms of growth frameworks. Learn how to always position your marketing technique into a sustainable, ROI positive revenue engine for your brand.

Develop your brand’s story

When people are spending money, they think with both their rational and emotional brains. The most effective e-marketing frameworks will always appeal to both. Storytelling is one of the most effective tools that your company might wield to create customer connections.

Get them to your site: Foundations of traffic acquisition

You may have the most amazing web storefront, blog, or product in the world. But when you don’t get traffic, your business’s growth method will fall flat.

Get your plumbing right: Foundations of conversion optimization

Traffic acquisition is half of the marketing equation. You will need to invest your time to build a technique to drive sales. Conversion optimization is the practical of converting first time visitors of your site into customers. Convert these first time customers into repeat buyers.

Build audience connections with content marketing

Just know that content marketing is more than just to blog. When executed very correctly, content includes articles, guides (like this very one), webinars, and videos will be powerful growth drivers for your business. So focus on building trust and to produce amazing quality. And most importantly, be sure to capture the right metrics.

Find customers with paid channel advertising

Paid channel marketing is a thing you must have come across in one form or another. Another names for it include Search engine marketing (SEM), online advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Often, marketers always use these terms interchangeably to mean the same concept, traffic bought through online ads.

Marketers frequently ignore this technique because it is expensive. This very perspective will put you at a big disadvantage. It’s not uncommon for businesses to run PPC campaigns with uncapped budgets. Why? Because you need to generate an ROI anyway.

Amplify your connections with email marketing

Email marketing has a very bad rap. Why? Because the majority of cases, it comes spammy. But when executed perfectly, email marketing can be your powerful trick to prioritize the human to human connection.

Drive incremental sales through affiliate marketing

It’s difficult to believe that the Internet is now multiple decades old. Affiliate marketing has been here since the early days of e-marketing. It’s a huge solution for businesses that don’t have the budget to spend on marketing costs. Use affiliate marketing to create a new stream of passive income for your ecommerce or B2B business.

Get found with SEO

Search engines are a powerful channel to connect with new audiences. Companies like Google and Bing always look to connect their customers with the best user experience possible. Step one of a very strong SEO method is to make sure that your online content and products are the best that they will be. Communicate that user experience information to search engines so that you will rank in the right place. SEO is very competitive and has a reputation of being a black art.

Launch your social strategy

You need to understand that your social media strategy is more than just your Facebook profile or Twitter feed. When it’s executed correctly, social media is an effective customer engagement engine and a good web traffic driver. You must focus on a few key channels where your brand is more likely to reach key prospects and customers.

What is the use of e-marketing?

Global reach

E-marketing will provide your business with a wide base of customers for your services or products. With the internet, all kinds of businesses gain access to millions of prospective customers. Your adverts will be seen by many customers through the advertising tools that you will use. The bigger the number of users that visit your page, the bigger the sales that you will make.

24/7 marketing

With e-marketing campaigns, you will be advertising your business 24 hours every day. Furthermore, you will not have to disturb yourself about staff wages or store rent. In addition, the time variations in the various parts of the world will never affect your campaigns. Your target customers will access your site and buy goods and services irrespective of the time or even fear of closing hours.

Low cost

Cost is a major factor that must be considered in any marketing campaign because of its effect on company’s budget. You need avoid the high cost of marketing that is known with traditional forms of advertising. By embracing e-marketing and blogging. E-marketing is less expensive than television and radio ads and to create and mount billboards. Marketing through your blog is one of the ways you will sell effectively online.

Social media

Social media plays an important role in modern advertising. Reason being that customers consider comments and reviews posted by other customers online. You need to incorporate social network tools in your advertising campaigns. And make huge profits from customers that rely heavily on social media.

Builds lasting relationships

As long as you have an online presence for your business, your customers will always find you. With e-marketing, you will easily access the email addresses or contacts of both the prospects and the buyers. You may use this information to send updates to them regarding special discounts, new products or services, and products available. Furthermore, you will continue to interact with your clients after the sale.

Ease of personalization

E-marketing will enable your business to tailor your advertising strategies to suit the needs of your target audience. You can equally personalize communication between your business and your clients. This really ensures that your service or product will reach your prospects on time. It will strengthens your brand image and presence of your company.

Blogging provides quality content

Nowadays, content reigns online and attracts natural links. If your blog content is good, other people will like to refer to it. This will certainly attract people to your site. Make sure that your site is constantly flowing with fresh, educative and relevant information that your users are longing for.

Today, there is an increase in the number of customers who buy products or services online. As a result, the best is for you to resort to e-marketing to connect with your customers and advertise your products or services. This will sets your apart from your competitors and helps you to increase your profit margins.

The problems or challenges of e-marketing

There are problems or challenges that almost every company involved in e-marketing is facing right now. Let’s discuss them:

A bad reputation

A lot of money that was spent on e-marketing over the past few years was wasted. Why? The stock market distorted business valuations and rewarded or at least failed to penalize profligate attempts to generate traffic or acquire customers.

Currently e-marketing has a bad reputation. And half-baked metrics like click-through rates (CTRs) paint an image of failure and inefficacy. Enough evidence is showing that the internet is the most cost effective branding platform available. But the reputation still need to be rebuilt one success at a time.

Marketing integration

Many major marketing strategies utilize many channels, on and offline. Web advertising, email, and viral Internet marketing must serve concrete, measurable objectives as part of your integrated campaign.
But to coordinate e-marketing with other marketing strategies is an underdeveloped art. Some business have successfully linked the web to under the cap promotions for new product launches.

E-CRM

Imagine recognizing the needs of your customers as they come to your site. With time, with implicit and explicit data, you will learn about the preferences of each. And will serve customers based on their habits, needs, and buying drivers. You will build deep loyalty, and increase your share of your customers’ wallets.

You must have heard that vision pitched dozens of times. So have your clients. Expectations that the internet will deliver e-CRM are extremely high. Many websites are rarely usable, let alone optimized for each customer. Managing customer relationships successfully on the internet is difficult than some have made it out to be. The industry has many work to do to be able to meet its promises.

Privacy

Things have calmed down somehow since Doubleclick backed down from its plans to merge its online data with offline Abacus data. However, the industry’s privacy issues have not been resolved sufficiently.
Most customers don’t completely trust e-marketing companies and back away from giving information about themselves. Businesses that always ask for data responsibly are highly exposed to misguided regulation with spammers and scammers invite. Sound policy, is imperative in the industry.

Traditional advertising dollars

The difference between the amount of time people spend online and the amount top advertisers spend there is alarming. According to a recent report, the top six advertisers spend less than 1% of their advertising dollars on the internet.

Many people over the past year that found jobs in e-marketing has been subsequently been laid off. Still with the lack of security, shifting organizational structures, chaotic and inexperience management, and long, grueling hours. Yet nobody wants to return to traditional marketing. This means there’s just too much opportunity in e-marketing.

Yes, there’s potential. But there is equally enough work to be done.

What are the main e-marketing activities?

Set goals and analyze results

To create realistic goals for your e-marketing campaign up will provide you with a framework for future progress. Goals and objectives are often regarded to as key performance indicators (KPIs).

KPIs must be measurable, achievable and accountable. This will give you the opportunity to determine which e-marketing strategies are working and which must be scrapped. Without proper placement of these metrics, it will be difficult to determine your next move in the e-marketing field.

Once you have established your KPIs. Then begin an organized process that will include collecting data, assessing performance and tweaking activities that won’t be producing the results you will need. Always keep track of improvements like recent results that will allow you to get information on trends in the customer marketplace.

Research your key demographics

Every business has a target audience. By determining the demographic that will likely respond to your products or services. You can then tailor your e-marketing campaigns to appeal to these customers. .

Have this in mind that different approaches appeal to different demographics. For instance, if you sell adult-oriented products or services. Make sure your e-marketing campaigns reflect this perspective, it will help you make a positive impact on members of your key audience.

Practice flexibility

The one constant thing in the e-marketing industry is change. Being prepared for shifts in the e-marketing industry requires careful attention to the trends currently in play online. Including the technology industry as well. Mobile devices, for examples, have exploded in popularity over the last decade and are now an essential thing for most people. Recognizing the potential of the revolution of mobile devices, savvy companies will capitalize on the e-marketing opportunities inherent in these devices.

While no one may predict the exact nature of e-marketing in the future, make sure your business stays flexible open to new ideas. This is the best way to promote improved sales and traffic.

Strategies of e-marketing

Another approach to understand the importance of e-marketing is just to take a step back and see how prevalent it is in your own daily life. You might be surprised to see just how frequently you’re being marketed to every day. And didn’t know. So let’s consider some common strategies that you’ve seen in action, whether to know if you noticed it at that time or not.

Search engine optimization

Take a break and think of the last time you typed something into your favor upite search engine. Were you looking for a particular kind of product, service or business? Or you were on the hunt for information? Regardless, if you did found what you were looking for, you owe it to search engine optimization, or SEO.

This powerful e-marketing practice is the activity that helps search engines like Google show you the more relevant information. In the past, it may have even led to you buying a product or service!

Social media marketing

Probably on social media, you follow some of your favorite brands there. And even you don’t, it’s more likely that you must have at least engaged with them in some way after stumbling across their accounts. This engagement, whether it happens always or not, exposes you to the e-marketing methods of those brands. No doubt you can still recall seeing a social ad or a post about an upcoming sale or even a popular product.

Content marketing

The internet would be empty without content. But certainly it’s most not empty today. It’s filled with billions of content, both written and otherwise. People are still into and is not stopping any time soon. Every piece is someone’s content marketing method, even when that content is purely informational. In such scenerio, it’s very easy to think that you’re simply being provided with useful information. However, you’re equally being marketed to by the businesses that do produce that content.

Are you now beginning to understand how widespread e-marketing really is…and how powerful it works, even on you?