So what is digital marketing? Digital marketing generally refers to online advertising; just like traditional advertising but using digital systems and technology. So it pretty much refers to any digital means to advertise – blogging, pay per click advertising, video, social media, email marketing and so on.
Many digital marketers use pay per click advertising. With pay per click or direct marketing, you get instant feedback as a marketer. You can see quite quickly where clicks have come from and whether a click resulted in the preferred action or not. This feedback is super important for marketers who are testing advertising. It lets them know how online visitors respond to their advertising in real time!
For a small business with a limited advertising budget, the idea of spending huge amounts on building a brand is not the goal. It’s not even practical for most small startups. Instead, small business owners can use pay per click advertising to learn how to acquire customers for the minimum cost.
When they figure this out, adverts can be left running indefinitely and scaled up because the business knows that it’s profitable.
Benefits Of Digital Marketing
This is one of the main benefits of digital marketing. The ability to test and measure advertising and track sales. With a few marketing campaigns running simultaneously, you can acquire customers from a number of them. By using tracking on each one, you can effectively determine the most profitable advertising campaign through a process of testing and measuring (trial and error).
Many beginner marketers will simply run an advert which fails to bring in any new customers. They declare that “it doesn’t work” and quit! But this is a big mistake and just because one advertising campaign doesn’t work, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work as a strategy. In fact, once you hit upon a campaign which brings in business, you can effectively spend $1 to make $2 (or even more).
Depending on your business model, some marketers will spend $1 and make $4. Once in this position, they can increase their marketing budget steadily to the point where they spend $10,000 and make $40,000! It can ultimately allow you to create an autopilot money making system – especially if you’re selling other people’s products using the affiliate marketing business model.
Although in the first instance, spending money on marketing can seem difficult and wasteful, especially if it doesn’t bring in customers initially, if you look at it as an investment rather than “burning through budget”, you’re in a better mindset for long term growth.
Digital Marketing Strategies
There’s other marketing strategies you can use as a marketer too. Although paid marketing is the fastest and most easily scalable method, you can also create content to attract an audience online. SEO – or search engine optimisation is one of the most popular ways to attract website traffic for free. You can build content on a website like this one, or create video content and upload to a platform such as YouTube or TikTok.
Social media platforms are another useful tool for marketers and there’s lots of them. The most popular ones are Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter but there’s many more. See unpaid social media marketing for more on this topic.
Facebook can be use to attract an audience through the use of groups, for example. Find people in your niche by joining groups and interacting with them. You can set up your social media profiles to attract visitors to your website.
Your Customer “Avatar”
One of the most important things to understand as a digital marketer is your customer avatar or target audience. The target audience refers to the small slither, or cross-section of the online marketplace who is most likely to be interested in your products/services.
With a global audience at your fingertips, it’s important to “zone” in on the people who actually matter to your business. Most online visitors won’t be interested in what you have to offer. But many will, and it’s these people you need to understand best to build your business through online marketing.
Where do your people hang out online? What do they search for? Where do they live? How old are they? The more specific you can get about your perfect customer avatar, the easier it will be talking to them with your marketing messages and targeting your advertising towards them specifically.
Summary
What is digital marketing? Digital marketing is online advertising using digital means. Online marketers can test and measure advertising with a small budget until they find a profitable campaign. This campaign, once it’s proved itself can become a globally scalable advertisement which bings in thousands of customers for a business.
Content marketing too can work very well for businesses. With content, it can take a little longer to get traction. But ultimately a piece of content online can stick around for decades. If that content gets traction, either through being ranked on the search engines or being shared virally, it can have dramatic implications for a business.
See also digital marketing mentors for more information.
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