How to Begin Digital Marketing the Right Way will cover how to get started doing effective digital marketing and touch on the fundamentals of business and marketing.
The goal of this article is for you to better understand what digital marketing is, how to implement effective digital marketing, and to empower you to take knowledgeable digital marketing action.
Thanks for being here. Let’s jump right in starting your digital marketing program.
Digital Marketing Made Easy for You to Get Going or Do Better
So you want to know more about this thing called digital marketing. Then you want to do it, and do it well.
What is Digital Marketing?
Right off let’s get this one out of the way. What is digital marketing?
Everyone thinks they know what marketing is, advertising and selling stuff.
And everyone thinks they know what digital marketing must be therefore, selling stuff electronically, or digitally.
But saying ‘advertising and selling stuff through digital media’ leaves you a bit short.
Effective digital marketing is sharing your offer to the right people at the right time via any medium with a digital component. Simple. But nuanced. Timing is everything.
You may already be doing digital marketing and not really know if it’s doing anything.
You may not be doing digital marketing and don’t know where to start.
Now you have the opportunity to learn how to get started the right way.
What Good is Digital Marketing?
So the bennies you get from digital marketing boil down to growth. Reach. Revenue. Engagement. All growing. All scalable.
It scales up. All of that adds up to higher profit too, when properly executed.
Increase Growth
Here’s how we put it on the home page:
Increase reach, revenue and engagement by implementing your custom digital marketing plan with a modernized mobile friendly website at its center.
Get growth by getting a modernized web presence with a digital marketing plan promoting your presence. Make the plan. Work the plan.
Increase Reach
Increasing your reach refers to how far and wide your offer is shared. This involves everything from email marketing, to the postal service, to social media. Increasing your reach is easy.
You just have to make the right plan for your business, and then work the plan. Track results. Adjust. Repeat.
Increase Revenue
Effective digital marketing will grow your revenue. How? By communicating your irresistible offer to the right people at the right time. That means the people who need you will meet you, love you, and accept your offer for help.
Increase Engagement
Engagement is the key. The glue that binds the conversation together. Your service to your customer. Engaging your prospects is critical to success. All the reach in the world won’t increase revenue without compelling engagement. So why didn’t we say reach, engagement and revenue and in that order? Doesn’t flow as well.
Point being, reach and engagement ultimately drive revenue.
Is Digital Marketing for You? Yes
If you are still here, than you are definitely looking to begin digital marketing the right way.
Now let’s take a brief look at business and marketing overall as promised.
Business Is Finding & Helping People Who Need Your Help
If you are in business then you probably know that business is really just filling a need or solving a problem in exchange for the coin of the realm or other means of compensation.
You may not have thought of business as helping people though. It’s not about you. It’s about them. Good. You may have just changed your perspective on being in business.
If you aren’t in business, then you should know, you actually are in business.
Business is sharing.
Business is service.
Both those things are a fundamental part of life.
So these principles apply to life in general. Or, really, life in general applies to business! So stop thinking there is a difference between ‘business’ and ‘personal’.
Sharing your offer with people involves an exchange. This is known as commerce. Exchanging something for something. Quid Pro Quo.
Commerce is a Conscious Exchange
Commerce is everywhere. Even breathing could be seen as a form of exchange.
Without getting philosophical though, there are mandatory basics to making an offering to the marketplace.
- You must have a genuine desire to help people.
- You must have an irresistible offering, a product or service that helps people.
- You must have a market, as in people who need and want that help, and have the means to acquire that help.
- You must know where they are, go to them and offer your help.
- You must be willing to spend and do whatever it takes to earn and keep customers.
Are you still here? Great! Moving forward.
Ripoffs Are Unconscious Exchange
Marketing is too often associated with trickery. Lose that thought. Banish that consciousness. You aren’t a ripoff. You aren’t a hustler. You serve your customer. You serve humanity.
Snake oil is history. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make her drink. Better is offering water to the thirsty where they are. They just might drink.
You are helping people who need your help. You go to them. Your job is not to convince, but to communicate you have their solution.
If you don’t have an irresistible product and a marketplace full of qualified buyers then business is going to be very disappointing for you.
So get one. Change up. Don’t waste energy trying to help when no one needs your help.
Marketing is Sharing Your Offer
Communicating the What Why and How of your offer is the core of marketing. What They Get. Why They Want Yours. How They Get Yours.
To market effectively you must have an advertising or marketing budget. Your budget can be time, energy, money, volunteers, whatever you bring to bear. This is your means forward.
For effective digital marketing, you must have a digital component to your marketing plan or budget.
You Must Be Hungry
This bears its own text block. There is a measure of intensity involved. If you are hungry enough to be reading this, then you probably have that intensity.
In other words, you have to want it. You have to want it BAD.
You have to want to reach out and help more people by sharing your awesome product offer with them.
You have to want to scale and grow your business for real high-intensity success helping more and more people.
So your product, your promotion, and your hunger, will help more people faster. That means you make you more money faster with digital marketing.
Digital Marketing is Digital Sharing
This was covered above, effective digital marketing is sharing your offer to the right people at the right time via any medium with a digital component. So let’s move on to how to implement effective digital marketing.
Digital Marketing Requires Means Motive & Opportunity
The basic requirements of digital marketing are the same as marketing. Communicate the What, Why and How.
The only difference is the medium. Digital Marketing uses digital or electronic media somewhere in the chain of events. Email. The Internet. Social Media. Text or SMS. Movies. TV. Radio. Streaming Media. Software. Mobile Apps. Phone. Anything carried digitally.
So as in marketing, you have to have the means, the drive and the arena to play in, the opportunity. The Internet and other electronic media provides and incredible opportunity to market and probably why you are reading this.
Email Web Traffic Social Local: Your Steps to Digital Marketing Success
Digital marketing can be broken down into five practices. This can help you focus your efforts.
All of these practices overlap each other. Many more practices could be broken out on their own. Keeping it simple helps getting started.
- Email Marketing
- Web Marketing
- Traffic Generation
- Social Media
- Local Brand Building
Email Marketing
Email marketing is permission marketing via email. Spam doesn’t count. Spam isn’t email marketing.
That’s like saying stealing is having a job. Sure, philosophically that is one perspective. But in practical terms, not so much.
So to elaborate, you get permission from the people who need their help to email them.
This is a conversation.
You visit with them regularly via email. They allow you to. After you’ve been talking a while, you remind them how you can help.
You do this by offering great value to them in exchange for their email address and permission to converse. This is accomplished via the ‘signup’ form being offered in various ways. You’ve undoubtedly been inundated with subscription offers.
Web Marketing
This is a term that usually means marketing through the world wide web. Your web site is the center. This can be called webcentric.
Web marketing can also be seen as marketing via the interconnected internet. The digital web. The web of life.
Traffic Generation
Social Media
Local Brand Building
Wash Rinse Repeat
Find out what works or helps the most. Do more of that. Keep moving forward. Keep trying new things.
Let us show you how.