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Digital Marketing for Beginners: Everything You Need to Know

Are you feeling confused about the big world of digital marketing? Check out this guide to understand the basics of digital marketing and how it can help you.

Currently, there are over 2.4 million active businesses contributing to the Australian economy. While getting noticed as one startup in this large figure may sound like a lost cause, don’t panic. It’s easy to make your business stand out when you employ digital marketing strategies to boost your visibility and sales.

But what is digital marketing, exactly? What specific advertising campaigns do you need to invest in to get customers to come to you? These are the questions that we aim to answer today, so read on to learn all about marketing online and its many benefits.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is exactly what it sounds like- advertising efforts that are conducted online. This component of marketing uses the internet and other network-based technologies (mobile applications, email servers, etc) to reach out to your target audience. The aim is to generate interest in your products, services, and brand online.

The Top Benefits of Digital Marketing

There are many benefits of marketing digitally as opposed to running print marketing campaigns. The average person uses their mobile phone 3-4 hours every day, and this doesn’t even include the time they spend on computers and tablets. It’s, therefore, easier to reach people on electronic devices than by sending them physical pamphlets or leaflets.

You also have the opportunity to get much more creative with interactive content. Videos, animated graphics, quizzes, and even games are made possible when you market online. This engages your audience in a way that text and printed images never could because they’ll feel as though they’re part of your brand.

Digital marketing campaigns also make it easier to target the audience that most needs to see your services. Almost all online advertising strategies let you target a specific demographic, whether that’s age, gender, occupation, location, or a combination of them.

Targeted marketing is done differently depending on the specific type of marketing campaign that you use, but it’s a key outcome all across the board.

Types of Online Marketing Campaigns

Speaking of different types of digital marketing campaigns, you have a lot of choices when it comes to how to reach your audience. It’s best to use as many strategies as possible since they all connect together well. However, when you’re just starting your online advertising campaign, you may need to weigh the pros and cons of each common technique.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO refers to manipulations that you perform to your website to make it more appealing to search engine crawlers. These bots scale the web for relevant, interesting, and reputable sites that they can place higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Since 92% of people won’t go past the first page in Google, it gains a lot more visibility than it otherwise would have.

There are two key parts of any SEO strategy. The first, on-page SEO, refers to manipulations that you perform on your website itself to make it more appealing. The main aspect of this is creating organic content such as blog posts that are rich in high-volume keywords. Google Crawlers will then see that your page is relevant to queries that use your keywords and will direct users who are interested in pages like yours to your brand.

There are other aspects to on-page SEO as well. They include:

  • Quality content that interests people
  • Descriptions and headers
  • Meta/alt tags
  • Indexing
  • HTML coding

The other half of a good SEO strategy is off-page SEO. This refers to manipulations that you make on pages other than your own to raise your site up in SERP rankings. One of the main off-site SEO strategies is backlinking, or the insertion of hyperlinks to other reputable pages in your organic blog content and other web pages.

Other important off-page SEO strategies include:

  • Reviews on other websites
  • Inbound linking from social media or in other business’ SEO blog posts
  • Shares and likes on social media
  • Location-based listings such as Google My Business

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEO is pretty awesome, but it has one downside: it takes anywhere between 4 months to a year to be effective. During that interval, you’ll need to invest in SEM strategies to have your advert placed in relevant positions on Google.

Google Ads is a pay per click (PPC) service. This means that you can bid on certain high-volume keywords that you want your advert to be displayed in the SERPs of. These adverts will be at the top of Google or on the sidebar and people can click them to be redirected to your website.

PPC adverts are extremely easy to create. You make an image-based advert with catchy colours and bold fonts. You then win a keyword bid and upload the advert into Google to have it automatically displayed to those who are already querying for services like yours.

It’s also really easy to budget for a PPC campaign since you enter the amount you’re willing to spend ahead of time. You only need to pay when a consumer clicks on your advert and goes to your page, so every dollar is well spent. Like Facebook Ads, the campaign will automatically end when you use up your entire budget.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Speaking of Facebook Ads, social media marketing is an awesome content marketing strategy. Facebook is one of the easier platforms that you can use because it basically is a social-media-based PPC campaign. The same applies to Instagram because it’s owned by Facebook.

You can, however, select your target demographic on Facebook rather than bidding on a specific keyword. This means you control the age, gender, location, and occupation of those you want to see your advert. You can even direct the site to show it to those who like competitor pages.

Twitter is another enormous social media platform that you need to make the most of. Create a pinned Tweet that has just enough of your business to get people interested. Because of the character limit, you’ll need to keep this short and sweet, but be sure to link to your official site as well.

This will drive clicks to your website and boost your visibility. It will also work wonders for your off-page SEO! 

Web Design (and Its Impact on Digital Marketing)

The ultimate goal of all types of online content marketing is to drive people to your official website. There, people will fill out landing page lead generation forms. They also will have the opportunity to learn more about your services and (hopefully) make a purchase or contact you.

Regardless of what your digital marketing efforts will look like in the future, it’s critical that you have a well-designed website. If your website is ugly and not up-to-date, consumers will assume that you don’t care about your brand. They’ll then question why they should care about your product since you clearly don’t.

This will lead to higher bounce rates that drive your target audience into the loving arms of your competitors. Additionally, since 57% of internet users won’t recommend a business that has a poorly designed website, it can seriously damage your reputation. Don’t let this happen to you- hire professional web designers. Trying to DIY everything is a recipe for failure.

Making Your Site Awesome

The average internet user will only stay on a website for 15 seconds before deciding to leave. If you can get consumers past this short window, they’re likely to actually browse your site and learn about your services. This means that your site needs to be awesome off the bat.

But how can you ensure that your site provides real value to visitors?

The most important thing to do is to ensure that your home page is rich in video content. 73% of consumers are more likely to invest in your brand after viewing a video on it. This makes sense when you consider that the human eye is drawn to movement and that viewers retain 85% more of video content than they do text.

Images are also extremely important to creating a high-level website. Photos of your products and services are essential, especially if you’re trying to make a sale completely virtually. Consumers are intelligent enough to understand that they should get a good look at what they’re buying before making an investment.

If you have a lot of data to convey, infographics are the way to go. Charts and graphs are also awesome when you want to showcase statistics and numeric data. Since people process visuals better than text (see: why video content is awesome), they’re less likely to become bored when looking at graphics.

Get Started

While there are many ways to get the word of your brand out there, the majority of people look online before making a purchase. That’s why you need to work with a digital marketing agency to begin building a brand online.

Contact us to schedule a consultation. We’ll talk strategy with you during this 15-minute meeting and start setting up an action plan to boost your online visibility and drive clicks to conversions. Our knowledgeable experts are committed to helping you set up a website that consumers will love, so we look forward to hearing from you soon!