It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you start talking about digital marketing.
With so many different tools, tactics, and strategies, and new social media channels coming out almost every week, its hard to know where to even start.
And so today, we’re going to cover 3 fundamental digital marketing basics, so you can build profitable and high converting digital marketing campaigns.
Digital Marketing. It’s like regular marketing, only digital…
Digital marketing is often made to sound overly confusing, but it doesn’t need to be.
The simple truth is that digital marketing is just, wait for it, marketing, but done digitally.
Deep, I know.
But while there are a lot of similarities between traditional marketing and digital marketing there are also some key differences that can mean the difference between a winning campaign that makes you money, and a losing campaign that gets you nowhere.
STEP 1: Define your target market
Step 1 isn’t all that different between traditional and digital marketing.
Before you do anything, you first need to first identify and clearly define your target market and who it is you’re trying to reach.
This is crucial because your target market will dictate how you advertise, where you advertise, and what you advertise.
As an example, you’re going to want to use a very different message to market to a 63 year old grandmother who likes gardening and lives in Oregon, then you are to a 22 year old male, who is a recent college graduate, likes crossfit and lives in Florida.
Both of these markets are likely to respond to completely different images, messages, and they likely hang out in different places online.
Clearly defining them first allows you to target them better, which saves you time and money by not marketing to people who are unlikely to care about what you’re offering.
Step 2: Use native content
Once you’ve identified your target market and defined who they are, what they like, and where they hang out online, it’s time to move to step 2, which is to create content that looks native to the platform it’s on.
Native content is really just fancy talk for saying content that looks like it belongs there.
This means taking a look at how others are using are using whatever online platform you want to leverage and then create content that feels like it fits.
Now there’s an important note here, whatever content you create, whether it’s an advertisement, an article, a post, or an image, you want to walk a fine line between fitting in, and standing out.
The best way to describe this is that you want your content to stand out, but for the right reasons, not because it looks like it doesn’t belong.
A few examples of native content that fits in while standing out would be taking great and unique pictures for Instagram, writing compelling and thought provoking articles on LinkedIn, keeping your Facebook Ads friendly, social, and human, and keeping your tweets on Twitter short and engaging.
And at all times, be sure to deliver a clear and consistent brand message so your results get compounded over time.
Step 3: Track everything
One of my favorite things about digital marketing is the ability to track how your campaign is performing.
Unlike with traditional marketing where you’re not really sure how many people saw your message, or if they did anything about it, with digital marketing you can measure everything.
In fact, there’s almost too much information, so it can be easy to get overloaded and overwhelmed, which is why I almost always suggest simplifying it as much as possible, which usually allows us to narrow it down to one key metric to watch and measure.
So, if your goal is to get people to see your message, then measure a metric called impressions, which is how many times your ad was shown.
And if your goal is to get more clicks to your website, landing page, or shopping cart, then watch and measure a metric called clicks to website, and if your main goal is to have people take a certain action online then watch whatever metric best aligns with that, whether it’s conversions, calls, clicks, or key page views.
The best way to start is to just pick one, and then measure how things are performing, so you can find ways to tweak and improve it over time.
And that’s the beauty of digital marketing.
