What is Digital Marketing? Start promoting your business today!
You may have heard the term Digital Marketing before, but never really understood what it is.
It is an umbrella term for anything designed to promote your business online. It is the use of the internet to reach consumers. Digital marketing is a broad field, including attracting customers via email, content marketing, search platforms, social media, websites, Facebook advertising and more.
A common challenge is where to start when drawing up your digital marketing plan. In this blog, I will briefly explain some of the different options out there, and how you can get started right now!
There are really only three parts needed to get started.
STEP ONE: Choose One or More Platforms to Launch From
So you have a business or message that you want people to hear about and opt in to by purchasing your product or supporting your project. It's important to first establish a platform where they can go to learn more. Good platforms include
A Personal Website: This is your own piece of territory on the internet, that people can visit. Websites can be built on WordPress with the drag and drop Themify Plugin or on Wix which is super userfriendly.
Facebook: You can create a page that advertises your business, with your contact information a button to buy your products from and a way to post updates to your community.
Instagram: Similar to Facebook but popular with the younger demographic, Instagram is a photo-based platform where you can post images with a caption to engage your audience.
Youtube: This is a video-based platform, which works well as most people prefer to consume information through watching rather than reading.
Create an account with these one or more of these platforms to get your brand out there.
STEP TWO: Create Great Content That Engages Consumers
So you have your platform set up. Now you need content. Content is made up of a few things.
A visually appealing graphic to stop them scrolling and focus on your brand.
A catchy opening line, to get them interested in what you have to say.
The main message of what you're trying to say
A call to action, where the engaged reader can act on their interest by purchasing or subscribing for more content.
Two Tools to Help
These two tools will help you create great content
Google Trends: Here you can find out what is trending in your industry at the moment, this helps you know what to focus your time on. https://trends.google.com/trends/
Canva: This is a free online platform where you can quickly and easily make a graphic, they also have a Pro version which unlocks a lot of features like being able to make your designs transparent, and a huge library of usable images. Try Canva Pro today
STEP THREE: Get The Message Out There Through Advertising
There are many ways to get your brand spread across the internet. Some ways are free or what the industry calls "Organic Traffic" and others are paid methods.
Free Methods Include:
Posting lots of content on your website, so that either google picks it up and starts recognising your website as important. This is good because if your website is seen by Google as important you can become ranked highly in the google search queries. But this method takes a while.
Posting lots of content on Facebook or Instagram and getting people to share it. This method is also slow. Organic Traffic takes time to grow, but it is a good method for the long term.
Starting a blog: The good thing about starting a blog is that each post becomes its own little doorway into your brand. So in a short period of time, there becomes 10's or 100's of ways for people to find your brand on google as you create more posts.
SEO Optimisation: Search Engine Optimisation is mainly for websites and is when you have made sure that all of your websites settings are the best they can be for google to recognise your website. Small changes here can have a big impact, such as giving your photos titles. But it is a complex topic and it is worth consulting a professional to help you with it.
Offline Promotion: When you have an online presence it always helps to promote your website offline with people you meet. You can send them your link, or have a business card with your link on it. This means they visit your website and contributes to Google seeing your platform as in demand.
Paid Methods Include:
Social Media Ads: These are usually a graphic and caption that has a call to action, which is then given to the social media platform and you pay them to advertise it to a specific demographic for a set time. You can then see how successful it was, make changes and retarget the demographics that convert well.
Google Ads: Google Ads can raise your website to the top of the search engine for that query. Whenever you see the word Sponsored before a website it generally means they paid google for advertising. But it can be insanely profitable for your business.
Influencer Shout-Outs: This is where you find a successful person in your industry who has a large following and ask them to recommend you to their audience. You often pay per mention and it is based on the number of viewers they have. This can be good because it is targeted to an audience that is interested in your product or services.
So to break it down, Digital Marketing has three parts.
1. A platform
2. Great Content
3. Advertising
If you need help with any of these I am an expert in all of those topics and would love to help you get your brand out to the world.
Send me a message and we can discuss how to get you to where you want to be.
Your friend and ally on this digital voyage.
Mitch Hamilton