A Guide To Digital Marketing Strategies For Beginners
Digital marketing has become the key to success for businesses. So, how can a beginner employ it properly?
Using digital marketing and understanding its core are two different things. If you’re using it without understanding the nucleus of online marketing, well, then you’re wandering aimlessly. That’s what you need to avoid when you dive into the intricacies of digital marketing.
For a beginner, the overabundance of options in digital marketing is one of the things that might confuse them. That’s why understanding just what you need is necessary, instead of diving into them all at once.
So, how do you get started? More importantly, where do you even begin? Let’s dig in and find out the answer to all these questions and more:
Importance Of Digital Marketing Strategies
Executing digital marketing strategies requires a good amount of work. So, it might make you wonder if it’s all worth it in the end. If you count garnering audiences and standing out in search engines as the primary business in your niche, then use it, it’s undoubtedly worth it.
While there aren’t exactly scales available to measure the importance of digital marketing strategies, they do help you stay on track. Not only because digital marketing is a wide field of opportunities but also because you need a strategy to keep your objectives straight.
So, here’s a glimpse of what digital marketing strategies entail:
- Search engine optimization is at the center of it, and it requires a thorough plan
- Social media networks play a vital role, and they need a strategy too
- You need emails, chatbots, and social media messaging to connect with your customers
- Blogs and websites are top of the funnel, so you need a system for both their contents
- Paid advertising such as PPC, In-App adverts require a plan too
You have all these options and no plan, so how do you hope to make the most of digital marketing? That’s why you need a plan, and only digital marketing strategies can help you implement each of these vital elements correctly.
7 Steps To Create A Viable Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing strategy requires you to understand a few fundamental essentials, such as the right platforms to use and your objective with each one of them. The primary purpose of digital marketing is to make your business accessible.
Then, you need to take one thing at a time, or in other words, make smaller & achievable objectives. After that, you create the content and use the right tech to deploy your strategies and monitor their progress.
So, let’s dive in and break down these essentials:
- Define Your Brand
Your customers need to know more about your brand, so tell them that. What drives your brand? What are the objectives? How would you define your brand if you weren’t acquainted with it? For instance, some brands lead with something very generic like:
“Serving you with the best”
That’s almost unacceptable in today’s creative era. Let’s say you’re offering hiking tours, then something generic isn’t going to attract your action-junkie audience. Try to think out of the box and define your business with a tagline such as:
“Blend in with nature’s beauty”
You might be thinking, “really?” Well, that’s all we could come up with for now, but that’s still better than the first one—which is overused and washed up. So, you need to define your brand in brief but descriptive manners.
Bearing in mind that these tactics will grow up to define your brand, make sure you outline the goals that your brand aims to serve. Build on your USPs or unique selling points since customers aim to look for these.
So, it’s not a bad idea to create a definite document about your brands’ values and what makes it different from others in your niche.
- Make Customers Reach You Easily
The reachability of your business will be one of the key pillars of its success. If your business isn’t accessible to your audience, then you’re going to have a hard time trying to draw them towards you. That’s why you need to focus on key elements of making them reach you readily.
Start by planning a local SEO overhaul. Let’s fix the physical reachability first. So, does your business exist on Google Maps? If not, try to do this:
- Open Google Maps—on mobile or desktop
- Enter the address of your business
- Right-click on the location and click on ‘Add your business.’
- Follow the on-screen instructions
After that, you need to make sure your business stands out in SERP (Search engine results page). Now, that is an intricate process, which would require an article by itself. However, you can use PPC or SEM tactics to do so quickly.
- Create S.M.A.R.T Goals
You need to focus on creating S.M.A.R.T goals. So, now you might be wondering what that’s the acronym for?
- Specific: Be as specific as possible, don’t leave anything to interpretation
- Measurable: Measure your chances and scale your success
- Achievable: Be reasonable, think big but don’t make ridiculous goals
- Relevant: Are these objectives relevant to your business? They better be
- Time-Bound: Time is of the essence, so schedule and plan your work and goals accordingly
- Set Your Budget
Your budget will play an essential role in creating your ideal digital marketing strategy. If you’re not trying to break the bank, then try to focus on the objectives that seem more achievable by spending the kind of money you can afford.
By setting a budget, you can easily ensure that you avoid over-spending. So, using something like email marketing might be on the cards for you, as it’s one of the most ROI-generating digital marketing aspects available today.
- Use The Right Tools
Using the right tools and technology is an essential to ensure your success in the online world. That’s why you need to rely on a certain array of tools to achieve your digital marketing goals.
Let’s look at them and how they work:
- Keyword Planner
You need keywords for content. All your keywords should be directly related to your content and brand. But how do you find that out? With keyword planning tools. These tools can find related keywords for your content along with their volume and ranking difficulty.
- Plagiarism Checker
Detect plagiarism in your content with the help of an online plagiarism checker. Plagiarism can singlehandedly destroy your digital marketing strategy.
Plagiarism can be detected by search engines easily and they penalize such content by reducing its rank. That’s why utilizing an online plagiarism checker is necessary.
- Emailing Tools:
Email marketing solutions and tools can help you jumpstart your strategy. You can email a vast majority of your target customers at once with the help of such tools.
- SEO Auditors:
Auditing tools allow you to check any SEO-related mistakes on your website. You can see which of your SEO strategy elements are working and which aren’t.
- Video editing tool
You can create videos for your website or social media platforms with the help of a free video editor, which contains a bunch of pre-made templates to help you to make videos professionally.
- Rephrasing Tool:
Rephrasing tools can help you improve the readability (and by extension engagement) of your content. If your content doesn’t sound good? Try an AI rephrasing tool to make it better.
- Launch Your Campaign
Once your tools are set, your digital marketing plan is ready, and the stars have aligned, then it’s time to launch your campaign. Most likely, your starting point is going to be the website or your blog—aka the top-of-the-funnel or TOFU content.
This campaign will begin with awareness phases, get extended by building interest, pushing the customer into consideration, and then coercing them into taking action—or making a purchase.
- Monitor Your Progress
Metrics are necessary for you, so you need to monitor them at all times. Find out what your essentials or KPIs (key performance indicators) are. Then, you can use an SEO auditor to find out if your content is performing as well as it should.
If not, then try to find out the problem. If it’s lackluster content, try rephrasing it with the tool. Or, if it’s plagiarism, then detect it through a free plagiarism checker.
5 Important Branches Of Digital Marketing
Before we sign-off, it’s necessary to understand the five key elements of digital marketing. These include:
- SEO (On/Off-Page)
SEO has two major elements, On-Page & Off-Page SEO. On-Page SEO occurs on your primary platforms, i.e., websites, blogs, etc. Whereas Off-Page SEO happens outside your domain, so backlinking and interlinking your content with other platforms.
- Content Marketing
Content marketing leads the way for digital marketing, and that’s why it’s essential to use it. It requires you to understand the concept of content marketing to educate your target audience. You indirectly sell your brand to your target customers by portraying your expertise and skills.
- PPC
Pay-Per-Click is self-explanatory, as you would have to pay the search engine or a social media network each time your advert is clicked.
- Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is evolving as we speak. So, there are many aspects to it, such as YouTube, guest blogging, etc. So, try to find the one that suits your business needs and scale the most.
- Online PR
With your customers and other brands, online public relations will help you create a viable and lasting image of your business. So, try to guest blog, ask your customers to review, and share your business with their friends.
Conclusion
This essential digital marketing guide should set you on the right path. Since digital marketing is a vast world of opportunities, it depends on you how you grasp each one and take advantage of it.
