Basics of Digital Marketing You Must Understand!
Business competition is now increasing and spreading to the digital realm. Not only in terms of selling, now, even marketing methods also depend on wireless or online networks. That is why it is important for you to understand the basics of digital marketing, both as an entrepreneur and as a marketing service provider.
An understanding of digital marketing techniques or what is known as digital marketing is very necessary at this time. If you open a job advertisement at this time, digital marketing jobs are one of the busy vacancies posted by many companies.
The reason is quite simple, following the times, conventional media is no longer enough to help companies reach the target market, especially if their target market is millennials and generation Z who spend a lot of time in front of gadgets. Want to know more about digital marketing? Come on, see the discussion of this article!
Definition of Digital Marketing
Before entering digital marketing learning materials, you need to know what digital marketing is and what is the importance of learning digital marketing for beginners. Digital Marketing is a product or brand marketing job using digital media or the internet.
The goal of digital marketing is none other than to attract consumers and potential customers more quickly and boost product sales from a brand and at the same time, increase a company's brand awareness.
Digital Marketer, the term for a person whose profession is centered on digital marketing is said to be the most sought-after profession and has the highest job opportunities according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Quoted from Kreativv, as much as 46% of total global advertising spending in 2021 is allocated for digital marketing. This fact is not surprising, because according to one study, around 52% of customers decide to buy a product after they see marketing video content.
In addition, WBR Digital notes that businesses with digital marketing strategies generally have an 81% success rate in bringing in sales. So, if you want to be successful both in business and in career development, try to become an expert and professional digital marketing.
Various Digital Marketing Strategies
So what do you learn about digital marketing? As we know, digital marketing is a marketing technique that is carried out digitally by utilizing the use of the internet as a means of application.
There are many different digital marketing tactics and strategies to consider, for example:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- PPC / Google Adwords
- PR online
- Content marketing
- Video marketing
- Social media
- Retargeting
- Native Advertising
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Email Marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Mobile app
- Geotargeting
- Affiliate marketing
- Website
- Conversion optimization
- Podcast sponsors
Instead of trying to use every single strategy, find the ideal mix for your customers and business needs.
So, for beginners, the right way to learn digital marketing is to know what are the basics of digital marketing, namely by first determining the type of marketing you want to use. Some of the types of marketing in question are:
Marketing Using Social Media
The way digital marketing works for this type of marketing using social media is by utilizing content to attract the attention of potential buyers. The content in question can be in the form of image or video content which is then uploaded to various available social media such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and/or TikTok.
In implementing this type of digital marketing, visualization and creativity are the main keys that must be mastered by digital marketing strategy drafters. The goal is that the advertisements displayed are able to steal the audience's attention and have the persuasive ability to provide suggestions so that the audience is willing to buy the product.
If you choose digital marketing through social media, you must consistently increase traffic for your product. Make sure that every marketing content that you upload can reach a wider and more diverse audience compared to the previous content. That way, your consumers will also increase.
To see whether the content you upload has increased the number of your audience or not, you can see the number of views and reach based on media reports where you advertise. The higher the number of views and audience reach you generate, the more people will be exposed to your product.
Marketing Using SEO
If you want your business website to appear on the main search results page of search engines like Google, then you need SEO digital marketing techniques. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way to bring up written content so that it appears on the main page of search engine search results.
The marketing objective of this technique is the same as that of social media marketing, which is to attract as many audiences as possible and increase brand awareness of your product to more target markets.
The key to the success of SEO is content writing that is not only creative but also contains related keywords that are often searched by internet users. Supporting tools for this type of marketing include Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Email Marketing
You can also recapture customers who have visited or even bought your product to make purchases again with a more personal marketing approach through email marketing or newsletter marketing.
Newsletter marketing is a feature of email marketing that allows your customers to receive the latest updates from your product website. The way to activate this feature is, first you have to successfully invite your site visitors to subscribe to the newsletter by registering their email.
After getting a database of visitor email addresses, then you can simply enter this data into your site settings so that, whenever there is a new update, email marketing will automatically send a newsletter to the previously registered email address.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click, or PPC, is an internet marketing model in which advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked on. Usually these ads can be found on Google search pages using the Google Ads service.
Pay-per-click or PPC aims to reach more people who search on Google with a keyword. For example, "buy shoes". Then on the Google search page ads will appear from your page.
PPC is a very useful online marketing strategy. This pushes your page to the top of search results, which can also help to acquire customers directly. However, if both places the page in the top position of Google search, then what's the difference with SEO?
Simply put, when using PPC, we pay Google for every ad placed on the search page that is clicked by people. Meanwhile, SEO is not advertising in nature, but is achieved in several ways, such as targeting keywords and optimizing the pages themselves.
Native Advertising
Forms of paid content displayed in a form that bears a resemblance to the media content and its placement. Content that looks and functions like part of the associated media. For example Promoted Post on Instagram and Facebook.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is when you partner with other people's services or sites to make commissions for referring readers or visitors to your business. For example Hosting video ads with Youtube.
Video marketing
Video marketing is another digital marketing strategy for businesses looking to drive revenue.
Some types of videos for video marketing include:
- Instructional
- Announcement
- Behind the scenes
- Event
- And much more
Video marketing focuses on increasing brand awareness, conversion rates and company revenue. It achieves this goal by creating valuable and high-quality content for users. These strategies, like voice search optimization, also appeal to current user behavior.
Content Marketing
Content marketing has the goal of reaching, involving, and connecting with consumers through various content so that brand awareness from businesses increases. You can provide content in the form of videos, articles on blogs, infographics, and more.
For example, if you have a traveling equipment business, you can make an article about the equipment needed when traveling for the first time.
However, the content will be even more effective if it can be combined with SEO methods. By using SEO, the content that is generated will be easily found by people on Google searches. One of them is by entering keywords in the targeted content.
Digital Marketing Basics
After learning sales marketing and knowing the types of marketing that are the basis of digital marketing, now is the time to know what skills are needed to start digital marketing.
Previously, the steps for beginners who wanted to start digital marketing were sorted into:
- Determine the target market and products;
- Products must be able to provide solutions to problems currently being faced by the market;
- Have a personal website to increase brand awareness and as a means of providing information to buyers and prospective buyers;
- Building interactive social media so that they are able to approach consumers and potential customers through intense communication;
- Make the best use of SEO, SEM, and Social Media Ads.
Ok, we are ready to dig in and start with some evergreen marketing basics. Let's go!
Finding your target demographic
Before you start anything, you should figure out who are you trying to reach.
You will probably not get it 100% right on the first try, especially if you are a beginner. As time goes on, you will keep refining on your demographic and get closer to what works best. Also, the more experienced you get, the faster this process will be.
The simplest way to start is to think who your product or service would help the most.
Who is it perfect for?
Get specific, think about one person. Think everything about them that is relevant to your product. Their age, gender, profession, location, they can all be helpful.
Whatever you end up with will describe your target audience. Your efforts will be focused on reaching them.
Reach your target audience
After you know who you are after, you should brainstorm about the best ways to reach them.
Where do your people hang out? Are they more likely to read blogs, watch videos, or scroll through social media?
When you have an idea about where you might find them, you should focus your attention on creating content on that medium.
If they do a lot of Google searching, you should start a blog.
if they watch a lot of videos, start a Youtube channel.
The way you get their attention will largely vary based on the channel, but there will be some common marketing tricks you can use no matter the channel. We will go over this in the next chapter.
Create great content / advertise and A/B test
As we already mentioned, there are two main ways to go about digital marketing. One of them is through creating lots of great content, and the other one is through paying for ads. They can (and should) be combined, but when starting out, choose one and direct all your energy to mastering it.
The theory of creating lots of great content is very simple. In fact, there’s not much to think about, since it's mostly execution.
If you are inexperienced, this will seem very hard at the beginning. But there is a great principle at play here
the more content you create, the easier it gets, the less time it takes you, and the content is better and better.
Which means you only need to do two things: to start, and to keep going.
The content creation path takes longer to bear fruit, and it involves more work. But it's also free, and it creates a lot more momentum that keeps your business going for free after put into motion.
Creating content is crucial, and we will be devoting more time to it. For the time being, just keep in mind that it takes a lot of time and work, but when done right, the results are like nothing else. All of the best marketers ever have two things in common: they have created tons of great content, and they have learned how to make their content better by doing that.
If you choose to learn advertising first, you will need some budget. It doesn't have to be great, but at least a few hundred dollars spread over two to three months will be the minimum requiement.
The heart of advertising is measuring, testing and experimenting. You come up with an idea, and you test it. The best way to do this is through the core principle of marketing - the A/B testing.
Most advertising tools and platforms provide easy ways to acomplish A/B testing. We will be going into more details about A/B testing later.
Build a relationship with your audience
Reaching your audience is just the beginning.
Most successful businesses get their revenue through repeat purchases. That means they've built a relationship of trust with their buyers.
The relationship with your audience is another crucial pillar of digital marketing. Marketing gets a lot easier when your prospects know you, trust you, and have already bought something great from you.
There are many great ways to build a relationship with your audience, and we will dive deeper into each of them as we move along. The core principles you need to remember for now are:
- you should listen to your audience and pay attention to their feedback, that is important information they are giving you for free about how to improve your product
- ideally, you only want to be selling to them about one third of the time, the rest of the time you should provide them with value
- never abuse their trust, it is very hard to regain it if once lost
Skills Basic for marketer
The basic skills that you must master in order to start digital marketing are:
- Consistency: even though it looks easy, digital marketing is a job that takes a long time to master. If you want to know how digital marketing works well, then consistency is one of the keys;
- Willingness to learn: of course, your consistency must be accompanied by a high willingness to learn new things. Materials about digital marketing will always change, so if you don't have a high willingness to learn, you will get bored easily and eventually give up halfway;
- Open-minded: in a sense, you must be able to nurture ideas from other digital marketing practitioners, even though they have different incomes and ways of working. What you need to instill is, there is no default that governs digital marketing performance, so all methods need to be considered.
Conclusion
When compared to conventional marketing, some of the advantages of digital marketing lie in:
- Digital marketing strategies by utilizing internet media have a faster spread rate and can be monitored in real time;
- The results of digital marketing activities such as information about how many advertisements are watched, how many audiences your product reaches, to how high the conversion rate is, you can access all of them directly making it easier for you in the evaluation process;
- Broad Audience Reach: the speed of information exchange via the internet allows you to spread brand awareness of your product to foreign countries;
- Less budget used: advertising in conventional media such as billboards costs a lot of money and the results may not be as expected because you cannot choose who will see your ad, in contrast to digital marketing, which allows you to set your own budget and your target audience.
To find out more about digital marketing, you can refer to several digital marketing journals that contain information about digital marketing that you need to know or you can also take part in paid workshops.
