Originally posted on September 13, 2021 @ 10:19 am
Online entrepreneurs are face with how to do digital marketing, as it’s the new path to establish your business presence online, drive more customer and sales and building online community. Digital marketing is the leading marketing trend in recent time and the best way to promote your business and gain brand recognition, as most experts says it is the best on how to build an online presence for your local business.
Every marketer, small and big online business owners are in for the new digital marketing courses, as they want to learn this skill and employ the skill to setting up an online marketing presence.
In this guide, I will take you through what is meant by digital marketing, its types, it’s strategies, its roles and what digital marketing is not.
What Does Digital Marketing Mean?
Digital marketing is the process of using all digital marketing channels and strategies to advertise a business’s product and services on the internet which also includes digital gadgets like Televisions, mobile phones and digital billboards.
Let quickly examine the contrast between the conventional or the normal marketing means and digital marketing: well to put it straight, digital marketing process is done mainly through online channels and digital marketers are fully in charge of the needed tools, analytic data to run the campaign efficiently and effectively.
How to do Digital Marketing Perfectly
Getting to market your business in this digital era, it’s important you understand the fundamentals and the components of digital marketing. In this section, you get to know the types of channels you’ll use to project your business to the digital world and how best you can use them to your advantage.
Let start…
Types of Digital marketing channels
In this section of this post, I will answer the question, what are the types of digital marketing channels. There are two classes of digital marketing channel namely: the online and offline marketing channels.
Online Marketing Channels:
This is the channels that are based on using digital devices that are connected to the internet. Examples of online marketing channels are Website Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Video Marketing.
Now let’s start examining each one of these marketing channels.
1. Website Marketing
Website marketing is one of the leading means on how to do digital marketing using the online marketing channels.
For every online marketing campaign, website is the key factor. For every business that wishes to go online will do that using a website, it’s the most important channel and also the best medium to carry out other online marketing campaigns.
Recommended Readings: How to start a website using WordPress, why you need a website for your business and How to build an online presence.
The uniqueness of your business should be seen in your website, as your website says a lot about your identity, product and services. I wrote on how your website and your business goals should blend to meet your audience’s needs. It should also be mobile-friendly and easy to navigate.
After you have set your website for your business, the next thing is to plan a digital marketing strategy to help project your website and your content to your audience with the aim of driving in traffic.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The next on the list on how to do digital marketing under the online marketing channel is the Search engine optimization.
This is a methodology of optimizing your website for the search engines. The main reason and goal of search engine optimization is the help your website rank high in search engine results as when keywords relating to business is searched on search engine and drive organic traffic from Google and Bing.
There are sub-processes of SEO. The key ones are:
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
3. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising is another online marketing channel on how digital marketing work, PPC advertising enables your business to get to large audience through the means of paid ads.
There are various social media platforms you can starting creating PPC campaigns, platform like Google, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Bing and Facebook. These platforms display ads to people searching for queries relating to your business’s products and services.
You can segment your PPC campaigns base on their demographic like age, gender, location and interests. So when people click on your ads, you are charge for the click, this is why it’s call Pay-Per-click advertising.
The most used PPC platforms are the Facebook Ads and the Google Ads. The use of SEO in PPC campaigns is called Search Engine Marketing
4. Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the most way on how to do digital marketing in recent times. There is a popular slogan online regarding content which is Content is Key. Content marketing entails content i.e., it’s all about content.
This is the use of different forms like text, audio, images and video to target or reach potential buyers and drive in traffic to any online business.
Content marketing is a way to promote your website content via various social media platform, email marketing, PPC campaigns and SEO.
Let me stress here that there’s a big difference between running content marketing campaign and promoting your blog. The former is:
- Targeted to a specific audience
- It’s has a specific goals of content to publish
- It’s been monitored and analyzed for effectiveness
The important elements for content marketing are:
- Blogs
- eBooks
- Online Courses
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Webinars
5. Email Marketing
The oldest and still the most effective digital marketing channels is the email marketing, despite the increase use of social media in running campaigns. Email marketing is the most used ways on how to do digital marketing, as it helps to connect and entice leads to become buyer.
Email Marketing is a digital marketing strategy used to contact potential buyers or those interested in buying your product and services, and keep them abreast to vital information, coupon and loyalties.
Note: those spam you receive in your email box is not part of email marketing, email marketing is targeted at giving anyone that has showed interest in a particular brand and has given them their consent to send them emails on information on latest services or product, coupon and loyalties.
Many online businesses and marketer that are successful, make use of email marketing through a built email listing to create funnels to convert leads to regular consumer.
Recommended Reading: How to start building Email Listing, Proven ways to start Email Marketing
6. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the reaching out to audience either targeted or otherwise via running a content marketing campaign. It could be paid ads, posting or both.
The main purpose of social media marketing campaign as part of how to do digital marketing via the online marketing channel is to create and publicize a brand; that’s Brand Awareness and more important, create trust and authority.
The beautiful aspect of social media marketing is, you can get audience who are interested in your product and services; but this is after you have built an awesome trust or better still a direct sales channel.
At this point, let’s examine the Facebook sales funnel, it consists of three (3) major steps.
Facebook Sales Funnel
- Awareness: This is the first step in the funnel. At this stage, the main goal here is to let Facebook audience know your brand and identity. You run ads across a large audience, as many as possible. This is to gain new readers or followers.
- Consideration: This is the stage I personally call the Interest Stage, the target here is get the audience to show interest and get them to visit your business website or blog, your community page, install your business app or they sending you email or message.
- Conversion: This is the third and last stage, where your visitors who have visited your website or page are turning into buyers. A conversion in its term could be completing a sale, or getting a product to the cart online.
7. Affiliate Marketing
The oldest kind of way on how to do digital marketing is marketing of product and services via affiliating. This kind of marketing has grown over the years with the increase in usage of the internet.
Affiliate marketing is the process of advertising a manufacturer’s and people’s product or service to your audience online via your website or blog and earns commission for every sales or lead made.
Recommended Reading: How to start Affiliate Marketing and earn money online.
Companies like Amazon, Bluehost, ShareaSale, SEMrush and many more have affiliate programs that pays individuals that sell their products and services on their website.
With an effective digital marketing strategy, you can include affiliate marketing as a way to sell your product or service and earn commission.
What I mean here is, if you have a product or service to sell online, you can do that by setting up an affiliate program where others can sign up and promote such product on the internet.
They receive commissions as a payback but you get more advantage than them. The most significant benefit of your affiliates aside from driving traffic for more sale, they are your brand influencer that helps to connect your business with their audience.
8. Inbound Marketing
This is the methodology of using different digital marketing channels to drive in new audience largely via creating unique content and ensuring it passes through the awareness stage of the funnel to the last stage of conversion.
Elements of Inbound Marketing
- Content creation
- Awareness
- Customers Engagement
- Building trust
- Customers Satisfaction
Most online business uses these inbound marketing elements to connect with their intended buyers and establishing a trusted relationship and communication with them that will eventually mature to sales.
Generally, the channels to make online sales have three fundamentals channels which is;
- Awareness: This is the point of letting people get to know your brand
- Engagement: This is the point where you use either your website or app to capture and engage them.
- Conversion: this is the last stage in the funnel where you get your online customer to convert.
9. Mobile Marketing
This is the most recent ways on how to do digital marketing and also the most effective online marketing strategy.
This is a digital approach of getting to customers via difference mobile app such as Amazon Marketplace, Apple app store, Google Play store.
All these stores houses thousands of app developed by app developers for millions of users worldwide. With apps, you can start mobile marketing and reach many customers through cross-app ads, paid advertising. This is achieved when people download your app.
Let me emphasize here that: Mobile-friendly website is from Mobile Marketing.
Mobile friendly website is a requirement for your website to be easily accessible through the mobile phone while mobile marketing is the use of mobile app to advertise your product and services to large audience depending on the installed applications from the various stores.
10. Video Marketing
Finally, on how to do digital marketing via the online marketing channel is the video marketing. This is the process of creating video as a way to promote a business’s product and services. Most popular channel for video marketing are YouTube, Facebook Videos, Vimeo.
The second most popular search engines after Google is YouTube. Most buyers go on YouTube to get some details about a product or service before making any purchase, and some for relaxations.
The most appropriate way to run a successful video marketing is to incorporate them into your SEO, content marketing or your social media marketing campaigns. With this strategy, you get your ROI awesomely.
Now that we have examined the online marketing channel on how to do digital marketing, let’s look into how you can utilize the offline marketing channel.
Offline Marketing Channels:
This is the marketing channel methodology where devices that are not connected to the internet are made use of. In other words, you don’t make use of the internet for offline marketing. Examples of offline marketing channels are SMS Marketing, TV Marketing, Billboard Marketing, Radio Marketing,
1. TV Marketing
TV marketing is a method of marketing where businesses run advertisement of in-between TV’s programs. Presently it’s not 100% targeted as it is displayed to a large audience where some are not interested in the ads.
In TV marketing, marketers make guesses according to the statistics gotten from some limited numbers of persons, in addition, there are able to target audiences according to the numbers of factor as to know what kind of content to produce.
2. SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is used to get audience to most local community store within a geographic location.
This kind of marketing in recent times make use of push messages on mobile and the web, also the Facebook messenger make use of the push message.
3. Radio Marketing
Radio marketing is a mean of running an ad on a radio station in-between a radio program. This is another way on how to do digital marketing, but less effective compare to others kind of marketing channels.
The disadvantage of radio marketing is that you don’t know how many people will listen or would hear of the advert. And this is according to the numbers of listeners or followers, the radio station has.
This kind of marketing is still very essential to local and businesses and small locations where social media is not well known.
4. Billboard Marketing
This is a method of advertising your product and services via billboard and electronic billboards. This is the kind of digital marketing most music and entertainment industries.
Electronic billboards are most placed in market and public places or at the center of a city or town.
One disadvantage of some offline marketing channel is that small businesses may not be able to afford the advertising bills, like TV marketing, Billboard marketing.
How does Digital Marketing Work?
Digital marketing works in a way that you must be strategic about it. It works on the ground that you have a goal, make a plan to achieve those goals. So in this section, we’ll be walking through the needed strategy you would take to make digital marketing work for you and your business.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a well organize plan on ways to achieve a business goal using the various digital marketing channels.
In creating an online marketing strategy, these are what you must consider and ensure it’s in place:
- Which digital marketing channel best fit your business goals
- The resources like; The people, time and money
- Your expectations from these.
In knowing how to do digital marketing, effective digital marketing strategy must be in place, or else, you will not have results.
The most common marketing mistakes most marketing personnel or small business do is to run all marketing channels at a time and eventually ends in frustrations.
Recommended Reading: Most common Digital Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.
This is because the needed digital marketing expatriate is not engaged or they have chosen to spend heavily on a marketing channel that does not fit their business plans and goals
Example of a Digital Marketing Strategy
Below is a step-by-step guide to start a digital marketing strategy for any company or business and wants to incorporate digital products to its online customers.
But first, you must know and understand which of the marketing channels blend with your business goal.
Step 1: Website
Creating or starting a website is the first step to take when starting out. Your website must be:
- Fast and user-friendly
- Responsive and mobile-friendly
- Have a landing page and Sales Page
- Must be easily accessible
With all this in place, you are good to go as all this will help present your product and services to your online customers
Recommended Reading: How to start a website for your business.
Step 2: SEO
After building a website, it’s important to run an SEO Audit to know the pages to optimize for search engine optimization. It should be followed in this sequence:
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
Optimizing your website for SEO will help you rank is SERPs, make sales and drive in large traffic.
Step 3: Content Marketing
After SEO Auditing and making a thorough research on keywords related to your business, content marketing plan is the next in line.
Your content marketing plan must include:
- The type of content you want to make use of – text, Videos or both.
- Your posting or publishing schedule
- Promotion methodology – Social Media channels, email marketing or PPC campaigns
Step 4: Social Media Marketing
How you start promoting and channels to use is very important when employing social media marketing. Using social media campaigns is very good specially to promote a brand and to generate sales. But it’s important to consider the following:
- Which social media channel suits your business?
- Which of the social media platforms is good for marketing your business?
- Appointed time for posting your content on social media networks?
With all these, you can have very good results out of your set goals.
Step 5: Email Marketing
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy used to communicate and bond with customers. The first step to email marketing is to start building email list, this can be achieved by using many CTA (Call-To-Action) on your strategic area of your website and social media channels.
The primary target is to get people sign up for your newsletter, free trials or free download. You can create plenty email marketing funnels to drive your subscribers from stage 1 (awareness) to conversion stage.
Recommended Readings: how to Start Email Marketing, how to Build Email Listing
Step 6: Pay-Per-Click Advertising
PPC advertising is a paid kind of advertising where you pay whenever people click on your ads. Search engines like Google, Bing runs PPC ads, Facebook also offers PPC advertising.
PPC campaign helps you target audience using Google related keywords. Your ads are display on search engines and ads accepting websites. So when people sees it and click on them, you are charged.
You can start PPC advertising by setting up AdWords Campaign and target audience looking for your product.
In parallel to the above activities set up an AdWords Campaign to target people searching for product-related keywords on Google and remarketing campaigns on Facebook to go after users that visited your website but did not convert.
Step 7: Video Marketing
With a relevant topics and keywords, you can start creating video content as it best explains what your business is about. Creating a one-minute explanatory video with a sharp CTA.
Facebook, Instagram and a devoted YouTube channel dedicated to your business are platforms you can use to run your campaign and target your audience.
The best approach to video marketing is to create a blog post and embed the video in the post.
Step 8: Mobile Marketing
With a good mobile app created with your business goal in mind, your readers and customers can get them installed from Google Play Store or Apple Store as the case may be.
With push notifications, your users can get the latest news update, coupon or loyalty offers and ways they can get in touch your product and services through the app.
Step 9: Evaluate and Examine Your Goal to Get the Results
One digital marketing strategy that must be constantly looked into is the evaluation and examination of your goals to effectively ascertain the results.
You can effectively and correctly measure your campaign by installing and correctly configuring Google Analytics.
With it, you can measure the numbers of visits, conversions, the people reached, demographic and the cost of your campaign and so many more.
This is just the summing up of what an effective digital marketing strategy should include. But for small businesses with minimal financial budget, you can start with:
- Building of website
- Doing SEO Audit
- Content Marketing
As time goes by, you’ll gradually begin to see increase in traffic and ROI, then you can implement other tools.
What Is the Role of A Digital Marketing Executive
Before I dive answering the question what is the role of a digital marketing executive, let me define a digital marketing executive.
What Is a Digital Marketing Executive?
A digital marketing executive is a trained digital marketing manager in charge of connecting a brand with potential customers or prospects through the web.
The Role of a Digital Marketing Executive
The main role of a digital marketing Executive are as follows;
- To create and supervise the brands’ online presence
- To advertising digital products on various online platforms and sites.
- Creating a well-organized digital marketing Strategy
- What channel to make use of
- Allocation of budget
- Supervision of other executives to attain the goal target
Digital Marketing Executive job description
The digital marketing job description is a specialty someone with a good expertise and knowledge relating to:
- SEO: Must have a wide knowledge and experience in working principles about SEO and how to incorporate them in WebPages and contents
- Content Marketing: He must be able to create and implement a content marketing plan, that he knows the kind of content to create and the channels that best suits it.
- PPC advertising: he must be able to run paid campaigns on various campaign platforms like Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram ads.
- Social media and marketing: he must be able to run ads on social media platforms and promoting the company’s brand, and pushing to the right audience.
- Email Marketing: Should be able to run and monitor email marketing campaigns, to ensure leads conversions.
Misconceptions About Digital Marketing
Before I conclude this post on how to do digital marketing, let me quickly clear some common digital marketing misconceptions.
The most common digital marketing misconceptions are:
Digital Marketing and Internet Marketing
Digital marketing is most time mistaken as internet marketing, but the truth is that internet marketing is a division of digital marketing.
Internet marketing is also called online marketing and is the method of running campaigns online.
Internet/online marketing include:
- SEM: Search Engine Marketing (this include SEO and PPC)
- SMM (Social Media Marketing)
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Mobile and Video Marketing
But digital marketing includes all these and other digital channels
Another misconception is Social media marketing, another truth is, if you are actively engage in social media, which means you are actively present, invariably you are running social media marketing campaigns and not run a digital marketing campaigns.
Social media marketing is an online or internet marketing which is also a division of digital marketing.
Winning Note On How to Do Digital Marketing
I am very sure that the query how to do digital marketing has been answer from this post. In summing up this post, you must know;
That digital marketing is the future of marketing and a way to market product and services on the internet and other digital devices. It’s a long-term process containing various components depending on your set targets.
It’s important to implement an effective digital marketing strategy that will help boost your brand and increase online sales. And this is why your business need a digital marketing executive.
Digital marketing must be implemented by a digital marketing executive who is capable of supervising the needed digital marketing activities; this is as a result of he or her broad knowledge and skills in deciding the best approach to execute a project.
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He is Digital Marketer who is passionate about blogging. MarketingBlogo was birth has a result of misconceptions about the reality of online marketing for business growth.
