This is an excellent example of digital marketing’s ever-changing landscape. When this post was originally written, the SEO best practices were very different from what they are today. Most notably:
- The lack of any visual aids
- The lengthy sections need to get cut down
- The post is targeting too many keywords
- This post would be an excellent pillar piece in a cluster SEO strategy, but doesn’t utilize internal linking strategies
I’d address each of those issues (plus update technical SEO factors) to bring the piece up to date!
Anyway, here’s a beginner’s guide to digital marketing, exclusively for small business owners looking to take a DIY approach to online advertising.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a technique that uses the internet or other digital technologies to market and advertise goods or services. As technology advanced, so did marketing strategies.
Digital marketing is a way to bring your customers to you by utilizing tools like social media, email, web content, and search engines to your advantage.
So, why is digital marketing important for my business?
Well… how many people do you know that still read a newspaper daily? Not a lot. More and more people are turning to technology, namely the internet, to get their news, which means that running an ad in the Sunday paper isn’t as effective as it used to be.
Many small businesses relied on word-of-mouth or offline advertising to grow their customer base, but now, that just doesn’t cut it.
Using digital marketing allows you to reach a bigger audience and even target specific groups who would be interested in your goods or services.
Getting Started With Digital Marketing
One of the best things about digital marketing is just how accessible it is. The internet is widely available to the public, social media is typically free to use, and the cost of web-hosting is minimal.
You don’t need a marketing degree to run a successful digital marketing campaign, but you will need to know the basics.
Generally speaking, digital marketing is an umbrella term for a number of different channels. The bare-bones basics of digital marketing are made up of the following strategies:
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Content Marketing
If you aren’t familiar with these terms, you should get acquainted with them. You’ll need to know the fundamentals of each one to get started with your digital marketing campaign.
Search Engine Marketing
SEM is a strategy which utilizes search engines as a tool to advance their marketing techniques. Simply put, it’s a way to get potential customers to your website.
If you’re like me, you may have never wondered how search engines, like Google or Bing, choose which web pages to display when you search for a given keyword.
A keyword is simply whatever word or phrase that you type into your search bar. Even full questions can serve as keywords, they are what’s referred to as long-tail keywords.
You might not have realized your bad habit of not going past the first page of results when you search a given term. Most of us take our failures as a sign that we need to refine our search.
Instead of “black sneakers” we may search for “black hightop sneakers without laces” and voila *somehow* Google knows exactly what shoes we are looking for.
Search engines aren’t as smart as we give them credit for, they rely heavily on SEM or more specifically Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is the practice of curating your website and content to specific standards in order to ensure a high ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Search engines rank websites based on hundreds of factors that make up SEO, these include keyword use, meta-descriptions, formatting, domain authority, and even page load time.
The goal is to make sure that users are getting the best and most accurate results for their searches.
“Content is king!” – Bill Gates
If your content isn’t optimized for SEO, no one is going to read it. Okay, maybe that’s not true, but you definitely won’t be giving your website or business the best opportunity to bring in more customers.
I’m going to say something harsh that comes from experience working in the field.
No one wants to read bad content, so stop taking a DIY approach to your business! I cannot stress this enough! A vast majority of my clients hire me to clean up their writing and reformat it to adhere to SEO standards.
They learned, too late, that they were selling themselves short and costing themselves business with bad content. Skip that step and hire a professional, they pay for themselves in the long-run.
Finally, SEO isn’t easy. To really become an expert, you have to know about both on-page and off-page SEO. That means you’ll have to take courses (many courses) and apply what you’ve learned on a real website.
It takes time and effort away that could be better spent, so again I suggest leaving it to a professional.
I’d discourage attempting to become an expert in your free time, but if you want to learn the basics Google Analytics is a great place to start.
There are also several online resources and tools for you to use! Check out Ahrefs for high-quality SEO knowledge and the SEO tool to end all SEO tools. If you are looking for a cheaper (read: free) option, try SEMrush on for size. Udemy offers a ton of courses on SEO at reasonable prices including this one that I’ve taken!
Social Media Marketing
Did you know that, currently, more than half of the world’s population has access to the internet? More impressive, is the fact that there are over 3.5 billion active social media users. That’s a lot of potential customers.
Advertising and marketing had to evolve to meet the needs of an increasingly digital world.
In plain words?
Well, Neil Patel describes SMM as “Social media marketing is the process of creating content that you have tailored to the context of each individual social media platform in order to drive user engagement and sharing.”
Social media marketing is extremely effective if done well. In addition to being imperative when developing and defining your brand, it’s also responsible for increasing the following.
- Business’s visibility
- Customer interaction
- Site traffic
- Conversions
Doesn’t that sound great?
The best part is that it’s all free! Literally zero dollars to do this. All you have to do is create an account on the platforms that you want your business featured on.
Pro tip: Know your audience. If your audience consists of an older demographic, you should utilize facebook over Snapchat and vice versa.
Remember what I said earlier, about social media marketing being totally free? Well, I lied. Sort of.
The major social media platforms (think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) have rolled out the ability to advertise to consumers more directly using paid advertising. These include Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads that run on the sides of or even within someone’s social media timeline or feed.
Businesses only pay a specified amount every time a user clicks on their ad. Hence the name.
Let’s get something straight.
Social media sites know A LOT about their users. Ethics aside, the platforms collect specific information about their individual users such as age, gender, and race.
However, what’s even more helpful is the information regarding a user’s likes.
If, for example, a major beauty brand is looking to advertise on a social media site, the brand is free to tailor its ads to appear for women of a certain age who have shown an interest in beauty products.
This is an extremely powerful marketing tool that has the potential to exponentially increase your bottom-of-the-funnel conversions.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that social media marketing is limited to your business. You can craft your own personal brand that is beneficial to your business.
Studies have shown that consumers are more willing to follow people than they are to follow brands.
Think about it. If you use social media you are likely following at least one brand or celebrity. That’s right, celebrities are their own brand.
They utilize their distinct personal brands to reap the benefits of having a large following. They are able to use their name and their reputation to advertise products.
You might not be on the same level as a social media influencer, but it is absolutely possible for you to leverage your social media in order to benefit your business.
Don’t you just want to hop on Facebook and watch a cat video right about now?
Content Marketing
Everything that is on the web falls under the umbrella of content.
That cat video that keeps popping up on Facebook? Content.
The article you just read about the stock market? Content.
Cute picture of your nephew on Instagram? You guessed it, content.
So, how does content marketing work?
Content marketing is essentially just crafting your content (think: images, text, media, etc.) in a way that promotes the growth of traffic to your site.
It’s the best way to keep your audience coming back for more. Content marketing is unique in that it really caters to your customers’ needs.
You’re able to provide the solutions to their problems and therefore show them that your business is reliable. Another win-win.
While you may read definitions of content marketing that state the content doesn’t explicitly promote your product, that isn’t necessarily true.
Check out this blog post from Ahrefs. You’ll notice that this blog post does mention Ahref’s SEO tool, but that certainly isn’t the main point of the article.
Your content can 100% promote your product. In fact, one of the most beneficial strategies of content marketing is to always end your blog post with a call-to-action that encourages readers to try your product, contact your business, or share the blog post.
Speaking of blogs…
You may have noticed the trend of businesses creating a blog portion of their website. This is simply a marketing tactic.
The content will be structured in a way that follows the standards of SEO, you’ll have the option to share via social media, and there is also the opportunity to comment. At least, if it’s any good it will be structured this way.
Blogs allow companies to attempt to rank for certain keywords related to their business and services, engage their audience, and get shares which translates to more customers (read: money).
However, blogs aren’t the only tool used in content marketing.
Media forms like podcasts are becoming increasingly popular. Other forms of content used for marketing are:
- Books, including e-books
- Videos
- Infographics
- Webpages
It’s important to create content that caters to your audience and your business niche. While it’s great to use a variety of different forms of content, you should try mixing and matching until you find what kind of content your customers engage with the most.
Final Thoughts
You’re not going to become a digital marketing expert in one day, but if you’re actively learning then you’ll certainly make progress. Check out some of the tools and links throughout the article, they helped me in my journey of learning the ins-and-outs of digital marketing.
I’m still learning more and more every day. That being said, I’ll update this article periodically whenever I learn something new that I want to share with my readers.
Have any questions or comments about the article? Interested in my services? Feel free to send me an email at davinagward@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing from you!