The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing is packed with insights and strategies for business owners, marketing professionals, students, and anyone looking to hone their current skills and get up to speed on the latest in digital marketing.
Read it now to build or refine your digital marketing plan, without the false starts and missteps that come from doing it alone.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is the act of promoting and selling products and services by leveraging online marketing strategies such as social media marketing, search marketing, and email marketing.
When you get down to it, digital marketing is simply marketing.
How businesses today are getting their message in front of their best prospects and customers.
Rule #1 in marketing is to make the right offer at the right time and in the right place. Today, your customers are online: hanging out on social media, staying updated on news sites and blogs, and searching online when they need it.
Digital marketing puts you on the same channels, so your best prospects can see you, learn more about you, and ask questions to learn more about you and your products or services.
If you are new to digital marketing, thinking about mastering all the online marketing techniques used in digital marketing can be overwhelming.
We get it…
And yes, there are different techniques you need to learn. But they all work together to create the foundation for your business: attracting prospects, building relationships, and making offers that your audience appreciates and responds to.
Let’s take a closer look at how that happens.
How does digital marketing work?
In many ways, digital marketing is no different from traditional marketing. In both, smart organizations strive to develop mutually beneficial relationships with prospects, leads, and customers.
But digital marketing has replaced most traditional marketing strategies because it is designed to reach today’s consumers.
For example…
Think about the last major purchase you made. Maybe you bought a house, hired someone to fix your roof, or changed paper suppliers at your office.
Whatever it is, you’ve probably started by scouring the Internet to learn more about available solutions, who provides them, and what your best options are. Your final purchase decision is based on the reviews you’ve read, the friends and family you’ve consulted, and the solutions, features and prices you’ve researched.
Most purchasing decisions start online.
In that case, an online presence is absolutely necessary—no matter what you’re selling.
The key is to develop a digital marketing strategy that places you in all the places where your followers are already hanging out, then connect with them in multiple ways using different digital channels…
…content to update them on industry news, the problems they face, and how you solve those problems…
…social media to share that content and then engage with them as friends and followers…
…Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to optimize your content, so the information you’ve written shows up when someone searches for it…
…advertising to drive paid traffic to your website where people can see your offers…
And email marketing to follow up with your audience to ensure they continue to get the solutions they’re looking for.
When you put all these pieces together, you end up with an efficient, easy-to-operate digital marketing machine. And while it may seem intimidating to build that machine from scratch, it’s as simple as learning and incorporating one digital marketing strategy at a time.
That’s why we’ve put together this guide: to help you build or refine your own digital marketing plan without false starts and missteps.
What are the benefits of digital marketing?
A strong digital presence can help you in many ways:
It makes it easier to create awareness and engagement before and after the sale
This will help you convert new buyers into rabid fans who buy more (and more often).
This kickstarts word of mouth and social sharing—and all the benefits that come with them
It shortens the buyer’s journey by presenting the right offers at the right time
Learn techniques to get real results
Be aware, that the digital marketing scene is always changing. Gurus, podcasts and bloggers proclaim a tool or technique as hot one week and dead the next.
The truth is, digital marketing is less about “digital” and more about “marketing,” mostly because digital marketing has come of age. Its basics are already established.
At DigitalMarketer, our mission is to eliminate confusion about strategies that work and how to use them to grow your business. We stand firmly against so-called “gurus” promoting the next “shiny thing” or “quick fix” that will destroy email marketing, digital advertising or search engine optimization.
Here, we’re all about the basics.
As you will see in this guide, these 8 key areas of digital marketing will be critical to your business growth today, tomorrow and for years to come. Each of these sections is covered in depth in a chapter of this Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing as shown below.
About the Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing
Digital marketing isn’t magic, and you don’t have to be a computer whiz to be good at it. If you offer a product or service that the market wants, you can successfully sell them on digital channels using the techniques taught in this guide.
The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing doesn’t present hype about the latest flashy techniques in marketing—digital or otherwise. Instead, this resource covers basic disciplines like content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing, always in the context of goals that businesses care about.
These goals include acquiring new leads and customers, monetizing the leads and customers you already have, and creating communities of brand advocates and promoters.
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