The use of the internet is steadily increasing, and so is digital marketing.
Marketing has been around for a very long time in traditional advertising mediums such as newspapers, billboards, radio, television, etc.
However, with the increase in internet usage, businesses have recognized that they now have to implement digital marketing strategies, in order to meet people where they’re at; if they want to bring awareness to their business, brands, products, and services.
Traditional or offline marketing alone will simply not work anymore. In fact, traditional marketing is slowly dying.
Online marketing is very effective for driving consumers to businesses.
Through inbound marketing, brands can bring awareness to their businesses and increase sales by attracting, engaging, and delighting specific customers online.
If you’re a beginner and want to learn the basics of digital marketing, marketing strategies as well as how to start a digital marketing agency then keep reading this guide.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is also called online or internet marketing.
It is the use of the internet and electronic devices to build brand awareness, customer relationships.
As well as promote and sell products and services online using digital platforms and tools to drive traffic, acquire leads, and increase sales.
Digital marketing is the current trend for reaching, engaging with, and understanding how customers behave online.
Business owners use a variety of digital marketing channels to reach new and existing customers from all across the globe.
Marketers use channels such as SEO, social media, search engines, email, paid advertisement, and more to get their messages across.
Below is a video explanation of digital marketing.
We’ll now take a deeper dive into these different marketing channels.
types of Digital Marketing Strategies
Digital marketing is very broad and covers many different elements. A combination of these different online marketing channels makes an effective and successful marketing campaign.
The components that make up digital marketing are
- Content Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Automated Marketing
- Paid Advertising (Pay-Per-Click/PPC)
- Native Ads Marketing
Allow me to give a brief summary of the different types of marketing tactics.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimizing your website for humans and search engine bots.
The goal of SEO is to gain organic traffic by making the contents of your website easy to understand and navigate.
SEO covers 3 key areas, on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
On-page SEO: focuses on the contents of a webpage. It covers every aspect of your page, that is, the title, h-tags, meta description, keywords, related phrases, internal links, images, videos, etc.
Off-page SEO: focuses on everything that happens off your website. It is all about engaging with audiences and building relationships.
There are a number of different digital platforms and tactics through which this can be achieved.
Technical SEO: deals with the technical aspects of your website. It covers things such as design, site speed, image compression, etc. It handles all the backend elements.
Content Marketing
This is the process of creating content using different content formats to reach targeted audiences.
Content marketing is the planning, creating, and sharing of content in the form of blog posts/articles, ebooks, podcasts, courses, videos, images, and infographics on different digital platforms.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing uses social platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Tik Tok, and other channels to attract, engage, build brand awareness, and promote products and services.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is used to send emails to prospects who have subscribed to a particular email list.
An email marketing campaign sends many different types of emails to subscribers, some of which are, but is not limited to promotional, discounted, updated, and interactive content.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting other people’s content on your website or digital platform and receiving a commission for each sale that has been generated through your link.
Effective affiliate marketing is generally done by bloggers, podcasters, influencers, YouTubers, etc.
Automated Marketing
This is the implementation of software to automate marketing strategies.
Once marketing automation is activated it acts on its own without anyone having to go and manually do the tasks.
Some of the things that automation software can automate are emails, social media postings, campaign tracking, and workflows that nurtures subscribers.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing
This is an advertising business model in which advertisers pay money whenever a visitor clicks on their advertisements.
Because organic traffic takes a while PPC marketing is used to get visitors to a site/business faster.
With PPC marketing you’ll get targeted traffic to your site and then you can use retargeting to eventually convert them into customers.
Some of the most popular platforms for running paid advertisements are Facebook, Google, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Native Advertising
This type of advertising is the use of ads that blends in with the content around it.
Native ads typically begin with an appealing meme, funny video, image, or information that gets you to click on it before you see the content that is being promoted.
Now, you have a basic understanding of what digital marketing is and its different types.
Now let’s talk about
Why Digital Marketing Is Important
Two of the most important impacts of digital marketing is that it allows businesses to be transparent and build relationships with their audience by engaging with them on whichever platforms they’re at.
Digital marketing is important as it uses digital mediums such as websites, social media platforms, email marketing, podcasts, etc to connect audiences to businesses.
This enables digital marketing companies to increase conversion rates and generate better revenues.
There are advantages and disadvantages to digital marketing.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
1. Global Reach
Digital marketing is more beneficial than traditional marketing due to its remarkable capacity to reach audiences wherever in the world they are.
While digital marketing is more effective than traditional marketing, it does not mean that you should neglect traditional methods.
An effective digital marketing strategy will have a combination of both digital and traditional marketing in its marketing campaign.
2. Ability To Target Specific Audience And Increase Conversion
Digital marketing provides the ability to target and reach specific audiences wherever they are.
Using data analysis marketers are able to send personalized content, promotional, and high-converting marketing materials and messages to specific audiences.
Digital marketing also allows businesses to retarget audiences and eventually convert them into customers.
3. Cost-Effective
With digital marketing, you get more bang for your buck. You’d spend less than you would on traditional marketing and get better results.
Traditional marketing is more expensive, you’d have to pay for newspaper printing, television and radio ads, etc and these would target the general audience.
That means you would be paying for your ads to go in front of people who have no interest in what you’re selling.
Digital marketing on the other hand gives you greater control over your audience and you can target a specific group for less than you would with the traditional method.
Content and email marketing are two very low-cost and efficient methods of digital marketing.
4. Market Automation
Digital marketing allows digital marketing agencies and individuals to create sales funnel that will eventually lead prospects to conversion.
Marketing automation software facilitates this process by sending out automated nurturing content over a period of time.
However, this automation should not stop at conversion but should continue to encourage and maintain a relationship with the audience.
5. Real-Time Communication
With digital marketing, businesses are able to conduct research by observing, analyzing, and understanding the behavior of their audience.
This knowledge allows digital marketers to use analytics to understand which marketing messages to send their audience.
It also offers high-quality services and products to prospects based on their buyer persona and specific interests.
6. Measurable Results
A successful digital marketing strategy will allow you to track and measure your marketing campaigns.
There are analytics and tracking tools that will enable you to view and track metrics such as impressions, shares, views, clicks, time on page, conversions, etc.
With these real-time results, marketers are able to stop or improve campaigns that are underperforming.
7. Increases Competitive Advantage
If you’re a new business with a very limited ad spending budget, it will be hard to compete with the giants in your niche, as you wouldn’t be able to afford to invest in television, billboard, or radio ads.
However, with online marketing strategies such as creating blog posts, or podcasts, you as a small player now have the opportunity to compete with those big competitors.
If you implement a good content and SEO strategy you may even be able to outrank your competitors in the search engine page results (SERP).
There are pros and cons to everything, so let’s look at a few
Disadvantages of Digital Marketing
Indeed digital marketing has many benefits and advantages, but like any good business, it also has some flaws.
A few of its disadvantages are
1. High Competition
Because online marketing is such an effective and low-cost strategy the competition is high.
It’s not just a case where you’re competing against local businesses, the competition is at a global level. You’re going up against businesses from all over the world.
Unless you have a very good marketing strategy, it’s going to be difficult to survive.
2. Feedback Can Damage Reputation
Another one of the downsides to internet marketing is feedback. A few negative feedback can damage the reputation of your brand and business.
It is important to provide high-quality products and services, build a relationship with your audience and provide great value to them.
You will get some negative feedback but your aim is to get more positive feedback than negative ones.
Use negative feedback to improve your business products or services.
3. Problems With Privacy And Security
Due to the fact that you may have to gather certain personal information from customers, privacy and security are at risk.
While there are rules and regulations that you have to follow when gathering personal information, it doesn’t mean that your website can’t be attacked by online predators.
Sometimes even when you think you have the best security, your business can still be hacked.
What does a digital marketer do?
The role of a digital marketer is to use organic and paid digital marketing strategies to build brand awareness and generate leads.
This is accomplished by using channels such as personal websites and blogs, social media platforms, email newsletters, display ads, etc.
Digital marketers pay attention to different key performance indicators (KPI), which indicate how a person or business is performing, and use this data to improve the business.
How To start a digital marketing agency
Currently, the digital marketing space is a great space to be in.
Digital marketing agencies are some of the highest-paid businesses online.
There’s no better time than right now to secure your space in the internet marketing space.
Just in case you’re wondering how to start and run a digital marketing agency, allow me to provide you with a condensed version that can help you get started asap.
Step 1: Learn.
Get educated about the in and outs of digital marketing.
Don’t make excuses and say you can’t afford courses and training. There are lots of free resources available for you to start learning.
Learn about SEO, content marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), FB ads, etc.
Places like Google Digital Garage, Hubspot, YouTube, have lots of free lessons; so get educated.
Step 2: Find Your Space.
After you’ve learned as much as you can about digital marketing, choose an area and focus on it.
Become an expert in that field and start branding yourself.
Cater to a specific audience. Don’t try to be everything for everyone.
Step 3: Analyze Your Competitors.
Once you’ve decided which area you want to focus on, identify and check out your competitors.
The digital marketing space is a jungle full of small and large competitors, so you need to identify a few of them and analyze their agency site and services.
This analysis will help you to identify their strengths and weaknesses so that you can capitalize on them.
You can make improvements to what they are already doing and add features or services that they’re missing, to help make your business stand out.
Step 4: Start Freelancing
Freelancing allows you to acquire jobs so you can get testimonials and begin putting a portfolio together.
To build your reputation and portfolio faster, you should offer some free services, or a trial run of your products in exchange for a review or testimonial.
Don’t forget that we love the word FREE so if you can afford to offer free for a few or for a limited time, etc, that would help your business.
Step 5: Create A Website
Now that you’ve got some testimonials, you can launch your own website.
Pick a good name that represents your business and build a website. You can easily create a website yourself without having to do any coding.
There are many website-building platforms that allow you to easily drag and drop the features you want on your site.
Most web hosting providers also have built-in website features.
Step 6: Figure Out Your Pricing Model
Decide how you’re going to collect payment from your clients.
Are you doing a subscription-based system, flat rate, or will you be charging by the hour?
What payment methods will you be accepting; credit cards, PayPal, stripe, etc.
Step 7: Market Yourself
Now it’s time to go all out and market yourself.
You already started the process in the freelancing step but now it’s time to up the game.
Use SEO and content marketing tactics.
Get on more social media platforms, run paid advertising if you have the budget, FB ads are great for generating leads.
As you engage in lead generation, be sure to build an email list.
Your email list is very important. Offer something free in exchange for their email address. DO NOT SKIP THIS PART.
Step 8: Scale
You started your agency, you’re up and running and business is increasing, it’s time to get smart and hire a team.
Don’t burn yourself out trying to do everything yourself. Hire talented members and train them to do the work how you want it.
Hire a graphic designer, content marketer, SEO manager, etc.
With a great team under your belt, you’ll be able to take on more clients, work less, and make more money.
Before you dive into the field of digital marketing check out this article where 45 experts share their best digital marketing tips.
Now that you have a condensed version of how to start and run a digital marketing agency go start learning.
Digital Marketing FAQs
Digital marketing is an umbrella that covers both outbound and inbound marketing. Inbound marketing focuses on specific audiences. Messages and content are tailored for a specific group.
Outbound marketing applies to the general audience, its content is directed at everyone, whether they show interest in it or not.
Some of the skills you need for internet marketing are SEO, content marketing, designing, data analysis, and social media marketing.
the wrap on digital marketing
Digital marketing is a very competitive field, to succeed you have to watch, learn, identify trends and patterns and adapt.
One tactic alone will not work, you must implement an omnichannel digital marketing strategy if you want to keep up with the competition.
Don’t neglect the power of SEO and content marketing, they are two of the best ways to reach the global population.
The future of digital marketing looks bright ahead so learn it, practice it, and get good at it.
However, don’t neglect traditional commercial advertising, it’s still useful.
Got any marketing tips you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below.
