Before we start developing your digital marketing strategy for your business, let's understand what digital marketing is, and its role in establishing an effective online presence and growing your business.
What Is Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is about leveraging digital (online) channels such as social media, search engines, email, and tools and strategies to promote and sell your products and services in a profitable and predictable way.
Its role is to bring more awareness to your business, engage prospects, and turn those prospects into customers (and ultimately raving fans).
It's how today's businesses are getting their message in front of their best prospects and customers.
Why Is Digital Marketing Critical to Your Business
Marketing is about getting your offers in front of your customers.
Nowadays, your audience and customers are online - hanging out on social media, keeping up to date on news sites and blogs, and searching online when they're looking for something or trying to get answers.
Digital marketing allows you to be present in those same channels, so your best prospects can see you, learn more about you, and even ask questions to learn more about you and your products or services.
95% of purchase decisions start on the internet.
There are many disciplines to digital marketing - content marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, social media, search marketing, data and analytics, testing and optimization, and more.
If you're new to digital marketing, it may feel a bit overwhelming to think about having to take control of all these for your business.
But you don't have to master all these strategies, and you don't need to get involved in all the technical aspects.
The key is to develop a digital marketing strategy that puts you in the places your followers are already hanging out, then using a variety of digital channels to connect with and provide value to them in a multitude of ways.
For example, you can use:
- Content to keep them updated with industry news, the problems they're facing, 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 it will show up when someone is searching for the information you've written about
- And email marketing to follow up with your audience to be sure they continue to get the solutions they're looking for
With all these pieces together, you can have a digital marketing system that functions efficiently and effectively for your business.
It may sound intimidating to build and maintain such a system, but that's where this course comes in. It will help you build your own business-specific digital marketing strategy.
But, there two fundamental concepts that are important to understand/appreciate before start developing your digital marketing strategy:
- Understanding your customer
- Mapping your customers journey through your business
That's what we'll cover next.