Digital marketing basics remain of utmost importance today. It has soared to popularity in these last few years.
However, you must know the basics first, if you are to successfully leverage it for your business.
You have certainly come across a number of online definitions. Some may be unfamiliar, and some may be jargon that could confuse you. You don’t want to miss out on all its real benefits just because you’re unsure about what digital marketing can do for you. Or because you’re constantly looking toward the next big thing, without first understanding the digital marketing basics.
Go back to the digital marketing basics and familiarize yourself with it before you delve into its depths. What follows, is to have clear goals that are tied to your business. Once you have your goals written on paper, then you can form a strategy – the first and most important start to your digital marketing journey. Strategies will, in turn, determine your actions, the tools you will use in order to take actionable steps, get things done, and achieve your business goals with planning and consistency.
Consider the following questions while you strategize:
– Who are the buyers of your product/services?
– Which are your most effective and least effective channels driving traffic to your site?
– What would you consider as success? How would you measure it?
Since this is key to understanding the basics of digital marketing, let’s revisit the same questions more deeply:
1.Your audience
Traditional marketing talks about reaching the right audience at the right time with the right message. While this still holds good for digital marketing, finding the right audience is not so simple anymore. It is no longer dependent on demographics like age, profession and location, as before.
Today, identifying the right audience hinges on understanding behavior. Have consumers shown specific online behavior? Have they showed interest in particular products or services? What are their consumption patterns? What are their preferences? Finding the answers to these questions will help you improve how you connect with them, and in offering tailored messages that have a greater chance of triggering a positive response.
- Traffic-driving channels
Study your analytics to identify how your customers are finding you online. Analytics is the best way for you to determine where the right kind of traffic is coming from. Understanding their behavior, their patterns and conversion points will help you customize your strategy in order to increase traffic as well as its interaction with your website.
Different channels bring different kinds of traffic to your website. Your analytics will show you which of the channels you are using to draw visitors is the most effective, and why. Then, you can concentrate your digital marketing efforts on that channel. Remember to start the conversation and engage with your followers.
- Measurable metrics
Before you launch a digital marketing campaign, or course of action, or decide to focus on one particular social media channel over another, define what success or failure would look like. Each actionable plan should have elements or “metrics” that can help you keep track of whatever you are observing. For example, for your email marketing campaign, you could measure the click-through rate. For organic search analytics, you could look at the number of non-branded keywords that are directing traffic to your site, and the rate of increase in traffic volume. These key metrics are your key performance indicators (KPI) and they differ with the channel, the company and the definition of success. They all, however, need to be measurable. And focusing on the wrong metric is one of the social media mistakes to avoid.
Digital marketing is not as confusing as it might seem. You just need to go back to the digital marketing basics and start with a strategy. That will be an excellent place to begin your digital marketing journey.
At Them You & Me, we lead business owners through their digital transformation and guide them through the basics of digital marketing. We help you understand what the digital space is all about, guiding you right from the basics, so you can apply digital innovations to your brand, moving forward into the strategy. Get in touch if you need some help with your digital marketing initiatives.
Digitally yours,
Marie
