How to Do Digital Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Get Started.
How to do Digital Marketing as a complete newbie?
If that’s the question you seek, then this detailed post is for you.
Digital marketing, online marketing, internet advertising… These are common terms used to represent the same thing.
Whatever you might call it; marketing your company, a business or a product online is a little complicated and broader these days than it was when it newly came into existence.
As we all know, technology keeps advancing and internet usage keeps gaining more acceptance and vastness which in turn, massively affects how we as humans purchase products and interact with businesses.
Now you may want to know what Digital Marketing is?
Table of Contents
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing to a layman can be described as a form of marketing that utilizes internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services.
Digital marketing is a form of marketing for promoting and selling products or services on the Internet. It can simply be described as the process of leveraging different online marketing channels like search engines, social media networks, and email to reach your target audience.
Digital marketing is like any other type of marketing you know. It’s a way to connect with and influence your potential customers. The real difference is, you connect with and influence those customers online.
Examples of digital marketing includes:
▶️Email marketing
▶️Pay-per-click advertising
▶️Social media marketing
▶️Blogging, etc
Digital Marketing helps to introduce people to your company or business and convince them to buy either your products or services.
Digital Marketing Strategies/Channels
There are numerous strategies that can be adopted when carrying out digital marketing, few of which I’ll be explaining in a simplified manner. These have proven to be an effective approach in Digital Marketing, and they include:
1. Website Marketing
The very first point of contact in any Digital Marketing campaign is a website. By itself is a very powerful channel but dependent on other strategies, it’s also the medium to execute most of the other online marketing campaigns.
A website is meant to represent a company or business brand identity, their product, and/or services in the best possible way.
While ensuring all this, a website is meant to have a faster loading time, should be mobile-friendly, and easy to surf through/navigate to get any information needed.
With a website in place, your next step is to come up with a digital marketing strategy to marry alongside to promote your website and the content on it, with the sole aim of getting more traffic and leads that converts to massive sales.
One of the many professional services we render at TechieBreed is building a professional Website that is tailored to meet your company/business vision at a budget-friendly rate.
2. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is actually a broad term that covers any type of digital marketing where you pay for every user who clicks on an advert.
This is model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked.
Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.
Let’s look at an example for better understanding.
There is a Google service called ‘Google AdWords‘, it is a form of PPC advertising called “paid search advertising”.
The goal is to get your products or services in front of customers when they’re searching for businesses like yours on Google Search and Maps. You only pay for results, like clicks to your website or calls to your business.
Paid search advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement on Google search engine so that when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering.
For example, if we bid on the keyword “Shoe Seller in Lagos,” our ad might show up in the very top spot on the Google search results page
Every time our ad is clicked, sending a visitor to our website, we have to pay the search engine a small fee.
Your Ads can be regarded a great success if the clicks on your ads to your website is worth more than what you pay for it. In other words, if we pay #1000 for a click, but the click results in a #22,000 sale, then we’ve made a massive profit.
I won’t be honest if I tell you it’s as easy as I have painted it to be. A whole lot goes into ensuring you record a good sales with a PPC campaign: from researching and selecting the right keywords, to organizing those keywords into well-organized campaigns and ad groups, to setting up PPC landing pages that are optimized for conversions.
If your ads and landing pages are useful and satisfying to users, Google charges you less per click, which in turn leads to higher profits for your business.
So if you want to start using PPC, it’s important to learn how to do it right.
A course that I will always recommend that teaches this in detail with a step by step approach for a complete newbie at a very discounted cost is the 72IG course, follow through this link to sign up today, after signing up, kindly leave a comment to this post, so I can contact you and provide you with the private support needed as you journey through the course implementation.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is a popular term I’m sure you must have come across times without number.
It is the direct opposite of PPC explained in point (1) above.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Which is the art of ranking high on a search engine in the unpaid section, also known as the organic listings.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is simply the process of optimizing your online (Website) contents so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.
Let me break this down a little further to a layman’s understanding:
When it comes to SEO, there are three (3) parties: You, the search engine, and the searcher.
If you have an article about ‘How to make Money Online in Nigeria’, you want the search engine (e.g. Google) to show it as a top result to anyone who searches for the phrase “Making Money Online in Nigeria’.
SEO is all you need to make this happen, in order to make Google very likely to include your post as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that keyword.
SEO is useful if you don’t want to pay to show up in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), as you can also use search engine optimization (SEO) to try and rank web pages or blog posts on your site organically.
Getting a web page to rank high on search engines usually takes quite a bit of time, effort and research which might be a little complicated for a newbie.
If you need a broader understanding of how to implement SEO, then you can sign up for any of our digital skill course by following this link
4. Paid Social Media Advertising
If you’re living in this present age, then you’ll agree with me that a larger percentage of humans spend a good number of times surfing through different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat.
The advantage of this to your business is that it can be a very effective tool for Digital Marketing if you know your onions, as these platforms allow anyone to run ads on their channels.
Paid social media advertising is great for building awareness with audiences that might not be aware that your business, product or service even exists.
Paid social media is a method of displaying advertisements or sometimes sponsored marketing messages on popular social media platforms and targeting a specific sub-audience who are more likely to patronize your business services or products.
If you’re an heavy social media user, you should understand that each channel differs in operation.
For example, Twitter offers a short-form content, Instagram focuses heavily on visual content, Facebook has its own marketplace for shopping enthusiasts, and LinkedIn is the home of networking professionals.
Now, setting the objective for your paid social media strategy gives your subsequent tactics a direction to work with and a goal to achieve.
Think of this strategy as a trip you’re set to embark on. You start your journey at your house with the goal of making it to your destination by a certain time.
Paid social ads work the same way, your audience is starting their journey with your brand on their newsfeed and your goal is to lead them to the destination .
This destination might be a content offer on your website, a product or service you intend selling, or an email subscription form to get their emails to engage them subsequently.
To establish where your audience is starting their journey, there comes the use of filters, settings, and other features each social media platforms will provide you with to narrow down your audience so that everyone you target is starting from a similar place.
This doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical location. You can target people by their age, their interest, salary level, location, hobbies, device they makes use of, etc
5. Social Media Marketing
Just like SEO is to PPC, so is social media marketing the free to point 4 above. It is the organic way to use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to market your business product or service.
Social media marketing (SMM), is a form of digital marketing that involves you creating and sharing contents like posting text and/or image updates, videos and many others, on social media networks in order to drive engagements that are geared towards achieving your marketing goals.
Here are some questions to ask when defining your social media marketing goals:
▶️What are you hoping to achieve through social media marketing?
▶️Who is your target audience?
▶️Where would your target audience hang out and how would they use social media?
▶️What message do you want to send to your audience with social media marketing?
Your business type should inform and drive your social media marketing strategy with the sole aim of converting to sales.
And, just like SEO, organically marketing your business on social media takes a lot more time and effort, but in the long run, it can deliver much cheaper results.
6. Content Marketing
Content marketing is another fairly broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets, the likes of blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, etc to build business awareness or drive clicks, leads or sales.
As you’re rightly aware that we’re in a digital age, with traditional marketing gradually becoming less and less effective by the minute; as a forward-thinking marketer or business owner, you know there has to be a better way.
So here is what content marketing does, instead of pitching products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.
Many do not know this, content marketing has been around far longer than the Internet.
Why?
Because content marketing is all about storytelling, and as humans have told stories for as long as they could speak. Our attention will always go to those who tell great stories.
That’s the reason why blogs like GospelBreed has been doing so well since 2016.
In a nutshell, content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis.
Eventually, when customers make a purchase decision, their loyalty already lies with you. They will purchase your product and prefer it over competitors’ options.
7. Email Marketing
The oldest form of online Marketing, I’ll say is the Email marketing. Most digital marketers use email marketing to advertise special deals, highlight content (often as part of content marketing) or promote an event.
Just like how Optinmonster defines this:
Email marketing is the highly effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to prospects and customers. Effective marketing emails convert prospects into customers, and turn one-time buyers into loyal, raving fans.
Before you can start sending out emails, you need people to send emails to.
So, how do you get started building your list?
One big approach that has always worked for me is by starting by offering an Incentive.
Think of email addresses as a currency — you wouldn’t give money away for free, right? Offering an incentive is the simplest way to gather email address.
So, how do you get started giving out inventives aimed at building your list?
This post answers the question
How to Give a Free Download to Your MailChimp Email Subscribers
8. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is essentially paying someone else (a person or a business) to promote your products and services on their website.
This is the most simplest form of digital marketing, as it is all about generating tons of profits without owing a product or service.
I explained more into details what Affiliate Marketing is, in this recent blog post.
For now, you simply need to know the 3 basic steps with how affiliate marketing works:
Step 1: You recommend a product or service to your followers through your website, blog, or email list.
Step 2: Your followers purchase the product or service using your affiliate link.
Step 3: You get paid a commission for the sales made using your affiliate link.
This post explains how you can get started with Affiliate Marketing and start earning in 6 figures consistently on a monthly basis.
How to Do Digital Marketing?
First, you need to specify your digital marketing goals (i.e. what you want to achieve with digital marketing).
Some practical examples could be, to increase brand awareness, to make more sales, or to build a community of like interest.
Thereafter, you need to decide which marketing strategy can help you achieve your goals from the listed options above.
Your goal might be to make more sales, then running paid campaigns on Google or Facebook could be a good starting point.
To make this whole process easier to manage, you can create a plan specifying how much money you’ll spend, define your target audience, define your performance metrics, and other information that will help you control the process.
This is what a digital marketing campaign is all about. Don’t worry if it’s confusing now, as I aim to build more on this particular blog post at a later post update.
So ensure you’ve Subscribed to receiving my new blog post updates, so you don’t miss out when it’s up for read.
______
As you can see from the list above, that there are countless numbers of ways to market your business online, through the process called Digital Marketing, which is why many businesses either hire an agency to manage their digital marketing efforts or pay for an in-house marketing team.
But, as a small business owners who cannot afford the Service of hiring an agency, what’s the solution?
I have a goodnews.
There is a course that teaches you all that you need to mastering the art of digital marketing, provided you’re willing to spare just few minutes of your time daily for 1-2 weeks to follow through all that you’ll be taught, then you will be a master in this game without the need to hire the service of a Digital Marketer/expert
I assure you, your business sales record will skyrocket by following and applying the practical steps the course will guide you through.
The good thing is, this course guarantees you 100% refund, if after trying all the laid down practical approaches, and still do not experience any positive changes to your business.
You can follow through this link to sign up for this course.
Kindly leave a comment below if you signed up for any of these Courses, so I can contact you to give my support on any part of your training as you journey into being an expert in the Digital space and see your business flourishing with sales.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is the marketing of the future, which we’re in already.
Digital marketing makes it possible to track the results of every efforts made with incredible accuracy, which means it is easy to see which strategies are producing profitable results and which ones need some work.
Incidentally, if this article has convinced you that you need digital marketing or you feel the need to up your digital marketing strategies and approaches, but you’d like some help identifying the right approach, let me know here or in the comments!
Personally, I love helping businesses grow with digital marketing, which was the sole aim of establishing TechieBreed.
Did I miss something in this article?
Do you have additional questions about digital marketing?
Let me know in the comments!
I’m the CEO of TechieBreed .
My goal is to ensure that technology is optimally utilized at the lowest cost possible to every bloggers and small scale business provider while ensuring the technicality aspect is eased and profit is adequately maximized.
Leave a Reply, I'll love to hear from you!