What’s a good digital marketing strategy for beginners? There’s lots of digital marketing “tactics” you can use. But a good digital marketing “strategy” is to incorporate a number of tactics which bring in customers to your business. You can use paid marketing strategies or free strategies, or a combination of the two. But before you even start with a tactic or strategy, it’s a good idea to identify your target audience. The target audience persona is a good place to start here.
Once you start advertising, or “marketing” online, you have access to a global audience. Most of that audience isn’t interested in what you have to offer. So to save budget, time and effort, it’s vital to understand who will be most interested in your products and services.
The thin “slice” of the online marketplace who is most likely to buy from you is your target audience or customer avatar. The “customer avatar” is very specific to your particular business. Once you understand who this is, you can target your marketing materials towards a smaller section of the online marketplace. These people are much more likely to be interested in your business.
Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – A Website
A website is always a good place to start if you haven’t already got one. You can even build a niche website which is more targeted towards your customer avatar. A niche website (built in a certain way) can give you free traffic from the search engines much more quickly. Checkout my blog post on affordable search engine ranking.
Once you have a website you can build more and more content on it to attract more traffic for free from the search engines. One tactic which bloggers use is to find low competition long tail keywords. Build content for those keywords targeting your customer avatar through blogging.
Over time and with some useful content you should find visitors coming to your site from the search engines: Google, Duckduckgo.com, Bing etc.
Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Google Business Listing
Google offer a free business listing too which is used for locally based businesses. So if you have a physical address which you can prove is yours, you can add a listing. This is definitely worth doing because it allows you to send free traffic to your website.
You’ll find local business listings usually at the very top of Google search page. Here’s what came up with a search for local shoe shops in my local area:
Besides the paid listings at the very top, Google “places” listings often rank very highly in the search engine results pages (SERPS). So if you have a locally based business this is a no-brainer! Get one, it’s free. Here’s the link for creating a Google My Business listing.
Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Paid Ads
You can also run some paid advertising using platforms such as Bing (Microsoft) or Google Adwords. Both these platforms allow you to target your advertising specifically to searches which match your customer avatar criteria. Use only searches which are relevant for your business and choose a budget your can easily afford.
You can run very low cost advertising campaigns for less than $1 a day while you’re learning. Be careful not to spend money on advertising to people who don’t fall into your target market, which is easily done. You can quickly burn through your marketing budget, and waste clicks on people who aren’t a good fit for you. Start with a small budget while you’re learning.
Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – A Facebook Page
Anyone can create a free Facebook Page for their business and drive traffic to it from Facebook. This can be done through sharing of your blog posts, paying for your posts to be boosted and asking friends to like your page. You can also get found organically if you name your page well. Choose good keywords to name your page, relevant for what a potential customer might look for. As you improve your page you can add this to a list of sources of website traffic.
To create a Facebook page, head to your Facebook and use the tab on the left drop down menu.
Fill out the fields and build your page filling in all the information required:
Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Email Marketing
Email marketing is definitely a good idea to grow your business. Offer some benefit driven giveaway on your website, such as a free ebook. To access your giveaway, website visitors opt in to your email list. As you build your subscriber list, you can automate messages to build trust with them and showcase your business services and products.
A good email follow up series helps subscribers with a specific problem they might have and also leads them to your products. On a website, a visitor will leave within a few minutes so getting them onto your list is great for business. Once on your email list you can keep in touch with them indefinitely, so long as they maintain their subscription.
Retargeting Your Website Visitors
Retargeting your website visitors can be done fairly cheaply and on a budget you choose. This works by following your website visitors off your site and advertising to them directly on another website which has advertising enabled.
You can set up a retargeting campaign using an advertising platform such as Microsoft Ads or Google Adwords, Facebook or YouTube. Place some code on your website which allows you to collect data from your visitors. Then build a “custom audience” which targets only those people who have already interacted with your website.
Retargeting is a great tactic because it’s cheap and your visitors are super targeted because they have already shown an interest in your business.
Collecting Leads Directly From A Landing Page
A website is good for free traffic, especially if you’re prepared to build some quality content which targets your specific customer avatar. However, another way to advertise your business is through email marketing. The fastest and best way to build up an email list is through the use of landing pages. Why use landing pages? On a website, there’s lots of distraction.
Visitors can browse around to their heart’s content. But a landing page is designed specifically to collect a visitor’s email address. So particularly if you’re using paid advertising, landing pages are better because you can optimise them for performance. When you’re paying for traffic, you want to make the most of it.
Once you capture an email address, the lead is more likely to turn into a sale than a random website visitor who leaves after a few minutes, never to return! Landing pages are super fast and built to give you the lowest possible cost of lead. When you test and measure landing pages they can help you build a large email list very quickly, which is used to advertise your business.
Running A YouTube Ad
YouTube can be used in a couple of ways. You can either build a channel of videos are drive traffic organically, which takes some time. Or create a single video and use it to run an advert, sending people to your landing page.
Either way, YouTube is another potential source of traffic for your business. So it’s worth uploading videos on a regular basis, to build a catalogue of content to attract your target audience. This can be done in the same way as with blogging, only with video content instead.
Summary
So there’s a few tactics you can employ to build your business up using digital marketing. Ideally stick with a tactic for a while until you’ve mastered it. Then move on and build another one. Depending on your marketing budget and available time, you may want to select the cheaper marketing methods first, such as blogging and using Google My Business for a free business listing. Once you have built some free infrastructure into your business, you can move on to using some paid advertising too if you like.
Free marketing methods tend to be slower than through using paid advertising. Organic marketing such as blogging can take some time before you see the fruits of your efforts. So if you don’t have the time, using paid ads and build an email list.
For more information on online marketing and building an online business from scratch, checkout this video.
