Learning how to do digital marketing can give you a huge advantage over your competitors. With a thoughtful strategy, you can increase your customers, leads, and revenue.

Sounds great, right? We’d certainly say so.

Think of this blog post as your guide to the digital marketing basics.

We’ll cover all of the essentials, including:

• What digital marketing is
• Why digital marketing matters
• Different types of digital marketing
• How you can get started with your strategy

You’ll feel ready to whip up a wonderful digital marketing strategy after finishing this blog post.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing means promoting your business through online channels. You can do this through paid or organic (unpaid) methods.

Many strategies exist to help you grow your business online, but a few of the main tactics include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Web design and development

Once you understand digital marketing for beginners, you can add more tactics to your digital strategy, including:

• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Video marketing
• Email marketing
• Personalization

Most digital marketing tactics are considered inbound marketing, which means you bring people to your business with your marketing. This differs from more traditional advertising—such as TV or radio ads — in which you push messages out to anyone who will listen.

Why use digital marketing?

Digital marketing is affordable

When it comes to paid marketing, you have the power to set a budget that works for you. Many platforms use AI and machine learning to help you get the most out of your money, too.

In addition, tactics such as SEO and content marketing can be done at a minimal cost (or even for free).

Digital marketing offers a plethora of data

You don’t need to wonder if your digital campaigns are driving results.

That’s the beauty of online marketing. You have access to so much data that tells you if what you’re doing is working.

Whether you use the insights from your social media platforms, implement Google Analytics on your website, or pay for a third-party tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, you can take this information and shape your strategy.

Digital marketing is flexible

Want to use video and social media to drive leads? Would creating in-depth articles work better for your strategy?

You can choose between several content formats and tactics when planning how you’ll drive results.

Not only that, but you can also adjust your strategy in real-time if the data shows things are not working out the way you had hoped.

Digital marketing can help you reach customers in a way that works for your business.

How we define each digital marketing strategy

SEO

SEO means optimizing your website so it shows up in search engines when people enter relevant queries. There are many different facets to SEO, and it covers everything from adding keywords to your website to making sure search engines can find and understand your pages.

Learn more about our SEO services

PPC

PPC is a form of paid promotion in which you pay for each click on your digital ads. Your PPC ads can appear across several platforms, including in search engines, across various websites, and on social media.

Learn more about our PPC services

Social media marketing

With social media marketing, you share content and engage with your audience on different social media sites. You can also choose to run ads on social media. Social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Learn more about our social media services

Content marketing

Content marketing uses different forms of content to generate traffic to your website and leads for your business. You can use blog posts, articles, videos, graphics, and more for your content strategy. Content marketing ties in with SEO and social media marketing to drive results.

Learn more about our content marketing services

Web design and development

Modern web design and development focus on making sure your website looks nice, is easy to use, and is regularly updated. Many designers and developers focus on creating good user experiences (UX) so people keep coming back to your website.

Learn more about our web design and development services

How to do digital marketing on your own

1. Identify your audience and your goals

Knowing who you want to reach and what you want to achieve are part of the digital marketing basics. If you don’t have this information, your campaigns will fall flat.

Who shops at your stores or engages with your existing online content? Who do you actually want to reach?

Ask yourself what you want your audience to do as a result of seeing your digital marketing efforts. Do you want them to make a purchase, sign up for your emails, or contact you for a quote?

With these pieces of information in mind, you’ll be better able to focus your marketing efforts on specific channels and maximize what results you get within your budget.

2. Determine which channels will work for you

You don’t need to spread yourself thin by doing every digital marketing strategy that exists. That’s not a great way to handle digital marketing for beginners.

A combination of SEO and PPC may be enough to hit the goals you set for yourself. Maybe adding social media into the mix will help boost audience engagement.

Keep in mind that you want to promote your business where your audience spends time online. And you want to focus your energy on channels that will help achieve your goals.

3. Plan out your budget

Advertising is an investment, but one that can help reach the most qualified audiences. You need a budget to be able to launch your campaigns. From there, you can break your investment down into individual bids across certain periods.

If you partner with an agency, account for your investment in their services in addition to your ad spend.

Even if you choose organic promotion methods, like content marketing and SEO, you need to evaluate the time investment you and your team are making.

4. Research your campaigns

You can’t just dive into the campaign creation process without research.

You should look at data from any of your existing campaigns and your competitors’ campaigns to determine what you should do going forward.

Did certain blog topics gain more traction than others? Did one audience targeting option outperform the others?

Have your competitors done anything that has garnered a lot of attention?

If you’ve chosen SEO as part of your strategy, especially, you need to research keywords and make sure your website performs well to rank highly.

Jumping into the implementation before the research will leave you with a half-baked campaign.

5. Do the work

If you’ve done the proper research and formulated a plan, you should have no fear when launching your strategy for the public to see.

Okay, maybe you have a little fear. But that’s normal.

Start implementing those keywords or writing those articles. Update old pages on your website. Shoot the video that you’ve been putting off.

If you’re not sure how to implement your strategy, partner with a team of experts who can do it all for you and make recommendations.

6. Analyze campaign performance

Don’t wait to review your digital marketing performance. Check in periodically to see how things are going.

If things aren’t going your way, make adjustments. You can easily increase your bids or re-optimize website pages for better search engine performance.

Things constantly change on the Internet. Don’t be afraid to step in and adjust your campaigns if they’re not hitting the goals you set for your business.

Do you feel confident you know how to do digital marketing?

To keep learning how to do online digital marketing, check out the other awesome resources on our blog!

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you’re looking for a team of digital marketing professionals to handle your online campaigns, either.