Opening a browser is all it takes to get a glimpse of digital marketing’s capabilities. It has the power to define lifestyle choices, help pursue new hobbies and careers, or actively support causes by changing our buying habits. A well-placed blog post that goes viral can be the difference between going bust or becoming the next unicorn.
Are you interested in digital marketing and don’t know where to start? Digital marketing for beginners can seem exhaustive at first but don’t falter. This article will help you understand what digital marketing is and explore the most common forms it takes. By the end, you’ll have a basic understanding of digital marketing and, hopefully, a yearning to know more.
What Is Digital Marketing?
There are more than five billion internet users in the world today. Many log on daily, whether for entertainment, education, social interaction, or shopping. Marketing efforts that tap into these same digital resources make the most sense as people spend more time in the digital world.
Digital marketing aims to reach audiences more meaningfully than traditional alternatives like print ads or ones you’d watch on TV. As these forms of media continue to decline, digital marketing is increasingly becoming the default. According to research by Gartner, companies allocate 56% of their budgets to digital marketing, leaving 44% for other means.
What are the advantages of traditional marketing?
What’s the first thing most of us do when searching for plumbers, wireless speakers, or education opportunities nowadays? Look them up on the internet.
The lead of digital marketing is unsurprising, given its numerous advantages. It lets companies reach far more prospective customers than traditional channels while paying less for better results. For example, you need professional equipment and a script that will appeal to a broad audience to create a TV ad. Air time is expensive, while the chances of the right person seeing the ad and caring enough to buy your product or service based on it are slim.
Conversely, thought-out digital marketing strategies produce content that resonates with specific audiences. They couple a potentially global reach with increasingly specific targeting. Such an approach ensures that people who see your content are already generally interested, making interactions and purchases more likely.
Interactivity is another major advantage. Traditional marketing broadcasts messages in hopes of finding a receptive audience. On the other hand, interacting with audiences and addressing their concerns is a core part of digital marketing. Customers appreciate it when brands engage in open discussion and build communities around their products.
Crucially, digital marketing produces large amounts of data that marketers can leverage in various ways. They can use it to quantify a marketing team’s impact on product sales, justifying its activities and expenses to higher-ups and stakeholders. Moreover, such data gives marketers deeper insights into customers’ spending habits, preferences, and future buying prospects. It’s possible to use such data to refine target audiences, plan more successful campaigns in the future, and even predict trends before the competition.
What Are the Main Types of Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing’s goal is to reach and persuade as many interested people as possible to choose your goods and services over someone else’s. Standing out is a key prerequisite, and doing so is only possible if you take advantage of the diverse digital marketing options. Digital marketing for beginners can seem overwhelming, but here’s a brief introduction to the main ones and their strengths.
Your website
While some brands thrive through social media marketing alone, having a website is a tried-and-tested way of growing your customer base. Think of your website as your online base of operations, a hub where you have complete control over how the world perceives your brand and products.
Putting considerable time and effort into creating an appealing website pays off whichever other digital marketing avenues you pursue. The process of creating it is the ideal opportunity to solidify core aspects of your brand’s identity, like its logo or a color scheme and tone of voice you’ll use through all other marketing channels.
The website can be a striking online storefront and a helpful resource center. It’s important to nail different aspects of its design accordingly. An intuitive, mobile-friendly layout that aids visitors in navigating various parts of the site and naturally steers them toward making a purchase is your top priority. You’ll also want to optimize the site for loading speeds and choose a good hosting service so visitors don’t get discouraged and leave while content is loading.
Running the website alone implies creating accounts with hosts, payment services, etc. Securing these and the countless other accounts you’ll need to utilize other marketing channels makes all the difference. For example, team password managers can provide you and your crew with unique password generation. Additionally, multi-factor authentication should be on your mind from the beginning stages of your digital marketing journey.
Content marketing & SEO
“If you build it, they will come” does NOT apply to websites from the get-go! Neither a product’s quality nor the site’s attractiveness and functionality affect its discoverability. You need to make the site and its contents appealing to humans and search engines alike, which is where content marketing and SEO come in.
Content marketing comprises all the non-advertising materials you create. Think blog posts, infographics, how-to videos, and so on. It indirectly boosts advertising by creating a body of content people find useful. For example, a brand that sells fishing lures could publish helpful articles on the best fishing spots in a state or videos demonstrating the best casting techniques.
The idea is to establish your expertise and reliability while offering valuable information prospects can take in without feeling pressured to buy something. This builds trust and makes people more likely to become customers organically.
Search Engine Optimization is responsible for the machine end of the discoverability equations. It involves researching and implementing keywords prospects are likely to search for, putting your content on search engines’ radars. SEO is an art and science since you have to balance technical aspects like your website’s structure with readability and use just enough keywords to make both humans and algorithms happy.
Affiliate & Influencer Marketing
Unless you’re working for a household name, someone looking for the products you’re selling has little reason to trust your marketing materials. That quickly changes if an influencer or website they trust gives you a glowing recommendation.
Affiliate marketing is simple – you establish a partnership with a reputable source and have them advertise your offerings. They get a commission in return, while you enjoy increased exposure and a boom in sales. It’s similar to influencers, although they may prefer free products or one-time payouts instead.
Social media marketing
Most of the 5B+ internet users also have at least one social media account. Couple that with the 2.5 hours an average user spends on such platforms, and you have nearly limitless outreach potential.
Social media marketing is dynamic and involved. You have to plan campaigns and schedule posts while being ready to take advantage of daily opportunities. Accounting for different demographics and social media specifics also comes with the territory. Maintaining a presence on Facebook isn’t the same as catering to the TikTok crowd, for example.
Social media is among your most valuable customer data resources. Interactions, reviews, and user profile information play a crucial role in tailoring your marketing content. Such data can become outdated over time, and you need to ensure any gathering practices comply with laws like the GDPR. Some users may also wish for you to delete anything you have on them. Partnering with the best data removal service will address all such concerns.
Email Marketing
Once a staple of the early internet, email remains as relevant as ever for digital marketing in the 2020s. Litmus suggests it’s the most lucrative marketing type, with an estimated $36 ROI per $1.
Email marketing is so effective due to prescreening and segmentation. Interested parties freely give their emails to receive surveys, newsletters, e-books, and other content you create, meaning they’re receptive to more promotional materials. Segmenting them further and creating different email campaigns for specific audiences results in more sales, while special promotions and regular check-ins keep customers coming back. Additionally, implementing an SPF checker in your email campaigns can help ensure that your emails are delivered successfully and not marked as spam.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Attracting customers organically might yield the best results, but it can take time. A SaaS PPC agency can help you implement pay-per-click, or PPC, strategies that act much more quickly in improving your brand visibility. You can set it up through search engines, large online retailers, and social media to maximize reach. They only charge for ads people click on, meaning you’re getting exponentially more exposure for free.
PPC is convenient because it can give a new campaign or a starting brand a timely boost. You control the budget and can increase effectiveness by retargeting past visitors to your website.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is an integral part of the modern online experience and, by extension, most of our lives. Its prevalence can sometimes be annoying, and the increasing role technologies like AI play in creating and propagating marketing materials is bound to cause unpredictable shifts.
Even so, digital marketing is an invaluable resource. It connects people with items and causes they care for and helps brands connect with audiences that would have been unreachable a few decades ago. We hope this brief introduction of digital marketing for beginners helps you appreciate the versatility of digital marketing and encourages you to explore the subject more deeply.
FAQs
1. What is digital marketing, and why is it important?
Digital marketing refers to the use of digital channels, such as the Internet, social media, and email, to promote products and services. It is important because it allows businesses to reach a larger and more targeted audience compared to traditional marketing methods.
2. How can I get started with digital marketing as a beginner?
As a beginner, start by building a strong online presence with a well-designed website and active social media accounts. Learn the basics of content marketing, SEO, and email marketing to create and distribute valuable content that attracts and engages your audience.
3. What are the key benefits of using digital marketing over traditional marketing?
Digital marketing offers a wider reach and more precise targeting, allowing businesses to connect with potential customers more effectively. It is generally more cost-effective, providing better ROI through targeted campaigns and measurable results.