A Detailed Guide to Digital Marketing. Why, and How to Get Started in Online Marketing & Advertising
Updated: Apr 3, 2022
Marketing is always about reaching the right people in the right place at the right time.
“Digital Marketing is any form of marketing that exists online. This encompasses all digital marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, websites to connect with current and prospective customers.” Hubspot
So, digital marketing is basically advertising or promoting and selling products or services using digital channels such as search marketing, mobile applications, web applications, or any other digital channel or online marketing tactic.
With internet usage increasing every day, it’s no secret that people spend a lot of time with their smartphones and other electronic gadgets than anything else.
The other day one of my friends wanted to pay for TV and he said he needed my help. I wondered why he needed my helping paying for his decoder. But instead what he actually wanted my Credit Card so he could pay for NetFlix and watch movies from his smartphone and his Smart TV back home. Sounds Cool, right?
Internet usage has increased more than ever. In this short insight — it shows internet usage in the United States. How Americans spend more than 10 hours on the internet daily.
About 3-in-10 U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online -Pew Research
There were 3.40 million social media users in Uganda in January 2021 - Datareportal
Digital marketing is not so different from traditional marketing as in both there is a great need to develop a great relationship with your prospects or leads and customers.
If you think about the last time you were looking to buy something like maybe a new sneaker, or a nice restaurant or health care. In most cases, you will find that one of the first things you did was searching on the internet. Most commonly a google search or asking your friends for a recommendation.
The process your customer goes through from seeing your brand on the internet to buying is also known as the customer journey. More on that later.
This means most people learn about the products and services they purchase from the internet through product reviews and websites and that is one of the reasons you need to integrate digital marketing in your business or life regardless of what you sell — furniture, clothing, construction materials — your online presence is a necessity.
To learn more about the huge potential your business has with digital marketing and the unlimited opportunities available for you as an affiliate marketer, let’s take a look at these 7 types of digital marketing channels below.
7 Digital marketing categories you need to know.
Content Marketing (Keep your followers updated)
Social Media Marketing (Share content with followers and engage)
Search Engine Optimization (Rank your website high in search engines)
Pay-per-click advertising (Drive traffic through Google, Facebook ads…)
Affiliate Marketing (Sale for other companies and make a commission)
Email marketing (Follow up with your audience) Read this…
Search Engine Marketing (Search Visibility with both free and paid traffic)
1. Content Marketing (Keep your followers updated)
This is a broad digital marketing term. It is the practice and efforts of creating content assets such as blog posts, infographics, eBooks, video among other content types to increase awareness, drive more visitors to your website, and increase sales.
Now there is something very important you need to know if you want to begin a career in digital marketing or use content marketing. This also applies to any other type of marketing and that is, the 5 stages of the customer value journey.
Awareness — First of all, before someone buys from you, they need to know who you are and get to learn about you or your product in their first phase of research and recommendations from their friends. Things like social media marketing, content marketing, and digital advertising could help you increase your brand or company awareness.
Engagement — After a prospect (potential customer) gets to know about your existence, they still need more information about your business in order to increase their trust in you and your product. This is where engaging social media content comes in and email marketing for follow-up.
Convert — As long as your prospect moves through the first phases of the journey smoothly, they will begin to trust you and will want to invest more of their time and money with you which is referred to as conversion. A conversion could be a purchase or a sign-up or a call or whatever action you need your prospect to take on your social media page, mobile application, or website.
Excite — Now assuming your customer purchased a product from you, what next? The next step is to make sure you retain the customer and retaining a customer is not an easy thing to do. But you don’t want to have only one-time buyers either. So things like customer experience, and customer support via email marketing and content marketing could help you a lot in this stage.
Promote — So now you have a returning customer, one that has purchased your products or services several times. The next step is to nurture your loyal customer in a way that they will start talking about your business in a way that they become “passive promoters” only spreading the good news about your business or brand for free.
Other things you need to consider if you are going to be creating content with an intention of increasing website visitors or prospects (potential customer)are, using Cross-channel content-marketing and being clear with your intention on each channel.
Cross-channel means you create and distribute content on more than one channel but making sure each channel receives the appropriate content in the right context.
2. Social Media Marketing (Share engaging content with your followers and encourage them to get involved)
Let's move on to your favorite, social media marketing. This is a practice of promoting your company or brand using social media channels to help increase your brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate more leads (prospects) for your business.
There are different channels you can use in social media marketing including:
Website/blog
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
YouTube
Social media sure does take a lot of time and effort, but in the long run, it can deliver much cheaper and better results.
Luckily for you, there are many tools out there that can help you to speed up the content creation process and graphics. You can use tools like Canva for both graphics and video, Buffer, or Hootsuite to automate your posting by scheduling posts.
3. Search Engine Optimization (Rank your website higher in the search engine results pages)
This involves optimizing or rewriting your content to make the most out of the search engines by making it easy for your data to be retrieved when someone is searching for a term similar to your business keywords.
When we talk of search engines, we speak of traffic (Visitors to your website)
There are basically two different types of traffic, Free traffic which is also known as Organic traffic, and Paid traffic. I guess for everyone free traffic is always the goal, right?
Paid traffic is traffic that costs you money. Organic traffic on the other hand does not cost you money, but it still costs you time. Time to create videos or write your blog post.
4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (Drive traffic through Google and Facebook Ads)
Now you know what paid and organic traffic are.
So now, What is pay-per-click advertising? It is basically paid traffic. You pay to accomplish a specific goal. This goal can be to drive website traffic, to get more Facebook followers, tweet engagement, or even app downloads.
With pay-per-click advertising, you pay a publisher such as Google, or Facebook, or Bing among other publishers to show your Ads. Usually, you pay per ad clicked sometimes impression which means someone sees your ad.
5 Sources of Paid Traffic
Google — Most purchases begin with a google search. Which makes it a great place to place your ads. Ads are placed on a bid strategy — which means the highest bidder’s ads are shown.
Facebook — These include video ads, slideshows, ads in newsfeed, images… shown to people interested in your products or services.
YouTube — More like traditional television, ads are shown at the beginning, in-between, or at the end of videos. However, these ads are more targeted and more specific to certain audiences and preferences.
Twitter — You can put tweets into promotion mode for automatic boosting. Set-up your audience, specific goal, payment method and get started.
LinkedIn — Sponsored messages are sent directly to specific users based on their industry or profile preferences.
Of course, there are many things to consider while setting up your advertising campaigns like your offer, copy (copywriting/sales copy), images, or graphics but most importantly your targeting.
Ads Targeting is a wide term, to give you a tip;
Here are 3 types of traffic You Need to Know.
Hot Traffic — means people that don’t know you exist but they need your help.
Cold Traffic — People that heard about your company but not sure you might help them solve their problems. (People interested in your services)
Warm Traffic — People who know about you, maybe purchased from you and know you can solve their problems but still need some follow-up.
Measuring Success with Paid-Advertising/PPC (pay-per-click advertising) Metric terms to learn.
Click-through rate (CTR) — the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions. A higher click-through rate means more potential sales.
Cost Per 1,000 Impression (CPM) — especially for brand awareness. It means the amount it costs for your ads to be seen by a thousand people.
Cost Per Click (CPC) — the ads spend(advertising spend) divided by the number of clicks for an ad or campaign.
Cost Per Lead (CPL) — the ads spend divided by the number of leads
Cost of Acquisition Per Customer (CPA)— the ads spend divided by the number of customers gained.
5. Affiliate Marketing (Market or sale for other companies for a commission)
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. Wikipedia
You can read this Comprehensive guide to Affiliate marketing or learn everything you need to know about affiliate marketing in my *Free Affiliate marketing Course here.
In a nutshell, to get started you will need a sign up for an affiliate program, a platform to promote affiliate links (blog or YouTube channel, or social media channel) as long as you have enough audience that enjoys watching or reading your content.
When people click on your affiliate links and take action, you get paid.
ClickBank, CJ Affiliate, Impact Radius are some of the places to get your links.
6. Email Marketing (Follow-Up with Your Audience)
Do you still remember the customer value journey? Email is one thing that applies to every stage of the customer value journey. It will help you exponentially grow your business, that is if you know exactly how to use it.
Email marketing can be used for increasing your brand awareness and for growing your brand, engagement, customer acquisition, retention, increase direct sales, help with reactivation for re-curring payments, help recover abandoned carts for eCommerce website owners, generating traffic, and getting referrals, making it one of the most versatile tools any business owner or affiliate can use to grow their business.
For email marketing campaign tools check out Convert Kit, GetResponse, MailChimp, or ClickFunnels. Many more out there.
3 Common Types of Emails any Marketer needs to know
Transactional — especially used for customer services. For example, order confirmations, purchase receipts, shipping notices, etc.
Relational — especially for engaging subscribers and creating or nurturing a relationship with them. They include but not limited to New member welcome emails, event announcements or webinar confirmations, News, or blog articles.
Promotional —especially for generating sales. New product releases, Trial offers, sales announcements, promotional content are some examples.
Your bonus for email marketing are two unique terms, Broadcast and Triggered Emails. A broadcast email is one sent to a segment or part of your subscriber list or members while a Triggered email is one that is sent after a prospect or customer takes a specific action on your website or page.
7. Search Engine Marketing (Increasing your Visibility using both paid and organic traffic).
The simplest definition of search engine marketing (SEM) — is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Do you think Social media marketing takes effort? I think search engine marketing takes even much more effort. If done right, however, SEM will help you boost your website’s traffic and visitors’ trust as well as complementing your other digital marketing strategies/disciplines.
If for social media marketing it’s all about creating a relationship with your followers and nurturing that relationship, then for search engine marketing it’s all about creating a good relationship between your website, other websites, and the search engines.
You do this by linking to other authorities in your niche through your content and creating a relationship with them in a way that they link back to you. this in turn will let Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines learn that your website is trusted and it will increase your website traffic.
Search Engine Marketing involves:
Creating high-value and highly optimized content that people love and are ready to share with their friends.
2. Work on the technical side of your website — the page structure +navigation
3. Keep researching, revising, and updating your target keywords as your competitors are fighting to rank for the same.
Search Engine Marketing Terminologies
To get the best out of search engine marketing, make sure you know and understand these terms.
Intent — A person’s goal when typing a query (your target keyword) in a search engine. What are they looking for?
Channel— The digital home of the product your prospect or customer is looking for. The product may be on your e-commerce website/online store, Instagram shop, or your blog.
Metrics — How are you going to measure your success? Conversion-rate, backlinks, and other goals you need to track.
Conclusion
So that is it for you with this Getting Started in Digital Marketing guide.
To sum it up, Digital Marketing is a form of marketing executed on the internet using electronic devices. It involves things like social media marketing (SMM), search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), Pay-per-click advertising (PPC), Email marketing, Affiliate marketing, and content marketing.
We also looked at how you can leverage targeted marketing/advertising and affiliate marketing to reach the right people in the right place and at the right time.
I hope this opened up your mind on the various online opportunities you have as a business, affiliate marketer as well as an individual looking to disrupt the internet.
Which of the 7 digital marketing strategies seems more interesting to you and Why? Leave your comments, and share the post if you liked it.
