Digital Marketing 101 - Everything You Need to Know

 
This article covers the benefits of digital marketing as well as the common strategies that are being utilised in todays landscape.

1. HUGE Market Reach

Reach people anywhere and everywhere – Well maybe not if they’re deep sea diving but you know what I mean.
Most people in the developed world are using a smartphone; Consequently you have access to billions of people that are scrolling around asking Google questions.

For instance, if you have SEO optimised and are running a PPC campaign you will attract people to your business.
More importantly if you’re solving their frustrations you will be rewarded financially.

Your potential customers are all online.

In 2021 there are 4.6 billion active internet users –  which is 60% of the world’s population.
In Australia there are 22 million active users as of January 2021 – that’s the majority of Australians online every day.

The one thing that all businesses need is new customers.

The internet is a great platform to let people know about your products/services and start establishing rapport with your future clientele.
Your website and social media presence play a significant role in your digital media strategy, when used correctly they act like a magnet, attracting like minded people to your business.

As a result of the large reach, digital advertising has a much higher return on investment.
The advertising has to be done through a professional approach that establishes your target market and your unique proposition.

For example, imagine running an ad campaign for a new running shoe through a billboard. Who sees it? Everyone.. You have no control over the demographic viewing the advertisement. To clarify, that’s not entirely true.. you get to pick the location of the billboard.

However, on the other hand, think about running an ad campaign through Facebook. You get to literally select the age, gender, profession and interests of the demographic that you show the content to. Furthermore you get to explain the benefits of your shoe and give them a strong reason to buy it.

Having a clear target audience generates higher engagement but more importantly gives you a higher return on investment.

Traditional marketing is extremely expensive especially if you’re a small business. The fees outweigh the benefits. The initial costs could cripple your enterprise.
The list of fees regarding traditional marketing are too long to note,  think about the need to print flyers and how time consuming and expensive that is – not to mention the cost of advertisement on a billboard or TV.

The other issue with traditional marketing is that the reach isn’t measurable. It’s very hard to collect data on who is seeing your ad and how people interact with it.

Furthermore traditional marketing is very broad. Your target audience is extremely wide. This isn’t ideal for most small businesses specialising in a certain industry. 

4. Personalised Approach

You can narrow down your advertisements on social media platforms.

For instance, creating informative content like infographics or ‘how-to videos’ that cater to certain pain points your target demographic is having issues with.
As a result this creates engagement and gets your clients interacting with you, they start asking questions which creates a buzz on your page.

Building a strong relationship with your audience boosts your brand awareness and generates a loyal customer base. This should be the main focal point of any business.

To sum it up with a quote from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos :
“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re  customer obsessed.
We start with what the  customers needs and we work backwards.”

5. Competitive Edge

Your competition is most likely doing some form of digital marketing.
If they’re not, you can grasp a stranglehold on your niche. If they are, you can use this to your advantage by critically analysing their marketing techniques and strategies.

Good marketing is all for show, you simply cannot hide it.

Having this awareness, you can use it to your advantage by seeing what people respond to and what they shift away from.
More importantly you can leverage this information to create a superior campaign – consequently, pulling their customer base into your influence and business sphere

6. Convenience

You can set up your digital marketing more or less from the comfort of your own home.
If you can’t do it all you can do the majority.
For instance most people have access to a laptop or a smartphone.
With those two things alone you can do 10 X more for less than you would with traditional marketing strategies in the past.

7. Scalability and Optimisation

Creating a digital marketing strategy not only gives you clear goals and objectives for the future,
moreover it allows you to better understand your customers.
Furthermore, being consistent with your digital marketing output allows algorithms to adapt as well as optimise your campaign strategy giving you a better ROI over time.

In short, digital marketing increases the rate at which you gain new customers. It also shows you engagement metrics allowing you to form a deeper relationship with your existing client base.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is a great way to drive new traffic to your website, for instance writing a blog / journal.
These aren’t blog posts about a day in the life of or writing about something random you’re passionate about.
The goal is to write posts that are specific to your client base, showing them how your product / service will help alleviate and solve a particular problem they’re having.

Firstly, you need to change your perspective on sales and shift away from selling people based on features and benefits. Start solving peoples problems based on your techniques as well as your products / services.
The moment you do this your business will flourish like a flower.

Blogging with SEO in mind does two things:

1. Pushes your website up Google’s ranking index – Google likes to know that your website isn’t dormant.
   
   
2. Drives organic traffic to the website – resulting in engagement and greater reach.

For example, let’s say you’re selling computer parts.
One of the things that people commonly search for is ‘how do I make my computer faster?’
Help your readers diagnose the problem and integrate products from your shop.

Let’s use another example, for instance, let’s say you’re a fitness coach.
A common query might be “how do I lose belly fat”.
You’d proceed to write articles relating to ‘HIIT’ (High Intensity Interval Training), ‘fasting’, ‘calories in vs calories out’ and various other topics like ‘nutrition’ and ‘hormones’ .

Building your blog and content over time is guaranteed to rank higher in Google.
The outcome is free, consistent quality traffic.
The broader your content the larger your traffic source and wider your funnel.

The term 'how to lose belly fat' has 301K monthly searches in the world. The article on healthline '20 tips to lose belly fat' has an insane 3.8 million visitors every month. That's a crazy amount of organic traffic to the website.

Create a Video Strategy

Jeremy Either has 1st and 2nd video for how to lose belly fat. Crazy amount of reach for his channel
Take note of the titles. They draw you in and tell you exactly what you're in for.

In conclusion, when creating videos try to be as concise and pragmatic with the information that you’re putting out there. Do not venture off topic too far, you will receive more views and engagement if your videos are precise and to the point.

Social Media Marketing

Honesty + Humour = Engagement

If you’re trying to bring people into your world, a very successful way to do that is to share your story and make it relatable to your audience.

Going back to our fitness coach example – You could share your ‘hero’ story about how you decided to get into shape and the events that led you to that point. People love to know the background and the back story.
The internet has made information readily accessible and people want to know, they want to relate and if they can relate they will engage with you.

The focus on the social media outlets is to have a loyal fan base, don’t get too concerned about numbers.
Big numbers don’t matter if you have minimal interaction with your audience.

Paid Per Click Advertising is the next marketing tool at our disposal.
There are billions of people using Google for queries and questions day to day.

PPC allows you to set a monthly budget and literally pay per click that your advertisement receives.

Depending on your objective (sales/leads/traffic) set your ad by choosing keywords as well as phrases that will trigger your ad to show, choose the target audience and set your budget.

PPC is best used if you’re running a special promotion or you have a no brainer offer to share with your clients. It's also very effective at driving sales and acquiring leads for a service based business.

Using the fitness coach example, let’s say they’re wanting to promote a discounted price off their training programs. Furthermore they want to drive leads and traffic to their landing page.
Keywords could be “Full body fat burning program”.  

Google Ads also gives you the option to promote your campaign outside of Google Search through relevant websites in the Google Display Network (GDN), there’s a plethora of websites in the GDN which allow you to get more reach with your campaign.

Podcasts are great for content creation in general.

Firstly, let’s say you film your podcast on camera, you can upload the video to YouTube as well as your own website. Secondly, you can strip the audio and upload it to Apple , Google , Spotify and literally a thousand other podcast streaming websites. Thirdly, you can edit bite sized pieces from the video and upload it onto your Instagram . Lastly, you can summarise the conversation into a blog post like this one.
Once all that is done you run a targeted ad campaign through Facebook to engage a larger audience and spread brand awareness using the same content.

There’s two ways to do podcasts:

1. You can either start your own and interview people in your field of expertise.
2. You can go on other peoples podcasts as a guest speaker.

Starting your own is ideal for building an audience and exposing your brand.
Bear in mind that starting out is a lengthy process and that it takes some time to build traction.

Being an interviewee is the opposite. It’s a lot easier to reach out to a podcast show for an interview based on your experiences and knowledge. Podcast hosts are always looking to speak to new people with lots of real world experience. Being interviewed allows you to cross promote your brand to an established fan base.

In short, podcasts add lot’s of value to your brand growth as well as your own knowledge.

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