How to Get Started With Digital Marketing

With many businesses pivoting to online solutions due to Covid-19, it’s a great time to be a digital marketer. Tech giants like Facebook and Google want to promote their platforms, so no degree is needed as they offer free online courses and certificates that are respected. All you need is an internet connection and a laptop, and then you’re ready to go!

The Beauty Of Digital Marketing

In the past, many businesses were reluctant to spend money on marketing and advertising, feeling that three was no way to know if it was luck or the magazine ads that were increasing sales. There is also, often a lag between your marketing efforts and sales, as it takes time to build a relationship and trust with your customers and clients. This is the beauty of digital marketing and why the industry is booming. Now, you can see where every penny of your marketing budget goes, you can see who has seen your ad afterward and learn about what they did after seeing your ad. Did they leave your website immediately? Why did they do that? Maybe they aren’t interested in your product? Maybe they are but your website isn’t great? maybe they will come back later? How long did they spend on your website? If they were there for some time and got all the way to checkout, maybe your price is too high?

These are just a few questions you can ask, which you can later answer by looking at the user data and running tests. You can obviously track if someone busy with your product or service, meaning that you know how much you need to spend on your digital marketing to make a sale. When most business managers find out that, for some tools, they only pay when someone clicks on their ad (called Pay Per Click (PPC) ) they can’t believe it. If you do your job well, you can ensure that the supermajority of the clicks is from people who buy the product, making each dollar of your marketing budget more profitable. 

Read Up On Marketing And Advertising Basics

Before you dive into a Google Ads course or managing someone’s Twitter business account, read up on the basics of marketing and advertising. There are decades of research on how to sell products and services to people, and how clever advertisers have capitalized on human biases to buy things. You definitely don’t need to get a degree, however, having a basic grasp is going to ensure your advertising budgets are not completely wasted and help you to reduce the number of bad decisions. For those who have a firm grasp of marketing and advertising, it is still going to be worth reading a current book or following one of the current experts to keep your finger on the pulse in this high paced industry. There is a wealth of online courses out there, most are very cheap or even free. The professionals from Marketer Stack say that this information has been curated and vetted from the latest marketing tools, platforms, and information. If reading isn’t your preferred learning method, there are also plenty of high-quality podcasts and YouTube channels that cover the basics and bring you up to speed with the industry.

Get To Know The Digital Tools

Websites, landing pages, and social media pages are foundational to digital marketing campaigns – they are the endpoints where your customer makes a sale, a booking, or leaves you their contact information. A sale is usually referred to as a conversion and contact information is usually referred to as a lead. Once you have a website or landing page set up, you need to get people to visit it. This is where search engines and social networks come in.

Learn how search engine marketing and social media marketing works, then choose the most popular platforms to get started with – Google and Facebook. Nearly everyone has a Facebook profile and using Google when they want to find out information. When people want to find a business, they search for it on Google. You can get a business to feature at the top of the Google search results by enlisting the help of a Google ads agency. If you want an ad to be shown to a specific target market, you can use Facebook ads. For example, you could have a business that sells sports shoes shown to appear on Facebook profiles that are interesting in various sports or outdoor activities.

There are many more platforms out there, such as YouTube, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter, Bing, and Reddit, but starting with the 2 most common giants is going to allow you to show your already ads to most of the world, and start your digital marketing journey quickly. Hopefully, you now have an idea of why there is such a craze over digital marketing, and you know how to get up to speed quickly by understanding the importance of the website, and the tools to target customers and direct them to the website.