The Beginners Guide to Digital Marketing
As a digital marketing training academy and agency, we know how difficult it is for beginners to understand what digital marketing is and how it works.
That’s why we created this guide to help you learn the basics of digital marketing and get guidance on how to start using digital marketing to promote your business or website online.
The digital marketing guide was prepared by an experienced digital marketer and trainer and will teach you in simple words, not only the theoretical part of online marketing but how to use it in practice and get real, measurable results.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a form of marketing for promoting and selling products or services on the Internet. It’s the process of leveraging different online marketing channels like search engines, social media networks, and email to reach your target audience.
Through digital marketing, you can find people interested in your offering, interact with them, and build trust with your brand.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
Before we get into the specifics of digital marketing, let’s take a closer look at the most important benefits of digital marketing.
Digital marketing can help businesses reach a wider online audience and increase visibility more cost-effectively than traditional marketing methods.
It’s a great way to improve customer engagement and loyalty. Businesses can build stronger relationships with their audience by providing customers with personalized content and targeted messaging.
And with the flexibility of digital marketing, businesses can quickly adapt to changing market conditions or customer needs, giving them a competitive edge in their industry.
With the right tools and strategies, digital marketing allows businesses to connect with customers worldwide, expanding their reach beyond their local market.
Digital marketing is the only way today to grow a business by connecting with potential customers in the places where they spend most of their time.
Read the following guide to learn more about how digital marketing can benefit your business.
How Digital Marketing Works?
Digital marketing works by creating campaigns that have a specific goal. This can be to increase brand awareness, get more traffic to your website, make more sales, get more followers on social media, get more likes, etc.
Here is a brief overview of the steps involved in launching a digital marketing campaign:
1. Define your target audience: Identify your ideal customer and their needs and preferences. Once you clearly understand your audience, you can use various channels to promote your products or services.
2. Set your marketing goals: Determine what you want to achieve with your campaigns, such as an increase in website traffic, more leads, or higher sales.
3. Choose your digital marketing channels: Select the channels that are most relevant to your audience and goals, such as social media, email, SEO, or PPC advertising.
4. Create your content: Create engaging, informative, and relevant content to get the attention of your target audience.
5. Launch your campaign: Plan and execute your campaign, including creating ads, publishing content, and managing social media channels.
6. Monitor and measure your results: Track your campaign performance using analytics tools and adjust your strategy accordingly. To measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns, you can track metrics such as website traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, and sales.
7. Refine your strategy: Continuously analyze your results and refine your strategy to improve your campaign's effectiveness.
To learn more about digital marketing campaigns and how they work, read the following guides.
Types of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is not a single discipline but a combination of different types that work together in campaigns to achieve specific goals. The most important are:
- Website Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- PPC Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
Website Marketing
A website is the focal point of all digital marketing campaigns. By itself, it is a very powerful channel, but it’s also the medium to execute most of the other online marketing campaigns.
Your website should represent your brand, product, and services in the best possible way. It should be fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to use.
Once you have a website, your next step is to develop a digital marketing strategy to promote your website and content to get more traffic and customers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO will help you optimize your website and content to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This will give you a great opportunity to reach your target audience while searching for information, products, and services related to your offerings.
SEO can be used in a digital marketing campaign to drive organic traffic to your website, increase conversions, and increase brand awareness.
SEO has a number of sub-processes. The main ones are:
PPC Marketing
PPC or Pay-Per-Click marketing is a marketing technique for displaying paying ads to your target audience on search engines, social media platforms, or other websites.
The benefits of PPC marketing include quick results, increased brand exposure, and precise targeting. PPC can be used in a digital marketing campaign to drive traffic to your website, generate leads, and increase sales.
You can set up PPC campaigns on Google, Bing, Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest, or Facebook and show your ads to people searching for terms related to your products or services.
PPC campaigns can segment users based on their demographic characteristics (age, gender, etc) or even their particular interests or location. Every time a user clicks on your ads, you pay a fee to the provider (and thus the term pay per click).
PPC Campaigns and SEO make up what is known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
A good way to get started with PPC marketing is to learn how Google Ads works, which is the most popular PPC platform. With Google Ads, you can show your ads to people searching Google, YouTube, Gmail, other Google products (such as Google Maps), and websites participating in the Google Adsense program.
Read our step-by-step guide below for more information on how to get started with Google Ads.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable, informative, and engaging content with your target audience.
Content marketing can be used in a digital marketing campaign to educate and engage with your target audience, build trust, and establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
The main content marketing types are:
- Blogs
- eBooks
- Online Courses
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Webinars
Read the guide below to learn more about content marketing and how to use it to fuel your digital marketing campaigns with good, high-quality content.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the most important digital marketing channels. It’s the process of promoting your brand, products, or services on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Social media marketing can be used in a digital marketing campaign to connect with your target audience, build a community around your brand, and drive website traffic.
Click the link below to get started with social media marketing.
Email Marketing
Despite the dominance of social media networks, email marketing is still one of the most effective channels for making sales online. Many people confuse email marketing with the hundreds of spam email messages we all receive per day, but that’s not what email marketing is all about.
When planned carefully and with the goal of not spanning people with unwanted email messages, email marketing can be used in a digital marketing campaign to nurture leads, promote products, and improve customer retention.
Email marketing is the medium to get in touch with your potential customers or the people interested in your brand, and this entails that these people want to hear from you and you are not hijacking their inboxes.
To get started with email marketing, use our beginner's guide.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing that has grown considerably with Internet usage. Affiliate marketing can be used in a digital marketing campaign in two ways.
The first way is partnering with other businesses or individuals to promote your products or services in exchange for a commission. This practically means more sales of your products and more exposure for your brand. Your affiliates can drive more sales, become the best representatives of your brand, and positively influence other people to buy or connect with your company.
The second way is by selling other businesses' products through your website and earning a commission for each sale. In other words, you can utilize your traffic and users’ trust to make money selling other products.
For practical examples of how affiliate marketing works and instructions on how to get started, visit our comprehensive affiliate guide.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is a relatively new digital marketing concept, but it has become so popular that you cannot ignore it. It involves creating and sharing video content on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram to promote a brand, product, or service.
Video platforms get millions of visits from users watching videos before they make a buying decision, to learn something, or just to relax.
The best way to take advantage of video marketing is to integrate video content into your SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing campaigns.
YouTube is the most effective platform to start a video marketing campaign, and you'll get all the details in our step-by-step guide.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is another digital channel to reach customers on mobile devices. The most commonly used mobile marketing types are:
SMS Marketing: Sending marketing messages to mobile phone users.
Mobile Apps: You can reach customers in different mobile app stores, such as Google Play or Apple App Store, by creating a mobile app for your business. You can promote your apps through paid advertising or other methods (cross-app promotions, etc.) so that more users can find and install them.
Note: Mobile marketing is not the same as having a mobile-friendly version of your website. Having a mobile-friendly website is a must for all digital marketing types.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a type of digital marketing where you hire influencers to promote or recommend your products or services to their online audience.
Influencer marketing works because of the high trust specific influencers have developed with their following.
You can use influencer marketing to make more sales and boost brand awareness. To get started with influencer marketing, read our beginner's guide.
Digital Marketing Roadmap For Beginners
For beginners, a digital marketing learning roadmap is the fastest way to get into digital marketing. Here are the four steps to follow:
- Learn the theory of Digital Marketing
- Enroll in a course to master advanced topics
- Gain practical experience
- Get an entry-level job
1. Learn the theory of digital marketing.
The first step is to learn the theory of digital marketing. Digital marketing guides like this one are great for beginners. You should learn how the different types of digital marketing work and how to launch digital marketing campaigns.
2. Enroll in a course to master advanced topics.
Then, you can jump into a course to master advanced concepts and get a holistic view of digital marketing. Some courses have quizzes and exams that will put your knowledge to the test and ensure that you understand the different concepts well.
3. Gain practical experience.
The third step is to gain practical experience. You can achieve this by working on your own web properties (website, social media accounts, etc.). Start a website if you don't have one and try to rank it to the top positions of Google for your target keywords. Create a social media channel (on your favorite platform) and work on increasing your followers and exposure.
4. Get an entry-level job.
The last step is to get real working experience by joining an established digital marketing team. There are hundreds of entry-level digital marketing jobs you can apply for and get a true understanding of digital marketing in real-life scenarios.
Going from novice to pro will take time and require much effort, but nothing stops you from entering this exciting industry.
You don’t even need a degree or prior experience. Our guides below will guide you through the process step-by-step.
Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing strategy is like a roadmap that helps businesses to reach their customers online. It's a plan that outlines the steps a business can take to connect with people using the internet.
A digital marketing strategy is essential because it ensures that a business uses the right tools and techniques to meet its goals. The person responsible for creating and executing this strategy is called the digital marketing manager.
The digital marketing manager works with their team to ensure that everything they do online fits into the plan and helps the business achieve its goals.
Digital Marketing Strategy Example
To help you understand how businesses can take advantage of digital marketing, let's see how an online store selling handmade jewelry can find customers interested in their unique and beautiful products.
Watch the video to learn how to create a winning digital marketing strategy.
Here's an example of a digital marketing strategy they could use:
Create a website: The first step is to create a website to showcase its products and make it easy for potential customers to learn more about them. The website should be mobile friendly, fast, have clear product images, adequate product descriptions, and an easy checkout process.
Create a content marketing strategy: The second step they can take is creating blog posts, social media posts, and other jewelry-related content (like nice infographics). They can create content to showcase their products and provide helpful information about jewelry.
For example, blog posts about choosing the best metal for your ring or blogs about the best practices for cleaning handmade jewelry. The overall goals are to:
- Create content that can help attract potential customers interested in the same topics.
- Establish the business as an authority in the handmade jewelry business.
Start an SEO Campaign:
The third step is to use Search Engine Optimization. The business can optimize its website for search engines, so that when people search for keywords related to their jewelry, they appear high in the search results.
This is not an easy process; it will take a lot of time and work, but it's the best way to grow an online business in the long term.
When you manage to get to the top positions of Google for your preferred keywords, you'll start making sales by keeping your advertising costs low, a combination that can generate a profitable business with all the additional benefits.
Start a Google Ads Campaign: The next step is to run paid ads on Google, while waiting for SEO to work. The business can run targeted ads on Google search, other Google products (such as Gmail and Google Discover), and third-party websites to attract potential customers interested in their products.
By creating attractive product ads, the company can show its products by targeting people based on what they search on Google and the websites they visit.
Promote products on social media: In parallel to Google Ads, the business can create social media accounts and post images and descriptions of their jewelry. They can also use social media advertising to target specific demographics and interests.
Email marketing campaigns: When their audience and traffic increase, they can start collecting email addresses from potential customers and send them targeted email campaigns with special offers and discounts to help them convert.
Invest in video marketing: As an additional step, and since their products are visual, they can create videos showcasing their jewelry and how they are made. These videos can be shared on social media and the business's website to attract potential customers.
What you've read above is one simple example of how a business can use various digital marketing techniques to increase its online visibility and get more eyeballs for its products.
For more examples and step-by-step instructions, read the strategy guides below.
Digital Marketing Additional Resources
Use the following resources to learn more about the different aspects of digital marketing.
