Summary
As a newbie in the digital marketing space, all the requirements can get overwhelming fast. However, understanding the basics of digital marketing will help you bridge the skill gap.
There are numerous digital marketing strategies you can put in place for maximum results. Seeing results takes time, but you will notice a better ROI if you are doing it right.
This article walks you through the efficient ways of how to do digital marketing deriving from my own experience and best practice. You will learn about the basic aspect like content marketing, social media management, SEO, email and affiliate marketing and much more to get you started.
My first year as a digital marketing professional was absolutely exciting!
And intimidating at the same time!
Why the latter you ask? Because when you talk about digital marketing, it’s not only about being tech-savvy but to be smart enough to make the most of every platform and grow your business.
And for that, you need to understand Digital marketing inside out!
Digital Marketing is defined as all efforts in marketing and assets using an electronic device or the internet. Companies leverage their digital channels such as social media, email, and other online platforms to connect with existing and prospective customers.
In this article, I will share with you all the efficient ways of how to do Digital Marketing and while you are at it, don’t forget to check my top articles on digital marketing here!.
Getting started at Digital Marketing
Getting started in Digital Marketing is quite easy. Plenty of online advertising sites make it easy to register and create your very first campaign. Here are some of the critical questions you would want to ask in starting with digital marketing:
1. How Much Should I Make?
It is essential to clarify the goals of your business when figuring out what to spend on digital marketing. Your approach will vary depending on your brand’s ultimate goal. You may want to drive conversions: leads, sales, the revenue of a specific amount of ROI. When you boil it down, the ultimate goal with any marketing entity must be ROI.
Conversions and clicks are good, but your organization does not make money from such clicks, the brand makes money from sales. With this approach in mind, the first thing you must clarify before you decide on digital marketing is to determine how much revenue you want to attain. Once you have determined this, you can now utilize that information to define how much you will spend to hit that revenue goal.
2. Who Is My Target Audience?
Once you have defined the amount of cash you want to make from digital marketing, ask now to whom you are marketing the product. This is vital because there are plenty of different buyer personas that require varying marketing strategies. Moreover, changing buyer personas align to different kinds of buyers.
If you cannot determine your buyer personas, it could be impossible to create an efficient digital marketing strategy. Even talking to your sales team is not enough to define your buyer personas to the level of detail you need to collate your marketing plan. To attain this, you must get to the details of talking to your current customers. Inquire on how they found your service or product, what were the factors that convinced them to spend on your service. These types of information will provide you a comprehensive insight into your sales process that you can harness to better your advertising performance and choose the right amount of marketing budget.
3. How Much Are My Buyers Worth?
People commonly look at buyer personas as the right way to create an efficient marketing strategy. Determining Buyer personas is important in collating an excellent digital marketing plan.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
The primary advantage of digital marketing in that there is a target audience that can be reached through measurable and cost-effective ways. The following benefits of digital marketing:
- The international audience-an online platform enables you to find new prospective buyers globally for a simple small investment.
- Affordable cost- a well-targeted digital marketing strategy can reach the right buyers at a much more affordable price than typical, traditional marketing strategies.
- Measurable output- having measurable digital marketing with online metrics and web analytics make it easier to maintain an effective campaign. Your business attains comprehensive information with how customers use your platform to respond with your advertising.
- Good customer relations- if your brand’s customer database is linked to your website, then whenever an individual visits the site, they can be greeted with offers. The more customers buy from you, the more you can refine your buyer personas and market to them effectively.
- Transparency- When your organization is involved with proper social media management, you can maintain and build customer loyalty and build a good reputation for customer engagement.
- Social currency- Digital Marketing allows you to create campaigns with content marketing strategies. This type of content has images, videos, and articles that can better your social money, with your brand name being passed from many users and being viral.
- Better conversion rates- if your brand has a website, your customers will only click a few times until they make a purchase. Unlike other platforms that require people to fill out paperwork or go to a store, digital marketing is immediate.
Cons of Digital Marketing
Some of the disadvantages of Digital Marketing you must know to include:
- Need for skills and proper training- You must ensure that your personnel has the right skills and expertise to carry out the company’s digital marketing strategy seamlessly. Platforms, tools, and trends quickly change, and you must maintain relevance.
- Highly time-consuming- optimizing SEO, knowing SEO trends, and creating digital marketing content will take up plenty of time. It is significant to measure your marketing results to ensure your ROI.
- Saturated competition-You can reach a global audience in digital marketing, and this makes your brand go up against competition from different parts of the world too. It will be a challenge for your company to stand out and remain unique to be attention-grabbing among many advertisements consumers see online.
- Feedback and complaints-any negative criticism of your service or product will be visible to your audience through websites and social media. You must carry out active online customer service to respond to complaints and solve customer challenges.
- Security issues- there are plenty of legal considerations for collecting customer information for marketing purposes. Your company must comply with the standards and rules involving data and privacy protection.
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What does a digital marketer do?
Digital Marketers are the ones in charge of company brand awareness and leading generation with all digital platforms. These digital platforms would include the company’s website, search engine rankings, emails, display advertising, social media in the company blog.
The digital marketer focuses on key performance indicators for each specific channel so they can correctly measure the company’s performance with each platform. For instance, a digital marketer in charge of SEO measures the company site’s organic traffic- the traffic from the website visitors who arrive at the pages through Google search.
Digital Marketing is carried out in many roles in marketing nowadays. In small brands, one generalist may own the majority of digital marketing strategies. While in large companies, these strategies may be handled by plenty of specialists that focus on the multiple channels of that more substantial company.
You may wonder what roles digital marketers take. The following are a few examples of these professionals:
1. SEO Manager
SEO managers generate organic traffic to the company’s online presence. Using different approaches to search engine optimization, this individual would most likely work with content creators to ensure the content performs well on online search rankings.
2. Content Marketing Specialist
This person is a digital content creator. They usually keep track of the company’s post and blogging calendar and create a strategy that includes making all types of online content. These professionals typically collaborate with people in different departments to ensure that the company campaigns and product launches are supported with efficient online promotion with each digital channel.
3. Social Media Manager
This role involves establishing a posting schedule for the organization’s visual and written content. This professional would most likely work with content marketing to allocate which content to post on each social media site.
4. Marketing Automation Specialist
This role entails managing the software that enables the entire marketing team to understand their customer’s behavior and measure the growth of the business as time progresses. This role groups digital activities into separate campaigns and tracks the performances of each campaign.
Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing
The two may appear similar on the surface: both take place online, and both centralize on creating digital content for buyers. So what is the difference between Inbound Marketing and Digital Marketing?
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Digital marketing does not differentiate with push and pull marketing strategies or what would be considered s outbound and inbound methods. Both still fall within the realm of digital marketing. Digital outbound tactics focus on putting a marketing context or message straight to as many people as possible online, regardless if it is welcomed or relevant. For instance, the in your face banner ads you may see at the top of many sites trying to push the promotion of a product to people who are not exactly ready to receive the item or service.
Marketers who utilize digital inbound tactics use online material to attract their target prospects onto their websites by providing their assets that are helpful to these prospects. Some of the simplest yet most impactful inbound digital marketing assets are through blog posts, which enables your site to capitalize on terms that your ideal candidates are looking for.
Inbound marketing is defined as a methodology that harnesses digital marketing to engage, attract, and delight prospects online. Digital marketing, however, is an umbrella term used to describe all kinds of marketing tactics online, regardless if they are outbound or inbound.
Digital Marketing Examples
The following are some of the most commonly used Digital Marketing tactics and their channel examples:
1. SEO optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your company cite to have a higher rank in search engine results pages (SERPS), hence adding up on the amount of organic traffic that your website receives. The channels that are benefited from SEO are blogs, infographics, websites, and infographics.
There are ways to harness SEO to generate quality traffic to your site, and these are:
- On-page SEO: This approach of SEO centralizes all content that is on the page when looking at a specific location. Through researching keywords with their intent and search volume, you can answer the reader’s questions and have a higher rank in the result pages of the search engine those queries create.
- Off-page SEO: This kind of SEO focuses on all the activity off the page when looking at website optimization. Now you may ask what the events that are not on your site that could better your ranking are? The answer is through backlinks, otherwise known as inbound links. The number of publishers that link to you and the authority of relevance of those publishers affect how high you will rank with the keywords your business cares for.
Through networking with varying publishers, writing guest posts on these sites, and generating outside attention, you can easily earn backlinks that will help move your website in the correct SERPs.
- Technical SEO: This approach to SEO focuses on the backend of your website and how your page is coded. Structured data, CSS file optimization, and image compression are all under the forms of technical SEO that can add up on your site’s loading speed, which is a significant ranking factor in search engines such as Google.
2. Content Marketing
This digital marketing term denotes the promotion and creation of content assets for generating traffic growth, lead generation, and brand awareness. The channels that play a part in a content marketing strategy are:
- Blog posts: publishing and writing blog articles within a company blog helps your brand demonstrate your expertise and boosts organic search traffic. This gives your brand additional opportunities to convert site visitors to sales leads.
- Ebooks: this channel allows you to exchange your content with a reader’s contact information, which generates leads for your company and moving users to the buyer’s journey.
- Infographics: These are a great way of visual content that helps your website visitors visualize a concept that you would want them to learn and understand quickly.
Relevant: Check how you can boost your traffic with these must-try content marketing trends
3. Social Media Marketing
This approach promotes your content and brand in social media sites to generate traffic, brand awareness and leads to your business. The channels used for social media marketing are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest.
4. Pay Per Click
PPC is a method of generating online traffic by paying a publisher each time your ad is clicked. One of the common types of PPC is through Google Ads, which enables you to pay for the top spots on Google’s search engine results with a price per click on the links you allocate. Other PPC channels are:
Facebook ads-where you can pay to customize an image, slideshow, or video that Facebook will publish to people who are your business’s target audience.
Twitter ad campaigns: with this, users can pay to allocate a series of profile badges or posts to new feeds of a particular audience, all dedicated to attaining a specific target for your business. This goal can vary from tweet engagement, more twitter followers to app downloads.
LinkedIn sponsored messages: this method allows users to pay to send messages straight to the LinkedIn user based on their background and industry.
5. Affiliate Marketing
This method of performance-based advertising allows you to receive a commission for the promotion of someone else’s services or product to your website. Affiliate marketing channels are:
- Posting sponsored/affiliate links from your social media channels
- Hosting ads with the Youtube Partner Program
6. Native Advertising
This refers to ads that are featured on a channel along with other non-paid material or content. An excellent example of this is Buzzfeed sponsored posts. People also consider social media ads to be native, such as Instagram and Facebook advertising.
7. Marketing Automation
This method refers to the software that allows you to automate your essential marketing operations. Marketing departments can easily automate their tasks as opposed to doing them manually; these tasks include:
- Blasting of email newsletters: email automation allows you to shrink and increase your contact database as needed, so your newsletters are only sent to people who would want to have them in their inboxes. Scheduling social media posts: If you aim to grow your company presence on social media, you must post frequently. Frequent and scheduled social media posting may be quite unruly a task, but it can push your content to social media channels for your brand.
- Nurturing workflows: Generating leads into customers can be a time-consuming process. You can automate these leads to receiving specific emails and content when they fit the particular buyer persona. Campaign reporting and tracking: Marketing campaigns usually include tons of people with tasks to handle content, emails, webpages, phone calls, among many aspects. Marketing automation can boost you to sort work in a campaign and track performance involved in the campaign based on all the progress of said performance over time.
8. Email Marketing
Organizations use email marketing as a method of communicating with their customers. Emails are often used to deliver and promote content and upcoming events, as well as to lead customers towards the company website. The email types you would send in an email marketing campaign would be:
- Customer welcome messages
- Follow up emails to site visitors who downloaded content
- Holiday promotions to current existing customers
- Newsletters
9. Online Public Relations
Online PR refers to the practice of securing online coverage with blogs and other forms of digital publications. It is similar to traditional PR but online. The channels you can harness to better your PR efforts would be:
Outreach to reporters through social media: Conversing with journalists on Instagram or Twitter is a powerful way to develop your company’s relationship with the press that can create media opportunities for your organization.
Engaging with online reviewers of your brand: Whenever a customer reviews your company online, whether it is good or bad feedback, it is good to engage with. Engaging with online reviews would help you humanize your company and deliver well-meaning messaging that would protect your brand reputation.
Engaging comments on your company blog: In the same way you respond with reviews, responding to feedback is the best way to better productive conversation within your industry.
The role of digital marketing in a company
Different from most traditional offline marketing efforts, digital marketing enables marketers to see automated, accurate results in real-time. For instance, if you ever put up an ad within a magazine, you will know how difficult it would be to estimate how many people actually flipped the pages and saw or even paid attention to your ad. In offline marketing, there is no accurate way to know if that ad was responsible for any of your sales. With digital marketing, you can easily measure your ROI for all aspects of your marketing campaigns.
What kinds of digital content do I create?
The type of content to create depends on the needs and challenges that your audience face within their buyer journey. Start with establishing buyer personas to define what are the goals of your audience about your company. You must aim to assist them in meeting their goal and overcome difficulties.
Afterward, you need to determine when they are likely to be ready to purchase your content. Think about the stage prospects are within the buyer’s journey. This process is called content mapping. Content mapping assures the goal to the target is according to:
- The closeness of a prospect to purchase
- The characteristics of the prospects
For instance, to implement PPC with Google Adwords, you will have to bid against other businesses in your industry to appear within the top of Google’s search results for keywords related to your business. Depending on the keyword competitiveness, this can be affordable or very expensive, which is why you must also focus on your company’s organic reach.
Digital Marketing Assets
People are not entirely aware of the digital marketing assets they have. The following are examples of Digital Marketing Assets:
- Company website
- Brand assets: logos, acronyms, icons
- Video Content
- Images
- Written posts: blogs, testimonial, product descriptions
- Online Reviews
- Pages on social media
Does Digital Marketing require a big budget?
The answer to this question depends on what modes of digital marketing you are going to use to enact your strategy.
If you choose to focus on inbound techniques such as social media, content creation, and SEO for a pre-existing website, you would not need much budget whatsoever. With inbound marketing, the focus is to create good quality content that your audience would want to spend on and consume.
With outbound techniques such as purchasing email lists and online advertising, there would be some expense. What this cost comes to how much visibility you would want to attain through advertising. Depending on the keyword competitiveness, this strategy can be affordable or highly expensive, which is why it’s a bright idea to focus on your organic reach as well.
Stages of the buyer’s journey
In terms of creating your buyer personas, here are the stages and our suggested channels to consider in the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness Stage: this stage engages and must entice people to your service. The platforms used to generate brand awareness would be blog posts, infographics, and short videos.
- Consideration stage: this stage needs further backing of data where customers are almost hooked to your product. Channels to use at the consideration stage would be research reports, webinars, and ebooks.
- Decision Stage: This final stage is when the customer to either purchase your service or not. This stage would require further data for your prospects. Platforms to help the decision stage would be Case studies and testimonials.
How to do digital Marketing on Mobile?
As you can likely imagine, mobile digital marketing is profoundly different from the digital marketing with the desktop. These differences are significantly significant with the reason that smartphones are currently the primary device that people use to explore online.
People’s 60% of online activity is through their mobile devices; the change from the desktop to mobile has a very profound effect on digital marketing. In 2019, Google Adwords removed the sidebar ads within their result pages to make room for a more consistent experience with the desktop and mobile.
Shorter blog posts and reviews outperform long blog posts on mobile, and this list continues on and on. In the context of today’s digital marketing world, it is good to assume that people will encounter your marketing on mobile and harness your strategy on desktop as needed.
Moreover, in optimizing your ads to mobile, it is vital to think about your site. You must also keep in mind the buying experience within it. Your website may look seamless and beautiful on a desktop, but if it is challenging to navigate the site on mobile, you may end up alienating a high percentage of your online traffic. You must have a mobile responsive online presence, but your mobile experience should be explicitly outlined to facilitate a seamless mobile journey. Digital marketers should now have a mindset that digital marketing is now a mobile experience. The good news is that if your company is entirely new to digital marketing, you will not have to worry about reinventing the wheel. You may start by formulating impactful and compelling mobile advertisements and then adapt accordingly for desktop.
Also read: How to combine email and social media marketing
Conclusion
With ever-growing digital channels, Digital Marketing is here to stay. To add to the benefits we have discussed, your company can easily track the results of your digital marketing campaigns to high accuracy. This advantage makes it incredibly easy which strategies use the most profitable results and which ones would require other approaches or added work.
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