Marketing is a fundamental part of every business, and in today’s market it moves fast. It seems every day there’s a new tool, a new tactic, and a new report in regards to marketing.
In this course, I’m going to guide you through the hyperactive and accelerated marketing landscape. I’ll walk you through the ins and outs of building a digital strategy and driving awareness to your business. This includes everything from evaluating your website to looking at the future of online marketing.
In this course, I’ll be showing you how to integrate analytics into your workflow, touch on the foundations of SEO, and look closely at creating your first text and display ads. We’ll also explore the rapidly changing world of social media and video marketing.
There I’ll be giving you insights into each of the major platforms, along with helpful tips to make your campaigns a success. Together, we’ll also look at e-mail marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, and mobile marketing.
Whether you’re looking to start your own home-based business or working for a large corporation, you’ll find the skills you need to connect with your customers online all in this course. Let’s get started.
What is online marketing?
When we talk about online marketing, we’re essentially talking about promoting your business online using a variety of channels. And these channels include search, social, video, email, and display. You see, today’s customer lives across these channels and online marketing is about finding ways to be present and stay present at the right moments to capture the customer.
The internet has transformed the way that people buy products or services. And, now, with mobile smartphones, that experience is everywhere. This puts the customer in charge of the buying process. They’re armed with resources to conduct research, compare options, share what they’ve found, and even ask their peers for recommendations, all digitally. And, often, this happens simultaneously. What was once the norm in marketing has taken a backseat to its online counterpart. Print continues to drop in readership.
People are leaving cable for on demand shows served up by digital companies like Netflix. And we’re distracted by our mobile devices while we walk on the streets, so we miss advertisements in the windows and next to the bus stops.
Streaming music has replaced radio. And the opportunity to pay for many services eliminates advertising from interrupting our experience.
The Yellow Pages has been replaced by Google Local and Yelp, where the consumer can easily read reviews and see pictures of the business. Even in brick and mortar, people are holding their phones, scanning barcodes, chasing deals, and deciding whether it’s cheaper to buy online.
And that’s where online marketing comes in. As a business, you need to stand out throughout the journey a buyer takes. With so many user interaction points and what seems like an endless amount of channels, online marketing can feel overwhelming.
To focus it, let’s talk about the three types of media you’ll be using in online marketing: paid, owned, and earned. Your paid media will make up everything that you, well, pay for.
This will include channels like Google AdWords, Facebook paid ads, and display marketing. Your owned media will encompass channels like your website, your list of customers that you use to send out emails, and a blog with an active readership. Earned media is the world of organic press.
Your social media accounts, mentions on other blogs, and articles written about you make up the channels within earned media. Now, all of these channels overlap just as a user will overlap as they interact with each. And, together, these make up the foundation of online marketing. So, at the end of the day, online marketing is the process of putting your business front and center along the journey that your customer takes.
Digital marketing strategy
In order to achieve your business goals, you need a well-defined Digital Marketing Strategy that integrates various digital marketing activities like Social Media Marketing, Web Designing/Development, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns etc.
How do we design an effective digital marketing strategy?
It is very simple!
Just follow these five steps below:
1. Understand your Business Goals: Digital marketing is all about business goals; without knowing what you want to achieve you will end up wasting a lot of time and money on your campaigns. Before we get down to work, we need to think about the things that are more important for us like proper planning, sales conversion, business growth etc. For example: suppose you want to expand your business into China; the very first thing that we need to do here is “Understand China” – it means we need to know about the people there, their culture, how they talk and what they like – before going on a journey to the land of the eastern dragon.
2. Set your Marketing Objectives : Digital marketing is all about short-term gratification and long-term goals; we have to make sure that our efforts are going in the right direction so that maximum result can be achieved within a specified time frame. We need to consider goals like traffic, leads, conversion, revenue etc.
3. Set your Budget : After setting up goals it is highly important to set a budget; here we need to be realistic and practical because if we have fixed our marketing objectives then its better that we stick to given budget otherwise, it will affect the performance of campaigns resulting in poor results.
4. Create a Strategy : The most difficult part of creating a strategy is the decision making; it requires lots of patience, hard work and time but without that, you cannot come up with a perfect digital marketing strategy.
5. Testing : Before implementing our plan we need to make sure that our idea is going to work for us or not because an implemented plan can turn out into a total disaster if it is not properly tested. It is better to test your marketing strategy before implementing and if the results are favorable then only implement; else go back to step 4 and create a new digital marketing strategy with improvements.
