Digital Marketing 101: Simple Steps for Beginners

These simple steps for beginners unravels the mystery, which many believe surrounds digital marketing, because quite a number of people have approached me, asking how exactly does digital marketing works? Some believe that digital marketing is highly technical and that it is most likely to be very expensive to implement. Whenever such questions are raised, I have always been swift in my response and my answer is that, digital marketing is not as complex as it may appear and it does not cost any more than what you can afford.

What is Digital Marketing?

Let us start from the beginning, and that is by trying to understand firstly, what digital marketing means. Digital marketing have various definitions, but SAS defined it as the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media and differs from traditional marketing in that it involves the use of channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what is working and what is not – typically, by real time tracking systems.

Scalability: 

Digital marketing allows you to fix your spending according to what you can afford. For example, using SEO, you can fix as low as $10 to get up 5,000 leads to your website using Google AdSense, and you can choose Affiliate marketing channels to promote your products and services. Most Affiliate marketing programmes are Pay-Per-Sales. In addition, this commission is often within the range of 5% to as much as 20% depending on the product, price or need for rapid sales.

If you decide to use Email Marketing, your cost further reduced, because, email marketing can be self-managed and automated, and it cost nothing except for the cost of the software, which you can decide to use a free download version. Social media marketing is free to use at base level. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and LinkedIn, all allow you to broadcast your brand promotion contents, and when you desire to upgrade and increase traffic to your website you can schedule payment to suit your budget.

Measurability: 

Digital marketing is measurable. You can tell how many visits your website received on hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis, and you can determine the number of sales by product type, audience and location of the leads. This analytics becomes handy when you take decisions on what products to stock more and which customers to direct your email marketing messages to.

Variability: 

Digital marketing provides a wide range of channels you can choose from when developing a digital marketing strategy or implementing an ads campaign and brand promotions, which mostly depends on desirability and effectiveness of the channels.

Digital Marketing Channels

There are various types of digital marketing platforms and some of the most effective channels that digital used by marketers include social media, blogs, email marketing, SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Content marketing, Pay-Per-Click, Display Ads, and Online Public Relations.

1.  Social Media Marketing: 

Social media marketing is the process of creating attractive content that encourages followers to share with friends and connections, and thereby generate leads to the website of the brand for increasing sales. Journal of Business Research suggests a new definition of Social media marketing as thus: Social media marketing is an interdisciplinary and cross-functional concept that uses social media (often in combination with other communications channels) to achieve organizational goals by creating value for stakeholders (Journal of Business Research).

Social media is the most used content marketing channel. The most used content types are infographic, video, Illustrations/photos in 2020 (Content Marketing Institute). Social Media marketing is a veritable marketing tool for businesses and individuals, and it is the fastest most cost effective way to share content, photographs and videos with customers. 

A Statista Market Forecast, shows that Social Media Advertising spend is projected to reach US$98,984m in 2020, at a projected growth rate of 6.5% in the year 2020-2025, resulting in a market volume of US$135,384 million by 2025. Social media marketing is the top revenue earner in the digital media marketing industry globally. 

2.  Blogs: 

The term blog originated from the word 'weblog' an online logbook or journal. A blog is a social media site, and often form part of a website that functions as a journal requiring regularly updates. A blog is a platform where individuals and companies publish content about themselves or their brands and broadcast to the online. Blog posts provide real-time interaction with its followers, which is usually informal and allowing you leave a comment, like or share blog post to friends and connections. Blogs stand out as one of the most effective content marketing medium used by online marketers. There are well over 100 million blogs in the world today and thousands of new content pieces and articles are going live every hour.

3.  Email Marketing: 

Email marketing is a process through which a business entity promotes or solicit patronage by email distribution of adverts, newsletters and content to a targeted audience who grant their permission. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach target audiences directly, without the usual crowd associated with the other channels. According to Email Monday, email marketing averages an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent, and Mailigen in its own report shows that for 89% of marketers, email serves as the primary channel for lead generation.

Three-quarters of companies agree that email offers "excellent" to "good" ROI (Econsultancy). Email marketing can be automated to send scheduled messages, for example, to returning customers, welcoming them back, and other forms of behavioral triggers. Companies send emails to their customers informing them about new business opportunities, products sales and advertisement, and this is email marketing.

4.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO): 

Search Engine Optimization is the process of attracting traffic from organic search results on search engines. Search Engine Optimization, is defined as the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. Search engines remain the bedrock of digital media marketing, and all other marketing channels rely on it to increase lead.

Search Engine Optimization is one of the ways you can generate leads, create brand visibility and boost your website ranking both in organic and paid search results. Google analytics shows that it gets over 100 billion searches in one month. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has been the paid method that B2B marketers use most frequently, and the SEO industry is currently worth $65 billion to grow by an estimated $79 billion by 2020 (Borrell Associates).

5.  Affiliate Marketing: 

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts (Wikipedia). It is a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals. Affiliate Marketing is a tripod relationship between the advertiser, publisher and the consumer, and the product owner registers as Advertiser with the publisher and offers to pay a fee based on pay-per-click (PPC) to publisher. The publisher then distribute these adverts in form of codes to its Affiliate channel websites either as banners, links or as content used for email marketing.

Affiliate marketing is one of the channels that produces the most ROI. Affiliate Marketing is the highest revenue earner in the digital marketing space in 2019, and has taking the lead over email marketing to become the most popular online advertising channel used by Publishers (Rakuten Affiliate Network). Affiliate marketing spend in the US alone is expected to grow 10% by 2020 to over USD$6.8bn.

6.  Content Marketing: 

Content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material such as videos, blogs and other social media posts that does not explicitly promote a brand, and intended to stimulate interest in its products or services. Content Marketing Institute defined content marketing as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately to drive profitable customers action.

According to Matt Cutts, Google engineer, in Google algorithm, good content matters more. Content marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing channel. Content marketing is one of the most used channel by marketers and the most used content types are infographics, video, animated GIF, photographs /Illustrations etc. Content marketing is about creating and distribution of content with the purpose of attracting a targeted audience to follow or patronize their brand. 

Starting an Ecommerce Storefront

Startups that want to sell online, can introduce online store where visitors to their websites can purchase items and be able to make payment through online funds transfer. There are a number of low cost ecommerce options for startups with small budgets. Some of these ecommerce service providers offer free download of their applications with features that allow you to sell and receive payment from customers using PayPal and other money transfer providers. WordPress and Wix also provide some free basic ecommerce features to its users, and they have upgrade versions, which attract a fee.

Challenges Encountered

Digital marketing will pose little or no challenge for those individuals who have basic IT skills who have the ability to manipulate social media apps, create content for their blogs and generate messages for email marketing, and have the time to constantly promote their products and monitor both visits and sales on the site. Nevertheless, for others who are not computer savvy and find it difficult to perform simple task such as tweeting, creating content for Facebook or their blog, and do not have the time to monitor traffic to the site and track sales, then, there is an issue.

Business owners, who want to avoid these rigour and complications of digital marketing, prefer to engage experts or digital marketing companies who will help them manage their online brand promotions and advertising campaigns. Companies such as Admate offer services in this area, helping these organizations develop digital marketing strategy, and provide support in the implementation, training and advisory.