Jump-Start Your Digital Efforts with Digital Marketing 101
Are you looking for digital marketing 101 presentations that are most effective for small business owners?
Many digital marketing strategies are effective for small business owners, but knowing which will work best can be hard.
The goal is to make things a little less scary by focusing on the basics of digital plans and digital technologies.
This blog post explores digital marketing options, digital advertising, content marketing, SEO, website design, social media, and marketing technology.
It also examines some of the most common bad habits that stunt digital creativity and how they can be broken with just a little more effort on your part.
You’ll learn about all the digital channels available to small business owners today – from email newsletters to Facebook ads – and what makes them.
Let’s get started!
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is promoting your product or service via digital channels. Digital marketing includes advertising, content marketing, SEO, website design, social media, and marketing technology.
The digital age has given rise to many different avenues for digital marketing.
Why is digital marketing 101 important?
Understanding digital marketing is important for any small business owner because digital channels have become a mainstay of the digital age.
Digital channels help you connect with consumers personally and allow you to find your target market more effectively.
Digital marketers help small businesses with web design, digital advertising, content marketing, and social media management. Digital marketers also offer SEO services to increase your website’s traffic.
Digital marketers can improve customer lifetime value (CLV) by using digital marketing services such as:
- Personalized digital experiences (aligned with the buyer’s journey)
- Customer retention
- Revenue
- Cost savings
- Improved efficiency
- Reduced errors
- Better insight
- Improved response time
What are digital channels most effective for digital marketing 101?
The digital world is vast, and digital channels can take many forms.
Digital marketing 101 involves all digital communication methods, including:
- digital advertising
- content marketing
- SEO
- website design
- social media
- marketing technology like HubSpot
The following sections discuss different digital marketing concepts in greater detail.
Digital advertising comes in many forms. Online banner ads fall under digital advertising and native ads that look similar to other editorial content on your site.
Paid search engine optimization (PPC) has been around since the inception of paid search in 1996 with the launch of Google AdWords. Matrix has been working with Google since 2002.
Search engine PPC allows you to specify a maximum bid amount per keyword or an overall budget. The digital ad industry has shifted from display advertising to search advertising and, more recently, into mobile advertising.
Before looking at different digital marketing options, it’s important to define digital advertising and understand what makes it effective.
Digital advertising refers to online ads on a computer or mobile device. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another form of digital advertising because it helps your site rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
PPC ads allow you to pay per click rather than per impression.
How much should be spent on marketing?
You will want to evaluate how much digital marketing you plan on using and your digital advertising budget versus the number of potential customers you will reach.
There isn’t a specific answer to this question, but digital marketers can help guide you with digital marketing budgets and outline the digital ad campaign that’ll best suit your needs.
Our client’s marketing budget typically ranges from 7 to 25 percent of a company’s revenue or revenue targets, depending on company size, stage of growth, and the importance of marketing on sales within the company’s industry, among other factors.
Small business owners, digital advertisers, and content marketers often have many questions about digital marketing services. In this section, we’ll cover some basic digital marketing service questions and provide answers to them.
Digital marketing strategies for small business owners to use:
Digital advertising
Mobile advertising is one of the digital marketing services that digital advertisers use more.
With digital advertising, digital marketers advertise on digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Video Ads, and Display Ads. Mobile advertising refers to online ads that appear on mobile devices.
Successful digital marketing campaigns depend on digital ad content production. Digital marketers need to know digital ad content production to develop engaging copy for PPC ads.
The digital marketer needs to understand the psychology behind digital ads to create content that will resonate with people.”
Other digital marketing strategies rely heavily on paying for digital ads through Google AdWords, for example.
But beyond the initial learning period where digital advertisers are figuring out what works best — and experimenting with different formats and types of creatives — using paid digital advertising becomes more expensive the longer they continue without improving their digital marketing skills.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a strategy many digital marketers use to tell the story of their digital marketing services.
Content marketing helps digital marketers connect with potential customers and digital sales leads.
Website design
The number one question digital marketers hear from small business owners is, “What should I do about my website?”
More often than not, digital marketers will suggest that the client either update their current site or redesign it completely based on what digital advertising goals they have.
“SEO digital marketing digital marketers know the digital advertising options available to small business owners. Digital distribution channels include social media, digital display ads, mobile digital distribution channels, digital behavioral targeting ads, search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate programs, video digital distribution channels.”
Great digital marketing websites have a clear hierarchy with functional menu systems, minimal distractions, and smooth navigation, so your viewers can find what they want quickly and effortlessly.
Interesting design visuals attract visitors to digital marketing websites, but the best ones have more than pretty pictures.
Great digital marketing websites also make digital marketers think about conversion rates by structuring their pages to help visitors complete the action they came for – like signing up for email updates or making a purchase – without getting lost within site.
Your digital marketing website’s design should be visually appealing and function well in terms of functionality.
A digital marketing website that looks great but is difficult to use may only get you halfway to your goal of capturing more digital marketing leads than you were previously.
SEO and digital marketing 101
Traditional digital marketing means paying for ads. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a promotion strategy paired with content marketing that pays no money and gets highly targeted viewers and potential customers looking specifically for what you have to offer.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing list the sites they think most relevant to a particular search term or question at the top of their search results pages, also known as “the SERPS” (search engine result pages).
Your ultimate goal is to rank high on those SERPS — by managing your website’s visibility mostly through SEO — so people find your site when searching on Google instead of competitors’ sites.
Suppose you pay for digital advertising like banner or video ads. In that case, measuring how many visitors respond to paid digital advertising is tough compared to how many respond to organic digital content is tough.
With SEO, you know exactly how much traffic your website gets from search engines because it’s based on clicks, not money.
Suppose your business is relatively new or you’re launching a new product or service. In that case, SEO can help increase awareness of that product or service quickly, before digital advertising tools have had time to generate impressions that build up over time.
It generally requires ongoing, regular attention to keep your website at the top of the SERPs over multiple years, so digital marketers must continually learn new SEO techniques to stay current.
We ran this back in June 25, 2001 and
The Two Major Types of SEO
There are two basic types of search engine optimization:
Off-page SEO
Off-page refers to factors that influence how search engines rank your website — outside your site or its code – including social media shares and digital publicity.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO focuses on factors directly related to your website’s pages’ content, structure, and functionality, such as keyword density and meta–information.
SEO is a broad digital marketing strategy that digital marketers must consider. Still, off-page but off-page SEO brings the digital marketer’s attention to two major areas of digital marketing: social media and digital PR.
While both are important, digital PR is integral to off-page search engine optimization.
A successful digital PR campaign involves getting your company mentioned or linked to by relevant influencers on popular websites over time so you don’t have to compete for valuable SERP (search engine result page) space with large competitive companies that can easily outspend you in advertising money.
Social media
What are digital marketing strategies most effective for small business owners?
It’s difficult to highlight one best digital marketing strategy because each will be effective for different companies.
However, several digital marketing strategies to explore include digital advertising, social media, content marketing, and SEO.
Social media digital marketers need to know:
- What content will be most appealing to which audiences on each platform?
- How do I measure engagement and conversion rates to improve them over time?
- What type of digital advertising works best on each network?
- Should I use text, image, or video depending on how much space is available and its impact relative to word count or picture size?
Digital marketers should also determine what platforms they shouldn’t spend too much time (or budget) targeting – no matter how big their audience is – because engaging with a digital marketing audience that doesn’t want what you’re selling isn’t going to do anyone good.
Marketing automation platforms
One of the digital marketing strategies for digital marketing 101 that digital marketers employ is marketing automation.
Marketing automation platforms, like SharpSpring CRM and marketing automation, allow digital advertisers to create and send personalized campaigns to their customers, promote offers through social media channels, automate customer segmentation and nurture leads with campaign suggestions.
The other thing that should be mentioned here is the value of using digital marketing software. Digital marketers often use digital marketing software suites to help automate their efforts.
Valuable digital advertisers know how important it is for your business to “be everywhere” and work 24/7/365 to get noticed by people looking for services and products like yours.
Digital marketing technology: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
Digital marketing technology has also become more advanced with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This has helped digital marketing companies like Google and Microsoft improve digital marketing platforms.
Digital marketing 101 is a bit beyond, but we wanted to introduce the concepts.
Still, it’s also been instrumental in helping digital marketers use digital channels to generate leads faster.
These digital channels have provided digital marketers with more accurate targeting capabilities and provide digital marketers with real-time data insights about the digital campaigns they are running.
In turn, this has enabled digital marketers to personalize their digital advertisements and content based on user preferences and interests, increasing users’ engagement rates with these advertisements.
Furthermore, artificial intelligence and machine learning also enable digital marketers to automate digital marketing tasks and improve digital marketing efforts.
These digital marketing tools are so smart that they can learn digital campaign trends and provide recommendations for how digital marketers could do their jobs better.
Also, artificial intelligence and digital automation don’t just end with digital channels; it has also become instrumental in helping advertisers to use digital media for other aspects of their business operations as well including content creation, e-commerce site design, customer service, market research, advertising campaigns tracking, etc.
By using these technologies, digital marketers can free up time from mundane digital tasks to focus more on generating more leads or revenue through these automated systems.
Furthermore, digital channel development is also becoming more automated, with digital marketers relying on digital platforms to help them create digital assets for their digital marketing efforts.
Digital advertising has also become smarter with the advent of AI and ML in digital channels providing digital advertisers with better ad tracking capabilities, faster ways to develop digital ads, real-time data insights about their digital campaigns, personalized digital ads based on user interests, etc.
For a digital marketing 101 example, Google uses its search engine technology to generate targeted keywords predicted to be the most relevant to a person’s search query.
This way, when you type in a keyword into Google’s search bar, it will provide you with more accurate long-tail keywords so that your website or blog post can obtain traffic from more optimized keywords.
The future of the digital marketing industry
The future digital marketing industry is not all that scary. Well, it might be a little scary to be unable to keep up with ever-changing trends, but digital marketing has come a long way.
Now that digital marketing is becoming more complicated and digital businesses are growing, and digital marketers have to go back to the basics of managing their digital platforms.
Finding ways to create an engaging experience without overwhelming your digital audience by integrating digital technologies is much more important than ever before.
Successfully utilizing digital marketing strategies in the future will require using strategy instead of just relying on automation or guesswork.
How do I hire a digital marketing agency?
As digital marketing becomes more and more essential, digital marketers are becoming a hot commodity. It can be hard to know whom to hire and what digital marketing services they offer.
The following sections will discuss the best digital channels to use for digital marketing, how to find digital marketers, and how to evaluate digital marketing agencies before you hire them.
How do I find digital marketers?
Go to digital marketing agencies that practice what they preach. The agency should show you what they can do for you. This is not a full-blown plan but what you are paying for and what to expect in payback.
There are many ways that you can find digital marketers. You can look at other people’s websites to see who designed them or consult other businesses in your area for recommendations.
The internet has made finding potential digital marketers very easy. Researching the company before you commit is important because you want an agency that will deliver quality work and get the results you’re looking for.
How do I evaluate digital marketing agencies?
When evaluating digital marketers, see what digital marketing campaigns they’ve run before and which digital channels they use. Also, check out their digital advertising campaigns on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Finally, if you’re hiring a digital agency specializing in SEO or digital website design, ask them about the keywords that drive traffic to their client websites. Keep these questions in mind when evaluating digital marketers:
- Have they ever managed a digital marketing campaign similar to what you need?
- What is your expected outcome?
- Which digital channels do they specialize in?
- How much money have their digital marketing campaigns made for other companies?
- If they can’t provide proof of success, you may want to run from them.
Conclusion and digital marketing 101
If digital marketing is not your strong suit and you’re looking to hire a digital agency, make sure they have experience in the digital marketing industry.
Ask them about their previous work and what digital channels they specialize in before making any commitments or signing contracts. You should also look for an agency that has been successful with other clients- it may be difficult to find success on your own!
As digital marketing grows, digital marketers are becoming lucrative. If you’re looking to hire a digital marketer, ensure they have experience in the digital marketing industry and can prove success (no matter how small).
Other than that, it’s important to choose digital marketers specializing in digital channels like email marketing or SEO.
General FAQs about digital marketing 101
What are digital marketing strategies most effective for small business owners?
Understanding digital marketing is the key to marketing your business. Digital marketing strategies are about reaching potential customers through digital channels like email and text messages; digital advertising; digital media, like websites and social networks; digital video games; customer relationship management programs (CRM), content creation, conversion optimization (more keywords!), search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and web development.
What is content marketing, and how does it work best in digital media?
Content marketing works best in digital media because digital content has become faster, cheaper, and easier to produce. Here’s an analogy: In traditional marketing, one company might spend a million dollars on a 30-second commercial during the big game—but with digital advertising, you can instantly upload a two-minute video that thousands will see of people who would never have been exposed to it before.
Is there an easier way to manage digital campaigns than hiring an in-house marketing department?
This is a tougher question than it may seem. The answer depends on what digital marketing you’re talking about and what your digital marketing skillset is like. For digital campaigns outside of your expertise, an agency can create campaigns for you at a lower cost because they specialize in the areas that digital campaigns require. If you’d like to learn SEO or PPC advertising yourself, but it may send your digital campaign into multiple directions and lessen its effectiveness by spreading it thin among different types of marketing activities.
How do I choose between SEO or PPC advertising when running a digital marketing campaign?
Ultimately, it depends on what digital marketing strategy is outside of your expertise. For example, if you’re a digital marketing novice and want to learn SEO strategies, that should be your focus. You can also hire an agency specializing in digital media for small businesses, and the one you choose will decide which tactics are best for your campaign.
