Digital Marketing 101: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide For Small Business Owners

Marketing basically is about finding where your customers spend a lot of time and introducing your business to them at that particular place/platform. This is why traditional marketing was all about TV, radio, and prints, but now, we are experiencing digital evolution. In this era, we must talk about digital marketing.

In fact, ‘digital marketing’ has become synonymous with marketing. Decades ago, people spent time flipping pages of newspapers and switching channels, but now they are more interested in scrolling social media feeds. This is why digital marketing is defined as an act of letting your customers and prospects know that you are offering services and products to meet their demands through online marketing tactics. These tactics include search marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing.

Let’s break it down to understand digital marketing better.

How Does it Work?

Digital and traditional marketing don’t have an underlying difference because both are targeted to meet customer demands. Both involve mutual relationships with prospects, customers, and leads. However, digital marketing uses different marketing tactics than traditional marketing because customers have evolved. They don’t spend time in front of the TV as much as they did before, but we can find customers idling on Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms.

According to Statista, Americans spend 11 hours a day using electronic devices. Thus, you are not in the wrong if you are prioritizing digital marketing for your business. For example, think about a recent purchase that you made. Didn’t you Google to find the best supplier or the best brand? Didn’t you read reviews before settling for a particular product? The ultimate buying decision would have been on the details gathered and research made online.

Likewise, the majority of the decisions start online. This is why your business must be online regardless of the services or products you offer. Your digital marketing journey’s prominent strategy should be to be active wherever your prospects and customers are at. You can use a myriad of digital channels to create a relationship with your audience. Some of the channels that you cannot avoid are:

• Social media to engage with customers and to share business updates.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) to rank in Google and show up when an interested party searches for your business.
• Advertising to increase traffic to your site so that people can see your business.
• Email marketing to keep up with your customers and to cater to their needs promptly.

These digital marketing channels will pay off if you utilize them effectively. Of course, beginning something from scratch is daunting, but you’ll get there if you take one step at a time.

What Skills are Required?

Certain strategies that are used for traditional marketing persist. However, with the advancement of digital marketing, some strategies and skills are specific to digital marketing. Here are the skills that are considered specific to digital marketing:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
2. Content marketing
3. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
4. Search engine marketing (SEM)
5. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
6. Affiliate marketing
7. Email marketing

Although a beginner must have an excellent understanding of these skills, it’s wise to discuss the top 3 skills mentioned. Hence, we’ll help you understand the “holy trinity” skills in-depth.

Skill 1: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Digital marketing without SEO doesn’t sound right because although you are targeting real people, you must have search engines in your mind. When someone searches your business online, it should be available for them. For that, your online content must meet SEO requirements.

For example, if you search “what is SEO?” in Google, Bing, or Yahoo, you’ll get many search results, but you will probably click the first few articles. This is what you should do to your service or product. You should optimize your site pages, articles, and blogs to appear on the first page of search engine results so that your customers and prospects would see it.

You can pair your SEO skill with content marketing that we are going to discuss next. However, some of the SEO skills are:

• Keyword research: can be done using Moz, Ahrefs, and other applications to figure out which keywords to focus on.
• Web traffic analysis: can be done using Google Analytics and other similar tools to find the site’s traffic information, trends, etc.
• Ranking strategy: can be understood and evaluated using Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. It will help you analyze the areas that need to be improved to rank your sites higher.

Learning these documents, tutorials and watching YouTube videos will help you understand SEO. It might take a lot of time and practice to become a pro, but you can manage your business’s SEO with gathered knowledge.

Skill 2: Content Marketing

Content marketing is creating and offering informative, valuable, and relevant content consistently to acquire a defined audience. The ultimate objective would be to drive an audience who would take profitable actions.

Online platforms allow marketers to enjoy the opportunity of creating and offering content regularly at a relatively low cost. If you compare traditional marketing methods to this, you will realize that SEO optimized content can drive higher traffic at a low cost. Furthermore, content marketing is beyond advertisement because it provides value to the customers. They not only enjoy the service or product but also gain knowledge.

The marketing content, like blog posts, YouTube tutorials, and guides are an excellent source of information. They talk about a problem and how a certain service or product could be a solution. On the other hand, traditional marketing simply focuses on CTAs, but digital marketing goes way beyond that. It educates the audience while meeting their demands.

As content marketing keeps the audience engaged, it works even after a purchase has been made. This makes it possible to acquire an audience who will become viewers, readers, and eventually turn into buyers. They might even refer your service or product to others. Content marketing takes various forms such as:

• eBooks and Guides: the longer version of blog posts. Readers will be able to get all their needs met in one place.
• Blog posts: these deal with buyer’s pain points. As in, they identify customers’ problems and discuss ways to solve them throughout the blog.
• Podcasts: audio content that will discuss the problems and solutions in detail, and these could be downloaded by the customers if available on your site.
• Video content: covers buyer’s problems through videos and mostly available on YouTube. But some businesses embed the videos on the site itself.
• Marketing emails: to send product announcements and newsletters to prospects and customers.

When you utilize different content channels, customers understand that you allow them to select the medium that works for them. This gives them the pleasure that they are being valued.

Skill 3: Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media looks like a place to have fun, but marketers can turn everything into a marketing strategy. In fact, SMM is considered one of the main digital marketing strategies. If your business creates a social media presence and continues to keep the essence fresh, it will let the customers and prospects know that they can rely on you.

As a brand, you need to engage with your followers, and you need to keep them posted and communicate with them in special events to let them know that your brand cares. It’s important to have your brand recognized outside your business site, which can be achieved through SMM.

You can utilize social media as a reverse technique to bring followers or an audience to your business or blog by linking the pages to the content shared on social media. You can use social media to share product pages that will link back to your site so that you increase views. These views might ultimately turn into buyers if you do the marketing right.

Take-Through

According to HubSpot, –”Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.” Now that you know Digital Marketing 101, you can do it on your own. But are you ready to sacrifice the time you have, or you could instead get help from digital marketing companies like Inbound Hype? Think about it before investing your most valued resource in marketing!