Digital Marketing for Newbies

Digital marketing is a huge umbrella term that includes many different types of marketing. Digital marketing can include paid advertising (PPC, display ads, etc.), social media, email campaigns and even organic SEO. The term “digital” refers to the Internet and online activities; it’s not just about websites and blogs (though those are included). If you want to be successful with your business or blog, digital marketing should be part of your strategy. There’s a lot involved with digital marketing – far too much for this post – but I’ll try to cover some of the basics here.

There are several reasons why nearly every business in the world is using some form of digital marketing in their strategy today:

The number one reason? It works! Targeting specific groups of people who are interested in your products or services is worth its weight in gold when it comes to building a successful business. An old school adage is that there are only 5 ways for companies to make money: Sell the Sizzle Sell Value Create Excitement Build Trust Give it Away How has that changed during our modern day technological revolution? Almost all companies know they need traffic / exposure / leads before they can sell anything. I am not sure how to do SEO in a “newbie” post, but I will go over a few of the most basic things that you need to know about in this post.

Traffic is still number one, when it comes to digital marketing. Without traffic you have nothing else! Traffic from the search engines is the main way so many businesses get their customers, and it’s often how they get their first customers with no sales or marketing budget. In 2013 there were more than 1 billion searches per day on Google alone; that’s a lot of people looking for information and products! The more traffic your website gets from search engines like Google and Bing (and others), the higher your website ranks in their listings (SERPS) which leads to more organic traffic: free leads who find your site by themselves via search engine results. This is why SEO (search engine optimization) is such an important part of digital marketing; if you want people to visit your site organically via clicks on results within search engines like Google and Yahoo!, then obviously you need do some SEO work on your website(s).

Social media has become an extremely important part of digital marketing as well. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest allow users to connect with other people around the world who share similar interests or problems just by sharing content with them online. These social media sites are like online communities where people can share content with one another pretty much for free (except for the cost of your monthly Internet connection). Like search engines, social media sites are extremely popular; there were 2.08 billion active Facebook users as of August 2014! How is this relevant to digital marketing? Well, social media gives you the opportunity to market yourself and your business to huge numbers of potential customers on a daily basis. I am not too familiar with promoting on Twitter, but I do know how to promote my company on Facebook and LinkedIn (and Pinterest). This is an area that is definitely worth exploring.

Email is still one of the best ways to communicate with customers, even in this day and age when everyone seems so attached to their smartphones 24 hours a day! If done right email can be very effective at driving traffic back to your site or blog posts as well as making sales. I personally use my email account every day about 10 times per day sending out newsletters or special offers or just communicating with customers who have questions regarding our products.

Digital marketing is the wave of the future. The more you are involved with it, the better chance you have at achieving success. If you are starting a new business or blog, I think digital marketing is a MUST! You need to take advantage of all these free sources of traffic or else no one will ever find your website. Digital marketing isn’t just for big companies; anyone can use it to build their business online, even if they’re an “old school” business that operates strictly in person. I hope this little post has helped anyone who was interested in learning more about digital marketing! If you have any questions or comments please leave them below and I will do my best to answer them!