Digital makreting course online
What Is Digital Marketing?
With how accessible the internet is today, would you believe me
if I told you the number of people who go online every day is still increasing?
It is. In fact, "constant" internet usage among adults
increased by 5% in just the last three years, according to Pew Research. And although we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy
really has changed along with it -- meaning offline marketing isn't as
effective as it used to be.
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.
” Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts
that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital
channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to
connect with current and prospective customers.”
How does a business define
digital marketing?
“ Digital marketing is
defined by the use of numerous digital tactics and channels to connect with
customers where they spend much of their time: online. From the website itself
to a business's online branding assets -- digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures,
and beyond -- there's a spectrum of tactics that fall under the umbrella of
"digital marketing."
The best digital marketers have a clear picture of
how each digital marketing campaign supports their overarching goals. And
depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a
larger campaign through the free and paid channels at their disposal.
A content marketer, for example, can create a series
of blog posts that serve to generate leads from a new ebook the business
recently created. The company's social media marketer might then help promote
these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business's social media
accounts. Perhaps the email marketercreates an email campaign to send
those who download the ebook more information on the company. We'll talk more
about these specific digital marketers in a minute.
1.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2.
Content Marketing
3.
Social Media Marketing
4.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
5.
Affiliate Marketing
6.
Native Advertising
7.
Marketing Automation
8.
Email Marketing
9.
Online PR
10.
Inbound Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
(SEO)
This is the process of optimizing your website to
"rank" higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the
amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that
benefit from SEO include websites, blogs, and infographics.
There are a number of
ways to approach SEO in order to generate qualified traffic to your website.
These include:
·On page SEO: This type of SEO
focuses on all of the content that exists "on the page" when looking
at a website. By researching keywords for their search volume and intent (or
meaning), you can answer questions for readers and rank higher on the
search engine results pages (SERPs) those questions produce.
·Off page SEO: This type of SEO
focuses on all of the activity that takes place "off the page" when
looking to optimize your website. "What activity not on my own website
could affect my ranking?" You might ask. The answer is inbound links, also
known as backlinks. The number of publishers that link to you, and the relative
"authority" of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for the
keywords you care about. By networking with other publishers, writing guest
posts on these websites (and linking back to your website),
and generating external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to
move your website up on all the right SERPs.
·Technical SEO: This type of SEO
focuses on the backend of your website, and how your pages are coded. Image
compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all forms of
technical SEO that can increase your website's loading speed -- an important ranking
factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.
·
Content Marketing
This term denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for
the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and
customers. The channels that can play a part in your content marketing strategy
include:
·Blog posts: Writing
and publishing articles on a company blog helps you demonstrate
your industry expertise and generates organic search traffic for your business.
This ultimately gives you more opportunities to convert website visitors into
leads for your sales team.
·Ebooks and whitepapers: Ebooks,
whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps further educate website
visitors. It also allows you to exchange content for a reader's contact
information, generating leads for your company and moving people through
the buyer's journey.
·Infographics: Sometimes,
readers want you to show, not tell. Infographics are a form of visual content
that helps website visitors visualize a concept you want to help them learn.
Want to learn and apply content marketing to your business?
Social Media Marketing
This practice promotes your brand and your content on social media
channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for
your business. The channels you can use in social media marketing include:
·Facebook.
·Twitter.
·LinkedIn.
·Instagram.
·Snapchat.
·Pinterest.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website by paying a
publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC
is Google Ads, which allows you to pay for
top slots on Google's search engine results pages at a price "per
click" of the links you place. Other channels where you can use PPC
include:
·Paid ads on Facebook: Here,
users can pay to customize a video, image post, or slideshow, which Facebook
will publish to the newsfeeds of people who match your business's
audience.
·Twitter Ads campaigns: Here,
users can pay to place a series of posts or profile badges to the news feeds of
a specific audience, all dedicated to accomplish a specific goal for your
business. This goal can be website traffic, more Twitter followers, tweet
engagement, or even app downloads.
·Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn: Here, users can pay to send messages directly to specific
LinkedIn users based on their industry and background.
Affiliate Marketing
This is a type of performance-based advertising where you receive
commission for promoting someone else's products or services on your website.
Affiliate marketing channels include:
·Posting
affiliate links from your social media accounts.
Native Advertising
Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily
content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content.
BuzzFeed-sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider
social media advertising to be "native" -- Facebook advertising and
Instagram advertising, for example.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers
to the software that serves to automate your basic marketing operations. Many
marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks they would otherwise do
manually, such as:
·Email newsletters: Email
automation doesn't just allow you to automatically send emails to your
subscribers. It can also help you shrink and expand your contact list as needed
so your newsletters are only going to the people who want to see them in their inboxes.
·
·Social media post scheduling: If you want to grow your organization's presence on a social
network, you need to post frequently. This makes manual posting a bit of an
unruly process. Social media scheduling tools push your content to your social media
channels for you, so you can spend more time focusing on content strategy.
·Lead-nurturing workflows: Generating
leads, and converting those leads into customers, can be a long
process. You can automate that process by sending leads specific emails and
content once they fit certain criteria, such as when they download and open an
ebook.
·Campaign tracking and reporting: Marketing campaigns can include a ton of different people, emails,
content, webpages, phone calls, and more. Marketing automation can help
you sort everything you work on by the campaign it's serving, and then
track the performance of that campaign based on the progress all of these
components make over time.
Email Marketing
Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their
audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as
well as to direct people toward the business's website. The types of emails you
might send in an email marketing campaign include:
·Blog
subscription newsletters.
·Follow-up
emails to website visitors who downloaded something.
·Customer
welcome emails.
·Holiday
promotions to loyalty program members.
·Tips
or similar series emails for customer nurturing.
Online PR
Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital
publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It's much like
traditional PR, but in the online space. The channels you can use to maximize
your PR efforts include:
·Reporter outreach via social media: Talking to journalists on Twitter, for example, is a great
way to develop a relationship with the press that produces earned media
opportunities for your company.
·Engaging online reviews of your company: When someone reviews your company online, whether that
review is good or bad, your instinct might be not to touch it. On the contrary,
engaging company reviews helps you humanize your brand and deliver powerful
messaging that protects your reputation.
·Engaging comments on your personal website or blog: Similar to the way you'd respond to reviews of your company,
responding to the people who are reading your content is the best way to
generate productive conversation around your industry.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to a marketing methodology wherein you
attract, engage, and delight customers at every stage of the
buyer's journey. You can use every digital marketing tactic listed
above, throughout an inbound marketing strategy, to create a customer
experience that works with the customer, not against them.
Here are some classic examples of inbound
marketing versus traditional marketing:
·Blogging
vs. pop-up ads
·Video
marketing vs. commercial advertising
·Email
contact lists vs. email spam
What does a digital marketer do?
Digital marketers are in charge of driving brand
awareness and lead generation through all the digital
channels -- both free and paid -- that are at a company's disposal. These
channels include social media, the company's own website, search engine
rankings, email, display advertising, and the company's blog.
The digital marketer usually focuses on a different key
performance indicator (KPI) for each channel so they can properly measure the
company's performance across each one. A digital marketer who's in charge of
SEO, for example, measures their website's "organic traffic" -- of
that traffic coming from website visitors who found a page of the business's
website via a Google search.
Digital marketing is carried out across many marketing roles
today. In small companies, one generalist might own many of the digital marketing
tactics described above at the same time. In larger companies, these tactics
have multiple specialists that each focus on just one or two of the brand's
digital channels.
Here are some examples of these specialists:
SEO Manager
Main KPIs: Organic traffic
In short, SEO managers get the business to rank on Google. Using a
variety of approaches to search engine optimization, this person might work
directly with content creators to ensure the content they produce performs well
on Google -- even if the company also posts this content on social media.
Content Marketing Specialist
Main KPIs: Time on page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel
subscribers
Content marketing specialists are the digital content creators.
They frequently keep track of the company's blogging calendar, and come up with
a content strategy that includes video as well. These professionals often work
with people in other departments to ensure the products and campaigns the
business launches are supported with promotional content on each digital
channel.
Social Media Manager
Main KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares
The role of a social media manager is easy to infer from the
title, but which social networks they manage for the company depends on the
industry. Above all, social media managers establish a posting schedule for the
company's written and visual content. This employee might also work with the
content marketing specialist to develop a strategy for which content to post on
which social network.
(Note: Per the KPIs above, "impressions" refers to the
number of times a business's posts appear on the newsfeed of a user.)
Marketing Automation Coordinator
Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate,
lead-generation (conversion) rate
The marketing automation coordinator helps choose and manage
the software that allows the whole marketing team to understand their
customers' behavior and measure the growth of their business. Because many of
the marketing operations described above might be executed separately from one
another, it's important for there to be someone who can group these digital
activities into individual campaigns and track each campaign's performance.
Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which Is It?
On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online,
and both focus on creating digital content for people to consume. So what's the
difference?
The term "digital marketing"
doesn't differentiate between push and pull marketing tactics (or what we might
now refer to as ‘inbound' and ‘outbound' methods). Both can still fall under
the umbrella of digital marketing.
Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing
message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space --
regardless of whether it's relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner
ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product
or promotion onto people who aren't necessarily ready to receive it.
On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics
use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by
providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful
inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to
capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.
Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital
marketing assets to attract, engage, and delight customers online. Digital
marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online
marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they're considered inbound
or outbound.
Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry.
Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing still involves
building out buyer personas to identify your audience's needs, and creating
valuable online content. However, that's not to say all businesses should
implement a digital marketing strategy in
the same way.
B2B Digital Marketing
If your company is business-to-business (B2B), your digital
marketing efforts are likely to be centered around online lead generation, with
the end goal being for someone to speak to a salesperson. For that reason, the
role of your marketing strategy is to attract and convert the highest quality
leads for your salespeople via your website and supporting digital channels.
Beyond your website, you'll probably choose to focus your efforts
on business-focused channels like LinkedIn where your demographic is spending
their time online.
B2C Digital Marketing
If your company is business-to-consumer (B2C), depending on the
price point of your products, it's likely that the goal of your digital
marketing efforts is to attract people to your website and have them become
customers without ever needing to speak to a salesperson.
For that reason, you're probably less likely to focus on ‘leads'
in their traditional sense, and more likely to focus on building an accelerated
buyer's journey, from the moment someone lands on your website, to the moment
that they make a purchase. This will often mean your product features in your
content higher up in the marketing funnel than it might for a B2B business, and
you might need to use stronger calls-to-action (CTAs).
For B2C companies, channels like Instagram and Pinterest can often
be more valuable than business-focused platforms LinkedIn.
What is the role of digital marketing to a company?
Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows
marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you've ever put an advert in
a newspaper, you'll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people
actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There's no
surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.
On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI
of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.
Here are some examples:
Website Traffic
With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who
have viewed your website's homepage in real time by using digital analytics software,
available in marketing platforms like HubSpot.
You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they
were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.
This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels
to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are
driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming
from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO
to increase that percentage.
With offline marketing, it's very difficult to tell how people are
interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson
or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and
patterns in people's behavior before they've reached the final stage in their
buyer's journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to
attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.
Content Performance and Lead Generation
Imagine you've created a product brochure and posted it through
people's letterboxes -- that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The
problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how
many people threw it straight into the trash.
Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can
measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it's hosted, and you can
collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only
can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you're also
generating qualified leads when people download it.
Attribution Modeling
An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to
trace all of your sales back to a customer's first digital touchpoint with your
business.
We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify
trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make
more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve
more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely
important -- according to Aberdeen Group, companies
with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate,
compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you
can improve your customer's' journey through the buying cycle by using digital
technologies, then it's likely to reflect positively on your business's bottom
line.
What types of digital content should I create?
The kind of content you create depends on your audience's needs at
different stages in the buyer's journey. You should start by creating buyer
personas (use these free templates,
or try makemypersona.com)
to identify what your audience's goals and challenges are in relation to your
business. On a basic level, your online content should aim to help them meet
these goals, and overcome their challenges.
Then, you'll need to think about when they're most likely to be
ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they're at in their
buyer's journey. We call this content mapping.
With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:
1.
The characteristics of the person who will be consuming it (that's
where buyer personas come in).
2.
How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e., their
lifecycle stage).
In terms of the format of your content, there are a lot of
different things to try. Here are some options we'd recommend using at each
stage of the buyer's journey:
Awareness Stage
·Blog posts. Great
for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword
strategy.
·Infographics. Very
shareable, meaning they increase your chances of being found via social media
when others share your content. (Check out these free infographic templates to
get you started.)
·Short videos. Again,
these are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by
hosting them on platforms like YouTube.
Consideration Stage
·Ebooks. Great for lead generation
as they're generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic,
meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive
it.
·Research reports. Again,
this is a high value content piece which is great for lead generation. Research
reports and new data for your industry can
also work for the awareness stage though, as they're often picked-up by the
media or industry press.
·Webinars. As they're a more
detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective
consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content
than a blog post or short video.
Decision Stage
·Case studies. Having
detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for
those who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively
influence their decision.
·Testimonials. If
case studies aren't a good fit for your business, having short testimonials
around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of
testimonials a little more loosely. If you're a clothing brand, these might
take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled
from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.
How long will it take to see results from my content?
With digital marketing, it can often feel like you're able to see
results much faster than you might with offline marketing due to the fact
it's easier to measure ROI.
However, it ultimately depends on the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.
If you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to
identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online
content to attract and convert them, then you're likely to see strong results within
the first six months.
If paid advertising is
part of your digital strategy, then the results come even quicker -- but it's
recommended to focus on building your organic (or ‘free') reach using content,
SEO, and social media for long-term, sustainable success.
Do I need a big budget for digital marketing?
As with anything, it really depends on what elements of digital
marketing you're looking to add to your strategy.
If you're focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media,
and content creation for a preexisting website, the good news is you don't need
very much budget at all. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating
high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless
you're planning to outsource the work, the only investment you'll need is your
time.
You can get started by hosting a website and creating content
using HubSpot's CMS. For those
on a tight budget, you can get started using WordPress hosted on WP
Engine and using a simple them from StudioPress.
With outbound techniques like online advertising and
purchasing email lists, there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes
down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the
advertising.
For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you'll bid
against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google's
search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the
competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely
expensive, which is why it's a good idea to focus building your organic reach,
too.
How does mobile marketing fit into my digital marketing strategy?
Another key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In
fact, smartphone usage as a whole accounts
for 69% of time spent consuming digital media in the U.S., while desktop-based
digital media consumption makes up less than half -- and the U.S. still isn't
mobile's biggest fan compared to other countries.
This means it's essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages,
social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. If your
company has a mobile app that enables users to engage with your brand or shop
your products, your app falls under the digital marketing umbrella, too.
Those engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to
have the same positive experience as they would on desktop. This means
implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website designto
make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. It might also mean
reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a hassle-free
experience for people downloading your content on-the-go. As for your social
media images, it's important to always have a mobile user in mind when creating
them as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices, meaning text can be
cut-off.
There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing
assets for mobile users, and when implementing any digital marketing strategy,
it's hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on mobile
devices. By ensuring this is always front-of-mind, you'll be creating digital
experiences that work for your audience, and consequently achieve the results
you're hoping for.
I'm ready to try digital marketing. Now what?
If you're already doing digital marketing, it's likely that you're
at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think
of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.
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