What Is Digital Marketing And How To Start As A Beginner?
Internet advancement and the power of online consumers have dramatically altered the practice of today’s business world. It is important for anyone who seeks success in a dynamic business environment to learn how to succeed in this digital revolution. Let’s go to the topics, what is digital marketing and how to start as a beginner?
What is Marketing?
Marketing is about understanding and meeting your clients’ needs and delivering customer satisfaction at a profit. The ultimate goal is to attract customers by promising superior value and keep and grow customers to deliver satisfaction through the exchange process with a range of activities such as public relations, sales promotion, social media, advertising, pricing, and distribution.
The core concepts of marketing include Needs, Wants, and Demands.
- Needs – a state of felt deprivation including physical, social and individual needs such as hunger, thirsty.
- Wants – A form that a human need takes as shaped by culture and individual personality such as bread, water, food.
- Demands – human want that back by purchasing power.
As a digital marketer, it is important to understand the customer’s needs, wants and demands to develop our powerful marketing strategy.
So, What Is Digital marketing?
Digital marketing is also known as internet marketing, web marketing, i-marketing, online marketing or e-marketing. It is an all-inclusive term for marketing products and/or services online by using the Internet, social mobile technology or social media to marketing products or services to the targeted customers and encourages site visitors to take action. To succeed in digital marketing, you need to have at least a few of the following digital marketing techniques:
– search engine optimization (SEO)
– search engine marketing (SEM),
– email marketing,
– viral marketing,
– blogging,
– micro blogging,
– podcasting,
– vodcasting,
– photo and video sharing,
– social networking.
Digital Marketing Tools
Here are the common lists of marketing tools that we used for digital marketing:
– WordPress, Blogger (Website Building)
– Twitter (Microblogging)
– Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest (social networking).
– Second Life (virtual worlds).
– Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo (photo and video sharing).
– Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools, SEO Web Page Analyzer (monitoring results).
– AWebers, MailChimp, SendInBlue, ClickFunnels (E-mail marketing)
– Schema Creator (Customise how the website appear in the search result)
So How To Start Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing allows small businesses to compete with large corporations by promoting products or services on the Internet. Although there is a learning curve to understand the mechanics of different techniques and tools, the payback curve is huge when you seeing tangible financial benefits for your business. There are lots of successful stories for business performing digital marketing.
To start digital marketing, you need to decide the following:
- How does digital marketing fit within your overall marketing plan or budget?
- How much time can you allocate for digital marketing?
- What do you want to achieve through digital marketing?
- What kinds of digital marketing do you want to do?
- Do you have the necessary tools and do you know where you can get those tools to maximum the digital marketing results?
- What’s the likely payback – and when?
After you think about these questions, you can start applying the knowledge into practice. You may start by using Twitter and Facebook. If you have more time, you can set up a blog or website by using WordPress.
If you are not a technical person, you can use the website builder from GoDaddy, Wix, WordPress.com, Shopify, Weebly and so on. There are also online courses from Udemy and SkillSuccess that teach you how to set up WordPress. If you want to set up a website for affiliate marketing, you can go for Wealthy Affiliate whereas you can learn 2 core modules that cover how to set up WordPress and digital marketing skills as a free starter member.
Why Should You Do Digital Marketing?
There are many lucrative reasons why you should do digital marketing.
1. Digital Marketing is comparatively inexpensive for the target audience numbers involved than traditional marketing tools.
2. You can create instant campaigns to address hot topics without the needs of publishing in a magazine or newspaper.
3. You can use videos to demonstrate your products or services by uploading videos on Youtube, Facebook or embed them in your websites.
4. Digital Marketing can be highly personalized – you can set the advertisements on specific websites or use SMS to target individuals’ needs.
5. You can see exactly how many people opened your email newsletter when they open by using e-mail marketing monitoring tools and use the call to action to encourage their purchases.
6. You can measure and monitor the responses to ad campaigns with web monitoring tools.
Final Thoughts
Online marketers like us are constantly devising new internet marketing strategies to drive more traffic to our websites and make more sales. We know there are many great things in digital marketing. If you start putting it into practice and using the right tools to promote your business, you will see a growth in your business. Feel free to leave your comment and let me know what you think about digital marketing.